Stranded

Marooned in Los Angeles by the pandemic, a marine biologist rediscovers the delights and wonders of the natural world in her own backyard.Stranded reminds us of what we all too easily forget: the sustaining delights of finding beauty and wonder all around us. Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix and HeartbreakConservationist and marine biologist Maddalena Bearzi made her career studying the wild creatures of the deep, but when COVID-19 made landfall on the California coast this seafaring scientist found herself shuttered up ashore, her wide blue world constricted by pandemic lockdown. Never good at sitting idle, she despaired at the confines of her Los Angeles flatuntil she began to find wonder in the wilderness of her own backyard.Stranded charts Bearzis discovery of both rapture and resilience in the unsung wildlife of urban LA. With a green thumb and a canine sidekick named Genghis, she finds as much to marvel at in her gardens singing blackbirds, night-blooming cacti, and industrious wasps as in the whales, dolphins, and sea lions at the center of her maritime adventures. Discovering in the quotidian an antidote to the grief occasioned by captivity and climate chaos, Bearzi reveals how each of us can take heart, find courage, and discover inspiration in the thrumming systems of life that surround us. With a scientists precision and a poets instinct, she invites us to look at, listen to, and revel in the everyday grandeur of the natural worldand to embrace, with urgency, our responsibility to sustain it.