Over the past three weeks, I’ve been watching one of the greatest natural spectacles on Earth, here in south Devon. At a certain station of the tide, within a few metres of the coast, the sea erupts with monsters. They can travel at 45mph. They grow to 2.5 metres (8ft 2in) in length and 600kg in weight. They herd smaller fish – saury and garfish in this case – against the surface, then accelerate into the shoal so fast that they overshoot sometimes 2 or 3 metres into the air. Bluefin tuna. They are here, on our southern coasts, right now.
When I’ve mentioned this on social media, some people refuse to believe me: you must be seeing dolphins, they say. Yes, I often see dolphins too, and it’s not hard to spot the difference. They don’t believe it because we have forgotten that our coastal waters were once among the richest on Earth. Bluefin and longfin tuna were common here. So were several species of whale, including sperm, fin, humpback and Atlantic grey, and a wide range of large sharks. Halibut the size of barn doors hunted the coastal shallows. Cod reached almost 2 metres in length, haddock nearly a metre, turbot were the size of tabletops, oysters as big as dinner plates, shoals of herring and mackerel were miles long.
Are these fisherman’s tales? No. There’s a wealth of evidence, historical and archaeological, of marine ecosystems built on an entirely different scale to our poor scraps, much of it beautifully documented in Prof Callum Roberts’ book The Unnatural History of the Sea. The historical size and abundance of our marine species seems incredible only because they have been so catastrophically exploited by the fishing industry.
Bluefin tuna are returning in very small numbers, compared with their old populations, because there has been a slight easing of fishing pressure in the north Atlantic. These magnificent creatures, sleek and serrated, flashing holographic as they break the surface, once roamed most of our coasts. For decades, the world record bluefin tuna on rod and line was one caught off the coast of Yorkshire in 1933.
So what sort of people see these wonders of nature returning to our seas and think “Let’s kill them and sell their flesh”? Well, ministers, for a start. In March, the Conservative government gave British fishing fleets permission to catch and kill 39 tonnes of bluefin tuna this year, in a “trial” commercial fishery.
If fish exist, it seems, they have to be killed. Two fields of study are perennially confused and conflated. One is called marine ecology. The other fisheries science. Fisheries science asks: “How many fish can we keep taking?” Marine ecology asks: “What would living systems look like if we stopped?” Even practitioners often mix them up.
Fisheries science attracts the most money, and seeps into almost everyone’s thinking. It divides the wildlife of the sea into three categories: overexploited, fully exploited, and – perhaps the most revolting framing ever used to describe the living world – “underexploited” or “underfished”. As soon as fish populations begin to recover towards their ecological baselines (very different from the depleted baselines set by fisheries science, against which populations are judged to be healthy), they are deemed underexploited, and scientists recommend that this appalling failure is redressed.
As a general rule, though there are dissidents, fisheries science is not so much an academic discipline as a branch of accountancy. It works on behalf of government and industry, and has many failures to its name: frequently setting higher catch rates – often with unjustified precision – than fish populations can sustain. Even so, governments, lobbied by an industry whose big players often look more like organised crime syndicates than the storybook image of a bearded mariner on a little red boat, routinely set quotas higher than the scientists recommend. Then they fail to enforce the rules, ensuring that even more fish than they allow are taken. Then everyone wonders why fish populations collapse. Sorry, not populations, “stocks”. Fish, in this schema, exist only to be exploited.
You might wonder why an industry would destroy the wildlife – I beg your pardon, “seafood” – on which it depends. But this is to misunderstand the nature of capital. What counts is not the reproductive rate of fish, but the reproductive rate of money. You exploit a resource as quickly as possible, extract what you can until it collapses, then invest your profits elsewhere. This is the strategy Friedrich Hayek, godfather of the doctrine that dominates our lives – neoliberalism – championed in his book The Constitution of Liberty.
There is another aspect of the government’s response to the tuna’s return that I feel more conflicted about: it has also sanctioned a catch and release fishery for anglers. I hate the thought of these beautiful animals being hooked and “played” until they’re brought to the boat – sometimes, because they are so fast and strong, for many hours. But I also recognise that this creates a lobby for their protection, as anglers want more fish to catch, and a potential commercial counterweight. I would much prefer that we left them alone.
We could actually do that, if we choose. I defy anyone to watch these sea monsters hunting their prey and not feel your life has been enriched. This is our true wealth; wealth that cannot be exchanged, that no one can monopolise. This is the wealth we should enhance. No one needs to eat bluefin tuna. Outrageous as it sounds, we could just stop killing them.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
