The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

  Three quarters of the United States haddock catch is caught within three miles of the boundaries of large protected areas on Georges Bank, east of Cape Cod, and in the Gulf of Maine.13 Lobsters have bounced back to seven times their previous abundance in a tiny scrap of protected area that was declared in 2003 next to England’s Lundy Island, and the reserve is spilling young lobsters into surrounding fishing grounds.14 Every year the examples multiply, and yet some people seem to stick stubbornly to views that science has proven to be unfounded.15 I hear the same arguments against protected areas that I heard fifteen years ago, about how they presage the collapse of the fishing industry and will eviscerate thriving ports. But ports are closing because a lack of protection means that every year there are fewer fish. Here is just one example local to me: The port of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast was a bustling center of fishing in the mid–twentieth century and long before that. Old photographs show the harbor crammed with boats and dockside stacked high with boxes full of fish. In 2010 there were ten boats left, all for sale.

  One old chestnut that pops up again and again is how marine reserves will not provide any benefit to mobile fish like cod, which are the mainstays of cool water fisheries in Europe, North America, and Japan. This view is based on a misunderstanding of how they live their lives. In recent years cod have been fitted with tags that track their movements. Many of them are remarkably sedentary and for months on end hardly move at all. Some stay put pretty much all year round. There is a telling example of what protection can do for cod in the convoluted entrance to the Baltic Sea.16

  Between Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmö in Sweden there is a short and narrow strait called the Öresund. It varies from two-and-a-half to twenty-eight miles wide and is the main route for ships in and out of the Baltic. Because of its importance to shipping, Öresund has been closed to mobile fishing gears like trawls and seine nets since 1932. Catches in the Öresund are made mainly by fixed nets. To the north, a region ten times its size, called the Kattegat, is fished by bottom trawls. The fortunes of their respective fisheries in the last thirty-five years could not be more different. In the late 1970s, fishers trawled sixteen thousand to twenty-two thousand tons of cod from the Kattegat while gillnetters in Öresund took about two thousand. In 2008, the Kattegat yielded 495 tons of cod, compared to 2,350 tons from the Öresund. Research catches made in Öresund that year showed cod there to be fifteen to forty times more abundant than in Kattegat, and much bigger too. Some of the cod pulled from these waters today rival the behemoths of old. Similar size differences were found in several other kinds of fish, including lemon sole, haddock, plaice, and whiting. The Öresund and its fisheries have remained in great shape because they are protected from the most destructive kinds of fishing. Despite the fact that it covers just 780 square miles, and the coasts that border the strait are home to nearly four million people, marine life flourishes.

  Fisheries benefit from complexity. As it transpired, not all cod are the migrants we took them for, in endless transit over thousands of miles between nursery, feeding, and breeding areas. Populations like those in the Öresund, or the Firth of Clyde for that matter, are locally adapted and more sedentary. Indiscriminate fishing has laid waste to this population diversity, and in the process it has undermined the capacity of populations, and the fisheries that depend on them, to continue to thrive as conditions change. This adaptability becomes ever more valuable as the world around us changes.

  Alaska’s Bristol Bay salmon fishery is a perfect example of how population variability can work to stabilize fisheries.17 Bristol Bay is 250 miles by nearly 200 wide and opens into the eastern Bering Sea. It is fed by dozens of salmon rivers and streams, each of which supports a population of sockeye salmon adapted to local conditions. Salmon stocks vary in size and productivity as the climate shifts. Under any given set of conditions some fare poorly while others thrive. Fifty years of salmon fishing records show ups and downs, but collectively salmon production has remained strong, much stronger and less variable than it would have been if the bay had only supported a single sockeye population.

  This has been dubbed the “portfolio effect.” Just as investors spread their risk by keeping a variety of stocks, having a variety of differently adapted fish populations imparts stability to ecosystems and fisheries. George Rose, who works out of Newfoundland’s Memorial University and saw Canada’s cod collapse firsthand, knows more about cod than almost anyone alive. Even as fishermen scooped up the last of the great cod shoals in the early 1990s, he found several populations local to different parts of the coast that appeared unaffected. He describes nature as being like an orchestra in which not all the instruments play loudly at once: “You have the horns playing for a bit, then the strings come in.”18

  The same effect is apparent across species. Every animal and plant makes a living in a slightly different way. Each one responds differently when conditions change; each reacts to stress from human activities in a dissimilar way. Something that one species might barely notice, or easily overcome, could fell another. Where there is a broad portfolio of species to draw upon, ecosystems are much more likely to continue to function as the seas change. Simplified ecosystems of the kind that now predominate in many places have little of this resilience. Their variety has been winnowed to a handful of species, like prawns and scallops. We will not be able to restore life to these places by tinkering with mesh sizes or fishing gears alone. Marine reserves are essential to defend and promote diversity and thereby help both wildlife and the fishing industry weather turbulent times ahead.

