Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 249

which no fishing or other industry takes place, and in which both
mobile and sessile lifeforms are allowed to recover. In other words,
rewilding.
In 2002, at two world summits, governments promised to protect
at least 10 per cent of the world's seas by 2012. 55 In 2003 the World
Parks Congress called for at least 20 or 30 per cent of every habitat at
sea to become strict reserves by the same date. 56 Despite the creation
of a few very large conservation areas, such as the Great Barrier Reef
Marine Park, covering 350,000 square kilometres, at the time of writ-
ing less than 2 per cent of the world's seas has any form of protection, 57
and only in some of these places is fishing wholly excluded.
In 2004 the British government's official advisers, the Royal Com-
mission on Environmental Pollution, proposed that 30 per cent of the
United Kingdom's waters should become reserves in which no fishing
or any other kind of extraction happened. 58 In 2009 an environmen-
tal coalition launched a petition for the same measure - strict
protection for 30 per cent of UK seas - which gathered 500,000 sig-
natures. 59 Yet, while some nations, including several that are much
poorer than the United Kingdom, have started shutting fishing boats
out of large parts of their seas, at the time of writing we have man-
aged to protect a spectacular 0.01 per cent of our territorial waters:
five of our 48,000 square kilometres. This takes the form of three
pocket handkerchiefs: around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel,
Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran and Flamborough Head in York-
shire. There are plenty of other nominally protected areas but they are
no better defended from industrial fishing than our national parks are
defended from farming.
When fishing stops, the results are remarkable. On average, in
124 marine reserves studied around the world, some of which have
been in existence for only a few years, the total weight of animals and
plants has quadrupled since they were established. 60 The size of the
animals inhabiting them has also increased, and so has their diversity.
In most cases the shift is visible within two to five years. 61 As the
slower-growing species also begin to recover, as sedentary lifeforms
grow back and as reefs of coral and shellfish re-establish themselves -
restoring the structural diversity of the seabed - the mass and wealth
of the ecosystem is likely to keep rising for a long time.