The Unnatural History of the Sea is an exhaustive history of commercial fishing and the impact it has had on the world’s seas and oceans. It was first published in 2007 and is written by Callum Roberts, the marine biologist and author who is professor of marine conservation at the University of York. Roberts begins the book by saying that he aims to show how commercial fishing and exploitation of marine life have led us to “this low point of ocean life.” He makes it clear that he is optimistic for the future and believes that changes can be made to once again restore ocean life. Roberts does indeed end the book on a positive note with ideas and plans which will restore the world’s marine life, but readers should be aware that the bulk of the book is a depressing, although thought-provoking, analysis of the destruction and damage humans have inflicted on the marine world over the last few centuries.
Roberts begins by saying “We are paying the price for over one hundred years of negligence in ocean conservation” and makes it clear that it is difficult to appreciate how much of the marine world has been lost due to human actions. People began catching and eating fish in the 10th century. During these times it was mostly freshwater fish that were caught but Roberts states that by the 15th and 16th centuries, sea fishing was becoming more common. He suggests that this may have been because traps and dams built to catch freshwater fish were so effective that in certain regions freshwater fish were becoming scarce and catch levels were decreasing. Roberts, therefore, traces the impacts of overfishing back many centuries and rejects the belief that it is only since industrialisation that human actions have had an impact on natural fish stocks.
Roberts then outlines the size and abundance of fish which were present in the world’s seas in these earliest days of fish catching. He states that cod 120cm long, coalfish 150cm long and ling 180cm long were commonplace in the seas around England and in Newfoundland, the waters were so thick with cod that it was difficult to row a boat through them. This brings us to one of Professor Roberts’s key points – shifting environmental baselines. People today accept the current state of the sea as normal and become accustomed to this and compare declines only to what they have experienced in their own lifetimes. People today simply do not realise the true amount of life the seas and oceans held prior to human exploitation and how barren they are today in comparison to previous times. A perfect example of shifting environmental baselines is provided through a discussion with three generations of fishermen who have fished in the Gulf of California. During his fishing career, the oldest man could gain high catches of large fish “on his doorstep” but the fisherman from the youngest generation now has to go much further out, fish for longer and still has smaller catches than his predecessors. Roberts describes how the younger man has been unaware of the abundance of the past and simply did not realise that it had once been possible to catch so many large fish so close to shore. A repeated warning from the book is that we should set our sights much higher than preserving the oceans in their current degraded state and should instead actively work to restore them to their former abundance.
Much of the book discusses trawling, as this is the most unselective and environmentally destructive form of commercial fishing, while also being the most widely used. Trawling began in the 1300s with sail-powered trawlers. Roberts describes how the first historical reference to bottom trawling from anywhere in the world was a request to King Edward III in 1376 to ban bottom trawling in certain inshore areas due to the number of small fish caught. Therefore from its very first mention in history the destructive potential and wastefulness of bottom trawling was acknowledged. Sail-powered fishing continued until the mid to late 1800s when steam power took over. Roberts states that “overnight [this] transformed fishing power and changed all of the rules of fishing.” Sail-powered vessels could only fish effectively in the right wind and tide conditions, but steam power allowed fishermen to work in any conditions and drag bigger nets meaning much larger catches. In the 1960s trawling expanded again with the development of deep sea fishing. Seabeds over 2000 metres (over a mile) beneath the surface could now be fished, opening up a whole new world to human exploitation. Deep sea fishing has reduced slow-growing species such as orange roughly to a fraction of pre-1960s levels in just a few decades. Other species such as goblin sharks, tripod fish and gulper eels are all disappearing due to being caught as deep sea fishery bycatch. Roberts laments “we are losing life in the deep sea before it has even been described by science.”
Through describing the history of trawling Roberts outlines how the ever-increasing power and efficiency of fishing vessels means that fishermen have always been able to increase catches, even when fish stocks have become depleted. By constantly travelling further to exploit new fishing grounds and fishing more intensively the illusion of a healthy and abundant ocean has been maintained. Roberts, however, warns that this is not a situation that can continue indefinitely.
Much of the book discusses the attempts which have been made to limit commercial fishing and protect stocks, and how remarkably ineffective they have been. In the 1800s fishermen claimed that trawling actually increased fish stocks as it released food from the seabed giving the fish which had not been caught an easily available source of food. The nascent discipline of fisheries science soon proved this to be wrong and it slowly became accepted that trawling not only depleted fish numbers but also caused significant damage to the seabeds over which it took place.
