Don’t just scrape the surface
* Score the seabed
* Diminish the fish
* Plunder Davy Jones’s locker
* Erode the Queen’s Bottom
A giant airship passes over the capital, dragging beneath it a huge net of chain metal. As it moves, everything in its path is scooped up in a crumpled mass of rubble. Finally, the net is hoisted, leaving behind a smooth, featureless canyon running through the heart of London. All that remains of Covent Garden and Leicester Square is a spectacular furrow bereft of life. All in all, a quite impressive feat, based on a fishing system honed in secret beneath the sea.
There, rather than airships, beam trawlers drag gigantic nets weighed down with 10-tonne weights. The areas of seabed they cover are left scorched bare, everything indiscriminately hoovered up, a fishing technique comparable to hunting rabbits with napalm. No one knows how much of the seabed has been desecrated in this manner. On the surface, the sea still evokes its beautiful tranquillity, but in its depths only carnage. Long ago, Britannia ruled the waves, but with her empire in tatters, she now sets her sights on dominating what lies beneath.
It was in the netherworld of the North Sea that scientists first realized something had gone terribly wrong. In one of the most inhospitable sites under British sovereignty, they discovered stunning coral blooms three times the height of man. As the scientists excitedly scoured the underwater images, they came across something else so startling it is hard to imagine their horror. Gouged deep into the seabed were mysterious wounds, each up to 25 miles long. But these weren’t formed by nature. No, even here, beneath hundreds of feet of water, man had made his mark.
Having emptied Britain’s shallow coastal strip of its once bountiful fish stocks, fishermen had delved deeper into virgin territory: the seabed itself. These spectacular deep-sea scratches, like rugged mountain gorges, were caused by modern fishing equipment. Beam trawlers, indisputably awe-inspiring pieces of marine machinery, are an essential component of your armoury against the planet. Their force is incredible to behold. Underwater cameras have witnessed ‘clean’ rocks, enormous slabs that have lain undisturbed since the last ice age, scooped out in a single motion. During a typical fortnightly fishing trip, each British trawler scrapes clean more than 440 football pitches of seabed.
If this sounds like an art-form you might be interested in, your first port of call should be one of Europe’s largest privately owned fishing-fleets. Based at Newlyn in Cornwall, Stevenson and Sons own thirty-five vessels, including twenty-four beam trawlers, almost a twelfth of the entire global fleet of these destructive beauties. Apart from rising fuel costs, there are no restrictions in place on the size of the weights they use. To cause the utmost damage, 10-tonne weights are recommended. Yank them like wrecking balls over fragile deep-water targets. British waters hide some of the best coral formations in the world, comparable in fact to their more celebrated counterparts in the southern hemisphere whose plight has triggered international attention. Only discovered in 1988, they may have taken eight millennia to evolve, but it should require less than four decades to abuse them beyond recognition. Suffice to say, get trawling before word gets out.
The Stevensons possess the tools to do just this, and although there is no evidence to suggest they will deliberately desecrate the seas, they do have form. Not only have they admitted to a £140,000 quota scam, but one of their beam-trawler owners, William Stevenson, was previously fined for fiddling his log books to conceal the area where he caught seabed-dwelling sole. It is worth noting that the company hires out trawlers, a method which might be considered if the Stevensons refuse to play ball. In the event that you are forced to hire, make sure to accidentally drop old netting over the side; even discarded at the bottom of the sea, it will snare marine life. Called ‘ghost netting’, it may take out only two, three or seventeen fish. But in the context of rapidly dwindling stocks, every dead fish can be viewed as a minor triumph.
Naturally, fishing can be utterly wasteful. Trawlermen have been caught hurling up to half a catch back into the water. Too small. Too oily. Too wishy-washy. Too fishy. Supermarkets, where 90 per cent of the fish will end up, like their fish a certain way. So do you. Dead. The European Commission estimates that ‘discard’ accounts for seven in ten deaths of fish in some waters. Scientific evidence proves that the waters around us need protecting from so-called damaging fishing practices, but these warnings continue to be ignored. 99 per cent of British waters have not been afforded any protection whatsoever. And while 99 could be 100, spirits can be raised with a quick international comparison of marine policy. Latvia, with barely 300 miles of coast, has more marine reservations than Britain, whose coastline is twenty-six times the size. Australia has declared one-third of the Great Barrier Reef a ‘no-take zone’. New Zealand has twenty-eight protected sea zones. The UK? Just three. A hat-trick of tiny reserve zones, introduced in the last quarter of a century. And one, Strangford Lough, has been almost totally trashed by scallop dredgers.
