Waterworld

Sunday 17 June 2012

In the early reels of The Core, a comedy-splashed disaster movie about a journey to the centre of a threatened Earth, the brilliant scientist who's diagnosed the problem completes his presentation to the brass hats with the words: "Please feel free to throw up.

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Ocean Of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing by Callum Roberts Allen Lane, £25 Reviewed by Brian Morton

I know I did." Five years earlier, an ocean scientist called Joanie Kleypas had taken him all too literally at his word. Her "Eureka" moment was decidedly emetic. At a 1998 climate change meeting, Kleypas learned that, by the end of the 21st century, the world's oceans would be too acid to support her beloved corals. Any corals. She rushed for the bathroom.

If only that were the extent of the problem. The scenario behind Callum Roberts's deceptively mild title – his earlier The Unnatural History Of The Sea is more sinister in tone – makes the restarting of the Earth's core seem a relatively straightforward task. For the seas don't just face lowered pH and "global warming", they're also reeling from generations of overfishing and brutal fishing methods, from introduction of invasive aliens, from pollution by chemicals, plastic and noise. Those whale species which have survived the harpoon can't hear each other's mating calls. They're stressed and accident prone.There's a vast Laputa of plastic junk, much larger than Texas, swilling round in the Pacific. Thor Heyerdahl told me years ago that on his first voyage he saw not a single sign of human manufacture on the deep ocean. By the time he made his last, he was spotting drinks bottles, fishing gear and other flotsam every few minutes. Everyone knows the story of the wrecked container of toy ducks that migrated round the globe. Plastic pollution is only the most visible of the ocean's ills but it also goes micro and insidious. Every time we use a facial scrub, another spoonful of tiny plastic particles goes into run-off and eventually into organisms small enough to mistake it for food, just as albatross chicks and dolphins mistake plastic lighters and shopping bags for something edible.We are, says Roberts, on the cusp of one of the great reorganisations of life on the planet, and "reorganisation" is a nicer word than disaster. Some of the change is very slow, some of it so scientifically complex and counter-intuitive as to be incomprehensible to a layman. Some of it, though, is blatantly obvious. The Firth of Clyde, where I live, is pretty much a dead zone as far as healthy marine ecosystems are concerned: formerly polluted, overfished, poorly husbanded. As a boy, I used to catch hefty codling, pollack and even ugly, tasty gurnard from the rocks. Now, I'll be lucky to take a few mackerel in the summer. Not for nothing is the trawl net the symbol of greedy modernity in John MacDougall Hay's novel Gillespie, set in Tarbert (though Tarbert people prefer to deny that). Nowadays, the trawl has been replaced in infamy by the scallop dredge which lays waste to the sea bottom. Visitors point to the number of small fishing boats still plying the waters as a sign of marine health, but all they are taking are scallops and prawns, whose prevalence is actually a sign of ill-health, the absence of the big predatory fish which are the most effective sustainers of a marine system. This is where the counter-intuitive stuff kicks in. Fish get bigger and more fertile as they age. It makes more ecological sense to eat the small ones and throw the whoppers back.Everyone has some sense of what needs to be done. Cutting pollution, avoiding wasteful bycatch, banning dredges, reducing nautical speed, noise and emission, only eating hand-dived scallops, and so on and so forth. Not enough, and besides, the last plate of "hand-dived scallops" I was offered had been hand-dived by a JCB. The Marine Stewardship Council (what? who?) does its bit, but inconsistently at restaurant and dinner-table level. The only proven way to regenerate the oceans, apart from reducing chemical run-offs and spills, carbon emissions and excess plastic, is to set aside areas of ocean with what Roberts identifies as strong protection. "Paper parks" in the sea are as useless as Areas of Outstanding Natural Irrelevance on land. Roberts, raised in Scotland, based in York, helped put 300,000 square kilometres of the North Atlantic under protection. This is his New Deal for the sea. The aim was to have 10% of the world's oceans protected by 2012. The figure reached is 1.6%. But it works, even at the most local level. Lamlash Bay on Arran has been protected for some years as a result of community initiative and has already shown benefits in line with Roberts' mantra of diversity and abundance. This is an important book because it is a practical book rather than a doomwatch scenario. It offers a clear plan, one in which everyone has a stake and a role, but it ruthlessly returns to apocalypse at the end. It also has a wider, almost philosophical relevance, reiterating the Aldo Leopold idea that every cog and wheel in every system is of importance, and it reminds us that even if we did emerge as a species on the African savannah, we became fully human and humanly intelligent by the sea. Eating fish will not make you Einstein, but Einstein came from a fish-eating species. And it doesn't take an Einstein (who wasn't good at maths) to work out that conserving our resources actually increases them."The last 200 years have seen marine habitats wiped out or transformed beyond recognition. And with an ever-accelerating tide of human impact, the oceans have changed more in the last 30 years than in all of human history before ... By the end of the 20th century, almost nowhere shallower than a kilometre remained untouched by commercial fishing, and some places are now fished to three kilometres down."

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