Callum Roberts - The Unnatural History of the Sea

Humanity can make short work of the oceans creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Stellers sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. Its a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the explorers set sail.As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the Sea, the oceans bounty didnt disappear overnight. While todays fishing industry is ruthlessly efficient, intense exploitation began not in the modern era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in medieval Europe. Roberts explores this long and colorful history of commercial fishing, taking readers around the world and through the centuries to witness the transformation of the seas.Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by fifteenth century seafarers is almost unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas.The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendor and prosperity of the seas through smarter management of our resources and some simple restraint. From the coasts of Florida to New Zealand, marine reserves have fostered spectacular recovery of plants and animals to levels not seen in a century. They prove that history need not repeat itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them. ---------------one of the 100 most influential UK scientists, Prof Callum Roberts is an award-winning expert on Marine Conservation.His main research interests include documenting the impacts of fishing on marine life, both historic and modern, and exploring the effectiveness of marine protected areas. For the last 10 years he has used his science background to make the case for stronger protection for marine life at both national and international levels. His award winning book, The Unnatural History of the Sea, charts the effects of 1000 years of exploitation on ocean life.He lectures throughout the US, UK and Europe, and is frequently called on to give government briefings to the US Congress and Senate, as well as Whitehall.-----------------------A few reviews:This book is a Bible for any marine biologist, historian, diver, seafood lover, environmentalist, fisherman or anyone who is interested in marine life. Roberts book is perhaps the best effort I have ever come across for putting ocean life today into context - he has made a tremendous effort to find obscure and esoteric records of fisheries and ocean life dating back as far to the first settlements in America, medieval fisheries, and some of the first ever accounts of fishing in the world . It isnt really fair to consider ocean ecosystems today without the knowledge that Roberts has so meticulously collected, and written about so well. I would say this is probably the best book about marine life I have ever read, and would highly recommend it.Most people are aware of overfishing, and the fact that animals like turtles and whales are endangered, but most people probably arent aware of the abundance they once existed in; Roberts mentions pre-exploitation numbers of 100 million green turtles in the Caribbean, and many million of whales before whaling almost drove all of them to extinction. He goes into detail about the degradation of pretty much all major rivers, which once had tremendous fertility that will seem surprising today. The unique historical context that Roberts provides is this books most valuable asset.The prose is surprisingly literary for a book about science, and contributes to the impassioned, often depressing and at many times horrifying line of argument. Despite this, Roberts is a scientist, and does not give the stereotypical save the Earth type monologues; all assertions are backed up with credible and meticulously evaluated scientific and historical evidence.With the context of the distant past established, Roberts describes the further onslaught of new technologies on the sea, goes into great detail about long-forgotten efforts from Thomas Huxley & Co. to establish if it was a cause for concern, and the establishment of (and lack of) sufficient laws to make fishing sustainable. He makes analogies to life on land, and highlights the often poorly highlighted fact that seafood is wildlife, and is as fragile as any equivalents on land to exploitation.The context of the past gives new light to his accounts of the state of todays fisheries, and how many have completely eradicated populations of species, and continue to do so. The Anthropocene Extinction is ongoing today as much as it is a thing of the past. Bluefin tuna, despite being a critically endangered species (making it more endangered than the Bengal tiger, White rhinoceros and many whales and sea turtles) is still commercially fished on an industrial scale. This is only one example in a comprehensive account of mass extinction.Despite all the depressing detail, Roberts describes the seas resilience and its ability to recover, and sets out the steps that need to be taken for fishing and seafood consumption to continue.I thought this book was really interesting, informative and enjoyable to read.