The importance of the oceans, their wildlife and ecosystems

The idea that humans can ‘manage’ wildlife seems to have become gospel. However there is overwhelming evidence that such actions undermine our chance to restore ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More. Instead we need to rebuild animal-driven processes and let nature do the job for us. So I was delighted to be given a copy of Rewilding the Sea by Charles Clover to read. Award-winning author of The End of the Line, he presents what he has learnt working alongside marine conservationists for years.

This is an excellent and thought-provoking book that presents a clear picture of the opportunities we have to restore the ocean. I hope it will do its part to help turn the tide on a century of ecosystem mismanagement. It tells numerous stories about the scope that nature has to recover. It also reminds us that human beings are better off leaving things alone if we are to let ecosystems recover and that people can still be part of that process.

Rewilding the Sea is a wonderful summary of the opportunities we have to build a better world. Read this book if you want to make a difference!

The natural state of the sea

Rewilding the Sea begins off the coast of the Scottish Outer Hebrides describing powerful scenes that hark back to my youth. They mirror some of my early memories watching White-beaked Dolphins, Minke Whales, tuna and gannets feeding in ‘The Minch’. Each chapter tells a different story from ocean-scale protection to the empowerment of local communities to conserve their own livelihoods.

In the first chapter Clover covers rewilding and the similarities between land and sea efforts. Visiting the Antipodes, where I now live, he talks about sea urchin infestations. This is a topic of concern in my adopted home city of Melbourne, Australia.

In Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay, researchers are encouraging ‘citizen scientists’, to smash sea urchins in an effort to restore coastal ecosystems. The urchins are variously described as ‘pests’ and ‘out-of-control’ as they consume all the sea weed. The urchins leave only the bleached bare bones of rock beneath what was once a diverse ecological community.

I’ve been watching the research action unfold with some horror. Because current activities are just as likely to create as many problems as they solve. Moreover they won’t work without rebuilding fish stocks. This is a fact that should seem obvious, as Clover indicates:

‘It doesn’t take much study to grasp the reality that most forms of marine management … are failing because they don’t control all destructive influences.’

What is the natural state of the sea? Asks Clover. He surmises there isn’t much wilderness left, so having depleted so much, surely we have to restore it full of fish and other large animal life? This means ‘rewilding’ the sea.

The fact that we don’t automatically do this comes down to a combination of our own fallibility and a certain scientific inertia that tends to represent an obstacle to new ideas. The concept of rewilding still hasn’t gained significant traction among scientists. Clover echoes Isabella Tree in Wilding by saying:

‘… science advances one funeral at a time as the deaths of fierce advocates of past orthodoxy allow new ideas to gain ground.’

Humans are fallible

In Melbourne we are permitting ecosystem biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More experiments to happen inside precious marine parks without, it seems, any focus on protecting what swims through them. Hence these tiny fragments of habitat are under a new threat – our own potential mismanagement.

As Clover points out:

‘ … we humans are fallible … and are politically influenced, by economic factors and by dogma, and it can take generations to fix our mistakes’.

Unless we restore fish populations, we are trying to restore the seabed, while protecting the interests that are destroying it. Then we …

‘[end] up with a network of marine protected areas … that attempts to protect what lives on the bottom but perversely not what swims and migrates through.’

I can support this statement with another point. By failing to put fish back into ecosystems we are expecting human beings to become a substitute for the work done by hundreds of species. Of the 6,000 tropical reef fish in the world only a handful do each task necessary to stabilise the planet. Imagine running a market, sacking all the staff except delivery drivers, and telling them to do everyone’s job.

Forgive the pun but when it comes to rewilding the sea, we are completely out of our depth!

If you want to read about how badly ecosystem management can go wrong, I’d also recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s book ‘Under a White Sky.’ We are only at the start of creating the catastrophic problems the US has made on an epic scale, after decades of thinking they can control nature.

‘I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one’.

Elizabeth Kolbert, 2021. Under a White Sky

‘Fish the size of small pigs’

Because we live in broken ecosystems we can only easily imagine what we’ve grown up with. For that reason, I recently wrote a blog about my own local marine park asking the question: ‘Where are all the resident reef fish?’ Because I think they are notably absent but have been for over 60 years.

The only anecdotal record of note is from the 1950s and describes hundreds of fish where there are now one or two. Two days ago I was snorkelling at the park and it was circled by recreational fishing boats. The boundary markers are piled into reefs where any remaining resident reef fish congregate. Fishing is gnawing away at any potential recovery and the local fishing authority is intent on reaching a milestone of a million recreational fishers.

However, the absence of fish didn’t even appear as an issue in a recent online talk between Parks Victoria, head researchers and The Nature Conservancy, when they were talking about managing sea urchins.

Why not? A cynic might suggest the work is being funded by the same government that wants a million fishers.

Clover puts some of this down to politics:

‘Though the protection of functioning ecosystems is supposedly an aspiration of official policy, it is being done with two competing intellectual systems in one place, one with more of a commercial bias than the other.’

But if over-fishing is not being deliberately omitted from discussion, what is the alternative? After all, the evidence of why urchins are a problem, has been known for decades. Also, why are the ‘runaway successes of rewilding’, such as the one described here by Clover, being ignored by our own universities?