  One thing that is seldom appreciated about marine reserves is that strong protection is needed for strong benefits. Early on in this book I described the phenomenon of “fishing down the food web,” as top predators are depleted and fisheries turn to smaller animals lower down the food web. Effects of exploitation on marine habitats parallel this trend, with progressive loss of structure-forming animals and plants; complex habitats crumble into simple ones. To be truly effective, marine protected areas must push ecosystems back up the slope of collapse. How far they can go—in other words how much recovery is possible—depends in large part on how strongly they are protected. A little protection, such as a small reduction in fishing pressure, will nudge things back slightly. Modest protection, such as a halt to scallop dredging, while continuing the use of trawls targeting fish, will be met by modest benefits. Animals of middling size will probably do well with middling protection like this, but the big beasts of old will not return. Only strong protection—removal of all exploitation and alleviation of other sources of harm—will drive ecosystems back toward their most prolific and productive. Because protected areas generate controversy and often inspire highly vocal opposition, politicians often seek compromise not in whether to create them in the first place, but in how much protection they will be given. The result is that the seas are full of protected areas that aren’t really protected at all. Many of Europe’s Special Areas of Conservation are like this (they should really be called Suspicious Absence of Conservation). In a way “paper parks” are worse than no protection because they give the illusion of conservation without the reality. America, whose politicians are no less weak-willed, suffers the same problem. Some of America’s National Marine Sanctuaries still offer little real protection from fishing, although times are changing there for the better.

  Marine protected areas will only contribute meaningfully to raising the variety and abundance of life if they spread and multiply. There is little value in protecting a few beauty spots to a high level if we continue business as usual in the rest. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity set a target in 1997 of 10 percent of the oceans protected by 2012. At the time of writing, the tail end of 2011, we had only made it to 1.6 percent, so the target date has been pushed back to 2020. Is this ambitious enough? An honest scientist will say no.

  Looking at the question of how much to protect from a wide range of angles gives remarkably concordant an
swers. Studies have looked at how much coverage is needed to sustain or maximize fisheries production, to protect populations of all species in more than one place (to avoid losses from random catastrophes), to prevent the loss of genetic diversity, and to ensure protected areas are large and numerous enough and sufficiently interconnected to sustain themselves. Across the board the answer is that we need to protect double-digit percentages of the sea to achieve these goals, not single figures. The middle of the range of answers is about 35 percent,19 so the 10 percent target proposed by the UN is too low. In my view we need to protect a third of the oceans from direct exploitation and harm, and manage the rest much better than we do today. Hitting the UN target means a sixfold increase over the next decade. I accept that it is unrealistic at this stage to expect more. But this target only represents a waypoint on the path to a more sustainable future, not the endpoint.

  CHAPTER 20

  Life Renewed

  I often come across people who think that we can’t afford to cut back fishing when every day there are more mouths to feed. But simple math tells you that restocking our seas makes economic sense. Think of it this way: If you have a million fish in the sea and can catch 20 percent of them every year without depleting the stock, that stock would give you two hundred thousand fish a year. Now imagine that you nurtured your fish and gave them a chance to grow so that you had five million. Your 20 percent would come to one million a year. The interest rate on your capital is the same, but the yield is much bigger. And with fish more abundant they would be easier to catch, so you would need fewer boats and each would cost less to run.

  Wishful thinking? Not really. In 1889, there were ten to fifteen times as many large bottom-living fish like cod, haddock, and halibut in the seas around the UK as there are today. As I explained, a late-nineteenth-century fleet, made up mostly of open-decked sailing boats, landed twice as many bottom-dwelling fish as we do today, with seventeen times less effort. Less fishing, more fish, bigger catches, food for more people. A World Bank report aptly titled The Sunken Billions1 highlighted the madness of overfishing when it calculated that major fish stocks of the world would produce 40 percent more if we fished them less. It sounds paradoxical—fish less to catch more—but that is the simple message. In Europe, the benefits of fishing less could be even higher, perhaps 60 percent, since stocks there are in such a poor state.2

  There are people out there who insist that all is well with the seas and that those who say otherwise are just bleeding-heart greenies or scientists who have drunk too deep from the cup of environmentalism. Foremost among them is Ray Hilborn, a well-respected fisheries scientist from the University of Washington in Seattle. The flavor of his argument can be garnered from the title of a New York Times op-ed he wrote in 2011: “Let us eat fish.” In it he claims, “On average, fish stocks worldwide appear to be stable, and in the United States they are rebuilding, in many cases at a rapid rate.” Hilborn has been on a one-man mission to face down “doom-mongers,” as he calls them, tramping the world in search of headlines. He finds a ready audience—who wouldn’t rather hear that we’re doing just fine? But Hilborn’s reading of the state of fisheries is highly selective, and he seems immune to any amount of historical evidence of decline. For sure some fisheries are doing well in some parts of the world (and after recent reforms, many are on the increase again in America after years of mismanagement).3 On a narrow reading this is good news, but these productive fisheries often come at the expense of a host of other species, as is the case of scallop dredge fisheries, which thrive in the open, sandy, predator-free bottoms that are left when other fisheries have carted off the rest. As Canada’s cod shows, pulling down fishing rates (Hilborn’s main metric of success) doesn’t always lead to recovery. Hilborn seems to place more faith in his mathematical models than he does on evidence, like someone who insists on going out in the rain without an umbrella because the forecast said it would be sunny. I admire his optimism, but his relentlessly upbeat reading of the state of the ocean life is Panglossian.

