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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Today, marine conservation is a widely recognised human endeavour, but when I was at university in the late 1960s, it barely existed. When I started work in 1978 for what became the Marine Conservation Society you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people employed full time in the UK with marine conservation in their job titles. For many it was a very small part their main jobs. Since then, there has been a massive transformation, and marine conservation is now recognised as a mainstream activity by governments worldwide, advocated by hundreds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and engaging many thousands of people.
The development of marine conservation is a story about people whose ideas and actions have challenged the status quo and have been translated into tangible protection for the marine environment. I have had the privilege to work with many who have played a part in this transformation, and as the idea for this book grew it seemed worthwhile to explore the development of marine conservation through their eyes. Accordingly, I interviewed nineteen marine conservation practitioners, and their chapters form the main content of the book. All of the interviewees have been directly involved in activities that have made a difference, often in difficult circumstances, and they have pioneered developments in many areas.
The central aim of this book is to describe and scope the development of marine conservation over the last fifty years through the very different perspectives of the interviewees. The book also explores some of the common themes to emerge from their chapters in a series of crosscutting chapters.
There are four main themes to this book:
• Marine conservation – its scope and development
• People – marine conservationists, their rationale, motivation, diversity of approach and skills
• Ideas that have influenced the way we protect our seas and undertake marine conservation
• Actions that have made a difference
MARINE CONSERVATION
The term marine conservation is used throughout the book in a deliberately open way, often coupled with the phrase protecting the marine environment. Environmentalists in its widest sense is another word that could usefully be applied to the interviewees. It is also clear that a large body of work surrounds managing human activities in the marine environment. You do not need to be a conservationist to work on protecting the marine environment, and many disciplines have been brought to bear to achieve significant gains for conservation as well as protecting the wider marine environment from the most damaging of human activities.
Chapter 2 describes what marine conservation involves, its scope and development. It explores how people frame and define their approach to marine conservation to guide their work, and reveals a wide range of viewpoints far richer than are found in textbook definitions. The chapter also includes a systematic structure for the content of marine conservation, revealing the richness of the subject (Earll 2016). Similarities and differences between terrestrial and marine conservation are explored, and the chapter finishes by outlining the broad challenges of marine conservation as it has developed.
PEOPLE
The key idea of the book was to involve a wide range of people. This is an approach which is entirely consistent with the way marine conservation is undertaken, because a major difference between marine and terrestrial conservation is that the former involves far more work with a wide range of stakeholders to achieve change.
People often come to marine conservation with an interest in a particular topic – maybe corals, cetaceans, birds or fish – but this book is more about marine conservationists and the way they work, than what they work on. Another reality is that many of the people who have made a huge contribution to protecting the oceans, including the interviewees, do not have conservation in their job description, let alone their job title, because managing and protecting the marine environment can be done in many ways.
For the nineteen interviewees, this book describes, in their own words, how their interest in protecting the environment and marine conservation started, and how it developed. Their work relates to different interests, from seahorses to whales, and from habitat protection and marine protected areas to management of large areas of sea and the mitigation of damage from pollution, fishing and many other human uses of the sea.
As important and interesting is the wide variety of disciplines and styles they have adopted in their conservation work in order to achieve change. Chapter 3 describes a number of elements of this, including:
• The personal development and inspiration of the interviewees and their mentors
• Their personal qualities and skills, such as passion, commitment, ambition and innovation
• The nature of marine conservation as a career or a vocation
• Their experience of building organisations and capacity building
Chapter 3 also explores how people have worked together in different ways, including multi-sectoral partnerships, active collaborations of organisations working together to find solutions to problems, as well as more focused work with particular sectors, such as the fishing industry, to find solutions to conservation problems.
IDEAS
The ideas that drive marine conservation have been heavily influenced by the wider context of thinking on conservation, the environment and sustainability. There are at least six major drivers, as described in Chapter 4:
1. Terrestrial and marine biodiversity conservation
2. Science
3. Environmental management
4. Sustainability and its principles
5. Other cultural inputs, including welfare, non-violent protest and social sciences
6. Events, planned and unplanned
ACTION
Something that sets conservation apart from many other disciplines is the desire to act and respond to the status quo in order to try and achieve change in activities that harm the environment, its species and ecosystems. Every chapter reflects the reality of delivering such change, covering an enormous range of case studies from UK, European and international perspectives. The book deliberately covers an enormous range of styles, including the science-policy approach, direct action, welfare, advocacy, innovation, capacity building, campaigning and working with people – for this is the reality of working in conservation.
After the nineteen interviews, Chapter 24 draws out a number of common themes on marine conservation actions which have emerged in the narratives, including:
• The threats to the marine environment and priorities for future action
• The barriers to action
• The different ways people have achieved change
• The importance of innovation
Looking forward, the insights from this chapter underline some of the main difficulties in making progress and the lessons we need to learn to progress more effectively in the future.
HOW THE BOOK WAS PREPARED
How were the interviewees selected?
My marine conservation career started with organising citizen science project for sports divers, and gradually this developed to include capacity building by developing an organisation, the Marine Conservation Society, by building a membership, developing a constitution, communicating with newsletters, prospectuses and conferences, developing information sources and identification guides. The conservation programme themes arose from working to support the developing Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) and working on issues from basking shark conservation to sewage and tributyl tin (TBT) pollution, from protected areas to bathing beaches, and working with people on local and whole-sea scales. It exposed me to people with completely different ways of thinking about the environment and the diversity of what marine conservation involves. Consequently, during my career I have come across many people who have made a difference. Their thinking has come from very divergent roots, ranging from the mainstream of government terrestrial nature conservation through to Greenpeace – but this barely describes the scale of the differences.
As the process of the interviews developed I used a number of criteria to select the interviewees, the four main ones being as follows:
1. History. The time span of the development of marine conservation, as covered in this book, is from the late 1960s to 2017. Many of the interviewees have careers which cover this time frame, and the majority bring at least 20 years of perspective to their narratives, with more than 600 years' experience in total.
2. Specialist expertise. There is a very wide spread of expertise covered in the book, from the protection of species and habitats, through to seas and oceans and the mitigation of human impacts.
3. Style and approach. Whilst the majority of the interviewees trained as natural or social scientists, I deliberately chose people who had come from very different backgrounds and used very different styles and approaches, well 'beyond science'. I have included people who use direct action, people with a strong welfare background, and people who proposed the spatial management of the seas in which conservation can be set. The contrast in working environment – from large government organisations and NGOs, through creating new organisations to acting individually – was also something that I wanted to reflect.
4. A world view. It is clear that marine conservation is now truly international in its scope. Whilst virtually all of the interviewees have worked on projects all over the world, the contributions from Jon Day (Australia), Keith Probert (New Zealand), Bud Ehler and Elliott Norse (USA) bring perspectives from beyond Europe.
The interview process
There are rigid research protocols for interview-based work, but that was not my purpose. Rather, this has been a personal interest – my aim being to look back and try and make sense of the development of marine conservation during my working life.
The methodology developed as I carried out the initial interviews, and the questions for the most part focused on four themes:
• An insight into how the interviewees began their careers
• An initial set of questions on marine conservation and its development
• A middle section that focused on the major themes of their work
• A final set of questions about the future
For the interviews with Jon Day, Keith Probert and Elliott Norse, a simpler style was adopted, asking about the key steps in the development of marine conservation in their countries and what lessons could be drawn from their experience.
As well as telling their individual stories, I was interested in looking at common themes arising from the interviews. These themes were certainly not clear at the outset, and the process has produced some surprising and fascinating insights into the way marine conservationists think and work. The interviews were videoed and transcribed, and chapters were then sent to the interviewees to be signed off. The videos of the interviews made the task of transcription much more enjoyable, and the archive of these videos may be of long-term interest. A few comments made by the interviewees appear in the common themes chapters although they are not included in the interview chapters themselves.
Five timelines have been included in the book as a way of recording the key developments. These are linked to the narratives of the interviewees as well as the wider context of marine conservation. Some of the events may seem remote in time or context, but their influence has been profound in various ways, and this is well illustrated by the debate over Brexit, which risks undermining many of the environmental gains that have been achieved over the last thirty years through our close connections with Europe.
