The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

  Seth Macinko, a colleague of Bromley’s from the University of Rhode Island, pointing to how politicians usually ignore the scientific advice they are given, says, “Catch shares are seen as a solution to the problem of fisheries management, but we haven’t tried management yet!”8 In my view, some of the downsides to catch shares could be solved if they were leased to the industry for set periods and the leases were sold to the highest bidders, much as governments do with other public franchises, like running rail networks. Even then, on their own, catch shares cannot solve the problems of overfishing. They don’t protect habitats from destructive fishing practices, they don’t stop other wildlife from being taken as bycatch, and they won’t save species like groupers or sharks that disappear from places intensively fished for more resilient animals.9 We need enlightened and effective public management of fisheries for that, and a willingness to establish protected areas to safeguard the fragile and vulnerable.

  People often ask me, “What can I do to help?” One place to start is to avoid eating fish that are overexploited in the wild or taken using methods that harm other wildlife. It is easier said than done. In the winter of 2011, I was invited to dinner at one of London’s top seafood restaurants in the heart of Mayfair by some wealthy philanthropists to talk about ending overfishing. My fellow guests included government ministers, the heads of conservation groups, journalists, media tycoons, and business leaders. Needless to say, our hosts had gone to a great deal of trouble to produce a menu of tantalizing delicacy and exemplary sustainability. Then came embarrassment served with the very first course. The menu said “hand-dived Loch Fyne scallops” but the three half shells on my plate spoke of an altogether rougher journey from sea to plate. Their edges were worn and chipped from tumbling in the belly of a scallop dredge. It was nothing like the porcelain fragility of the frilled shell edge shown to me by a Scottish scallop diver who offered up a handful of freshly caught scallops. My hosts had been duped. Despite their best efforts, even a high-class restaurant with experts in seafood sourcing couldn’t do the right thing. So what hope does a confused customer have contemplating the fish counter at the supermarket and trying to figure out what to get for dinner?

  You may have heard of the Marine Stewardship Council, an organization dedicated to helping you choose seafood from sustainable fisheries. It has a blue and white logo in the shape of a fish with a check mark for a tail that implores you to take this packet home rather than some other dubious fish whose background cannot be trusted. Rupert Howes, the chief executive of the organization, certainly hopes you know the logo but you would be in good company if you did not recognize it. Three quarters of all shoppers quizzed in 2010 didn’t know what it was. In gaining visibility for the Marine Stewardship Council, Rupert faces a dilemma: The label will make little difference to seafood buying habits if people cannot find any certified fish, but fisheries have to pass tough standards before the label is awarded. They are judged against three criteria: Is the population healthy? Does the fishery harm other wildlife? Is it well managed? From what I have described in this book, you won’t be surprised to hear that not many fisheries achieve these standards. So some fisheries are being certified on a promise to get better, which makes environmentalists uneasy. As of 2011, the Marine Stewardship Council’s label was carried by more than a hundred fisheries that together made up 12 percent of the world’s reported catch. The organization now has visibility, and the fishing industry is falling over itself to gain accreditation after big suppliers such as Walmart, McDonald’s, and the German Kaufland chain have pledged only to sell certified fish (McDonald’s has already fulfilled its commitment). Holland has promised to sell only fish that carry the logo “as soon as possible.” If others follow suit, it could make a big difference.

  There is a price to this success. An increasing number of fisheries are being certified that cannot possibly be regarded as doing little harm to other wildlife or habitats. Ask any sponge that has been shredded by a scallop dredge, or juvenile skate carried away by a prawn trawl. Where fisheries for scallops or prawns seem reasonably healthy and well managed for the target species, it seems that the certifiers have simply shrugged their shoulders about wider environmental damage. The report for a Scottish prawn fishery acknowledged that prawns could not be caught without damaging bycatch species and the seabed but concluded that since the seabed had been damaged like this for some time, there was no harm in carrying on. Here is an example of the fish bycatch from four days of prawn trawling off the west of Scotland: to land 28,300 prawns, 12,500 fish from 38 species were caught, and all were thrown away, the vast majority of them dead.10 The destruction of seabed life went unrecorded.

  The trouble is that some of the most robust fisheries today are for species that have high population growth rates and can live in heavily degraded environments. The peculiar fact is that it is possible to have “sustainable overfishing” in which resilient species manage to hang in there after others have long departed. Scallops and prawns, for instance, have benefited from the removal of most of their predators by overfishing. Cod, angel sharks, giant skates, and a bevy of others once crunched their way through legions of scallops and prawns. What remains are fisheries of last resort. They are all we have left when everything else is gone. Scallops and prawns are the last commercially viable fisheries in Scotland’s Firth of Clyde (and even then, by 2011 the prawns had become so small from overexploitation the fishermen called them “beetles”). I was left breathless with indignation when a leading environmental organization teamed up with the prawn trawl fishery there to help them get Marine Stewardship Council certification. I asked the chief executive of this organization whether he would support the destruction of rain forest if it could be shown that the palm oil that caused deforestation was produced sustainably. In his enthusiasm to find industry-led solutions to overfishing, he had forgotten that his core business was to be nature’s champion.

