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    The Unnatural History of the Sea
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    The Unnatural History of the Sea
    Unavailable
    The Unnatural History of the Sea
    Ebook657 pages8 hours

    The Unnatural History of the Sea

    By Callum Roberts

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Humanity can make short work of the oceans’ creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller’s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It’s a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the
    explorers set sail. As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the Sea, the oceans’ bounty didn’t disappear overnight. While today’s fishing industry is ruthlessly efficient, intense exploitation began not in the modern era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in medieval Europe. Roberts explores this long and colorful history of commercial fishing, taking readers around the world and through the centuries to witness the transformation of the seas.
    Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by fifteenth century seafarers is almunimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas. The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendor and prosperity of the seas through smarter managemof our resources and some simple restraint. From the coasts of Florida to New Zealand, marine reserves have fostered spectacular recovery of plants and animals to levels not seen in a century. They prove that history need not repeat itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIsland Press
    Release dateJul 16, 2010
    ISBN9781597261616
    Unavailable
    The Unnatural History of the Sea
    Author

    Callum Roberts

    Professor of Marine Conservation at York University, Callum Roberts is one of the world's leading oceanographers. He was the Chief Scientific Advisor on Blue Planet 2 and writes regularly on marine issues for the Guardian. He is the author of two award-winning books, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Rachel Carson Award, 2007) and Ocean of Life (Mountbatten Award, 2013).

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    Reviews for The Unnatural History of the Sea

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      I read this a few years back but really loved it!
    • 4/5
      The Unnatural History of the Sea hits all my geek buttons: the author mines historical sources to reconstruct the natural world of the past, has a strong grasp of current research on ecosystem resiliency, and peppers the text with observations from his own research. The thesis of the book is that fishing has had an unimaginably large impact on the earth, most of which has gone unnoticed because of shifting baselines.Part of me wants to quibble with the titular use of "unnatural" - why are humans always exempted from natural history as if we were aliens? But part of me couldn't think of a better title, either.
    • 5/5
      With The Unnatural History of the Sea, Callum Roberts extensively documents the destructiveness and shortsightedness that fishing has generally had on the abundance, distribution, and diversity of marine life in many of the world’s oceans over centuries. The concerned tone is justified by the vast evidence synthesized throughout which provides a picture of how paltry today’s oceanic cornucopia is compared to historical plenty. After all, we’ve been fishing down the food web while shifting our baselines – and it’s just not a good combination for either the fish or ourselves. One of the main strengths of this book that I enjoyed was the juxtaposition of contemporary historical reports from ships logs and private journals with modern scientific understanding of fishery stocks, their changes over time, and the factors that influence them. For example, Roberts often relates observations by William Dampier. Dampier was a “extraordinary man. Born in the west country of England around 1650, he was in the course of his colorful career a planter, logwood cutter, pirate, navigator, hydrographer, sea captain, diplomat, explorer, naturalist, writer, and relentless traveler. By the age of sixty, three years before his death, he had circumnavigated the globe three times.” And there are tons of interesting people like that whose observations contribute to the briny riches that this book describes. Roberts also relates personal observations by himself and other scientists focused on coral reefs, marine parks, kelp forests, and other exotic ecosystems. This book roams across the seas, delving into the fates of cod, herring, swordfish, seals, whales, coral reefs, Chesapeake Bay striped bass and oysters, and the deep dark places which we still know little about. Despite the broad range of topics Roberts covers, at times the book felt cyclical and repetitive. Yet unlike books of poorer quality, recurrence is not due to poor writing but rather the depressingly destructive cycle with eerie repetitiveness across the ‘seven seas’ over time. As Roberts patently shows, historical abundance of near-shore fisheries dwindles as fishing intensity increases, followed by a switch of targeted species to previously less valuable ones and/or improvements to fishing technology until resources are depleted at which point fishing grounds move to deeper waters further offshore. Fish stock impoverishment is often masked by changes to practices (e.g. technological advancements or opening novel fishing areas) or reporting (e.g. lumping multiple species or fish of different ages together). Roberts further makes the connection that a mismatch of communication, interests, and timing often confound efforts of scientists, fishery managers, and politicians from fixing the problems or even getting a clear picture of the extent of the problem. While it’s a depressing taken as a whole of fishing history, the book does not end there. He envisions a future global fishery turned on its head and points out seven ways to get there. These are:1.Reduce present fishing capacity2.Eliminate risk-prone decision making3.Eliminate catch quotas and implement controls on the amount of fishing4.Require people to keep what they catch5.Require fishers to use gear modified to reduce bycatch6.Ban or restrict the most damaging catching methods7.Implement extensive networks of marine reserves off-limits to fishingI’ll let Roberts expound and explain these himself. You’ll just have to read the book.
    • 4/5
      The Unnatural History of the Sea hits all my geek buttons: the author mines historical sources to reconstruct the natural world of the past, has a strong grasp of current research on ecosystem resiliency, and peppers the text with observations from his own research. The thesis of the book is that fishing has had an unimaginably large impact on the earth, most of which has gone unnoticed because of shifting baselines.Part of me wants to quibble with the titular use of "unnatural" - why are humans always exempted from natural history as if we were aliens? But part of me couldn't think of a better title, either.
    • 4/5
      This really is a fascinating and beautifully argued book. I chanced across it because I had been disappointed by Jared Diamond's Collapse and wanted to find something that dealt more rigorously with humans' approach to natural resource management. I know very little about the specifics of marine resources, but, as a detailed and specific, though very readable, case study, this way outclassed Diamond's offering. One of Roberts' more interesting points (though in retrospect it's an obvious one) is how processes of environmental change that outlast an individual's lifespan are underestimated because we assume that what we're used to is what has always been. We may notice limited change over our own lifetime, but this record is not passed on to subsequent generations. The result, after successive historic waves of marine exploitation, is that the species, volumes and sizes of fish we currently catch would have been laughed at by our 18th Century, and found totally incredible by our medievil, ancestors. Many of the detailed and well argued lessons that Roberts draws are very much applicable to other types of natural resources (minerals, energy, carbon absorbtive capacity).