Dump 'em in the ocean
Neil Collins
0 rri Vigfusson is the salmon's messiah. If he has not come to save their souls exactly, he has certainly come to try to save the species, and his arrival is not a moment too soon. Orri is, to all intents and purposes, the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, and he tours the countries on the ocean's borders preaching the gospel of co-operation. It is, he reckons, the only way to the salvation of this magnificent — and hugely valuable — fish.
His goal is not so much conservation as abundance. With care, he reckons, it can provide a livelihood for thousands of people, from 'subsistence' fishermen with nets offshore to those looking after the fattest investment banker who demands the best week on the world's best salmon rivers, and will pay accordingly if the fish are there.
Orri, a smiling, slightly rotund figure with endless patience and relentless optimism, was on the Countryside March (of course). I met him for the first time over lunch that day at Wilton's, so you can see just how tough life is for fly-fishermen these days. What, I asked him, is the single most important measure that could be taken now to help the species? His answer is an end to mixed-stock fisheries, the polite name for the vast nets which just haul out everything, throwing back (dead or dying) anything that is not wanted. This has done wonders for the populations of gulls and fulmars, but is catastrophic for a wide range of fish. I told him that I had a solution, of sorts, to the problem. There are hundreds of oil platforms in the North Sea, and, as every offshore visitor knows, they have spawned sealife in abundance, thanks to the shelter that they provide from the top predator with his vast nets.
The platforms are starting to reach the end of their useful lives, so they must go. One of the earliest to go was the Brent Spar, and Greenpeace must bear the blame for hijacking the platform when it was on the way to the north Atlantic. The bunnyhuggers hijacked the agenda too, and despite their fictional scare-stories about pollution from the platform (it contained only one-tenth of the oil they had claimed) forced a change of plan and policy. Redundant platforms must now be taken ashore and broken up, at huge cost in wasted energy, and considerable danger to the breakers. Far better to take each structure and dump it, cut off to avoid any danger to shipping, in a predetermined pattern, in the Atlantic. As the numbers build up, an increasingly large area would be out of bounds for the trawlers which do so much damage. They would steer clear for fear of losing their nets on the obstacles. The wildlife would thrive.
Where best, I asked Orri, to place this pattern? His eyes lit up. There is an area of the north Atlantic, he said, where the fishing rights are disputed between Britain, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands (Denmark). Such a dumping solution would solve two problems at once three if you count the disposal of the platforms. Fishing in the neighbouring zones would become more productive, too. There would be no need for regulation, policing or all the other favoured (and doomed) bureaucratic attempts to control fishing before all the fish are gone. It would be a true market solution, the only ones with any chance of long-term success. Orri believes passionately in market solutions, defined as those which rely on all involved behaving not so as to comply with restrictions, but to pursue their own long-term self-interest. As he says. 'Inter-governmental solutions have not worked. The current most valuable fisheries resource in the Irish Republic incurs an annual burden on Irish taxpayers of many millions of euros. The management policies there have resulted in a perverse outcome in which a range of official organisations pursue local objectives, and fail to recognise the damage they inflict on other countries.'
The fish everyone wants to see in the rivers are those which have spent two years or more at sea. They represent the finest flowering of the species, rather than the grilse, salmon which return after one year (as the typically dour Scottish ghillie puts it, while you squeal with enthusiasm at a take: 'That's not a fish, sir, it's a grilse'). To thrive, the fish need feeding grounds which have, well, food in them. Even if they evade the nets, they can starve. Much of the north Atlantic has become a marine equivalent of the destroyed rain-forest, except that we can't see the damage on the television news. The trawlers are doing the same job as those loggers who are torching the jungle, and the challenge is to persuade them — or, rather, the politicians who control them — that wholesale destruction is not in their interest either. If Orri can do that, he really can walk on water.
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