There are many ecological services that we cannot artificially re-create or which would simply be too expensive or impractical to reengineer. It would be impossible to create a high-capacity filtration system that worked as well as the carpet of invertebrates that once covered much of the seabed. Stirring oxygen into dead zones would be an enormous undertaking. And no man-made reef will ever come close to the richness of a healthy estuary. Restoration efforts are most worthwhile when they work with nature. In America’s Delaware Bay, intensive efforts to reestablish living oyster reefs are beginning to pay off, as transplanted oysters are seeding the bay with their own offspring. And restored beds provide the foundation for rich communities of other invertebrates and fish that the natural beds of old did. In the Philippines, replanted mangroves help protect coasts from erosion while also creating nurseries for wild fish and shrimp that later on fill the nets and baskets of fishers. In Britain, farmland long ago reclaimed from the sea is being reflooded to encourage salt-marsh growth and replace mud flats that are disappearing under sea-level rise.
Although I spend much of my life behind a desk, wild nature inspires and renews me. I carry the memory of it with me wherever I go, and I return to the well whenever I can. A few years ago I was lucky enough to witness the elemental struggle between two great creatures of the ocean in the Galápagos Islands. I was with a small group in a dingy when some sixty feet away we spotted a hunting orca plunging through the face of a wave as it cornered a green turtle against a hidden reef. White foam streamed over its dark flank lending it a frightful beauty. Another orca crested beside it, then lashed its tail as the king of predators snatched the turtle, and flung it across the surface of the sea. The orcas seemed to play with the turtle after that, rising and diving, arching their fins against a backdrop of volcanic slopes, black on black. It was a timeless moment: the millennial struggle for survival played out over and over in these waters. Storm petrels flitted above in excited flocks, while far overhead frigate birds circled and waited, hoping for a share of the spoils. Nature offers us things that no artifice could ever create. If we give it a chance, it can heal many of its wounds.
I am not foolish enough to think that we can wind back the clock to some primordial condition when our species first walked out of Africa. Change is inevitable. Species rise and fall; ecosystems shift and warp with time. But if our biosphere is to weather the storms ahead, then we must strengthen the twin pillars of life’s variety and abundance.
How can we deliver this New Deal for the oceans? Marine reserves are a critical part of the solution. Placing areas off limits to exploitation and excessive use has proven time and again to be a powerful tool to protect and enhance life at sea. But if reserves are to make a real difference, there must be lots of them in extensive networks that are well enforced. They cannot simply safeguard a smattering of beauty spots. We should think of these interconnected safe havens as the new foundations underpinning everything we do in the sea. Fortunately, there is a growing appetite for this kind of protection in the world at large.
The mountains of Arran rise up from Scotland’s Firth of Clyde in a ragged ridge of brown and gold. The island is known as the “sleeping warrior” for its profile from the mainland. Its warrior spirit must infuse some of Arran’s five thousand inhabitants, for it was here that the first battle against overfishing and degradation of the Firth of Clyde was fought and eventually won.
In 1995 a small group of islanders got together to campaign for the protection of a short stretch of coast in Lamlash Bay. They were shocked by how, within a few decades, the bay had been nearly emptied of fish and its fragile seabed habitats destroyed by scallop dredging. For years they were rebuffed by fisheries managers, government officials, and politicians. Even Scotland’s own nature conservation agency wouldn’t support them, because they felt that the bay was not special enough to warrant protection. The islanders refused to give up. Over the years their campaign group, the Community of Arran Seabed Trust, grew to include half of Arran’s population.4 Votes count, and political support for the protected area followed. Through dogged persistence and a conviction that the destruction of the Firth of Clyde should not be ignored, the people of Arran achieved their goal. In 2008 Lamlash Bay became Scotland’s first marine protected area to be closed to all fishing. A small community had taken the future of the sea into their own hands.
