The problem was already serious, even before the price of diesel started rising. More boats than ever were soon attracted to a fishery which cost so little to reach. There was no quota on scallops and TV chefs had made them popular. I had already been looking for a way to involve myself in this campaign when the MS Napoli, a large cargo ship, obliged me by starting to break up during a winter gale early in 2007. Deliberately run aground in Lyme Bay so that it could be salvaged, about a hundred of the containers stacked on its deck were lost overboard. A few of them washed up on a nearby beach and were looted.
The campaign of a local Wildlife Trust to stop scallop-dredging is not news, as several magazine editors had already pointed out to me, but an oil-spill was and so was this horde of latter-day wreckers. Welcome to what sells magazines. In the guise of writing about the news, I finally got to write about what really interested me. There were several people I’d been wanting a pretext to interview – fishermen, biologists, activists. Here was my chance.
It felt perverse, of course, to view such an occasion as an ‘opportunity’, but such is the logic of the current affairs industry. I’d claimed, in other contexts, to be looking for a way to live and write that didn’t mean jumping in aeroplanes quite so regularly – well …
The government was already taking scientific advice on how much of our coastal waters should be protected if fish stocks were to stand some chance of recovery. The advice was: about one third. In Lyme Bay, several ‘voluntary agreements’ with fishermen had been tried, but none of these succeeded in excluding the largest and most damaging dredgers, mainly from Wales and the Isle of Man.
When the government consulted, I wrote the response for a local environmental group. Such consultations of course rarely have much effect, so I was astonished when the government decided to make of Lyme Bay a test case. In July 2008, a Statutory Instrument protecting its sea-bed from all towed fishing gear was announced by the Secretary of State in Lyme Regis. Sixty square miles of the bay were designated, far and away the largest such reserve ever created in UK waters. Another thirty miles were added in 2009 under European legislation, a further fifteen by the British Government in 2013.
Given the scale of the site, surveying its recovery presented challenges. But all agree that the sea-bed has recovered quickly, even on the loose sandy gravels between reefs where little or no change had been expected. Ross coral, branching sponges and sea fans have all recovered strongly, as have scallops and lobsters. Allow the sea some time and the surprises soon begin.
Small boats have signed up to an agreement, initially brokered by the Blue Marine Foundation, whereby they limit their catch in the common interest and police the protected areas against any dredging. All larger vessels must now carry inshore Vessel Monitoring Systems. Mobile phone networks will soon be used to track smaller vessels and the Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authorities also have patrol boats and radar. The port of Brixham, in Lyme Bay, was, in the 17th century, one of the first in Britain to employ the then new (and already controversial) technology of bottom trawling. Four centuries on, the ‘technological creep’, which has for so long worked against marine habitats, is finally being used to protect them.
The time for euphoria is, as usual, not yet. The scientific advice on which the Protected Area was set up was for 30 per cent of the UK’s inshore waters to be No Take Zones, i.e. areas in which no fishing at all takes place. That may have been unrealistic but there still is not one solitary square mile of No Take Zone in Lyme Bay or in any of the other more recent designations. Indeed, of the 750,000 square kilometres of the UK’s coastal waters, 7.5 square kilometres, a one hundred thousandth part of that area, is fully protected.
After a consultation involving more than a million people and the government’s own scientific advisors, costing almost £10m, a network of 127 Marine Conservation Zones was proposed in 2010, in which certain forms of fishing would be banned. In sixty-five additional ‘reference areas’ no fishing would take place. The reference areas were all later dropped and just fifty of the 127 sites proposed have become reserves. The scientific body commissioned to advise on this, The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, was meanwhile abolished in 2010 by a Conservative government which had come to power on promises to be ‘the greenest government ever’.
LIFE ON BOARD THE EXETER
Fisheries scientists have long argued that Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have never been shown to work outside the Tropics. There is a growing body of scientific evidence, however, that they do exactly what you would expect them to do, in temperate waters as elsewhere. They result in larger numbers of older, larger, more fertile fish, which then improve fish stocks in the surrounding area through ‘spill-over’. This has been demonstrated for coastal populations of cod in Scandinavia, as well as for lobsters and scallops in UK coastal waters.
MPAs are not, of course, opposed because they don’t work. They plainly do. They are opposed because they represent an alternative to the short-termism by which the industry and its friends in government choose to be guided.
What is true of MPAs is even truer of No Take Zones. Their purpose is the recovery of a habitat to something like its condition prior to industrial exploitation. The campaigning for them, and then the recovery itself, take time. Neither will the recovery ever be entirely ‘as expected’. In January 2014, Lyme Bay was hit by three storms of a magnitude that would normally be expected every fifty years. Scientists already studying the bay’s recovery were able to look at how it was impacted by the kind of extreme weather event we can expect more of in the future. In other words, work undertaken to study a Protected Area was now telling us what we can expect from climate change, too.
Tracking such changes is only possible in areas which have been permanently closed to certain fishing methods or to all fishing. Without such areas, we can’t know ‘what the sea might regenerate towards.’ And this is the nub of it: the reason Protected Areas are opposed by the industrial fishing lobby is because they represent a long-term commitment to understanding marine habitats.
