Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 251

There are fewer inherent conflicts between marine rewilding and
those who make their living from the seas than there are between ter-
restrial rewilding and those who make their living from the land.
Biologists have noticed a strong spillover effect: the fisheries sur-
rounding marine reserves improve because the spawning fish are
protected and allowed to reach maturity, and they and their offspring
migrate into surrounding waters.
Fishermen tend to resist marine reserves before they are created,
then to support them once they have been established, as their catches
rise, often far beyond expectations. In the seas surrounding the Apo
reserve that I mentioned a moment ago, for example, the catch swiftly
rose to ten times its previous level, and has stayed that way since. 67
There have been similar results in, for example, fisheries off Japan,
New Zealand, Newfoundland and Kenya. 68
Marine protection is so cheap and the results so lucrative that, the
Royal Commission calculated, just a 2 or 3 per cent increase in
the fish catch in the North Sea would pay for the protection of
30 per cent of its area. 69 The returns are more likely to rise by 200 or
300 per cent.
A report by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the fail-
ure to protect fish stocks properly costs the European Union some
82,000 jobs and €3 billion a year. 70 Marine rewilding not only offers
the best chance of protecting much of the life of the seas, but also the
best chance of protecting the livelihoods of those who harvest it. The
weight of fish landed worldwide peaked in 1988. Despite attempts by
Chinese officials to inflate their production figures, it has been declin-
ing since then by half a million tonnes a year. 71 The surest means by
which this could be reversed is the creation of a network of large mar-
ine reserves.
But here, as so often, we see short-termism triumph over not only
wider social and environmental interests, but also over the medium-
and long-term interests of the people who block this reform. For
example, the proposal to stop crab and lobster fishing in just 1,100 hec-
tares around Skomer Island, off the coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales,
was voted down by the fishermen on the committee which considered
it, 72 despite the evidence of greatly improved catches around similar
reserves. The prospect of lower returns for the first one or two years