The 
Fisheries Effect

"The oceans are the planets last great living wilderness, mans only remaining frontier on Earth, and perhaps his last chance to prove himself a rational species."
John L Culliney


By Charles Clover
Environment editor, The Daily Telegraph, London

school of fishA great change has come over the oceans in a single human lifetime, greater than any caused by pollution. What is happening can be compared with the time when the herds of North American bison were reduced to a handful, when white hunters began to shoot out the African herds of elephant and rhino, or when British, Norwegian, and Soviet whalers hunted the great whales to the verge of extinction in the middle of this century. This time the change has come about through overfishing. Each "fish war" that appears on the evening television news brings home the need to reassess an activity that has enshrined virtues of courage, ingenuity, and peaceful endeavour since time immemorial. At some point this century the balance between nature and human enterprise has shifted, the result of improving technology, a growing human population, and greed.

The first man I met who understood the scale of what was happening was not an environmentalist, but the owner of a fish processing factory in the Scottish port of Peterhead who had made a living from the sea all his life. "Tell the people who are trying to save the whale and the elephant that its the same with fish," he said.

His name was Len Stainton and in his lifetime he had seen the 350kg tunny bluefin tuna which were caught in the North Sea in the 1930s and 1940s and the giant halibut which were caught off the west coast of Scotland until the 1970s. He had moved his fish processing business to Peterhead when the herring collapsed in the 1970s. He was angry the same thing was happening again, to the cod and haddock.

"They used to catch fish bigger than a man," he said. "Now youre lucky to get fish bigger than your hand."

That was in 1991, before the Canadians closed the Grand Banks, once the richest cod fishery in the world. (There John Cabot, who discovered Newfoundland in 1497, found that the sea was so full of cod that they could be taken not only in nets but in baskets lowered over the side.) That was before the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation announced that global catches, which had risen every year since the Second World War, had peaked in 1989 and had levelled off. Now, they said, most of the worlds main commercial fish stocks were either fully exploited or in decline.

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Copyright 1997, The World Wide Fund For Nature