That ‘long-term commitment’ is about their future prospects of course but not only that. Researchers have also analysed official catch data, i.e. records of fish landed, which for the Channel go back to the 1920s. The fishing industry bases its own assessment of stock on the same data but cry foul when environmentalists use them, too, as the basis of their own studies. The catch data strongly suggest a massive shift to reduced biodiversity over the past century. And the offence caused by this finding is only compounded by other discoveries being made.
What we describe as ‘industrial fishing’ began with the introduction of steam trawling in the mid-19th century, so you need to go back well beyond the 1920s. Biologists are picking through the accounts of travellers, not to mention explorers, in search of a pre-industrial baseline against which the present state of our seas can be measured. They have picked through medieval laws and trade agreements. They are searching the archaeological record, too, for clues to what our seas were like before industrial fishing got its teeth into them.
Aelfric’s Colloquy is one example of how their approach might work for the Dorset coastline. This ‘colloquy’, or discussion, arose from a teaching experiment devised by a monk at Cerne Abbas in the 10th century. Trying to interest novices in learning Latin, Aelfric interviewed people from all walks of life: a ploughman, a shepherd and a hunter, a lawyer, a merchant and a cook. Aelfric translated his questions and their answers into Latin, then set his pupils to translate these back into Anglo-Saxon. His interviews are about as close as we will ever get to a fly-on-the-wall documentary about everyday life in Anglo-Saxon England.
He also interviewed a fisherman from somewhere near Wareham. The interview includes a fascinating exchange about the dangers of hunting for whales in the English Channel, which makes it quite clear that they were at that time abundant in the West Country’s coastal waters. Not to mention the oysters, herring, sturgeon, dolphin and salmon of which ther
e were also no shortages. It can only follow from this that there existed, at that time, marine (and river) habitats which were able to sustain all of this.
The response to evidence of this kind from industry scientists is that since we do not have scientific data from the pre-scientific era, it follows that such evidence as we do have must be discounted. Especially when it tends to suggest that having Marine Protected Areas might be a rather good idea. The industry’s preferred time-frame is both shorter and altogether better adapted to its own thoroughly self-interested approach to what the ocean is for.
The call for longer-range thinking is always problematic for a certain mind-set. Or ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’, as Milan Kundera, another one of those Czechs I used to read all the time, once put it. Lyme Bay has witnessed many transformations in our relationship with the sea. But there is one episode in particular which should be better known than it is.
The Devon Record Office was moved to a business park on the edge of Exeter at about the same time as a new Met Office was going up just across the road. The document I have pre-booked is carried with care between the reading-room tables. The large cardboard folder contains particulars relating to five voyages made to the Arctic between 1754 and 1759. Whales in any number had by then, evidently, long since disappeared from English waters, but this is a ledger detailing all income and outgoings to and from The Exeter Whale Fishery Company. At the end of each set of accounts are the signatures of the company’s directors, creatures of habit who met each year in the same coffee house to inspect and sign the columns of figures. At the end of each voyage there is an entry showing the payment made to the crew ‘when they returned from Greenland.’
Disbursement Number One: £2150 ‘for purchase of a ship in London.’ The vessel was re-christened the Exeter and fitted-out as a whaler on the mudflats at Lympstone. Harpoons, lances and whale-line, cordage and rivets must be purchased. Insurance, coal, coopers. Sailmakers and smiths present their bills. The ship would have shared those mud-flats, in the winter of 1754, with one of the West Country’s largest fleets of Newfoundland ‘bankers’. Named after the Grand Banks on which they fished the cod, the bankers travelled west each spring, returning to Lympstone each autumn.
There were an estimated one hundred of them plying this route in 1600. These were the fishermen William Borough and William Gilbert interviewed as they researched their books about the earth’s magnetic field and there were plenty of them to interview. But the Whale Fishery Company was not some ‘organic’ development of these predecessors. The many Scottish surnames on the crew-lists are a clue: suitably trained personnel were unavailable locally. Most whaling companies set up at this time were in the north and east of England. Exeter’s involvement is more complicated than it first appears.
A quarter of a century had passed before the whales Davis had noted on his voyages to Greenland began to be hunted on any systematic basis. The Spitzbergen whaling grounds were already by then in decline. In this the Dutch had led the way, so it was Dutch and not British ports that benefitted. Irked by this, the British Government tried various schemes to stimulate their own whaling fleet.
In 1749 they hit upon the crude but effective method of offering a massive bounty on every tonne of whale blubber and bone brought back from Greenland. Exeter might not have the facilities or experienced crews of its northern competitors, but its cloth trade was in long-term decline and thirty-two of its merchants knew a good deal when they saw one. They subscribed over £5,000 to found the company and less than a year later the shareholders signed their first set of accounts.
