Per-marine-culture

With a startling report just released by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, one wonders whether it’s time to include the world’s seas in our understanding of permaculture.

I was brought up within a community that was inextricably linked to the sea for it’s livelihood and its sense of identity. Though many fishermen are now vilified for overfishing the sea, the reality is that the vast majority of those men and women who make a living from the ocean are sustainably and conservationally minded. What other way is there to be? If one has no respect for this natural resource, with its complexity and diversity, trawling it and fishing it without any understanding that it is a fragile ecosystem that needs to be sustainably managed, then one might as well go down to the quay and burn your boats. Ironically, it’s not the fishermen that are the problem, but those who stay on dry land - the consumer. In the same way that our desire for cheap milk, meat, vegetables and grain-based food have driven forward high-yield intensive mono-crop farming, so our desire for cheap fish-fingers and cod and chips on a Friday night caused commercial scale fishing that targets only a tiny number of species on a vast scale. In the process, we (the landlubber consumerist) have underpinned a commercial system that exploits the seas, undermining the diversity and unbalancing the ecosystem (for more on the problems this has caused, and to campaign for positive change see FishFight). Ironically, agricultural run off from intensive farming has also been cited as one of the causes tat has brought the world’s oceans to the brink of catastrophe.

As I read the IPSO report on the state of our oceans, I couldn’t help wonder whether the ideas that underpin permaculture, increasingly seen by many as a more sustainable and productive way to use land as a resource, could and should be applied to our relationship with the world’s oceans. To encourage the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems and so benefit from the natural, sustainable abundance of the world.  I’m not one to advocate we stop fishing altogether - that’s as likely to happen as everyone on the planet becoming vegetarian. But I am the first to suggest that we as human beings should be minded never to exploit the world we inhabit and ever ready to live as justly, humbly, and gently as we possibly can.

Articles about the IPSO report can be found on the BBC’s Science and Environment webpages and those of the Independent Newspaper

Your comments.