Blue-sea thinking
Our seas are in crisis. The scale of the pollution from discarded plastic, which is in imminent danger of entering the human food chain, has been highlighted, not least by The Prince of Wales and Sir David Attenborough, and requires international action of the kind that has been so difficult to achieve on climate change.
There are also more local issues and, according to the Wildlife Trusts’ report, The Way Back to Living Seas, Brexit provides the opportunity to tackle them, even though this may seem paradoxical, given that 70% of environmental protection comes from the Eu and that fish don’t carry passports or recognise national boundaries.
The first call is for existing Eu legislation to be incorporated into British law, but the Eu’s record is hardly unblemished (think of historic over-fishing of our waters by Spanish ships) and this is a chance to set a higher standard.
What’s needed is a comprehensive marine strategy. British waters, the largest in the Eu, aren’t as colourful as those of the Caribbean, but they’re equally rich in wildlife. We need to protect them, while allowing for what’s called Blue Growth: employment generated by coastal tourism, aquaculture, marine biotechnology and ocean energy (although not all offshore renewables—the thousands of wind turbines around our coastline—have been benign).
Alas, the seabed is all too often treated as an open resource rather than a fragile ecosystem. Take Goodwin Sands, that 10-mile sand-and-gravel bank off the Kent coast feared by mariners down the centuries. The Port of Dover, perhaps instinct- ively antagonistic to the cause of 1,000-plus shipwrecks, wants to quarry 90 million cubic feet of it, largely to use in its new Dover Western Dock.
The sands teem with small invertebrates that are a feast for fish. Once the gravel has been extracted, it will have gone forever, along, perhaps, with the local fisheries it supports. Defra Secretary Michael Gove should signal his intent by making the Goodwin Sands a Marine Conservation Zone. These zones don’t ban all commercial activities from the area they cover, only those that damage biodiversity.
Protection has been shown to work. Earlier this year, it was announced that cod stocks in the North Sea have recovered to the point that sustainable fishing of them can resume—a real triumph for proactive management.
Brexit will, for better or worse, reinforce Britain’s consciousness of being an island nation, which seems an appropriate moment to consider the quality of the seas lapping our shores.