How to save the oceans

My Times column on fish and oceans:

The decision to create the world’s largest marine
reserve around Pitcairn Islands seems to have taken campaigners by
surprise. Environmentalists and celebrities had been pushing for this reserve and others
in British overseas territories (around Ascension Island and the
South Sandwich Islands) but their startled pleasure at George
Osborne’s announcement in the budget implies that they had not
expected to win anything.

You can see why. The government’s progress in creating marine
conservation zones around the British coast has been grudging.
Despite being under an international obligation, it has designated
only 50 of 127 zones recommended by experts. Worse, the MCZs are
not much more than paper preserves: with little enforcement, some
fishing still allowed, but budgets galore for landlubber
bureaucrats to send memos to each other.

The difference may be that the Pitcairn islanders don’t get to
vote in the general election. Marine protection annoys a few
fishermen disproportionately more than it pleases a lot of nature
lovers. But there are four reasons why protected zones in the sea
should be far and away the top priority in conservation right now:
they are desperately needed; they work; the alternatives don’t; and
the technology to police them is coming.

On terra firma, I am a conservation optimist. As the world gets
more productive, we can (and do) reduce the amont of land we need
for food, fuel and fibre, which takes the pressure off wilderness
so that we can start to re-green the continents and bring back
species from the brink of extinction. In the sea, by contrast,
things are still getting horribly worse. What works best on land is
to align incentives with conservation. Problems remain where there
is free access to a common resource, like bushmeat in African
forests.

And that’s how we treat the sea: as a free-for-all, with
inevitable tragedies for the common good. Stock after stock has
been or is being driven to extinction by gold-rush fisheries:
Newfoundland cod, North Sea herring, California abalone, Chesapeake
menhaden, bluefin tuna, Black Sea sturgeon, Caribbean grouper.
Passing laws to ban over-fishing just isn’t working, because it’s a
political process susceptible to lobbying, or because of pirates
and poachers.

At sea we are behaving as our African ancestors did on arrival
in Eurasia and later in the Americas and Australia: we slaughter
our way through the biggest animals first, then shift down the food
chain to the next, then down to the next and so on. On land we
wiped out the mammoths and sabre-tooths first, then bison, gazelles
and rabbits and by the end were left eating grass seeds. In the
sea, it was the same and in many areas we are now down to the
prawns and shellfish. No other predator has the flexibility to do
this “fishing down the food chain”, which is what makes our species
so lethal.

Just as on land, there is growing evidence from around the
world, especially Iceland and New Zealand, that the best way to get
fishermen to cherish rather than punish fish stocks is to set up
transferable quotas under which they can own, buy or sell the right
to a percentage of a total catch set by the government. That turns
them into conservationists trying to maximise the overall catch.
But politicians have proved reluctant to follow this route, so
political control, and political failure, continue to be the story
of fisheries.

Fishing has been by far the dominant factor spoiling
the oceans. This came out clearly in The Unnatural
History of the Sea, a fine book by Callum Roberts, a
University of York marine biologist. Professor Roberts looked up
the accounts of what each sea was like when pristine: encrusted
with reefs of coral and shellfish, boiling with vast shoals of
fish, attended by sharks, dolphins, seals, whales and turtles. We
no longer even know just what a pristine marine ecosystem looks
like, he argues, so we settle for dismal second best when saying
that fisheries have “recovered” — by which we mean moderate shoals
of smaller, less desirable fish in an impoverished ocean.

We tolerate the utter devastation of the seabed by nets and
dredges, increasingly assisted by powerful engines, synthetic
materials, sonar and electronics. Seabeds could be a veritable
aquarium of reefs of water-cleansing shellfish and corals, even in
the North Sea, instead of a waste of silt and rubble. We would not
drag nets through forests.

Over-fishing has been more important than pollution, which —
with the exception of plastic litter in some places and nitrogenous
dead zones in others — has mostly done less harm. Over-fishing has
far more impact than climate change or ocean acidification. Indeed,
the relentless focus by the “green blob” of environmental lobbyists
on the latter has sucked attention and funds from the over-fishing
issue.

For example, National Geographic recently examined the plight of Iceland’s puffins,
kittiwakes and arctic terns, which have failed to breed well for
many years for lack of fish to feed their young — like those of
Shetland and Norway, too. It blamed global warming and mercury
pollution; it did not even mention over-fishing. Yet this makes no
sense: the puffins, kittiwakes and arctic terns of the Farne
Islands off the Northumberland coast are thriving at the southern,
warm limit of their range, and closest to industry, but where
sandeels are not exploited. The climate obsession has not served
the conservation movement well: it has been a red herring.

We know that marine reserves work: examples from New Zealand,
Florida, Chile and elsewhere show dramatic results. A scallop
no-take reserve in Lamlash Bay off the Isle of Arran has increased the number and size of scallops
inside the reserve and nearby. At Cabo Pulmo on the Mexican coast,
where a no-fishing reserve was established in 1995, there has been an explosion in the number of
fish, including an eleven-fold increase in large predators such as
groupers and sharks: it’s a glimpse of what oceans could look
like.

It is not too late. The restoration of the oceans can happen.
Most populations of great whales — blues, sperm, humpback, fin,
right, bowhead — are now growing by up to 8 per cent a year.
Antarctic penguins and seals are rebuilding their populations.

It is surely not beyond the wit of man to find ways to do the
same for bluefin tuna, albatross, sharks, halibut and giant cod. In
the days of satellites, it should be possible to insist that every
fishing boat has a transponder fitted so it can be tracked. Maybe
the green blob could use some of its vast budget on such
things.