When fishing stops, the results are remarkable. On average, in 124 marine reserves studied around the world, some of which have been in existence for only a few years, the total weight of animals and plants has quadrupled since they were established.60 The size of the animals inhabiting them has also increased, and so has their diversity. In most cases the shift is visible within two to five years.61 As the slower-growing species also begin to recover, as sedentary lifeforms grow back and as reefs of coral and shellfish re-establish themselves–restoring the structural diversity of the seabed–the mass and wealth of the ecosystem is likely to keep rising for a long time.
Five years after Georges Bank, off the coast of New England, was closed to most forms of commercial fishing, the number of scallops had risen fourteenfold. Around Lundy Island, mature lobsters trebled in number within eighteen months of the creation of the reserve.62 After four years they were five times as abundant as those outside;63 after five years, six times.64 Eighteen years after they were first protected, the combined weight of large predatory fish in the Apo Island reserve in the Philippines had risen by a factor of seventeen.65 Bigger fish produce more eggs, and the quality of the eggs improves as the parents mature, so more of the offspring are likely to survive. Like the Kraken in Tennyson’s poem, the suppressed life of the sea awaits only its chance to re-emerge.
Not all missing populations can be restored. Some of the lifeforms being wrecked by perhaps the most destructive fishing operation of all–the trawling of the deep seamounts–take thousands of years to grow. Many of them are endemic, confined to one place. Extinction there is extinction everywhere. Scientists are also beginning to understand the extent to which some populations of fish are specific to particular spawning grounds. Like salmon returning to the rivers of their birth, for example, every population of cod appears to possess its own migration routes, and travels to particular banks and reefs to reproduce, following invisible rivers beneath the sea. This could offer another explanation for the failure of some cod populations to recover after fishing for them has ceased: if one group has been destroyed, neighbouring communities are unlikely to fill the gap, just as salmon born in the River Tweed will not replace the salmon missing from the Thames. Migrations are led by the bigger, older fish, which are the first to be exterminated by overfishing.66
Nor would it be correct to suggest that reserves are the only necessary measure. There should also be restrictions on the kind of equipment used in places where fishing continues, on the capacity of fishing boats and the time they spend at sea and on their freedom to discard the fish they do not want to keep. The reserves will probably work best if they are surrounded by zones in which pressure is reduced: where, for example, only line fishing is allowed. But the rewilding of parts of the sea is the essential element without which protection is almost meaningless.
There are fewer inherent conflicts between marine rewilding and those who make their living from the seas than there are between terrestrial rewilding and those who make their living from the land. Biologists have noticed a strong spillover effect: the fisheries surrounding marine reserves improve because the spawning fish are protected and allowed to reach maturity, and they and their offspring migrate into surrounding waters.
Fishermen tend to resist marine reserves before they are created, then to support them once they have been established, as their catches rise, often far beyond expectations. In the seas surrounding the Apo reserve that I mentioned a moment ago, for example, the catch swiftly rose to ten times its previous level, and has stayed that way since.67 There have been similar results in, for example, fisheries off Japan, New Zealand, Newfoundland and Kenya.68
Marine protection is so cheap and the results so lucrative that, the Royal Commission calculated, just a 2 or 3 per cent increase in the fish catch in the North Sea would pay for the protection of 30 per cent of its area.69 The returns are more likely to rise by 200 or 300 per cent.
A report by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the failure to protect fish stocks properly costs the European Union some 82,000 jobs and €3 billion a year.70 Marine rewilding not only offers the best chance of protecting much of the life of the seas, but also the best chance of protecting the livelihoods of those who harvest it. The weight of fish landed worldwide peaked in 1988. Despite attempts by Chinese officials to inflate their production figures, it has been declining since then by half a million tonnes a year.71 The surest means by which this could be reversed is the creation of a network of large marine reserves.
But here, as so often, we see short-termism triumph over not only wider social and environmental interests, but also over the medium- and long-term interests of the people who block this reform. For example, the proposal to stop crab and lobster fishing in just 1,100 hectares around Skomer Island, off the coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales, was voted down by the fishermen on the committee which considered it,72 despite the evidence of greatly improved catches around similar reserves. The prospect of lower returns for the first one or two years of the reserve’s existence appears to have outweighed the promise of higher returns for ever after.