It could have been very different. Four years ago the eminent Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution declared that 30 per cent of UK waters were to be made reserves. For the first time, rules were put in place to prevent exploitation of the sea by fishermen, oilmen, dredgers and energy farmers; a Magna Carta for the belea-guered British fish. Ministers described the protection of the seas as ‘one of the biggest environmental challenges’ facing the world.
But in politics, as at sea, the weather changes quickly. Suddenly, your plot to despoil the nearby seas was back on. The Marine Bill, promised in the government’s manifesto, sank without trace in late 2007. Attempts at saving the seabed stand no chance against the influential fishing lobby, whose persistent success in shaping the debate ensures there is little need for you to wade in. They argue that, if fishing bans were put in place, livelihoods would be lost. A valued and honest tradition would be gone for ever. Care is taken not to dwell on the 40 per cent of commercial fish stock that have fallen below sustainable levels in the North Sea and evidence that only 16 per cent of north-east Atlantic fish stock are within safe biological limits. If this topic does crop up, the fishermen attack oil platforms for disturbing the seabed. This is always their trump card, despite no recorded instance of a platform being dragged miles across the seabed every week.
And so, the unseen destruction continues to be ignored, even sanctioned. But there is no room for complacency. Under no circumstance should any footage of the current state of the seabed get out. A single image of the not-yet-celebrated British coral reefs could single-handedly undo all this hard work, particularly if it showed any hint of damage. In Norway, a snippet of seabed destruction so horrified viewers that the government went soft and completely banned trawlers from coral-bed areas.
Despite its success rate, trawling is bloody hard work and other means of wanton desecration are worth exploring. Construction, particularly, should not be forgotten. Gratitude should be extended to the Queen for giving up some of her much-prized estate, not only to facilitate climate change, but also to ensure undocumented devastation of the seabed. It all began with forecasts that Britain’s population growth meant acute housing shortages. The government responded by ordering 200,000 new homes to be built in the south-east of England. They were to be in ‘sustainable’ eco-towns, an international showcase on how to build and simultaneously keep one eye on the needs of the planet. Aggregate was needed from somewhere, somewhere discreet. Quarries were too ugly, an obvious no-no. In terms of mines, they don’t come more hidden than an underwater pit in the Median Deep, a crater halfway between the coast of Sussex and France which handsomely doubles as a valuable nursery for fish. From here, millions of tonnes of sand and gravel could be excavated, well away from the twitchy-curtain brigade. In 2006 more than 24 million tonnes of building material were quietly taken from the Queen’s subterranean estates, a fifth of all aggregate used in Britain and a 12 per cent increase from the previous year.
Tiresome concerns persist with regard to the scooping of the so-called Queen’s Bottom. Some bores liken it to ripping away a metre of topsoil from the best vineyard in Bordeaux. In a rather hysterical letter to the European Commission, the French authorities protested, claiming ‘an irreversible change’ to the Channel would ensue, leaving parts devoid of life. Typical. You would have thought that, more than anywhere else, beneath the waves you would have carte blanche to really indulge in destructive activities. Nonetheless, don’t be deterred from investing in property. The house-building boom is just beginning and 325,000 acres of Britain’s seabed has been quietly licensed by the Crown Estate for further dredging. Sand and gravel is used liberally to make concrete, which is responsible for 8 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions. So press ahead with that new dining-room extension, and vow to eat only the freshest of bottom-dwelling fish at your mahogany table.
* Large pit in Channel deepens. French say this and that. No one cares. Government doubles house-building projections. Likely.
* A fifth of Britain’s seas are designated marine reserves in response to new studies that reveal crashing fish populations. Minute possibility.
* Beam trawlers are phased out, but only after Stevenson & co are caught fiddling figures again. Implausible.
* New underwater images of Darwen Mounds reveal they are criss-crossed with fresh handsome scars. Fish sales are unaffected. Foreseeable.
* Just 10 per cent of fish stocks are deemed sustainable by 2013. Due to scarcity, four-fifths of species considered too unethical to sell. Almost certain.
Likelihood of beam trawlers being banned by 2015: 61%