In a depressingly familiar tale, Roberts outlines how a better understanding of the link between increasing commercial fishing and declining fish stocks did little to stimulate action to protect the world’s seas and oceans. The 1920s saw the first forms of on-board refrigeration technology providing commercial fishermen with more opportunities to travel to distant waters and catch fish, while consumers could buy and store more fish at home as fridges and freezers became more affordable and common. During the twentieth century consumer tastes also changed in ways which benefited commercial fishermen. Covering fish in batter meant that the species which was caught mattered less, meaning that previously commercially unimportant species could now be caught and sold, while consumers also became more adventurous in their tastes allowing foreign-caught fish to be imported.
Roberts explains that by the middle of the 1950s, the world’s fisheries had seen over one thousand years of growth. This growth had only been maintained by constantly finding new places to fish and new species to catch but both of these were now close to being exhausted meaning they were now living on borrowed time. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, world fishing intensity tripled as fishermen had to work harder and travel further in order to make catches which made economic sense. During this time the power of fishing vessels continued to increase with Roberts saying that “the bridge of a modern fishing vessel more closely resembles the cockpit of a jumbo jet than that of a boat”. He goes on to say that seabed mapping and imaging now allow areas that were inaccessible to trawlers to be fished, giving fish few natural places to escape exploitation. Indeed, modern trawlers are so technologically advanced that the nets feature sensors which beam up data about the speed the net is travelling over the seabed, its fullness and what lies ahead of it.
By this point in the book, the reader may think that the optimism promised at the very start of the book has been in short supply (and they would be right) but worse is to come. Roberts outlines the mess Europe has made of its own fish stocks through the Common Fisheries Policy. In 1970 around 10 per cent of fish stocks in the North Sea were seriously overfished but by 2000 this had increased to 50 per cent. He then tells us that “in relation to true unexploited population sizes we probably have today less than 5 per cent of the total mass of fish which once swam in Europe’s seas.” The situation is even worse for large species such as skates and sharks which are calculated to be at one-fiftieth of the level they would have been at before the advent of commercial fishing. A further depressing point which is made is that when there is a recovery of fish it is almost always small, short-lived forage fish such as herring, sprats or anchovies. When medium to large species are fished down to remnant populations (such as cod in the Grand Banks which he spends a chapter discussing) they rarely recover.
Up until this point rod and line angling has only been mentioned in terms of big game fishing, mostly in colonial times for high-status species such as sharks, marlin and swordfish. However, around two-thirds of the way through the book, Roberts turns his attention to recreational angling. Unfortunately, the scrupulous research and measured tone which has characterised the book up until this point is nowhere to be seen during Robert’s brief foray into discussing modern angling. He states that “a day spent angling is no longer the easy jaunt into the countryside as it was in Izaak Walton’s day” and claims that “even recreational anglers are beating up the high-technology trail.”
He goes on to say:
“Many recreational fishers now employ sophisticated technology in the pursuit of fish. New high-strength fluorocarbon lines are thinner than monofilament and have the same refractive index as water making them virtually invisible to fish. Carbon fibre rods are more sensitive to movements at the end of the line. Even poor anglers can cast modern lightweight lines as far as the best of thirty years ago, reaching those once inaccessible spots. Computer modelling software has enabled the development of lures which behave in the water almost like real fish .. This is no longer “sport” fishing, the fish have little chance against such uneven odds” (page 232).
This chapter is entitled No Place Left to Hide it is clear that Roberts is arguing that the same process which allows commercial fishermen to constantly increase catches due to ever-improving technology also applies to recreational anglers using rod and line. The problem here is that it is simply not true and the evidence he has used to base this claim on is both wrong and misleading. Fluorocarbon lines are extremely expensive and seldom used in sea angling and there is no evidence that there is any correlation between line colour/visibility and catches. He also asserts that “poor anglers can cast modern lightweight lines as far as the best of thirty years ago.” This is a claim which is demonstrably wrong – and something which a few minutes of Google research would have told him. The United Kingdom Surfcasting Federation lists the best casters of the late 1970s and early 1980s such as Paul Kerry and Neil MacKellow as casting 150-gram weights distances of up to 281 yards using 0.35mm (15lb breaking strain) line. Is Roberts really saying that “poor anglers” today can now cast further than this? Similarly, the claim that “computer modelling” is used to design fishing lures making them much more effective is deeply misleading. While a small number of high-end fishing lures may make use of this technology (again with no proof that it actually improves catches) the vast majority of anglers used tried and tested lures, the design of which has not changed in generations. The Toby-style spinner remains hugely popular with UK anglers today and has remained unaltered since it was introduced by Abu Garcia in Sweden in 1956, while spoon-style spinners used today have changed very little since they were invented by T. J. Buel in the 1830s. Even soft plastic and jelly lures which seem like recent developments have a long history – the first was the Wriggle Worm created by Nick Creme for bass fishing in the USA in 1949.