The opposition of the fishing industry also explains the dithering and downgrading by the British governments which promised to protect the life of the seas. In 2004 the Royal Commission pointed out that the seas around this country ‘have been scrutinized in great detail since at least the mid-19th Century’. Existing data was easily sufficient ‘to design comprehensive, representative and adequate networks of marine protected areas for UK waters’. But at the time of writing, eight years later, the Westminster government is still procrastinating, on the grounds that ‘there are a number of gaps and limitations in the scientific evidence base’.73
The government originally offered to protect 127 sites in English waters. Now it appears to be paring the list down. Worse still, it intends to protect only the remaining ‘vulnerable features’. In most places trawling has already destroyed just about every fragile habitat; the government, according to a conservationist heavily involved in this debate, intends to ‘protect the pin-pricks of features that remain, and allow trawling around them . . . Someone recently likened this to designating a ploughed field for an oak tree in the middle of the field, and only the oak tree is protected, whilst the ploughing is continued.’74
Even this feeble protection will apply to only some of the sites on the list: the government says that designating an area as a marine conservation zone ‘does not automatically mean that fishing in that site will be restricted’.75 Many of them will be protected in name only. Unless something changes, the reforms will raise the proportion of England’s seas in reserves where no fishing takes place to around 0.5 per cent: one sixtieth of the level the Royal Commission suggested was necessary to protect a significant portion of marine wildlife.
In Wales the policy is even worse. The government has promised to consider ‘no more than 3 to 4 sites’,76 covering 0.15 per cent of its seas.77 So far there has been no certain progress towards this miserable target. The ‘protected areas’ we already possess are nothing of the kind. For example, a little way down the coast from where I live is the Cardigan Bay Special Area of Conservation (SAC). Special areas of conservation are supposed to offer the highest level of protection available under European law. They are described by the government’s official conservation body as ‘strictly protected sites’.78 Yet in the Cardigan Bay SAC, set aside, we are told, to protect Europe’s largest population of bottlenose dolphins79 and the rest of the life that persists there, every form of commercial fishing bar one is unrestricted, except by the laws that apply to unprotected areas. The only commitments in the management plan are to ‘review’ and ‘assess’ the fishing that takes place, to ‘encourage’ good fishing practices (without discouraging the bad ones), and to ask fishermen to record the dolphins and porpoises they accidentally catch and kill.80 That, dear reader, is ‘strict protection’.
As a result, beam trawling, otter trawling and, with one exception,
any other forms of industrial fishing the boats wish to pursue continue there unhindered. There is no prospect of the seabed or the ecosystem recovering from past destruction as a result of this regime of ‘strict protection’. Nor is there an opportunity for the fish stocks on which the dolphins depend to rebound.
There is one method–scallop dredging–that is restricted in some parts of the Special Area of Conservation. With the possible exception of dynamite fishing, it would be hard to devise a more effective means of destroying both living creatures and their habitats. Scallop dredges operate by raking through the seabed with long metal teeth, dislodging the shellfish from the sediments and trapping them in a net whose underside is made of chain mail. The teeth rip through any sedentary creature in their path, as well as the fish, crabs and lobsters unable to escape in time. The steel mesh smashes animals missed by the teeth. Where they are used, divers publish heartbreaking photographs of the seabed before and after they have passed. It looks, where the dredges have worked, like a ploughed field, lifeless, covered in fragments of shell.
As if to demonstrate what ‘strict protection’ really means, the Welsh government decided to let the scallop dredgers into the middle of the reserve. The government’s official advisers, the Countryside Council for Wales, warned that if dredging went ahead it would be ‘likely to have a significant effect on Cardigan Bay SAC’ and may have ‘adverse effects on the dolphin population’.81 This advice was ignored, and dredging was permitted within a large square at the heart of the reserve. This also served as an open invitation for these scarcely monitored boats to leak into the surrounding waters and dredge the other parts of the SAC.
The person responsible for this decision was Elin Jones, the minister then in charge of rural affairs with whom I had the frustrating exchange over farming policy. After I had asked her about the management of the uplands, I turned to scalloping. She told me she was ‘not convinced that it has any kind of degrading effect on the SAC’. She agreed that the Countryside Council for Wales had warned against it, but said she had taken advice from another body, called CEFAS (The Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science). This agency lists among its duties ‘collaborations with the fishing industry’82 and ‘address[ing] fishermen’s own concerns about scientific assessments’.83 Why, I asked, did she take this body’s advice while rejecting the Countryside Council’s?
‘Well, because I was more convinced by the CEFAS advice than by the CCW advice.’
‘What was it that convinced you?’
‘Well, I can’t recall at this particular point on that.’
I pressed her further on the reasons for her decision. She told me she wanted to strike a balance between ‘the need to protect our seas’ and ‘to protect and even enhance the coastal fishery that we have’. So, I asked, given that most of the dredgers come from Scotland and the Isle of Man, fish scallops for a few weeks and then move on, how do their activities enhance the Welsh coastal fishery?
‘Well, it means that people in Aberystwyth and Machynlleth who want to eat scallops can hopefully eat scallops from Cardigan Bay . . . scallops are eaten by people from this area, and I want them to be fished from as close a source as possible.’
I pointed out that the great majority of the scallops taken from the bay are shipped abroad, mostly to Spain, France and other parts of Europe.
