Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 245

By which instrument in many places the fishermen take such quantity
of small fish that they do not know what to do with them; and that they
feed and fat their pigs with them, to the great damage of the commons
of the realm and the destruction of the fisheries.44 44
A wondryechaun is an object of amazement. The object in this case
was a beam trawl pulled by a sailing boat. The flowers of the land
below the water is an excellent description of the lifeforms - the soft
corals, sea fans, sea pens, tube worms, fan mussels and all the other
delicate creatures ('huge sponges of millennial growth and
height . . . unnumbered and enormous polypi') - which must once have
thronged the seafloor around our coasts but which are now rare or
missing almost everywhere. And catching juvenile fish to feed to pigs?
As the case of the Irish herring trawlers I mentioned a few pages ago
suggests, not a lot changes.
The early industry sometimes managed to inflict great damage. The
Scania herring of the western Baltic, for example, became extinct in
the Middle Ages as a result of improved netting technologies. 45 Sig-
nificant ecological change may go back even further. The excavations
at Bouldnor Cliff, on the Isle of Wight (off the coast of southern
England), for example, suggest that the Mesolithic people who lived
there 8,100 years ago could have been running a boatyard. The
wood-working techniques they used were previously believed to have
arisen in Britain only 2,000 years later, in the Neolithic. Among
the discoveries are a plank split from an oak trunk likely to have been
used to make a log boat, and a platform that might have been used as
a jetty or quay. 46 This suggests a fishing capacity greater and more
sophisticated than previously imagined. Whenever a new fishery
opens, the largest animals tend to be caught first. Who knows what
monsters might have been extracted then? Ours is a dwarf and rem-
nant fauna, and as its size and abundance decline, so do our
expectations, imperceptibly eroding to match the limitations of the
present.
It is not my purpose to dwell at length on the destructive habits of
the fishing industry, some of which are likely to be well known to you.
But I will briefly mention a handful, of which you might not be aware,
which emphasize the need for a radical change in policy.