This section of the book is disappointing to read from the perspective of a sea angler. Roberts provides no statistics, evidence or reference to reports to back up his claim fish have “little chance” against today’s recreational anglers. Instead, he relies on anecdotes and informal observations, and many of these come from Roberts’s observing freshwater fishing around the University of York. He may have a point when it comes to freshwater carp anglers who do go fishing armed with bite alarms, arrays of rods and various other pieces of technology, but it is something of a stretch to apply this to sea anglers (see Casting Shadows (2020) by Tom Fort for a much more nuanced consideration of the distinction between high-tech and traditional angling). For a book which is otherwise so meticulously researched by someone who is a world-renowned expert in his field, it is sad to see such lazy and disingenuous arguments being levelled at sea anglers and alarming to think that general readers may now have the impression that sea anglers take part in a high-tech sport which allows them to effortlessly remove limitless fish from the sea.
This section of the book could have been used to present angling in a positive light (as Charles Clover does in his 2004 book The End of the Line) and highlighted how sea angling as a traditional, low-impact and low-catch activity could be used to reconnect people with the sea and increase knowledge and understanding of the challenges confronting the marine environment. Angling is not revisited in the book, leaving these misleading and low-effort couple of pages the only reference to the sport.
The final sections of the book address what can be done to reverse the situation and some of the optimism promised at the start of the book finally begins to emerge. Roberts highlights encouraging progress that has been made such as international agreements to stop marine pollution and points out that as much as fish stocks have been reduced there are very few species which have actually been driven to extinction. This means that there is still a chance of recovery, but this will require a complete reinvention of fisheries management across the world. He goes into detail describing the changes which need to be made. Currently, fisheries ministers who will have moved on to a new role or been voted out of power in a few years set policies. This leads to short-term thinking when policies need to be set knowing they will not pay off for at least five to ten years. He is also critical of the way quotas are one of the main methods used to regulate commercial fishing. The level quotas are set at become the focus and no attention is paid to fish that are killed but not caught during commercial fishing, or the damage which has been caused to the marine environment by catching these quotas. Instead, Roberts says that fishing effort should be limited and everything caught should be landed. Government schemes could be used to purchase low-value fish which have been caught and these could be turned into fishmeal. This is something that the Norwegian government already does and provides a model which many other countries could successfully follow. Roberts, however, stresses that the most important measure is the most simple saying “Cutting the amount of fishing is the first reform needed to fisheries management.”
He is also extremely enthusiastic about marine reserves stating that the one around St. Lucia provides “living proof” that they work. They benefit commercial fishermen in the long term allowing them to catch more fish in less time with less effort. They also provide a “window to the past” showing how abundant the seas used to be, and what they could be like again if we allow them to recover. The book also explains that around 12 per cent of the world’s land is protected, but only one-sixth of one per cent of the world’s seas and oceans are, and some forms of commercial fishing are still allowed in most of this. We are “squandering the wealth of the oceans” and need to break out of the cycle. Creating reserves would benefit everyone and would also cost less than the subsidies currently paid to commercial fishermen.
The Unnatural History of the Sea is a book that anyone interested in any aspect of angling, marine biology, nature or conservation will find fascinating. Roberts combines history, science and policy to provide a thorough explanation of how we ended up with the world’s fish stocks in the state they are currently in. He is able to explain complex issues in terms which people with a non-science background can understand which makes the book extremely readable. With the exception of the section on angling, this is a book which everyone with a stake in the health of the seas and oceans – especially policymakers and politicians – should pay great attention to.
The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts can be purchased on Amazon by clicking here.