‘[Bill Ballantine] pointed out changes that no scientists predicted until the University of Auckland was persuaded to create a no-take reserve – just to see what would happen. At the time it was protected in 1975 … the seabed at Goat Island was known as rock barrens. By the 2000s the snapper had grown to prodigious size. They had eaten the sea urchins, which in the past had eaten all the kelp and prevented it from returning. What had been an area of bare rock has been transformed into a kelp forest, populated by unfrightened and curious fish the size of small pigs.’

Charles Clover, Rewilding the Sea.

Ceding control to people and other animals

The best examples of marine management don’t manage wildlife at all but manage human behaviour. In order to do this we have to first place control with communities rather than centralising that with government. When I say ‘communities’ I mean ecological communities. People and animals are both part of nature.

This is the power of a book like Rewilding the Sea by Charles Clover. It’s a timely reminder of the sheer weight of evidence for nature’s power of ecosystem renewal and the role people play in that.

To create working policy systems though, means telling a whole new story, one where control is ceded to people and other animals. It means local people giving respect to nature to recover itself, while being given respect by society, to protect their own ecosystem values.

Evidently we still have some way to go before to persuade governments or even scientists to relinquish enough control to make this real difference.

Meanwhile, we risk wasting efforts tinkering with things we don’t fully understand, burning finance and delaying the creation of actual awe-inspiring outcomes. The likes of which are described so eloquently in Rewilding the Sea by Charles Clover.

Local marine parks

There is a wonderful chapter in Rewilding the Sea by Charles Clover that documents the multi-decade process to protect coral reefs off the United Kingdom and the concurrent trials and tribulations. This is a very different situation to the one we face in Melbourne, Australia, but it does illustrate how much can change – how much conflict can be resolved – by empowering local people.

In Lyme Regis the main problem was commercial scallop dredging that ransacked the seafloor and destroyed local fisheries. Over time the local fishers also accepted that they had become dependent on overfishing. Here is a 30-minute film that tells that story.

Ultimately the creation of a 155 square kilometre marine park was the largest ever done in the UK. But this was initially at the exclusion of local fishers who had been working there for generations. Local fisher David Sale who spearheaded the early efforts said:

‘We used to import chestnut hoops from France and netted them with sisal or manilla. We didn’t fish in the winter. The [potting] gear would not stand it.’

I wonder how long Sale’s ancestors had been honing those traditional skills? There are 1.75 million hectares of coppiced chestnut in Europe, some dating back thousands of years. Until the advent of modern equipment, fishing was done in summer. The winter months would have allowed recovery. This boom-bust cycle of predator and prey is iterated across ecosystems planet-wide. Human predators are no different. Modern equipment has changed that culture. Over the years fishers have also had to work harder, longer, with modern gear but still caught less.

When we break tradition, we break ecosystems.

Scientists might look for a technical solution. But it took a fisher with traditional knowledge to understand how to return to the right way of doing things. Clover paraphrases David Sale saying:

‘The task for conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More, he believed, was to put back some of the challenges for the fishermen that made the sea more productive in the past.’

The fishers of Lyme Bay are now teaching other regions to do the same. To find new ways to be sustainable. They’ve gone from a position of conflict with conservationists to one where they say:

‘Having the reserve in position has done no harm. All good.’

A change in values

While we mustn’t underestimate the complexity of the challenge at hand, the solution itself is simple. Let wildlife back in, protect it, and ecosystems begin to restore themselves faster than most people can begin to imagine. The difficulty is the time it takes to restore what we’ve destroyed. But even that can be in the order of a few years. Yet it is a few years of pain. In our case, in Melbourne, recreational fishing is the greatest pressure. It is a lifestyle impact, not a commercial one, and it is highly emotive. But we have no choice. Unless we reduce the pressure our ecosystems will all become rock barrens.

However, once people see that recovery is possible it creates consensus. Without this context first, conservation can’t work.

Heavy-handed tactics to manipulate broken systems are far from effective and can be equally damaging. At the very least it’s pouring good money after bad. It’s wasting valuable time. Instead we need an approach that empowers community imagination and breaks down the ‘[political influence] … economic factors and … dogma’ that Clover and other authors such as Schwartz so elegantly describe.

‘It was their set of beliefs that convinced them it was impossible. Once we acknowledged it could happen, it took the pressure off. This freed up their minds so they could consider what they would do.

Judith Schwartz, The Reindeer Chronicles.

The path to success isn’t to centralise decision-making with quotas or mandates. In the immediate term it’s not even to do ecological research. It’s to exchange knowledge with local people and cede control back to communities of people and other animals.

‘To rewild the sea is to bring back lost and depleted species to our oceans and restore ecosystems that have been harmed by human activities – simply by stepping back and letting nature repair the damage, or by reintroducing species or restoring habitatsWhat is habitat for animals and people? Habitat, hence the word "habitable" describes the natural surroundings in which any animal (or human) lives, that houses basic needs, such as food and shelter. Vegetation, for example, is habitat for animals. On its own, habitat is not necessarily stable or sustainable, which is why it differs from an ecosystem. Habitat in disrepair More.

Charles Clover, Rewilding the Sea

We must give nature the time and space to recover itself.

The people who have the most to gain or lose will eventually reach a consensus that is sustainable. That is why they need people to be part of the solution. That’s the only way to create long-term protection.

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Read an extract here