Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 243

other disturbances, such as climate change, pollution, disease and
storms. The planet was, before its foodwebs were broken up, con-
trolled by animals and plants to a greater extent than most of us
imagined. Evidence supporting James Lovelock's 'Gaia hypothesis' -
that the earth functions as a coherent and self-regulating system - appears,
at the ecosystem level, to be accumulating.
Our understanding of these issues suffers, like our perception of the
state of the hills, from Shifting Baseline Syndrome. It applies through-
out the ecosystems with which we engage, but it is especially powerful
at sea, where fisheries scientists often recommend that stocks be
restored to the state they recorded at the beginning of their careers,
apparently unaware that this state was itself badly depleted. The past
abundance described by explorers, naturalists and seafarers is often
dismissed as fishermen's tall tales. On behalf of the peculiar tribe of
anglers to which I belong, I feel obliged to admit that on a few, entirely
unrepresentative occasions, we have been known to exaggerate. But
the remarkable wealth of the seas before large-scale fishing began is
also attested by more reliable evidence.
An article published in the journal Nature used government fisher-
ies reports dating back to 1889 to estimate the extent to which fish
populations in the North Sea have been depleted. 40 The results have
revolutionized our understanding of the life it once supported. Instead
of simply charting the amount of fish caught there, which creates the
impression that the decline of fish populations has been moderate, it
divided the fish caught by the amount of fishing power used to pursue
them: the size and catching ability (larger engines, better nets, elec-
tronic fish finders) of the boats being launched.
When the British government first started gathering data, sail trawl-
ers were beginning to be displaced by steam. Trawling in the North
Sea had already been happening for 500 years, which means that the
ecosystem was likely, by 1889, to have been gravely depleted. Even so,
the researchers realized that, when fishing effort was taken into
account, fish populations had declined not by 30 or 40 per cent in the
following 118 years, as the scientists advising fishery managers had
assumed, but by an average of 94 per cent. In other words, just one
seventeenth of the volume of fish that existed in 1889 survived into
the first decade of the twenty-irst century. Fish stocks, they found,