Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 244

collapsed long before the amount of fish being landed declined: the
landings were sustained only by ever more powerful boats, with ever
more effective gear, scouring ever wider expanses of sea.
Haddock, they noted, had fallen to 1 per cent of their former vol-
ume, halibut to one-fifth of 1 per cent. But the most remarkable
revelation in the paper was this: that in 1889 the fishing fleet, largely
composed of sailing boats, using primitive, homespun gear, reliant on
luck and skill rather than on ish-inding technology and all the other
sophisticated equipment available today, landed twice the weight of
fish as boats working the same sea do today.
Studies using different techniques have come to similar conclusions,
both in our own seas and in other parts of the world: typically fish
populations have been reduced by 90 per cent or more. 41 Yet so
powerful is Shifting Baseline Syndrome that even some professional
ecologists are snared by it. The UK's National Ecosystem Assessment,
for example, which is generally a reliable guide to the state of the nat-
ural world, reports that 'around half . . . UK finfish stocks [are] now
at full reproductive capacity and harvested sustainably'. 42 Yet the
baseline against which it makes this judgement is the state of stocks in
1970. By then they had been reduced to a small fraction of their 'full
reproductive capacity'.
The same applies to the size of the fish that used to be caught, tales
of which are frequently mistrusted by those suspicious-minded people
who have never picked up a fishing rod. As the great fisheries scientist
Ransom Myers found when surveying records of the first commercial
fisheries on the ocean frontier, in twenty years the average weight of
the tuna caught falls by half, while that of marlin falls by three-
quarters. 43 There lived dragons where none live now.
Heavy exploitation began in many places long before the Industrial
Age. The first known ecological complaint about destructive fishing
techniques is contained in a petition submitted to Edward III, in
1376:
the great and long iron of the wondryechaun runs so heavily and hardly
over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land
below the water there, and also the spat of oysters, mussels and other
fish upon which the great fish are accustomed to be fed and nourished.