14
May 2014
www.intrafish.com
COVER STORY
Fishing on the defensive
Quentin Bates
Fishing certainly has some heavy artillery lined up against it. There is hardly a whisper of criticism anywhere in the media levelled against other marine users, such as the dredging industry that takes millions of cubic metres of habitat from vulnerable inshore zones or emerging industries that are increasingly interested on the deep sea
T
he North Sea’s Dogger Bank, a fishing area for as long as there has been fishing, now apparently needs to be protected from the effects of damaging fishing gears. Yet dotting the seabed with steel structures driven a hundred feet into the seabed, seems to be acceptable. The North Sea today is strewn with windfarms, and fishing grounds are being steadily lost. It is increasingly noticeable that once other interests require access to the seabed, fishing is shunted aside, such as in areas where exploratory drilling for oil and gas is apparently acceptable, while those same areas remain closed to fishing to
protect supposedly vulnerable fish stocks. The mainstream media maintains its strong anti-fishing emphasis, not least as a group of journalists close to the NGOs tends to dominate any environmental debate. Material from NGOs is reproduced largely verbatim with no effort made to seek out opposing viewpoints that could contradict the green viewpoint or even expose it as being over-simplistic. European and US media routinely carry this very onesided coverage of anything that relates to the marine environment, while in the UK every broadsheet newspaper is guilty of much the same bias. Even British satirical magazine Private Eye, renowned for aiming its barbs