“Environmentally harmful fishing techniques remain authorized within marine protected areas”

En sinking huge blocks of granite around a marine protected area off Brighton, the NGO Greenpeace revived in February 2022, with a controversial tactic to combat bottom trawling that it had already experimented with in the German and Swedish waters in the late 2000s.

Its goal: to prevent the practice of this industrial fishing, considered destructive of the seabed and not very selective, by putting the trawlers who come to drag their nets in this sanctuary zone to risk losing or damaging them. As the marine ecology researcher Joachim Claudet (CNRS-PSL University) clearly demonstrated, many fishing techniques that are harmful from an environmental point of view are still authorized within so-called protected marine areas.

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On 3 May, the Members of the European Parliament moreover rejected, in the name of defending the economic and social interests of the industrial fishing sector, a proposal aimed at strictly prohibiting bottom trawling in these areas devolved in theory to preservation of marine species and ecosystems. This conflict around bottom trawling and its environmental impact is not new since it goes back to the very origins of the trawling technique.

A clear awareness of “species conservation”

The use of this fishing gear, denounced for the first time in 1376 in a petition addressed by fishermen of the Thames to King Edward III of England, belongs to the category of “trailing arts” – as opposed to “dormant arts”. “, reputed to be less harmful and more selective on the whole – has long been extremely strictly regulated (mesh size, weight of the reinforcement, zones and periods of use, etc.) so as to limit its effects on the resource.

In the wake of an old edict of 1584, a declaration by the King of France “for the restoration of fishing” even went so far as to prohibit it in 1726 on the grounds that it would be at the origin of “the dearth of sea fish” that we deplore at that time on the coasts of the Channel. If the vocabulary and theories of contemporary fisheries management are linked to the rise of marine ecology and biology from the last decades of the 19^e century, many scholars, administrators and fishermen have already, in the twentieth^e century, a clear awareness of the issues relating to what was then called the “species conservation”.

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