Living as I do, inland in east Northants, I don’t get to see the sea very much, and when I do it’s usually a bit of sea with some land not very far way on the other side of it. But we live on an oceanic planet which is dominated by vast water expanses that cover the surface of Earth and have an average depth of over 2 miles. That water matters to us and we haven’t treated it well. Much of the life on Earth resides within, or depends upon, those oceans and yet most of us can only stand on the shoreline and gaze out to sea, or occasionally fly over or sail upon the surface. It’s all a bit of a mystery to most of us.
The previous abundance of life in the oceans has been written about by many, and some of the old accounts are so spectacular that one has to wonder at their veracity let alone wonder at what the seas were like. But it is not for nothing that the concept of shifting baselines emerged from studies of marine change, and refers to the fact that each generation tends to think of the state of the environment in their youth as being normal and therefore being what we should aim to restore, whereas our parents had an even higher baseline and our great grandparents’ baselines would be even higher and they had great grandparents too. Much has changed and much could be recovered, if only we did the right things. And arguably, recovery would be quicker in many marine environments than on land.
This book is about those biological facts and explores what the right things are, and it proposes a simple radical position; we should have global protection with just a few exceptions rather than global exploitation with just a few exceptions of good stewardship. It’s a challenging position but probably the right one, although getting global agreement on it looks a bit tricky.
But the author is persuasive and well-informed. Much of the framework legislation and thinking is in place already – we need a shift in attitude.
I found this a very stimulating and rewarding read – lots of facts, lots of stories and lots of distilled knowledge explained well.
It made me think that maybe what we need is an on/off approach such as five years of complete global protection followed by five years of letting rip with exploitation, with some safety nets, and then another period of complete global protection. I suspect that this model might persuade fisherfolk more rapidly that restraint can lead to bigger and easier and more cost-effective catches in the ‘on’ years, thanks to the ‘off’ years. Whimsical perhaps, and no easier to implement, maybe, than complete protection.
This is an important and fascinating exploration of the environmental issues facing most of our planet – must be worth a read?
Future Sea: how to rescue and protect the world’s oceans by Deborah Rowan Wright is published by University of Chicago Press.
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“although getting global agreement on it looks a bit tricky”
Yes, doesn’t it.
I’m off to listen to the pale blue dot again.