  Does that mean the Marine Stewardship Council logo cannot be trusted? While its reputation is dented, I wouldn’t go that far. It is a pretty solid guide to fisheries that are well managed and where the target animal is still reasonably abundant. But that is as far as it goes. Until fisheries of last resort and those that use destructive methods like dredging stop being certified, you cannot be sure of the wider harm that is being done. There is a simple way out of this bind—the MSC needs to embrace the idea of “mitigation.” In my opinion there is only one circumstance in which fisheries that use trawls or dredges should be certified and that is if managers establish extensive protected areas alongside fishing areas so that fragile and less resilient species can find refuge. I recently had an awkward conversation with Rupert Howes and Canada’s Daniel Pauly, who shares my concerns about the MSC. I put this suggestion to Rupert, but he said the MSC was not in the business of recovering overfished species. Good grief! Given the depleted state of so many of the world’s fisheries, it should be. The MSC needs to think beyond sustainability in a narrow fisheries sense, because it isn’t good enough. In light of the many pressures the sea faces, we need to manage the sea for resilience, which means “sustainability +.” What that entails is the promotion of increased abundance of life across the board, not the survival of the dregs left behind after we have plundered the rest. This shift in approach would multiply the MSC’s ability to roll back the harm done by fishing many times over. Then we could eat dredge-caught scallops with a clearer conscience.

  So to get back to the stumped customer standing by the fish counter, here is my advice: Try to avoid prawns or scallops and other bottom feeders fished up by dredgers and trawlers, such as plaice, cod, and hake. If you want to eat such fish, try to find them line caught: handlines and trolls (hook and line towed from a boat) have less bycatch than longlines. Eat low in the food web, so favor smaller fish like anchovies, herring, and sardines over big predators like Chilean sea bass, swordfish, and large tunas (you will be doing yourself a favor as these predators also concentrate more toxins). If you ca
n’t give up tuna, choose pole and line caught animals that have virtually zero bycatch. “Dolphin-friendly” versions alone may not be very dolphin-friendly, since tuna are often caught with purse seines, walls of net that surround and stress dolphins and snare sharks, turtles, and other wildlife. Farm-raised fish and prawns often come at a high environmental cost in destroyed habitat and wild fish turned into feed. Vegetarian fish like tilapia and carp are better than predators like salmon and sea bass. Organic is better too, since your fish will have been dosed with fewer chemicals. I offer more detailed advice in appendix 1.

  Can the oceans continue to feed us? Will marine plankton survive their acid future well enough to support the rest of life at sea? Can we keep dead zones from expanding further? The exponential growth in human population, together with our ever increasing aspirations for material comfort, is taking us into the unknown. The population explosion over the last half century means that rates of change ahead will be greater than anything we have experienced up to now. The only thing we can know for certain is that problems will get worse, perhaps much worse, before they get better. Greenhouse gases already emitted commit us to unavoidable climate change that could push some species and ecosystems to the limit of their endurance, and perhaps beyond them in the case of coral reefs. If we are to avoid the more disastrous of foreseeable futures, we must use every means at our disposal to lower stress and boost the abundance and variety of life in the sea. It could just buy nature enough time for us to stabilize our own population, transition to energy sources other than fossil fuels, and to find ways of living within the limits of a finite planet.

  For that we need therapies complementary to protected areas and lowered fishing intensities. Stress, as any sufferer will testify, can affect every aspect of life. Stressed people are more tired, suffer more illness, and are less able to cope with everyday life. Chronic stress can eventually lead to psychological or physical breakdown. Multiple stresses in the sea have analogous effects, triggering lower fertility, higher rates of injury, disease, and parasite infection. Stressed ecosystems are more susceptible to invasive species. Because ecosystems are a product of the interactions among the animals and plants from which they are constituted, the influence of impacts reverberates. If our underwater worlds are to cope with the vicissitudes of climate change, we will have to do everything we can to minimize other stresses. Research in Australia suggests that coral reefs could cope with a couple of degrees more global warming before throwing in the towel if the water that bathes them is clean, clear of sediment, and free of nutrient pollution.11 We can’t perform miracles overnight, but some countries have understood that it behooves them to do everything humanly possible to protect their natural resources. In 2010, in recognition of the compounding effects of multiple stresses, the Thai government closed eighteen popular dive sites when coral reefs bleached due to seawater warming.12

  Many stresses affecting marine life have local origins so local remedies can be effective. Coral reefs illustrate graphically what is at stake, and what the options are. The Stern Report of 2007 made it clear that dealing with the problems climate change may bring could cost a great deal more than tackling greenhouse gas emissions at source.13 You can build seawalls to hold back the ocean, but they are massively expensive, they don’t work as well as natural habitats, and their costs put them beyond the reach of most of the countries that depend on coral reefs for their survival.