--------------------Roberts is the Rachel Carson of the worlds ocean wildlife and this book is his Silent Spring. Interestingly, in some cases we dont realize the extent of damage done to the worlds dramatically depleted fish stock because of baseline creep, our inability to remember or believe in stories of teeming ocean fisheries and long lost monster catches. In other cases, the apparent damage is more sudden, as when rapid technological innovations enable huge increases in our capacity to fish wider and more diverse areas only to have the numbers of available fish collapse over just a single season or two. Huge schools of cod used to be common. More recently, it seemed like every restaurant served the slimehead fish known as Orange Roughy, only to nearly eliminate most members of this deep sea, slow growing species in a matter of a decade. The examples go on and on, in painfully depressing detail. This book is testament to the tragedy of the commons.----------------I felt terrible every time I ate any seafood. On the other hand, the book is the single most powerful thing you will read about the ocean. It is well researched, persuasively argued, and leaves no doubt about the devastating impact man has had on the seas. It more than adequately explains how mans hubris can push a species to the brink of or all the way to exhaustion. It also shows how this isnt a battle of fishers against conversationalists but of man against his excesses. If we do not change our actions, fishing wont exist as a profession.For anyone who likes to eat seafood, fish recreationally, or just enjoys being in or near water, this book should be required reading. -----------------------A brief glossary of terms:trawling (technol.): a type of fishing in which the ocean floor is scraped clean, not only of fish, but of every living thing - vertebrate and invertebrate, coral, even chunks of the reefs themselves. An industry which extracts fish as a non-renewable resource, like coal or oil. Underwater strip-mining on a near-global scale.ghost fishing (technol.): the stuff of nightmares; a process whereby a length of abandoned gill-netting, perhaps miles long and either lost during fishing or deliberately dumped overboard at the end of a trip, continues to fish. It stands upright on the seabed snaring everything which swims, floats or crawls into it - fish, turtles, dolphins, everything. Eventually the sheer weight of corpses forces the net down flat. The bodies then rot and are scavenged by crabs until, released, the netting stands back up again. The whole process is then repeated, again and again...indefinitely. Losing and dumping fishing gear is routine, so the worlds oceans are littered with these perpetual death-traps.inrage (psychol.): similar to, but opposite of, outrage; what happens inside your head at the precise moment you read about trawlermen complaining that their nets are often damaged by coral reefs.dodo (zoolog.): an extinct species of flightless bird, wiped out in a manner which we condemn while simultaneously treating the entire biosphere with the same contempt and ignorance.bluefin (zoolog.): a species of tuna, formerly abundant, but now rapidly following the dodo into oblivion. So scarce and valuable has it become that it is now worth using sonar, helicopters and even spotter planes to locate individual fish and guide the boats in for the kill. As Callum Roberts puts it: This isnt fishing any more, its the extermination of a species.money (econ.): the system of exchange responsible for this madness: as a commodity becomes ever rarer, so its price rises to ridiculous levels; the last bluefin tuna of all, worth millions, will also be the most ruthlessly pursued.growth (econ., as in economic growth):the process by which everything shrinks except the size of the human population.marine nature reserves (ecolog.): one of the most bizarre concepts ever devised by the imagination - politicians simply find it incomprehensible.shifting environmental baselines (psychol.): the mental phenomenon at the heart of this apocalypse. Each fresh generation of Homo sapiens only sees its own small section of the decline; theres little perception of the longer-term depletion, and none whatsoever of the superabundance (at times more fish than water) which existed at the start before human beings began plundering it. This is true even of the ecologists who study what is left of these ecosystems; thus conservationists work back to baselines which arent meaningful baselines at all, just slightly earlier points back up the slope - points which creep downhill from one lifetime to the next.Homo sapiens (zoolog.): arguably the least intelligent of the primates; the only one, arboreal or otherwise, currently sawing through the very branch it is sitting on.Earth (astron.): third planet of eight orbiting a G-class main-sequence star midway between 61 Cygni and Sirius. An ocean planet (71% of its surface area). Abundant life, but currently in the throes of its sixth (and primarily marine) great mass-extinction.The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts (bibliog.): a meticulously detailed and relentless book by a leading authority on the subject. Reduced this reader, during its second half in particular, to despair.despair (psychol.): a state of mind, impossible to express in a mere book review (and perhaps in words at all) in which you find you no longer care what happens to the human race, but that what is being done to the beautiful Earth fills you with sorrow.