Callum Roberts
Author of The Unnatural History of the Sea
About the Author
Callum Roberts is professor of marine conservation at the University of York in England.
Works by Callum Roberts
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Roberts, Callum
- Birthdate
- 1963
- Gender
- male
- Places of residence
- York, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Occupations
- marine conservation biologist
oceanographer
professor
author
writer - Organizations
- World Conservation Union
US National Research Council Committee on Marine Protected Areas
The Marine Reserves Working Group
Members
Reviews
Lists
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 9
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 435
- Popularity
- #56,232
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 11
- ISBNs
- 31
- Languages
- 4
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.… (more)