Callum Roberts

This book left me too angry and depressed to write coherently, so instead here's a brief glossary of terms which I hope might give you some idea why:
   trawling (technol.): a type of fishing in which the ocean floor is scraped clean, not only of fish, but of every living thing—vertebrate and invertebrate, coral, even chunks of the reefs themselves. An industry which extracts fish as a non-renewable resource, like coal or oil. Underwater strip-mining on a near-global scale.
   ghost show more fishing (technol.): the stuff of nightmares. A process whereby a length of abandoned gill-netting, perhaps miles long and either lost during fishing or deliberately dumped overboard at the end of a trip, continues to fish. It stands upright on the seabed snaring everything which swims, floats or crawls into it—fish, turtles, dolphins, everything. Eventually the sheer weight of corpses forces the net down flat. The bodies then rot and are scavenged by crabs until, released, the netting stands back up again. The whole process is then repeated, again and again...indefinitely. Losing and dumping fishing gear is routine, so the world's oceans are littered with these perpetual death-traps.
   inrage (psychol.): similar to, but the opposite of, outrage; what happens inside your head at the precise moment you read about trawlermen complaining that their nets are often damaged by coral reefs.
   dodo (zoolog.): an extinct species of flightless bird, wiped out in a manner which we moderns condemn while, simultaneously, treating the entire biosphere with the same ignorance and contempt.
   bluefin (zoolog.): a species of tuna, formerly abundant, but now rapidly following the dodo into oblivion. So scarce and valuable has it become, that it is now worth using sonar, helicopters and even spotter planes to locate individual fish then guide the boats in for the kill. As Callum Roberts puts it: "This isn't fishing any more, it's the extermination of a species."
   money (econ.): the system of exchange responsible for this madness: as a commodity becomes ever rarer, so its price rises to ridiculous levels. The last bluefin tuna of all—worth millions—will also be the most ruthlessly pursued.
   growth (econ., as in economic growth):the process by which everything shrinks except the size of the human population.
   marine nature reserves (ecolog.): one of the most bizarre concepts ever devised by the imagination, apparently—politicians in particular find it utterly incomprehensible.
   shifting environmental baselines (psychol.): the conceptual flaw at the heart of this apocalypse. Each fresh generation of Homo sapiens sees only its own small section of the decline; there's little perception of the longer-term depletion, and none whatever of the original superabundance (at times "more fish than water") which existed back at the start before human beings began plundering it. This flaw is found even amongst ecologists who study what is left of these ecosystems; thus conservationists work back to "baselines" which aren't meaningful baselines at all, just slightly earlier points back up the slope—points which, moreover, creep downhill from one decade to the next.
   Homo sapiens (zoolog.): arguably the least intelligent of the primates; the only one, arboreal or otherwise, currently sawing through the very branch it is sitting on.
   Earth (astron.): third planet of eight orbiting a G-class main-sequence star midway between 61 Cygni and Sirius. An ocean planet (71% of its surface area). Abundant life, but currently in the throes of its sixth (and primarily marine) mass-extinction event.
   The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts (bibliog.): a meticulously detailed—and relentless—book by a leading authority on the subject. Reduced this reader, during its second half in particular, to despair.
   despair (psychol.): a state of mind, impossible to express in a mere book review (perhaps impossible in words at all), in which you find you no longer care what happens to the human race, but that what is being done to the beautiful Earth fills you with sorrow. show less

Roberts' Reef Life is a gorgeously written account of his life spent working on and around and for coral reefs, moving from the early 1980s up to around 2017. His passion for marine life and corals is apparent on every page, and readers who've taken their own dives and snorkels to explore underwater landscapes will probably get the most out of this work and best relate to the encounters and stories shared here. That said, while the early chapters where Roberts was just getting his feet read show more as you might expect a memoir to, that 'memoir flavor' gets left behind for most of the book, to the extent that it feels a bit like we're reading something more akin to a localized biography of corals through one POV, or something like of an extrapolation of what a marine conservationist's career might look like. I adored reading the book because I do love marine life--it's why I picked the memoir up to begin with--but I was surprised at the balance of science to memoir, and I can see some memoir readers being more disappointed than I was.

For readers who are passionate about coral reefs or marine life or conservation, though, I'd absolutely recommend this work. show less

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 show more humans always exempted from natural history as if we were aliens? But part of me couldn't think of a better title, either. show less

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 show more 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). show less