Cod

The great American activist Aldo Leopold once argued that to be a modern environmentalist was to suffer a world of wounds as you endured the losses inflicted on one cherished organism after another. No one, then, can suffer more anguish than the campaigner for the world’s fishes. In this wide-ranging, heartfelt, meticulously assembled account of our oceans Rose George shows why. She tells us that there are four million fishing vessels worldwide, the most appallingly efficient belonging to China, the EU, Taiwan, Japan, Russia and the USA. It is primarily these giant industrial regimes that have driven four-fifths of the planet’s fishes to the edge of sustainable limits. Much of

It is easy to assume that there is not much to be said about the history of the Atlantic before 12 October 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas. In 2005, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn published a little book entitled Atlantic History: Concept and Contours which said absolutely nothing about what happened before Columbus, whom he barely mentioned. Atlantic history meant for Bailyn, and the growing mass of Atlantic historians, the story of modern contacts between the four continents that face the Atlantic, especially the nefarious slave trade linking Africa to the Americas. Earlier centuries were seen as the fishing-ground of fantasists, who looked for ancient Egyptians or Irish

The Shetland Islands and the Faroes may seem to be somewhere out there in distant waters, marginal and in the greater scheme of things not very important in the history of the world. But from a maritime perspective it is precisely the fact that they are suspended in mid-ocean, surrounded by water that teems with fish (if one knows where to look) that has given them a role in human history out of all proportion to their size. In his fascinating account of the part played by these islands in the harvesting of cod and herring from the North Atlantic, John Goodlad raises vital questions about the world’s food supplies.