  I recently came across a study of historic sea levels in the Maldives in which the authors found that sea levels had been twenty or twenty-four inches higher than now on a couple of occasions in the past few thousand years.14 They concluded that “there seems no longer to be any reason to condemn the Maldives to become flooded in the near future.” This is encouraging perhaps, but before Maldivians take too much comfort from the news, they need to keep in mind that today’s coral reefs face a fusillade of other stresses that didn’t exist in the past. The Maldives has led on the world stage in negotiations to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Their voice will have to be multiplied to be heard—we need a coalition of “wet-footed” nations from across the world who, by dint of geography, are on the front lines of global change. These negotiations have proven extraordinarily difficult and will take time to conclude, perhaps decades. But time is in short supply for coral countries. Perhaps the only thing that could buy them enough time to survive the transition to a world of reduced emissions will be to raise their standards of coral reef protection to the very highest levels. It may not work but it is the only thing that might.

  Many people I talk to are pessimistic about the future, feeling that human nature cannot be changed; we will just carry on depleting and despoiling. It is easy to feel overwhelmed, but it would be wrong to give up and do nothing. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If we all shoulder some responsibility for improving the oceans, at whatever level of influence we can muster, then change will come. Small effects multiplied millions of times make a great force.

  The future is an unknown and sometimes frightening place. When I was a child the Cold War was at its height, and I grew up fearing that nuclear annihilation was just around the corner. In preparation for a postapocalyptic future, I devoured books on survival and self-sufficiency in the wild. Young people growing up today fear a slow-motion apocalypse. The creeping gears of climate change and ever greater burden of a growing population mean that future worlds will be different in ways that defy accurate prediction. Today whole societies must hone their survival skills if they are to prosper. We have to work out how to live within our means, and there isn’t much time to do it.

  Yet we are adaptable and resilient. Our success is testament enough. In the industrial age, so far, human resilience and adaptability have been directed toward maintaining the use or extraction of our natural capital in the face of dwindling resources. In the case of fishing this has included increased fishing intensity and power, invention of new gears and methods, and periodic switches to less favored species. What we need now is to redirect our energies toward maintaining and rebuilding our resources. Prepare for change, and you have less to fear. It is our good fortune that there are so many ways to rebuild the variety and abundance of life. We have the means but do we have the will? For if we are to refurbish our planet, we need to reinvent our relationship with the natural world.

  From the perspective of society as a whole, the best policies are those that maximize long-term benefits and minimize costs. But politicians are human. They tend to serve the interests of those who most ardently court their favor, and weigh short-term interests far more heavily than long-term considerations. I constantly encounter politicians who view nature conservation as an extravagance that affluent societies can afford to indulge in a little, but no more. Perhaps this is why we so often see policies that pay lip service to nature rather than recognize it as indispensable to human welfare. Their logic is that economies compete with nature for space and nature should yield to economic interest. We have to reverse that logic. More space for nature means more space for us. Our interests overlap far more than most people recognize.

  CHAPTER 21

  Saving the Giants of the Sea

  After a lecture in Glasgow one evening, I was collared by a grouchy Scot. Fixing me with an unfriendly stare, he spat out, “Whit are we goin tae do aboot all them gray seals then? They’re eatin moor fush than we catch!” My talk had been punctuated with old pictures of monster catches and bleak graphs of fish landings over the last century, whose lines plunged like jagged alpine slopes toward zero. This man had picked out what for me is one of the few bright spots in a sea of decline: the fact that gray seal numbers around the UK have been on the increase since we stopped hunting them in 1970. So too have common seals. Seabirds like gannets and guillemots also bounced back after we stopped eating them in the late nineteenth century.

  What this proves is that conservation works. If we don’t kill animals they live longer and become more common.
Gray whales in the eastern Pacific have made a comeback from near extinction in the 1930s to a population of twenty thousand today. Blue whales are slowly fighting back in Antarctica, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. Several species of fur seals have struggled away from the precipice of extinction in the last century, and Kemp’s ridley turtles in the Gulf of Mexico have multiplied out of the risk zone. Florida’s goliath groupers are mounting a comeback after fishing for them was banned in 1990. There is much joy to be had from these examples, for which the credit is widely shared.

  Many ocean giants are quintessential world travelers so protecting them is complex. In the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami of March 2011, Fukushima’s nuclear disaster brought some of those connections to public attention in America. Albacore tuna winter in the seas off Japan before they head for California five thousand miles away, where they support valuable fisheries. Northern bluefin tuna make the same journey but more sporadically. Suddenly Fukushima didn’t seem so far away. Humpback whales migrate thousands of miles from chilly polar waters in both southern and northern hemispheres to warm water breeding grounds in places like the Caribbean and the Mozambique Channel between Africa and Madagascar. Gray whales enliven the seas all the way along the west coast of North America as they shuttle between breeding lagoons in Mexico and summer feeding grounds in the Bering Sea. White sharks and whale sharks swim thousands of miles between feeding and breeding grounds. Some albatross circle Antarctica many times in their lives. Protected areas are often dismissed as a waste of time for such nomads. The truth, as you probably already know from migrant birds, is that put in the right places, they can do a lot to help even the most peripatetic species.