Arran’s faith in the regenerative powers of the sea quickly proved well-founded. Within two years of protection habitats inside the reserve began to take on a more lush and healthy appearance, and juvenile scallops had become more numerous under protection than in nearby fishing grounds.5 Other benefits, like recovery of big fish, will take longer to accrue, but reserves elsewhere show they will come if protection is maintained.
Across the world, other communities have trodden parallel paths to Arran’s. In the Philippines, a few villages troubled by the growing scarcity of fish, established small protected areas in the 1970s to help rehabilitate reefs and fisheries. Those areas were studied by researchers from Silliman University under the direction of Angel Alcala, an affable and determined man who later became a government minister, and Garry Russ, a scientist at Australia’s James Cook University. Over time, fish and corals rebounded in the reserves. A change of leadership in one village led to the Sumilon reserve being reopened to fishing in 1984. Within a year stocks fell by half, and the connection between protection and benefit was firmly established. By way of contrast, support for the reserve at Apo Island remained strong and fish stocks there kept on going up, year after year.6 Twenty-five years of sustained protection has since increased Apo’s stocks eleven times over.
Word spread about these islands of protection in what are otherwise some of the most intensely overfished seas on the planet (remember pa-aling). With the encouragement of Alcala and others keen to revivify Philippine seas, groups of fishers who lived near reserves traveled the country to share their experiences. Other villages copied their approach. The Philippines now has hundreds of community-managed protected areas. Even though the fishers involved were desperately poor, they realized that if they didn’t make some short-term sacrifices, they would have no fish to eat in the future.
In Fiji, local chiefs have for centuries jealously guarded patches of the coral reef exploited by their communities, always keeping some areas off limits to fishing (called tabu, which is where our word taboo comes from). In recent years, their efforts have been harnessed in the creation of a national network of community-managed reserves. Fiji has committed to the protection of at least 30 percent of its seas by 2020, and with nearly two hundred protected areas already, it looks likely to reach this target long before then. Big fish are still easy to come by in Fiji, and the islands have some of the most exciting shark dives in the world. Examples of effective protection are multiplying across the world. The Hol Chan reserve in Belize, Cabo Pulmo in Mexico, Ras Mohammed in Egypt, Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park in the Bahamas, Tsitsikamma in South Africa, the list grows longer month by month, all thronging with life and testament to the spectacular effects of protection. Time and again, when people realize what they have lost, and understand that careful stewardship of their resources will bring some of their riches back, this realization kindles enthusiasm for action.
Marine protected areas represent an indispensable building block of our New Deal for the oceans. In the last century and a half we have expanded our exploitation of the oceans from a narrow strip around the coasts to the deepest and most remote seas. In the early nineteenth century, the untapped sea exceeded the areas that were fished by at least a hundred to one. Today that position is reversed. This expansion, like our earlier spread to every corner on land, has left far less space for wild nature. The difference between land and sea is that we depend on wild nature to supply the majority of our seafood. To ensure continuity of this food before it is too late, we must set up parks at sea, and lots of them. If well protected, they could harness nature’s resilience to produce a resurgen
ce of life. As Apo Island proved, exploited species can increase by five-, ten-, even twentyfold within a decade of protection, and sometimes in just a few years. After eleven years of protection in Spain’s Cabo de Palos reserve, dusky grouper, a popular Mediterranean eating fish, had leaped in abundance by over fortyfold, while in Florida’s Dry Tortugas Ecological Reserve, mutton snapper rebounded by three times in only four years.7
Watching reserves refill with life over a span of years, as I have many times in the Caribbean, is an uplifting experience. Caves, ledges, and overhangs repopulate with animals that had formerly been scarce, while the blue waters above thrill again with the flash and strike of predators and prey. After an absence of ten years I recently revisited a small marine reserve at Molasses Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which has been protected from fishing since the 1970s. I was delighted to find many more fish than on my first visit, including several kinds that are usually absent from exploited reefs. Three-foot-long blue parrotfish grazed the bottom in amiable groups, their pale flanks a pleasing contrast to the indigo shades of the midnight parrotfish mingling with them. I even spotted a thick-set Nassau grouper between two coral heads, once the mainstay of Caribbean fish dinners, it is now missing from much of its former range.
