Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A devastating account of the state of the world's fish stocks and our blind destruction of them
Which takes us, doesn’t it, to your last book? A hard hitting conservation book by Charles Clover called The End of the Line. We’ve been talking, up to now, about man’s great adventure with the sea, which has been, in many ways, a remarkably irresponsible adventure. And a wildly exciting one. But now we’ve come to the end of the line in lots of different ways, hence the punning title of this book. We’ve come to the point where we have to take responsibility – remarkably – for the sea, which previously we’d thought was so enormous, so infinite, so unfathomable, that all we had to do was to survive on it long enough to get what we wanted. Now we discover that it is exhaustible and we’re actually on the verge of exhausting it. Of destroying what has sustained us.
It’s the technology again. What comes out of Clover’s book – apart from the reckless politics, the greed and destruction - is the triumph of technology. We’ve become much too efficient at fishing. In Melville’s day it was hard enough to get a ship into the whaling grounds, let alone to skewer a whale. It would have astonished him – and gone against his whole grand idea – to imagine that man could have had such an effect on the sea. What he was interested in was the effect of the sea on man, its Old Testament divine power, but this book is full of evidence that over the last hundred years the tables have turned. And the plundering is made easier by the fact that the effects are usually invisible.
In 1870, T H Huxley, looking into existing fisheries, famously said that you could go on fishing for ever. And that it was actually a good thing, because by fishing you encouraged the stocks to grow. But he was writing just as steam trawlers were taking over from sail.
So that was the tipping point?
Yes, from then on it’s been a steady retreat for the fish.
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Philip Marsden is the author of seven travel books and dramatic histories, including “The Bronski House” and most recently “The Barefoot Emperor”. His first novel was “The Main Cages”, which adopts the only template for a seagoing romance available since “Moby Dick”: man meets watery nemesis.
Your next choice is The End of the Line by Charles Clover, arguing that soon we won’t have any fish left?
I know Charles and he is a very sober, solid journalist – you’d never accuse him of sensationalism. He has researched this issue for years, and the book is a journey of his around all manner of places: the Tokyo fish market, the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, English fishing ports… And there’s a simmering, developing anger. it’s different from the anger of an environmental campaigner, demanding action on something. It’s this sense of building outrage, never losing the plot, never going over the top, but always very well-founded on fact and his own research. It’s a slow build, as he travels around and sees the staggering rape of the oceans. He’s got a description of some of the largest fishing nets – which are big enough to catch half a dozen Boeing 747s if they were flying formation. Images like that are incredibly powerful and in terms of awareness-raising, it’s absolutely staggering.
It’s hard to eat fish having read this book. It’s been turned into a documentary that was released as a movie. I haven’t seen it, but I can see why they did it.
You mean the visuals, actually seeing a net that big?
It’s also such a hot topic. There’s this constant battle between the political imperative of helping fishing communities and meeting market demand, and what the science is saying about what’s happening to the oceans. It’s a very passionate but I think level-headed book. He describes fishing with modern techniques – with radar, and these huge nets – as the most destructive activity on earth. He says that over-fishing is changing the world. We don’t see it, because it’s underwater, but if the same went on, on land – imagine if you had miles of net dragged over the plains of Africa, catching everything – it just wouldn’t be tolerated. But that’s what’s going on underwater.
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David Shukman is Environment and Science correspondent for BBC News. He has reported from the Arctic, the Amazon, Antarctica, and the Galapagos Islands, and more than 90 countries. His latest book is Reporting Live from the End of the World
