Saving the Seas
As CEO of the Blue Marine Foundation, Clare Brook is tasked with a monumental challenge: trying to slow and effectively stop industrial overfishing on a worldwide scale. Blue Marine has been making headway. Over 1.5 million square miles of ocean are now protected—from Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic (and a favorite nesting place of sea turtles), to St. Helena, off the coast of lower Africa. But there’s still much more work to be done. We caught up with Clare to learn more.
—SimonMurray
I READ SOMEWHERE RECENTLY THAT 71 PERCENT OF THE EARTH IS MADE OF OCEANS, BUT ONLY 4 PERCENT IS PROTECTED. IS THAT STILL TRUE? It’s now closer to six, which shows how rapidly we’re making headway in terms of getting governments to protect more and more of the ocean, which is exciting. When Blue Marine was founded in 2010, less than 1 percent was protected.
WHAT DOES THAT 6 PERCENT INCLUDE? The main movers on this have been the U.S., France, and the U.K. These countries have overseas territories, and even the tiniest little island has an exclusive economic zone around it that extends out about 200 nautical miles. So, you’re talking areas nearly the size of France around each of these remote islands [including Pitcairn, Ascension, St. Helena, and Tristan da Cunha].
These little scraps of territory around the world are a hangover of our imperial past. So we have huge amounts of ocean that is “ours,” that’s up for protection, if our governments are minded to do so.
HOW DID YOUR RECENT PARTNERSHIP COME ABOUT WITH SUNSEEKER YACHTS? They came on board to support our London to Monaco Cycle ride. We’ve done it for two years now, and it’s a ride attempted only by very fit people [laughs], from London to Monaco, which is 1,000 miles, or about the same distance going from Ascension Island to St. Helena. HOW IMPORTANT ARE THESE YACHT BUILDER PARTNERSHIPS TO YOUR MISSION? They’re completely vital. Our biggest partnership is with Lürssen. Peter Lürssen has personally been supporting Blue Marine now for three years. He basically provides us with our core money to keep going. I think it’s fair to say that without the support of Lürssen, Sunseeker, Feadship, Benetti, and Amels, Blue wouldn’t be able to keep going. It’s completely vital that the yacht industry supports us, and we’re really so grateful for them.
The Sunseeker partnership is really interesting to us because they’re also very interested in getting their clients involved with Blue. If we can do something with yacht owners as well as the builders, then we can really look to protecting vast amounts of ocean.
WHY IS IT IMPERATIVE THAT BOAT OWNERS TAKE AN ACTIVE INTEREST IN PRESERVING OUR OCEANS? lf you like to go into the ocean, then obviously you’d want to see some marine life when you’re swimming. The methods of largescale fishing are so destructive to the ocean, you’re basically removing entire ecosystems. So what you’ll be left with in the water is a very simplified ecology of just mud, plankton, worms, and jellyfish.
You fish out all the tuna, say, of the Mediterranean, where this is happening, and you get this sort of nasty, murky water that just has jellyfish in it. So for someone who swims from a yacht, it’s very distressing, I think, when you go into the water and what was a lovely underwater world is completely ruined. And I think if that was happening on land there would be a much louder outcry.
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE FOR OUR OCEANS? The exciting thing about the challenge of overfishing is it’s a relatively solvable problem. Really, the only thing that’s holding us back is the amount of funding we can raise. The more yacht owners and builders that get involved in conservation, the more millions of square miles that can be protected.