This story was originally published at Hakai Magazine. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over the centuries, transforming the North Sea into an industrialized seascape. Trade has made this sea—which washes against the United Kingdom to the west and mainland Europe to the east—one of the world’s busiest shipping…
