marine reserves

Lords of the sea no longer... bluefin tuna carcasses await auction at a Tokyo market - Japan is the main destination for Turkish tuna (image by stewart, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

No, this is not another story about the crazy things we feed to our farm animals, but rather yet another sad tale of failure in fisheries management … and yet another nail in the coffin for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean.

Clean, healthy and biodiverse : the reef around Appo Island in the Philipinnes

Behind many a Greenpeace action and every campaign lies a large amount of science related work. Much of the analysis and some of the research backing our campaigns comes from the scientists of the Greenpeace Research Laboratories,  based at Exeter University. Over the years they have accumulated a vast amount of expertise and thousands of scientific papers on a wide range of issues including many that are related to the health of the worlds oceans. From bycatch to ocean acidification, the team has been uncovering the facts behind the changes we are now witnessing happening at sea.

Red fish alert! Guppies hit the slopes to help promote 'End of The Line' © Greenpeace / Mackenzie.

Update: guppies go skiing - watch the video »

Park City during Sundance is crazy busy. The Main Street, hotels, and carparks are all chockablock, and everyone has a film to sell or see. So, clearly we needed something to attract a bit of attention and make obvious Greenpeace's support for the End Of The Line film. If you've read my previous posts, you'll be aware that part of the solution (after some complicated logistics) involved five Greenpeace US volunteers  plus two red fish suits from Greenpeace Netherlands (thank you guys!).

Oi - Oishi, No! (to bluefin tuna on the menu, that is). Guppie spreads the word at Sundance © Greenpeace / MacKenzie

I'm writing this from Utah, a landlocked state in the US, which hosts the Sundance Film Festival each year. Sundance is known as the place for new independent films, and we're here to support a great new documentary movie called 'End of the Line', based on former Daily Telegraph environment correspondent Charles Clover's book about what overfishing is doing to our oceans.

Marine reserves not only protect the ocean life within them - they help to sustain surrounding ecosystems and animals that pass through them - like whales

Ok, this might take some believing, but apparently outgoing US President George W Bush just made a major contribution to protecting the oceans.

Yesterday the man better known for threatening our entire planet's future by dragging his feet on climate change and paying less attention to environmental conservation than any US president in history, announced plans for three 'national monuments' to be created in the Pacific. A total of 505,775 square kilometres [195,280 square miles], containing some of the most ecologically-rich areas of the world's oceans, will be protected - creating the largest marine reserves in the world.

Imagine you were in a car that was rolling quickly towards the edge of a cliff. The sensible thing to do would be to slam on the brakes as much as possible, knowing that it will take some time to stop, even with your best efforts and your foot to the floor. Another option would be just to take your feet off the pedals and hope it slows down in time. If it was an EU fisheries regulator who found themselves at the wheel, though, chances are they'd consult widely to ensure that they had the best advice possible on how to get out of the situation, and then totally ignore it...

All the available data shows that many fisheries around the world are in serious decline. Some face complete collapse (hence the 'falling off a cliff' analogy) unless drastic action is taken to end over-fishing and give threatened stocks time to recover. This can only happen by setting aside large areas of ocean as marine reserves, off-limits to all forms of fishing. But sadly the fishing industry itself still seems incapable of taking any meaningful steps to address the problem.

OK so I'm a day or two off the pace with this story (courtesy of a long weekend - well even we need a day or two off once in a while), and didn't find out about Monday's tuna direct action in Paris until I showed up at the office again today. So what did I miss? Well, our French colleagues took the opportunity to protest against France's leading role in decimating Mediterranean bluefin tuna stocks by dumping five tonnes of tuna fish heads outside the door of the French Fisheries Ministry.

Timed to coincide with coincide with the opening of the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), in Marrakech, the action targetted France (as opposed to Italy or Spain, the two other worst offenders) in this instance because French Premier Nicholas Sarkozy currently holds the EU presidency. He has been using it to shape the EU position in favour of the short-term interests of his fishing industry above the need to save the Mediterranean bluefin tuna stock from collapse.

Latest updates from the impressive ProtectPlanetOcean web site provide convincing support for Greenpeace's long-held contention that marine reserves provide the best long-term solution to the problems of overfishing and pollution which threaten the world's marine ecosystems. In case you've forgotten marine reserves are protected areas, national parks at sea where no fishing or other extractive industries (such as oil, gas or gravel extraction) are permitted.

The site has pulled together studies of 124 marine reserves around the world - scientific peer-reviewed research published in academic journals - to provide a clear picture of what has happened where reserves have been established.

Our oceans are the last global commons, and as such are about as effectively regulated as Dodge City when the West was at it's wildest. As recently as 40 years ago they were considered to be an inexhaustible resource. No amount of fishing could possibly make a dent, it seemed, in the teeming mass of ocean life which constantly replenished itself. It was a one-sided arms race, with increasingly advanced fishing techniques maximizing catches: GPS; sonar; trawl nets big enough to catch a jumbo jet; bottom trawling; fish aggregating devices and open-water 'ranching' are just some of the methods employed to extract maximum profit from the seas.