The document to which they put their signatures remains to this day a startling window into the day to day operations of such a venture. The ship operated in a punishing environment. After a ship accompanying the Exeter became caught in ice in the Davis Straits, money was paid out ‘for victuallising 8 men 344 day[s] after the ship was lost @ 6d’. The Exeter was in 1757 attacked by a French privateer – England and France were at war over Canada at the time. ‘The Coffin and Burying of Ben Courtenay who was killed defending the ship’: 19 shillings. Hiring a coach ‘to carry the wounded men to Hospital’ cost 5 shillings. There are doctor’s fees to pay. Thomas Glass is not mentioned but must have heard about it. On the next voyage, £195 are paid out ‘for Warlike stores’. There was relief when that expedition returned safely: two shillings and sixpence were paid to ‘the messenger who brought News of the Ship’s arrival’.
But there was money in ‘weighing the whale bone.’ There was ‘cutting money for 6 fish’ at so much a fish. There was money for ‘watching the oil while boiling.’ And the danger of the work may help explain how well fed the crews were by the standards of the day. ‘2 Hogsheads of good beef’. Twelve hens supplied the crew with fresh eggs. Mustard seed and cress were grown on board.
At a first glance these accounts are quite unexceptionable. Here is an honourable record of business transactions conducted by scrupulous gentlemen. The destruction of the northern bowhead proceeds but the accounting is exact and the handwriting is immaculate. Candles, tea and coffee. No hint of a scruple. Profits from this company were considerable and will certainly have found their way into the building boom which created some of Exeter’s most elegant buildings of this period. The ‘whale bone’, i.e. baleen, from one journey yields about £800. The oil, about £1100. In those days, you could build some nice houses for that and build them they did. And then more. On 28 March 1758, £1 1s is paid ‘To the crew to drink the owner’s health.’
It all sounds jolly prosperous. There is nothing here to suggest, say, that any of the directors might be dealing on a private basis, selling company products through intermediaries and profiting royally therefrom. For that information you must turn to the private accounts of the company’s treasurer, one Mathew Lee. They are, as luck would have it, preserved in the same archive.
The accounts of our energy companies will read no less strangely to our descendants, as they discover all the updated ways we have found to ‘drink the owner’s health.’ The conferences and the bonuses, sponsorship for the arts. It was, after all, largely for their oil that these creatures were valued. As Rebecca Solnit puts it: ‘ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters.’
The British Government, quite as much in the 21st century as in the 18th, continues to offer excellent illustrations of this. Ben Bradshaw, Minister for Fisheries in 2006 and closely involved with the build-up to the Lyme Bay closure in 2008, is still MP for Exeter. His government’s establishment of that original MPA was an act of far-sighted political bravery. Governments since, ‘greenest ever’ ones included, have rarely matched that courage. Continuing efforts by the dredgers to be readmitted to the MPA and the support they are receiving from some in government should serve to remind us that the 1750s are not as far away as they might seem.
The MPA has, over a decade or so, developed a management structure tailored to its own needs. That the scallop-dredgers have been successfully excluded is down to an alliance of formally trained biologists and responsible fishermen. The fine-scale knowledge of the area, which the fishermen provided, has meshed with that wider-scale, methodical knowledge of marine habitats, which the researchers have brought with them. The fishermen have been fully involved with surveying the sea-bed’s recovery.
Marine conservation is popular. Communities around the bay, like the one I live in, are rightly proud that the first of the larger reserves was established here. But the popularity of marine conservation does not always translate into the kind of organised opposition that actually wins. Of those ‘protected areas’ which have been created around the country, Lyme Bay is among the more fortunate. Others have already seen the readmission of dredgers, as in Cardigan Bay.
In conservation, as in any other field, it is easy enough to say that the best cours
e is to discover the truth and then insist upon it. So, of course, we should. But we can work, also, to deepen the kind of truth we tell. The Devon Wildlife Trust recently launched a campaign to protect the white-beaked dolphins in Lyme Bay. They argue that the white-beaks would benefit from such a measure because they are more sensitive to surface temperature than other species of dolphin. You could protect the cooler areas of the bay and be sure you were protecting them.
They argue also that the nutrient up-welling, abundant in plankton and fish of all kinds which attract the dolphins, is well worth ‘future proofing’. Minke whale, basking shark and harbour porpoise have all been recorded, as well as the Balearic shearwater. There are as yet no English Marine Protected Areas for such ‘highly mobile marine species’, i.e. cetaceans and birds. The white-beaks are clearly resident and therefore well suited to this form of protection.
The Devon Wildlife Trust and the Hadley Centre for Climate Change are based in the same city, yet the campaign has thus far made less than it might have of the climate change implications. It is seeking to protect a marine mammal closely associated with the Arctic, here towards the southern limit of its range. Their continued presence in the bay, in other words, will be directly affected by climate change.
Exeter, as we’ve seen, is one of the many British cities that enriched themselves through whaling, that is to say, through killing cetaceans for their bone and oil. Whale ships once set out for Greenland through precisely the waters in which the white-beaks are now found. Might this reserve not be some small way to make belated amends? Who, today, shares that indifference to the health of our oceans that is written all over those accounts of the Exeter Whale Fishery Company?
The Paradoxal Compass Page 13
