Alanna Mitchell is an award-winning Canadian author and journalist and an engaging speaker on environmental science, conservation and sustainability. In her latest book, Sea Sick: The Hidden Crisis in the Global Ocean, Mitchell convinces us that if we kill the ocean, we kill the planet. Skillfully interweaving scientific concepts with firsthand accounts and stories about the fieldwork of internationally renowned scientists, Mitchell shows us how the ocean—what she calls the true lungs of the planet—produces most of the Earth's oxygen and how it ultimately controls our climate.
After nearly two decades as an investigative journalist, Mitchell perfected her gift for decoding the complicated language of science and translating it into the emotional narrative of everyday life. Sea Sick is the first book to examine the ecological crisis facing the world's oceans—and how we're altering everything about them from temperature, salinity, and acidity to ice cover, and the very life within them.
Mitchell was raised in Saskatchewan, her mother an artist and her father a biology professor at the University of Regina. Even though Mitchell herself doesn't have a science background—having studied Latin and English Literature at the University of Toronto and then Journalism at Ryerson—she says her interest in science is rooted in her father's passion for it. "We fed on science at the dinner table," says Mitchell.
After completing her studies, Mitchell worked as a journalist for 17 years, first at The Financial Post, where she covered the real estate market, then at The Globe and Mail, where she covered social trends and statistics, eventually becoming a feature writer on Earth Sciences. During her time at the Globe and Mail she received four major national and international journalism awards.
In 2000 Mitchell was named the world's best environmental journalist by The World Conservation Union and the Reuters Foundation—an award that led to a fellowship at Oxford University where she studied alongside the eminent ecologist Norman Myers. From there she went on to publish her first book in 2004, Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots. In this book Mitchell traverses the globe—from the receding shoreline of the Dead Sea in Jordan, to the melting permafrost of Banks Island in the high Arctic—reporting on how climate change and other human impacts are affecting the pace of species extinction.
In 2004 she left reporting to devote herself to writing popular science books and magazine articles, also setting up her own consultancy on environmental issues and strategic communications.
In 2008 Mitchell won the Atkinson Fellowship in Journalism award, a $100,000 prize to conduct a new course of study on the intersection of neuroscience and education. In 2010 she won the prestigious Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment for her book Sea Sick. She is also an Associate with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), based in Winnipeg.
Mitchell lives in Toronto with her husband and their two children.
- Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots, 2004, Key Porter Books
- Sea Sick: The Hidden Crisis in the Global Ocean, 2009, McClelland and Stewart
- Reuters/ World Conservation Union Global Award in Environmental Journalism, 2000.
- Atkinson Fellowship in Journalism, 2008.
- Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment, 2010.