Refuges like these cannot solve all ills. They will not address the root causes of global change, nor reduce pollution, but they can alleviate some of the effects of these problems. This is how: Marine reserves—places off limits to all exploitation—have proven to be spectacularly good breeding grounds. This is a simple consequence of two things: increased abundance and extended lifespan of the animals they contain. Early on in this book I explained that overfishing had caused a collapse in fish and shellfish stocks because it culled the big, old, fat females that were the engines of egg production. A big fish can produce hundreds of times more young than a small fish, and many marine creatures keep on getting bigger as they grow older and remain fertile most of their lives. So having craggy and ancient giants around is a brilliant way to ensure masses of offspring. If you think of a marine reserve as a fountain of microscopic eggs and larvae pouring into the sea, you won’t be far off. As populations recover and individual inhabitants grow larger, the flow increases from a trickle to a stream to a gush. Long-established reserves offer up countless millions of eggs, larvae, seeds, spores, planulae, or whatever other means their inhabitants use to reproduce. Like dandelion seeds caught in the wind, currents carry offspring away from their parents for distances of feet to hundreds of miles, depending on the species. So the new life spreads far beyond the limits of the protected habitat.
Stresses like climate change and pollution reduce survival rates and make reproduction harder; by increasing the flow of offspring, protected reserves can mitigate these effects. Bigger populations that reproduce vigorously will be much better able to battle through the battery of stresses that we throw at them, tipping the balance between life and death back in their favor.
Protected areas do things that fishery managers cannot achieve without them. The Leigh Marine Reserve in New Zealand is just three miles across, and yet it produces more young snapper, a burly gray fish much loved by fishermen, than sixty miles of fished coast. For some animals in long-established reserves the multiple is even greater and protected areas outproduce fishing grounds 100 to 1.
Marine reserves can boost the resilience of fish populations and fisheries in another way too. One of the effects of fishing, if you recall, is that it increases the variability of fish stocks, which induces swings in the fortunes of fishers. This happens when fishing drives down populations and shortens lifespans so far fewer offspring are produced. Reserves reverse this effect by securing a steadier and richer flow of offspring.8 If you fish for a living, that difference matters. When the stream of new life flows fast, there will always be something to catch. When it is weak and intermittent, catches are unreliable.
Reserves can also bring back habitats swept away by trawls or dredges, and reverse habitat collapses induced by plagues of grazers like sea urchins let loose by the removal of their predators. If you could fast-forward through the years after a reserve was created, you would see kelp forests rise from the seabed, sea grasses thicken and spread, sediments disappear under crusts of invertebrates, like oysters and sponges, that elbow their way above the bottom. The gradual rebuilding of these underwater metropolises increases the capacity of the sea to sustain life. There are more ways to make a living and more places to hide.
There probably aren’t too many people who, if given the choice, would want the fish on their plate to come at the price of extinction for other species. But that is the unseen cost of many fisheries today. Most people are unaware that some of the species that show up on the fishmonger’s slab simply cannot sustain productive fisheries in the long run. They grow and reproduce too slowly. Most sharks and the bigger skates and rays fall into this category. So does almost everything caught more than sixteen hundred feet down, deep-sea beasts like Chilean sea bass, orange roughy, or roundnose grenadier. They are caught because they are there, and when they are gone they disappear from markets. If you are old enough, you will remember the sudden appearance of orange roughy in supermarkets in the 1980s and 1990s. Their firm white fillets were similar enough to cod and haddock to find a ready market. Just as swiftly they vanished early this century as their fisheries collapsed, the seamounts from which they were pulled left empty. There are good reasons why we farm animals that are highly productive and feed low in the food web, like chickens and cows, rather than bears or cougars. But it is the bears and cougars of the sea that we have grown used to eating.
