December 2007
The unnatural history of the sea
It took me a long time to think of a title for this book, because what I wanted to do was to tell people that it was about the sea, it was about history, that it was about how people have influenced the sea over the ages. But eventually I came up with the title The Unnatural History of the Sea to try and alert people to the fact that it’s about how we have impacted the oceans over the last thousand years or so. And many people might think that unnatural doesn’t refer to people’s effects on the planet because in fact they’re natural — people are part of our ecosystems. But I think we can consider that humanity is a special species, certainly from our own perspectives and that unnatural history is what describes the topic of the book quite closely.
I read a paper in Science which gave me the idea for the book. It was all about the impact that people had had on the oceans over historical time and going right back into periods when the only records that you got really come from archaeological remains. I was just fascinated by this subject. I was at the time spending a sabbatical at Harvard University and I went up to the library there, which is full of all these dusty old books and some of them looked like they hadn’t been cracked open for a hundred years. And so I started reading them and tried to piece together some of the experiences that people had had — what they had seen in the way of marine life. When explorers started spreading across the planet, what they had discovered when they came across were these amazing wildlife spectacles with millions of fur seals or hundreds or thousands of sea otters, or spouting whales where you could see the spouts going from the ship to the horizon. These things were just remarkable and spectacular to me, so I decided what I needed to do was to try and create a book that would bring all of this together, so that a much wider range of people could find out about it.
What I’d like the book to achieve is to really recover the past for people whose perspectives have become really rather short. When we look back in time we give much greater weight to our own experiences, and so, when we think about how the oceans have changed, it’s really how they’ve changed since we were first playing with our buckets and spades on the beaches at Scarborough or wherever, and not how they’ve changed over a much longer segment of time, say the last millennium. And what I want to do is to show people how the oceans were, so they can once again start thinking about how they could be and how they should be, and to revise the way we think about the oceans from a management perspective, so that it’s not all about maintaining the few things that are left. But really the perspective needs to shift onto recovery and to rebuilding populations to much higher levels than they are at the moment. So I’d like to achieve an increase in people’s awareness, particularly among decision makers and fishery managers who have the power to do something about the state of the oceans today.
There are two ways we can go from here really if we look forward in time.
One is if we continue with what we’re doing right now, we will end up with an ocean that has fewer and fewer fish of the kinds that we value and more and more of the things that we would rather not have. As we overexploit the fish in the oceans, what we are seeing is an increase in the amount of jellyfish. And just recently in Ireland some fish farms have been overwhelmed by jellyfish explosions, which had killed all the salmon. So we’re seeing this shift towards an ocean which provides fewer of the kinds of things that we want it to provide, like clean and healthy, safe bathing water and fish to eat and succulent shellfish and so on. So I think we want to move away from that possibility.
The second possibility is that if we reinvent our relationship with the sea, we can move towards a future with more fish and ecosystems that are intact enough that they can provide those kinds of services to us that we value. The oysters that used to occur in every estuary around Britain and Europe, rebuilding those populations will increase the filtration of the water and keep the sea cleaner; process the nutrients that we’re dumping into the sea via our rivers. These are services that can only really be provided by living organisms, and if we want to maintain them, we need to keep the oceans in a very healthy state.
So I hope that that is the future we can look forward to, and I hope that we can reinvent our relationship with the sea. I think we can, but it will take an increased level of awareness and a strong sense of political will to achieve it.
The Unnatural History of the Sea: The Past and Future of Humanity and Fishing was published by Gaia Books in August 2007. Further information on the book and on to find out more about protecting the oceans can be found at www.york.ac.uk/res/unnatural-history-of-the-sea
Researcher:
Professor Callum Roberts, Environment Department, cr10@york.ac.uk
Listen to the researcher talk about his book here: