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Small victory for whale conservationists
Marine PollutionBulletin though it is not clear how any of these measures would have helped ensure that national herring quotas were not being exceeded. Scottish fishermen, anticipating an armada of foreign fishing vessels sailing over the horizon to scoop up all 'their' fish, hurriedly took to sea and promptly caught 800 tonnes of herring. At that rate the British quota would have lasted only 50 days. The rest is farce. Since the closure of the Scottish fishery, the herring processing and marketing industry in Scotland has virtually disappeared. When the first day's catch of herring was landed more than 700 tonnes of it had to be sold at knock down prices for fishmeal. The Scottish fishermen hurriedly pulled out of this uneconomic game and by the end of the first week a total of 964 tonnes of herring were landed, but only 225 tonnes of that were sold for human consumption. What the Times described as " T h e final absurdity" was the EEC intervention machinery withdrawing herring from the
Britain's Unclean Beaches A survey of 633 British beaches by the Coastal AntiPollution League has found that 190 bathing spots are at risk from sewage pollution. The report states that despite a government working party recommendation ten years ago that sewage effluent be discharged through long outfalls several hundred metres offshore, since 1974 only six long outfalls have been built in England and Wales. One of these, at Brighton in Sussex, has subsequently broken down and been taken out of service. Among towns where untreated raw sewage continues to be piped into the sea, the survey mentions Lowestoft, Scarborough, Bridlington, Cleethorpes, Grimsby and Blackpool, and indicates that huge discharges of crude sewage go into major estuaries such as the Humber, Mersey and Severn. In all, some 400 outfalls dispose of sewage from 6 million people and more than half discharge crude sewage on to a beach or into a shallow water. A call for immediate action to halt such discharges was made this summer in a paper presented to the Royal Society for Health by research chemist Geoffrey Stanfield of the Water Research Centre. To circumvent the need to spend large amounts of money to bring beaches up to the standards laid down by the 1976 EEC bathing water directive before 1985, only 25 British beaches were listed. The present economic climate offers little hope that the British Government will, in the near future, suddenly change course, and set aside cash to tackle the 'swim in sewage' conditions which many of the country's bathers currently face.
Radioactive Waste Dumping Resumes The resumption this summer of the annual programme of 'low-level' radioactive waste dumping in the Atlantic, 286
market to bolster the price. " S o we have the Community, on behalf of the trenchermen of Europe who have long felt the want of a herring, reopening the fisheries in a manner which puts the stocks at some risk and swamps the trade, and then tax the consumer to defray the cost of sending these excellent fish to the meal factory." What a way to manage a fishery (or anything else)! The herring war started in acrimony, moved into expensive farce and may yet get into a state of acute international friction as countries fulfil their quotas and have to decide about ordering their fishing vessels out of the area. The need for a rational Community fisheries policy has been obvious for years, progress towards it is negligible, but the present attempt to impose order on chaos hardly encourages one to believe that reason will prevail over short-sighted greed. R. B. C L A R K
some 500 miles off Lands End, has once again provoked angry protests in Britain. A total of 300 tonnes of waste, described by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority as being laboratory refuse, broken equipment, material contaminated by radioisotopes used in industry and material from the nuclear power programme, will be encased in cement inside steel drums and dumped in an area of sea 2 V2 miles deep and 1600 miles square. The UKAEA says attempts to measure contamination caused by earlier dumping have never produced a result because the radioactivity is so widely dispersed. But protesters, including members of the Campaign against Sea Dumping, say such assurances are unsatisfactory while the UKAEA decline to provide them with details of these monitoring programmes. While failing to halt the dumping of UK waste, the protesters did succeed in postponing the sailing of a ship carrying waste which emanated from Holland, Belgium and Switzerland to the designated dumping ground.
