A glimmer of hope for the blue planet

You might think – with its feeding frenzies, vertiginous seamounts, perilous weather and deep history of the monstrous – that the ocean was a wild enough place as it is; but according to the environmentalist Charles Clover it has systematically been ‘de-wilded’ by decades of commercial overfishing, and our seas are now in urgent need of healing. I believe him.

When it comes to conservation, fish hold less appeal than terrestrial fauna: they are perceived as cold-blooded, mostly invisible, lacking in charisma, and often delicious – plus, for centuries, there existed the comfortable delusion that their stocks were inexhaustible (even a proof positive of divine benevolence). Now, thanks to ruinously efficient modern trawling techniques, poorly enforced regulations and sheer greed, this abundance is palpably at an end.

A wider awareness of the crisis, and the attempt to reverse international trends, was promoted by Clover’s previous book, his influential The End of the Line, and a subsequent documentary film which highlighted in particular the plight of bluefin tuna (a single specimen of which was once sold in Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market for £2.5 million) and explored the devastation to marine ecosystems caused by this industrial plundering of the seas. Its premiere in 2009 was memorably associated with a photograph of a naked Greta Scacchi hugging a large cod.

In several ways, Rewilding the Sea is a follow-up volume – indeed, it begins with the welcome reappearance of tunny off our own Western Isles – and charts the progress that has been made in the intervening period. Although urgent and sometimes indignant in tone, this is far from some shrill doom-sayer’s polemic. It describes ‘how things once thought impossible have happened,’ largely through the creation of marine reserves across the world, many of the ones the author charts having been championed by the Blue Marine Foundation (BLUE), a charity of which he was co-founder.