It’s not too late to save the sea

This uplifting book proves rewilding can fill oceans with teeming life again

REWILDING THE SEA by Charles Clover 288pp, Witness, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

To most landlubbers, it’s pretty obvious that the sea is wild. Compared with, say, a shopping mall, or even a nature reserve, the sea is powerful, raw and decidedly alien. Wild is what the sea does, unforgiving to the foolhardy, careless or unlucky. Why should it need rewilding?

For an answer to that question, Charles Clover begins his powerful new book, Rewilding the Sea, with a dive into history. The seas plied by early civilisations were, according to their own fragmentary accounts, full of fearful creatures. Early maps are dotted with illustrations of half glimpsed, half imagined giants: serpents, whales the size of islands, enormous winged fish, hook-nosed terrors with gnashing teeth and barnacled hides. Most are loosely based on real animals such as humpback whales, orcas, angel sharks and walrus. Later, explorers, navigators, adventurers and scientists supplanted the more fantastical elements of this menagerie with descriptions of wildlife phenomena that are nonetheless extraordinary: seas filled from horizon to horizon with spouting whales; cod so thick in the water you could hardly row a boat through them; halibut the size of dining tables pulled from the sandbanks of the North Sea.

These past seas were doubly wild, jumping with life in abundance almost unimaginable today. “Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters,” as Herman Melville put it. Implacably and mostly imperceptibly, as Clover details, we have spent the past two centuries emptying the seas of their life by catching or poisoning it. Werner Herzog captured the sense of loss we face today when he said, “What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”

The consequences of our actions have mostly been unintended. No fisherman wants to destroy what he depends upon. But the collective action of many has produced that result all the same. Fishing is a competitive business, and new technologies are constantly being devised to find and capture fish, in the face of falling fish abundance. Technological creep, as this process is called, adds several per cent a year to the catching power of the fleet, masking declines and slowing the reactions of regulators. By the time they step in, it is often too late.

Clover first realised the enormity of the overfishing problem – and its patent absurdity, for this is an eminently soluble problem – as The Daily Telegraph’s environment editor. The result was a powerful polemic against wanton ocean destruction, The End of the Line, published in 2005, and quickly made into a film of the same name by George Duffield and Chris Gorell Barnes. In a testament to their skill, given that overfishing is an unlikely route to Hollywood stardom, the film was a critical and popular success.

That would be the end of their interest for many filmmakers, but this trio decided to try to solve the problems highlighted in book and film, founding Blue Marine Foundation (Blue). The charity, and Clover himself, might well be described as pro-fish and profishing. For the past 10 years Blue has earned a reputation for its uncompromising pursuit of greater ocean protection, and for achieving huge wins for marine life and those who depend on it. Blue champions small-scale, low impact, community-based fishing and also, at the other end of the spectrum, of enormous protected areas where wildlife can thrive, free from interference and harm.

Rewilding the Sea is an account of the successes of Blue and a testament to what can be achieved by determined people. One such success was in Ascension Island, a remote and mountainous speck in the mid-Atlantic, which Clover describes in a vivid chapter, “Jurassic Parks of the Sea”. Blue, in partnership with other organisations and philanthropists, brokered the full protection of 275,000 square miles of sea. The wolves and bears of early Medieval England may be gone, but their ocean counterparts, sharks, turtles, whales and sailfish, are alive and well in the seas around Ascension.

As Clover points out forcefully, we still have time to save these animals before they disappear for ever. Ascension’s waters represent a rare survival of abundant ocean life. But we shouldn’t be satisfied with protecting the few remnants that remain, Clover argues. Rewilding can happen anywhere, by reducing what we take from the sea and the damage we do to it. We would all be better off with wilder seas.