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Carregando... The Unnatural History of the Sea (2007)de Callum Roberts
   Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. 1   justlurking | Jul 4, 2021 |   Roberts gives a fine portrayal of the disastrous human interaction with oceanic life throughout history and even prehistory, and I was surprised to learn how far back overfishing and over-exploiting the ocean really goes. Before I read this I thought of overfishing as having begun in the twentieth century, or maybe a little earlier if whaling is included. I had no idea that whaling had begun as early as the Neolithic – there are rock carvings in South Korea dating from 6000 to 1000 BC that portray people in boats pursuing whales in enough detail that individual species can be identified. The overfishing of European waters began during the Middle Ages, and because of factors as diverse as Viking invasions, the dietary requirements of the Catholic Church, the clearing of land for agriculture, and the damming of rivers for gristmills and aquaculture. Meanwhile, governments tried to ban or at least decrease overfishing as early as 1289, using surprisingly modern reasoning. King Phillip IV of France cited a mixture of health, economic, and environmental concerns in his decree against it: “the fish are prevented by them [the fishing industry] from growing to their proper condition, nor have the fish any value when caught by them, nor are they good for human consumption, but rather bad, and further it happens that they are much more costly than they used to be…” I also thought of trawler fishing as a twentieth-century development, but it began in the 1300’s, and as early as 1376 there were petitions to ban the practice in English waters. The efforts were in vain, and trawler fishing continues to be used today even though it is vastly destructive to the ocean floor, and has been compared to strip mining. Roberts doesn’t stop there, stating that trawling is “leveling unknown Yellowstone Parks.” However, the book closes on a note of hope, which I believe as very important because a lot of times hope is what keeps people going. And there is some reason for it, especially if we can constructively channel our outrage over how the ocean has been treated in the past, and start recognizing the ocean as the extraordinary place it really is. (  ) Jennifer708 | Mar 21, 2020 | Roberts gives a fine portrayal of the disastrous human interaction with oceanic life throughout history and even prehistory, and I was surprised to learn how far back overfishing and over-exploiting the ocean really goes. Before I read this I thought of overfishing as having begun in the twentieth century, or maybe a little earlier if whaling is included. I had no idea that whaling had begun as early as the Neolithic – there are rock carvings in South Korea dating from 6000 to 1000 BC that portray people in boats pursuing whales in enough detail that individual species can be identified. The overfishing of European waters began during the Middle Ages, and because of factors as diverse as Viking invasions, the dietary requirements of the Catholic Church, the clearing of land for agriculture, and the damming of rivers for gristmills and aquaculture. Meanwhile, governments tried to ban or at least decrease overfishing as early as 1289, using surprisingly modern reasoning. King Phillip IV of France cited a mixture of health, economic, and environmental concerns in his decree against it: “the fish are prevented by them [the fishing industry] from growing to their proper condition, nor have the fish any value when caught by them, nor are they good for human consumption, but rather bad, and further it happens that they are much more costly than they used to be…” I also thought of trawler fishing as a twentieth-century development, but it began in the 1300’s, and as early as 1376 there were petitions to ban the practice in English waters. The efforts were in vain, and trawler fishing continues to be used today even though it is vastly destructive to the ocean floor, and has been compared to strip mining. Roberts doesn’t stop there, stating that trawling is “leveling unknown Yellowstone Parks.” However, the book closes on a note of hope, which I believe as very important because a lot of times hope is what keeps people going. And there is some reason for it, especially if we can constructively channel our outrage over how the ocean has been treated in the past, and start recognizing the ocean as the extraordinary place it really is. ( ) Jennifer708 | Mar 21, 2020 |  ) Pinniped23 | Sep 19, 2014 | One of the main strengths of this book that I enjoyed was the juxtaposition of contemporary historical reports from ships logs and private journals with modern scientific understanding of fishery stocks, their changes over time, and the factors that influence them. For example, Roberts often relates observations by William Dampier. Dampier was a “extraordinary man. Born in the west country of England around 1650, he was in the course of his colorful career a planter, logwood cutter, pirate, navigator, hydrographer, sea captain, diplomat, explorer, naturalist, writer, and relentless traveler. By the age of sixty, three years before his death, he had circumnavigated the globe three times.” And there are tons of interesting people like that whose observations contribute to the briny riches that this book describes. Roberts also relates personal observations by himself and other scientists focused on coral reefs, marine parks, kelp forests, and other exotic ecosystems. This book roams across the seas, delving into the fates of cod, herring, swordfish, seals, whales, coral reefs, Chesapeake Bay striped bass and oysters, and the deep dark places which we still know little about. Despite the broad range of topics Roberts covers, at times the book felt cyclical and repetitive. Yet unlike books of poorer quality, recurrence is not due to poor writing but rather the depressingly destructive cycle with eerie repetitiveness across the ‘seven seas’ over time. As Roberts patently shows, historical abundance of near-shore fisheries dwindles as fishing intensity increases, followed by a switch of targeted species to previously less valuable ones and/or improvements to fishing technology until resources are depleted at which point fishing grounds move to deeper waters further offshore. Fish stock impoverishment is often masked by changes to practices (e.g. technological advancements or opening novel fishing areas) or reporting (e.g. lumping multiple species or fish of different ages together). Roberts further makes the connection that a mismatch of communication, interests, and timing often confound efforts of scientists, fishery managers, and politicians from fixing the problems or even getting a clear picture of the extent of the problem. While it’s a depressing taken as a whole of fishing history, the book does not end there. He envisions a future global fishery turned on its head and points out seven ways to get there. These are: 1. Reduce present fishing capacity 2. Eliminate risk-prone decision making 3. Eliminate catch quotas and implement controls on the amount of fishing 4. Require people to keep what they catch 5. Require fishers to use gear modified to reduce bycatch 6. Ban or restrict the most damaging catching methods 7. Implement extensive networks of marine reserves off-limits to fishing I’ll let Roberts expound and explain these himself. You’ll just have to read the book. (  )3 GoofyOcean110 | Dec 28, 2010 | sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Humanity can make short work of the oceans' creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller's sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It's a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the explorers set sail. As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the Sea, the oceans' bounty didn't disappear overnight. While today's fishing industry is ruthlessly efficient, intense exploitation began not in the modern era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in medieval Europe. Roberts explores this long and colorful history of commercial fishing, taking readers around the world and through the centuries to witness the transformation of the seas. Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by fifteenth century seafarers is almost unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas. The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendor and prosperity of the seas through smarter management of our resources and some simple restraint. From the coasts of Florida to New Zealand, marine reserves have fostered spectacular recovery of plants and animals to levels not seen in a century. They prove that history need not repeat itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)909.09History and Geography History World history Other Geographic ClassificationsClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.94)
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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 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. (