We can longer turn a blind eye to the damage done to our seas

A swordfish at a fish market in Lombok, Indonesia. Inshore species have been decimated by industrial fishing. Top-predator 'game' fish are now caught for food.

The UK proposes to ban bottom trawling — weighted nets being dragged over the sea bed — in four Marine Protected Areas (MPA) including the Dogger Bank, which is half the size of Wales and a vital breeding ground for cod, whiting, and sand eels — food not only for fish but for sea birds. The UK government says the ban will be imposed now that these areas are beneath exclusively British seas. EU nations have failed to end overfishing, and to protect habitats from bottom trawling.

Britain has the same abysmal record. Some 97% of British MPAs continue to be bottom trawled. As for the seas within Ireland's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), I quote the data: 218 MPAs, of which 1.2% are "Less Protected" and 1% "Designated but Unimplemented Zones" — not protected at all.

Damine Enright: 'All life, as well as we, ourselves, are endangered.'

Doing some research, I find that, as everyone knows, our planet's seas are being maltreated and overfished everywhere. If the seas are killed, then 71% of Planet Earth will be dead. That's frightening, but it's a fact. We can face it, or turn a blind eye.

We know that all life is interlinked; if we lose one species, we use many others; everything that lives is part of a 'chain'. We, at the top, are the apex predators on the land, on the soil itself, on the ocean floors and on all water fresh or salt, on the vertebrates and invertebrates, on all vegetation. We are, fast or slowly, damaging every one of these beyond repair — and we know it.

To demonstrate this, one can start anywhere. I first looked at the seas, trolling through wildlife magazines like Nature and New Scientist, and The Guardian newspaper's Seascape bulletins.

Whales immediately grab headlines; but of course sand eels, sardines, and starfish are just as important in the chain. Whales are highly visible, but what is happening to them is happening to vital creatures we can hardly even see. Readers of the column will know this already. All life, as well as we, ourselves, are endangered.

The blue whale, the largest mammal ever to live on the Earth, is threatened by collisions with boats at one of its principal feeding grounds in Chilean Patagonia. It's not surprising. The boats take 1,000 passages per day. Over 80% are employed by salmon farming for international markets. New research on global salmon farming finds that it is devastating marine ecosystems everywhere through pollution, parasites, and high fish mortality, and annually causing billions of euros in damage. Of course, wild salmon stocks, at least in Europe, were long ago devastated by bad management.

In Canada, collisions with container ships and tankers are seriously threatening the survival of North Atlantic right whales. Even under maritime speed restrictions, strikes are often fatal. Counts estimate that only 356 North Atlantic right whales remain. Most deaths are caused by human actions.

In the Gulf of St Lawrence, scientists have monitored a serious decline in the number of calves born to humpback whales over the past 15 years. Climate change has led to escalating sea temperatures and sea levels, resulting in less herring — a primary food source for humpback and other migrating whales in summer.

A graphic portrayal of whale slaughter was captured by the co-founder of Greenpeace, who recorded a 1975 voyage he and a group of activists made in an 85ft boat to reach a Russian factory ship harpooning sperm whales off California. "There was blood all over the water," he said. "There were dead whales in the water, and there was a large pipe that came out from the hull of the factory ship that was running constantly with blood. We could see the giant slabs of whale being ripped off the bone. There was the stench of dead whales and blood, and there were sharks in the water. It was a horror show.” 

Hammerhead sharks, one-time abundance in our oceans, face the threat of extinction. In 2014, my wife and I saw lines of hammerheads laid out at a dawn fish market in Lombok, Indonesia. Amongst them was a giant basking shark cut into sections, too heavy to be transported complete. Elsewhere, eight-foot-long marlin and swordfish lay on mats in the dust. Since inshore species have been ravaged by industrial fleets, top predators are targeted.

While David Attenborough urges governments to ban deep-sea mining, European and American corporations increasingly finance deep-sea bed exploration, damaging the ocean bed. The International Seabed Authority wants governments to cease licencing and, instead, implement an ocean treaty with adequate protections.

Individuals insisting their governments put nature conservation first is our best hope for survival. Ordinary people do what they can. This week, in frozen Texas, residents are rescuing thousands of cold-stunned sea turtles in the Gulf Of Mexico.