Small Victory for Whale Conservationists The 23rd meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Brighton, England, once again failed to reach the required three-quarters majority necessary for a moratorium on all commercial whaling• The British proposal for a total ban on whaling was defeated by 16 votes to 8 with three abstentions• Equally unsuccessful was a move to ban all whaling in the North Atlantic. The only good news to emerge from the week-long conference was a moratorium on taking sperm whales• To circumvent objections from those nations who have always opposed moratoriums on the grounds that there was insufficient scientific evidence for them, the objective was achieved by using the form of words that 'catch limits • . . be set at zero'. Whalers currently take 300 sperm whales of the west coast of South America, 130 in the North Atlantic and 890 in the waters around Japan.
Britain's Unclean Beaches A survey of 633 British beaches by the Coastal AntiPollution League has found that 190 bathing spots are at risk from sewage pollution. The report states that despite a government working party recommendation ten years ago that sewage effluent be discharged through long outfalls several hundred metres offshore, since 1974 only six long outfalls have been built in England and Wales. One of these, at Brighton in Sussex, has subsequently broken down and been taken out of service. Among towns where untreated raw sewage continues to be piped into the sea, the survey mentions Lowestoft, Scarborough, Bridlington, Cleethorpes, Grimsby and Blackpool, and indicates that huge discharges of crude sewage go into major estuaries such as the Humber, Mersey and Severn. In all, some 400 outfalls dispose of sewage from 6 million people and more than half discharge crude sewage on to a beach or into a shallow water. A call for immediate action to halt such discharges was made this summer in a paper presented to the Royal Society for Health by research chemist Geoffrey Stanfield of the Water Research Centre. To circumvent the need to spend large amounts of money to bring beaches up to the standards laid down by the 1976 EEC bathing water directive before 1985, only 25 British beaches were listed. The present economic climate offers little hope that the British Government will, in the near future, suddenly change course, and set aside cash to tackle the 'swim in sewage' conditions which many of the country's bathers currently face.
Radioactive Waste Dumping Resumes The resumption this summer of the annual programme of 'low-level' radioactive waste dumping in the Atlantic, 286
market to bolster the price. " S o we have the Community, on behalf of the trenchermen of Europe who have long felt the want of a herring, reopening the fisheries in a manner which puts the stocks at some risk and swamps the trade, and then tax the consumer to defray the cost of sending these excellent fish to the meal factory." What a way to manage a fishery (or anything else)! The herring war started in acrimony, moved into expensive farce and may yet get into a state of acute international friction as countries fulfil their quotas and have to decide about ordering their fishing vessels out of the area. The need for a rational Community fisheries policy has been obvious for years, progress towards it is negligible, but the present attempt to impose order on chaos hardly encourages one to believe that reason will prevail over short-sighted greed. R. B. C L A R K
some 500 miles off Lands End, has once again provoked angry protests in Britain. A total of 300 tonnes of waste, described by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority as being laboratory refuse, broken equipment, material contaminated by radioisotopes used in industry and material from the nuclear power programme, will be encased in cement inside steel drums and dumped in an area of sea 2 V2 miles deep and 1600 miles square. The UKAEA says attempts to measure contamination caused by earlier dumping have never produced a result because the radioactivity is so widely dispersed. But protesters, including members of the Campaign against Sea Dumping, say such assurances are unsatisfactory while the UKAEA decline to provide them with details of these monitoring programmes. While failing to halt the dumping of UK waste, the protesters did succeed in postponing the sailing of a ship carrying waste which emanated from Holland, Belgium and Switzerland to the designated dumping ground.
Small Victory for Whale Conservationists The 23rd meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Brighton, England, once again failed to reach the required three-quarters majority necessary for a moratorium on all commercial whaling• The British proposal for a total ban on whaling was defeated by 16 votes to 8 with three abstentions• Equally unsuccessful was a move to ban all whaling in the North Atlantic. The only good news to emerge from the week-long conference was a moratorium on taking sperm whales• To circumvent objections from those nations who have always opposed moratoriums on the grounds that there was insufficient scientific evidence for them, the objective was achieved by using the form of words that 'catch limits • . . be set at zero'. Whalers currently take 300 sperm whales of the west coast of South America, 130 in the North Atlantic and 890 in the waters around Japan.