6. Fisheries and coastal ecosystems: the need for integrated management

How can it be that fisheries appear in trouble every time newspapers report on them? Coastal and marine fisheries have existed for a long time. Initially, people waded along the shore gathering shells and harpooned whatever marine mammal or large fish ventured inshore. Only those fish and other animal species that were large and had very narrow coastal distribution were then in danger of being over-fished. The invention and increased sophistication of crafts gradually extended our reach offshore but, for millennia, the elements and the very vastness of the ocean protected most fish populations from being over-fished; hence the notion that earlier, preindustrial fisheries were 'sustainable' (Pauly et aI., 2002). The gradual expansion of European fishing fleets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their impact on the cod and other fish populations they exploited in European waters and off New England and Eastern Canada did not appear to change this, though signs of localized, fisheries-induced depletion were already then beginning to occur. Things really changed when, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, steam trawlers began to expand into the North Sea, gradually mowing down one coastal stock after the other, then moving on to do the same offshore, inducing the first 'serial depletions' on record (Pitcher, 2001). Further technical developments the invention of hydraulic winches, inboard refrigeration, acoustic fish finders, and so on increased the ability of these boats effectively to locate and catch large quantities of fish and to bring them back from longer distances, thus opening up the entire North Atlantic to fishing operations (Cushing, 1988). Similar development occurred in other industrialized parts of the world, for example in North America, North Asia and Australia. There as well, this occurred in waves following on the two World Wars, both of which accelerated the development of technologies that were later transferred to fishing operations.