Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins have written books together about topics ranging from Disney’s planned utopia in Florida and the Holocaust at sea to nuclear weapons trafficking. None was more important than Salmon Wars, an urgent plea for consumers and governments to respond to the health and environmental consequences resulting from the industrialization of Atlantic salmon.

 Frantz spent 37 years as a newspaper editor and reporter, sharing a Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times and serving as managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. After leaving journalism, he was chief investigator for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama administration, and Deputy Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Collins was a reporter and prize-winning foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and contributed to The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Upon leaving her newspaper career, she became a private investigator specializing in international financial fraud and corruption.

They began work on Salmon Wars in January 2020 after hearing about the environmental dangers of salmon farming at a public meeting near their home in Nova Scotia. In two years of intensive research that followed, they uncovered new documents illustrating the danger posed by open-net salmon farms to wild salmon and other marine life. They peeled away the industry propaganda to disclose campaigns to discredit critics and undermine environmentalists. They interviewed scientists and medical practitioners who detailed the health risks from eating farmed salmon, particularly for children and pregnant women. And, in a hopeful development, they met people trying to raise salmon in sustainable, environmentally friendly ways on land. Salmon Wars is about more than just a fish. It is about how the choices we make affect our health and the health of our oceans.