‘Yes, I know, that’s part of the weakness of what we have at the moment, which is something that I’m trying to address, through the funding activities that we have in the European Fisheries Fund, to improve the quayside infrastructure that we have in Aberystwyth or Cardigan, to ensure that all of this fish that’s caught can be kept locally and sold locally.’
A local fisherman tells me that some £6 million worth of scallops is caught in Cardigan Bay every year. The population on and around the bay is tiny and overwhelmingly poor. The dredging industry exists because of lucrative markets abroad. There is no obvious mechanism by which local people could outspend these markets, even if they developed a sudden craving for coquille St Jacques at breakfast, lunch and tea. In other words, of the many unlikely propositions I have heard issuing from the mouths of ministers, this must be the most ridiculous.
One October, two years after I discovered that lime trees were growing there, I returned to the Nantgobaith gorge with a friend. Instead of following the forestry track on the north side of the little river, on which I had found the leaves which suggested that this might be a fragment of primeval rainforest, we slithered down the steep south bank of the gorge. We wanted to walk where no one had walked for many years, and to see which trees were growing in the scarcely accessible parts of the wood.
This fragment must owe its existence to the topography: the land is, or was, too steep to clear and too dangerous for keeping sheep. We slipped and slithered in the soft black loam which barely coated the rocks to which the trees clung. Below us the river roared through narrow passages and over cataracts. Had we lost our footing we could have slid down the gorge to our deaths. Clinging by our fingers to exposed roots, the stems of saplings, slippery emergent rocks, we slowly lowered ourselves towards the valley bottom.
When we reached the river, we began picking our way over moss-slick boulders in the mist raised by the many rapids and falls. Before long we came to a white chute of water between two crags. Standing on one of them, I peered gingerly over the edge. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing,’ I asked, ‘if we saw a salmon leaping the falls?’
‘I would love to see that.’
‘I doubt they run up this river. And it’s probably the wrong time of–bloody Norah!’
As if I had summoned it, something bronze and glistening arced out of the water, failed to reach the top of the falls and crashed back into the plunge pool.
‘Did you see that?’
‘No, what?’
‘I saw a salmon.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Watch.’
A minute later another fish hurled itself into the air. We sat on the rock and brought out our lunch, and for the next hour or so we watched salmon large and small rising from the water, wriggling through the air as if to gain purchase on it then tumbling back into the white chaos from which they had sprung.
Willing them upwards, elated by their flight, catching my breath every time a fish appeared, I found myself enraptured. I felt at that moment as if I had passed through the invisible wall that separated me from the ecosystem, as if I were no longer a visitor to that place but an inhabitant–a bear perhaps, emerged from a bimillennial absence back into this ancient scrap of wildwood (which might indeed have been one of the last places in which its species held out), leaning over the falls, mouth agape, fur sodden with spray, knowing at that moment only the water and the fish and the rocks on which it stood.
It was then that I realized that a rewilding, for me, had already begun. By seeking out the pockets of land and water that might inspire and guide an attempt to revive the natural world, I had revived my own life. Long before my dreams of restoration had been realized, the untamed spirit I had sought to invoke had already returned. By equipping myself with knowledge of the past while imagining a rawer and richer future, I had banished my ecological boredom. The world had become alive with meaning, alive with possibility. The trees now bore the marks of elephants; their survival in the gorge prefigured the return of wolves. Nothing was as it had been before. Like the salmon, improbably returning from the void, the depleted land and sea were now gravid with promise. For the first time in years, I felt that I belonged to the world. I knew that wherever life now took me, however bleak the places in which I found myself might seem, that feeling–the sense of possibility and, through possibility, the sense of belonging–would remain with me. I had found hope where hope had seemed absent.
Salmon are not the only fish which, in some parts, are beginning to recover. While the bottom-dwelling creatures of the sea cannot rebound without the closure of fishing grounds, some of the pelagic animals–those u
nattached souls which haunt the middle reaches of the sea–have begun, in a few places, to demonstrate the remarkable capacity of marine life to reappear when conditions change. The cessation of the fishmeal operations in the Irish Sea and elsewhere, and the gradual, partial recovery of the herring population, has attracted back into our waters animals which were once common here.
In 2009 a lone killer whale joined the dolphins that reside in Cardigan Bay. At one point it turned up half a mile off the beach at Llansglodion. A small pod–always accompanied by the same large male–has now appeared off the coast of Pembrokeshire every May for the past eight years. Minke and fin whales have arrived in the same seas in numbers unknown for decades. In 2011 the fins–the second-largest animals ever to have darkened the planet–began, for the first time in living memory, disporting themselves off Pembrokeshire in the winter as well as the summer.84 Later that year, twenty-one of them were seen in the Celtic Deep.85 In 2005 a humpback whale was spotted off the seaboard of Wales. Two others arrived in the Irish Sea in 2010; one was filmed breaching three miles off the Irish coast.86 I dream of the day on which I kayak among them.
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