LIMITS TO COMPLETENESS – WHAT THE BOOK DOES AND DOESN'T COVER
This book cannot be comprehensive, and this reality struck me many times. Nevertheless it does cover a number of important points that arise when considering marine conservation in a more holistic way.
The activities surrounding marine conservation are so extensive and far-ranging that it is absurd to imagine that they could be covered by a single book. Four points illustrate this:
• I did not select any lawyers or economists to interview, or a host of other specialists, and so the book is lacking in those and many other perspectives.
• I have not tried to cover marine conservation systematically, although Figure 2.2 shows how a book on the subject could be structured. Such a structure is more likely to be used in the future for a website that covers this task.
• Individual topics now have so many strands, that even if you were working on them full time it would still be very difficult to keep up with developments.
• Given its sheer scale and richness, the totality of the subject matter of marine conservation is well beyond any single volume.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN FROM THIS BOOK
This book outlines the context of the development of marine conservation and scopes the diversity of the subject, as well as pointing to the issues that will continue to challenge us. It includes:
• An introduction to how marine conservation has developed
• A systematic structure to describe marine conservation
• An insight into the people, ideas and actions that have led to significant developments in marine conservation
• An understanding of the varied scale and focus of marine conservation – from individual species to oceans, and from detailed studies of ecosystems to the mitigation of damaging human activities
• Multiple voices – insights into the motivation of practitioners, their views and values, and the wide range of beliefs and approaches that have helped make significant gains
• An insight into the realities and difficulties of what marine conservation involves in practice, through the perspectives of successful practitioners
• The diversity of approaches to delivering marine conservation, from science and policy work through to direct action and welfare thinking
• A realistic picture of the skills and motivation required to work in marine conservation
• An understanding of the ongoing need for innovation, capacity building and developing programmes of action at all scales
• The importance of working with people in a variety of ways, from partnership to confrontation, to make progress in marine conservation
Put simply, the book describes the work of some remarkable people who, often in difficult circumstances, have made a difference.
CHAPTER 2
Marine conservation
WHAT IS MARINE CONSERVATION?
This looks like a simple question, but even after a short period of reflection it becomes rather more complicated and interesting. At a personal level it has many answers. At the start of this project I gave this a good deal of thought, not least because if you look at the breadth and coverage of marine conservation in a systematic way its scope is enormous – and this led to the development of the structural approach described later in this chapter.
Initially the question put to interviewees was 'How do you define marine conservation?' It quickly became apparent that their responses were not so much about definitions, but more to do with how they 'framed their views' in terms of their work. Usually, after some hesitation, interviewees commented on the difficulty of answering: 'I see you've started with the most difficult question' (Joan Edwards). The question of course encourages people to think through their own attitudes and beliefs, and prompts them to give a personal explanation of what they do. There was often a recognition that their views had changed over time. Over the course of the interviews, eight recurring themes emerged, and these are described below.
HOW DO WE FRAME OUR VIEWS? THE KEY THEMES
1. Definitions
I used the words 'define' and 'frame' when asking people what they believed marine conservation was all about, but it was surprising how few people responded with formal definitions. More common responses were 'defining things is always difficult' (Callum Roberts) and 'I don't use any formal definition' (Sue Gubbay). Definitions, by definition, are a clever use of a small number of words to describe really complicated things. Even so, one of the fascinating points to emerge from the responses was how many of the elements described in people's understanding simply do not arise in the formal definitions. Words like inspiration, passion, magical and fairness – which are entirely missing from the definitions and yet commonplace in the rationale of the interviewees.
Keith Hiscock referred to a definition: 'I use a definition that is from a time before "biodiversity" had entered our vocabulary and become fashionable: the regulation of human use of the global ecosystem to sustain its diversity of content indefinitely (Nature Conservancy Council 1984).'
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Excerpted from "Marine Conservation"
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Copyright © 2018 Bob Earll.
Excerpted by permission of Pelagic Publishing.
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