Our book-of-the-month is "Ocean of Life" by Callum Roberts, a book that puts everything into perspective by telling us the full story of the sea, from the earliest beginnings right up to the present day, tracing the accelerating effects of man’s interference with marine life.
As a key example of the changes that we have become barely conscious of, he looks at the photographs compiled by marine biologist, Loren McClenachan, two of which are shown on the opposite page.
The pictures show the daily catch from chartered fishing trips landing at Key West. The top picture is recent. The bottom one was taken in 1956.
The really telling thing about McClenachan’s collection of photographs is that although the fish get smaller, the smiles on the fishermen’s faces are as large as ever. They are as proud as ever of their catch, not giving any hint of a notion that their paltry harvest is evidence of some kind of mass fishicide, rapidly wiping out whole species.
Roberts' book is at points both bleak and hopeful.
It is bleak, for example, about the chronic over-fishing that has rendered large patches of sea bed barren, and bleak about the world's governments that have consistently granted fishing rights far in excess of what can possibly be sustainable.
But it also finds hope in small victories, noting, with more than a little surprise, that George W. Bush, whose conservation record on land is less than glorious, became the sea conservationists' hero when he designated protected areas in the Pacific.
With a stroke of the pen, Bush Jr added over 30 per cent to the total area under protection in the world's oceans.
But if there is a glimmer of hope that humanity will find the will to turn back the tide before it is too late, there is still a huge amount of inertia and indifference.
Take this urgent plea for example - a call to ban trawl fishing. The trawl "runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land below".
That plea was made to the English king in the fourteenth century, and it is as true today as it was then, but still trawling and dredging are allowed to continue, with devastating effects on the sea bed.
Man may have changed the seas, but it's human nature that seems to be in need of some tweaking.
Fish You Were Here