Why don’t we heed seas’ warning signs?

Anyone who reads Alex Renton’s piece this morning (Deep End: What rapid changes means for our seas, pages 13, 14 and 15) cannot but be concerned about the destruction he describes; anyone who reads the piece and thinks about how we reached this dangerous point and how little we are doing to reverse the unfolding apocalypse — not by any means too strong a phrase — cannot but be frightened and angry.

And so we should be. Any other reaction would be a form of denial and very difficult to understand. Anyone who still thinks this is about the survival of fish and crabs rather than humanity is in denial too.

Renton describes vast areas of ocean turned sterile and unproductive — dead zones — because of human behaviour, behaviour that despite all of the grim warnings and grand rhetoric continues unchecked, indeed in some instances accelerates.

He describes the scene in Barcelona’s La Boqueria — just one of thousands of city centre markets around our world — where species of fish once abundant but now greatly reduced are bought and sold as if industrial-scale commercial fishing was an appropriate use of a finite, delicately-balanced, natural resource or even sustainable in the medium term. It, especially on the barely regulated, almost impossible to police international waters, seems a force almost out of control and answerable to no-one, or at least anyone in a position to do anything about it. Responsible fishermen must find this more frustrating than anyone.

Commercial fishing, or at least the most rapacious commercial fishermen, may be emptying the seas and pushing entire species to the brink but they cannot be blamed for the ever-increasing dead zones, swathes of ocean without oxygen where nothing lives, where nothing can be harvested. A third of all marine life in the Baltic Sea, which once fed all of Northern Europe, is gone and may never recover. And yet we continue to do the very things that caused that desecration. Ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse and indifference seems a form of insanity.

In this country we are doing our bit to add to marine pollution. Proposals for Europe’s largest salmon farms off the west coast are advancing despite considerable and rational opposition. No independent study of the unprecedented proposal, or the impact it would have on the immediate environment or wild salmon stocks, has been published. This, once again, seems to fly in the face of the Government’s promise to reintroduce transparency to our public life.

In another bizarre, only-in-Ireland twist, the minister responsible for the lead agency in this scheme is also the minister who will make the ultimate decision on whether or not it goes ahead. It hardly seems likely, or even imaginable, that the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Simon Coveney might over-rule Bord Iascaigh Mhara, the agency he has encouraged to develop our marine industries. Transparency indeed.

The Aran salmon farm proposals are, in the context of dying oceans, little more than a wave on the shore but they are indicative of the terrible bind we are in — how do we feed the world and how do we controls man’s determination to harness the entire world to the idea of making a profit without destroying that world. Unless we quickly find answers to those questions we seem set on a path to our own and, even more quickly, other species’ destruction.