It’s a fact of life: death and destruction make for compulsive reading. The latest tome in the apocalypse genre is Callum Roberts’s, Ocean of Life: How our seas and changing. The book describes how man has ravaged and defiled the oceans, and explains how our rapacious stewardship is damaging us. Thanks to over-fishing, fossil fuels and lax waste disposal, Roberts says, an aquatic catastrophe looms.
The Sunday Times gave Roberts a rave review (£). A man named Brian Schofield wrote:
‘There isn’t much optimism in Roberts’s conclusions regarding climate change and the oceans, just a declaration that “there is a less dismal future ahead if we quickly wean society off fossil fuels”. But his message on overfishing is much more distinct and direct: “We must set up parks at sea, and lots of them.” Fishing-free marine reserves work: when the Isle of Arran established one in 2008, the undersea “desert” became “lush and healthy” after just two years.
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