Finding Hope in Dire Times: Ocean Country by Liz Cunningham

Airing Tuesday, 22 September 2015, 11:00 AM ET

One Woman’s Voyage from Peril to Hope in Her Quest to Save the Seas – Liz Cunningham shows us how people around the world are practicing “hope in action” and why it’s time for all of us to join them. After Liz Cunningham was nearly swallowed by a rogue wave in a kayaking accident in which she was temporarily paralyzed, she was left with a sense of despair and alienation from the waters that she had always turned for solace and healing.

As she recovered physically, Cunningham vowed that she would reconnect with the ocean and recover hope – hope for herself and for the planet’s ailing waters. Cunningham shares her two-year global journey to discover how communities and individuals are fighting to save the marine world that every living being depends on and how they are creating hope through action in dire times.

Cunningham shows us how people throughout the world are beginning to see that we can have hope, that we must act, and – most importantly – that the two are interdependent.

OCEAN COUNTRY is an adventure story, a call to action, and a poetic meditation on the state of the seas – but most of all – it is a story of finding true hope in the midst of one of the greatest crises to face humankind.

Twenty-one percent of royalties will be given to the New England Aquarium’s Marine Conservation Action Fund (MCAF), which aims to protect and promote ocean biodiversity through funding of small-scale, time-sensitive, community-based programs. This amount was chosen to highlight the percentage of oxygen in each breath we take and that the fact that over one half of that oxygen comes from marine plants and algae in the ocean.

About Guest Liz Cunningham

LIZ CUNNINGHAM is the author of Talking Politics: Choosing the President in the Television Age (Praeger), which features frank and probing oral-history interviews with top television journalists such as Tom Brokaw, Larry King, and Robin MacNeil. She has written for Earth Island Journal, East Bay Express, the Marin Poetry Center Anthology, The Outward Bound International Journal, Times of the Islands, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She has collaborated with institutions such as the Academy for Educational Development, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. She also serves on the board of Outward Bound Peace building and holds a B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Visit her at: http://lizcunningham.net

More info & sample slideshow photos: https://www.facebook.com/LizCunninghamAuthor | https://twitter.com/lizcunninghamwr