  Overfishing has been called one of the biggest soluble environmental problems in the world. We know what must be done and it takes no more than a sentence to say it. We have to fish less, waste less, use less destructive methods to catch what we take, and provide safe havens where fish can reach their full reproductive potential, habitats can flourish, and vulnerable species can be protected. So why hasn’t it happened?

  Every year Europe’s political leaders set ludicrous fishing quotas that over the last twenty-five years have averaged a third higher than the safe catch levels recommended to them by their own scientists.4 The folly of this approach is obvious. A forester who cuts down more trees than he plants will soon run out of wood, while a farmer who sends ten more cows to market every year than he produces will run out of livestock. There is a simple omission in the complex political calculus of quota setting: You can’t cheat nature out of more than it produces. Europe is running out of fish in large part because politicians have chosen to ignore what scientists are telling them they need to do to get the most from the sea. In serving the short-term interests of the fishing industry or their own narrow electoral goals, our political leaders are condemning the industry to death in the medium-to-long term.

  The same broken reasoning and flaw in collective decision making has poisoned the management of fisheries on the high seas. Away from the coasts in international waters, catches are regulated by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. These bodies consist of representatives from all of the nations with an interest in fishing the area in question. Instead of following scientific advice, these political appointees often pursue their perceived national interest at the expense of common sense. The car crash of bluefin tuna management is a perfect example of all that is wrong with the system. Bluefin tuna are hugely valuable (in part because they are now rare) so nations are reluctant to stop fishing them, even when scientists are virtually unanimous in saying that this is what must happen for the stock to recover. Countries are so busy competing with one another for a slice of the pie that they seem blind to the fact that every year the pie is smaller. Prince Charles summed up the folly of this behavior beautifully: “It seems one thing to destroy a species out of ignorance; but it is totally another to destroy it in the full knowledge of what we are doing.”5

  The perversity of political decision making is mirrored within the industry itself. Both are manifestations of “the tragedy of the commons.” Fishermen will try to take as much as they can to maximize their own gains, even though they would all be better off in the long run if they exercised restraint. According to economists, people are more willing to look after what they own, and so the idea of “catch shares” was born.

  In New Zealand, Iceland, and some of North America’s fisheries, the fishing industry has been given shares in the take. For example, the New England groundfishery for haddock, flounder, and other bottom-living fish was converted to catch-share management in 2010, while the Canadian halibut fishery has been managed this way for over twenty years. Own 10 percent of the shares, and you will be able to take 10 percent of a given year’s catch. Catch shares have the advantage of ending the race to fish. Prior to catch shares, the seasonal opening of Canada’s halibut fishery had been shortened year after year to the point where the entire catch had to be landed in just six days. Catch shares have become very popular with some environmental organizations, who see them as a remedy for all fishing’s ills, and with many of the philanthropists who support them. But I think they are oversold. I worry that giving away something that all of us own—the resources of the sea—to a few will set us up for problems in the future. I am not alone. One of their most prominent critics is Daniel Bromley, a professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin in the United States. In a stinging polemic against catch shares, Bromley abandoned the neutral language of academia:

  The universal policy response to this [fishery management] failure seems to consist of nothing more imaginative
than the free gifting to the commercial fishing sector of permanent endowments of income and wealth under the utopian claims associated with [catch shares].… This… can only compound the tragedies of past malfeasance by the dangerous endorsement of this bundle of confusions, contrivances, and deceits.6

  We seem to have blind faith that new private owners will look after fisheries properly and see to their health and preservation. Their incentive is that their shares will increase in value as fish stocks recover to more healthy levels. But these catch shares often go beyond this and can be bought and sold, with the result that small family businesses have sold out to larger firms and ownership of the fisheries has become vested in fewer and larger hands. Within one year of the New England catch share scheme coming into use, the Gloucester fleet had lost 20 percent of its boats. Before catch shares 80 percent of the fishery value was landed by 68 percent of the boats; afterward it was landed by 20 percent. There is little evidence that the new owners of catch shares feel any responsibility for long-term stewardship of the seas—or indeed that catch shares offer up any wider environmental benefit.7 Having given away public property, it will cost society dear to get it back if we change our minds. Imagine how you would feel if your government gave away all the national forests to industry and then twenty years later used your taxes to buy chunks back to turn them into nature reserves or return them to the public amenities they once were.