Many exploited species became rare so long ago that we can no longer remember a time when they were abundant: angel sharks and giant skates in Northern Europe, bluefin tuna in the North Sea (even Iceland), halibut in the North Atlantic, goliath groupers in most of the Caribbean, rosefish in the Gulf of Maine. Celebrity chefs and environmental organizations sometimes confuse variety with sustainability. They exhort us to eat less cod, for instance, to ease pressure on an overfished species, while urging alternatives like ling or wolffish. Here a little historical perspective may help us judge the wisdom of these substitutions. Both ling and wolffish are impressive beasts. Fully mature they can grow longer than a man is tall. The wolffish has a face like a seasoned rugby player and teeth to match, their gappy grins and broken canines testament to a lifetime of hard knocks gained crunching clams and urchins. We are not the first generation to appreciate wolffish steaks: they were much admired in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Trawl fishing records from the UK show that since 1889 catches of wolffish per unit of fishing power have fallen by 96 percent.9 Ling catches have fallen by the same amount. My student Ruth Thurstan once gave a presentation in which she showed a photograph of fish landings made at the UK port of Grimsby in the 1890s. Six-foot ling were piled on the dock like logs. A fisherman in the audience rebuked her for confusing tuna with the trawl catches she had mentioned. But he was the one who was confused. He had never seen ling so large or abundant, so he mistook them for tuna. Neither ling nor wolffish is a sustainable alternative to traditional favorites. Today they are rarities that were once common. So if you want to find a substitute for cod, a better option would be something that is still common, like haddock, whiting, or pollock.
Marine reserves offer a way out of the dilemma of whether to fish hard to benefit from high-production, high-turnover species like scallops, prawns, and plaice, or to fish lightly to prevent the disappearance of the big and vulnerable. At the moment, species like the “no-longer-common skate” hang on in scraps of rough ground beyond the reach of trawl and dredge. But these de facto refuges are shrinking under the onslaught of new technologies and fishers chasing better catches as traditional grounds fail. Scuba divers in the west of Scotland report scallop dredgers scraping the bottom right up to the edge of submerged reefs, guided by sophisticated underwater sensing equipment. They lift tons of the s
ediment that settles over the reefs and smothers life on the rocks so their impact extends even into places of apparent safety. Reserves provide refuges where fragile and vulnerable animals and plants can thrive without hindering fishing operations. Intensive fishing and susceptible wildlife can coexist, but not in the same places. In this respect the sea is no different from land. Sensitive animals and plants that cannot cope in landscapes dominated by industrial agriculture find safety in protected woodlands, heaths, and prairies. We just haven’t got our heads around the simple fact that we need to set aside parks in the sea. We can’t easily see what is going on down there, but many modern fishing technologies are equivalent to clear-cutting and monocrop farming rolled into one.
With so much in their favor, why is it that marine protected areas are so often opposed by the group that stands to gain most from them—the fishing industry? In 2010 England embarked upon a grand project to create a national network of marine protected areas to redress over a century of accumulated damage to marine life, and to fulfill its commitment made in 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Like other coastal nations of the world, the UK promised to create a national network of marine protected areas by 2012. Sadly, many within the fishing industry have chosen to oppose this. Lurid headlines and exaggerated claims have filled the fishing press: NO TAKE ZONES ARE THREAT TO FISHING from Fishing News is typical.10 In reality, the biggest threat to fishing is fishing itself. Overexploitation is putting people out of business, not protected areas. All the evidence suggests that protection keeps fishers at work. In developing nations, marine reserves have been proven to boost the food security of people who live nearby.11 In the Mediterranean, artisanal fishers, the very lifeblood of coastal culture and community, make a better living in the waters near marine reserves than those in places where there are none.12
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