Poul Holm

Humans are driven not by what we eat but by what we want to eat, and fisheries have driven us far and wide.

Fishing played a central role in the voyages of discovery and in the spreading of humans throughout the globe. Perceptions and fashions are fundamental to understanding fishing matters. Those sentiments are what drove the Los Roques Indians to venture the Caribbean, it cannot escape anyone’s attention when you look at the imagery of Crete in the Mycenean age, and it is perhaps more apparent today with our focus on healthy seafood, sea air, diving and cruising. Fishing is by no means a unilinear, unstoppable sail towards emptying the oceans. But it is an environmental history full of conflict and choice.

I shall argue that the questions if, how and when to fish have been answered very differently through history. In some cultures, fish and othermarine products were considered essential while other societies literally

turned their backs to the sea. Ocean life was impacted by human activities long before modern trawling. Similarly, a preference for fish asfood shaped coastal  settlements, shipping and technology. Moreover, knowledge and understanding of oceans past may help us not only understand but even manage the current crisis in the oceans.

The book planned is divided in seven chapters, the first four deal with what and how much we have extracted from the sea and the ecological consequences of extraction and depletion; the fifth focuses on the factors that drive the fisheries, economically, socially, politically and culturally, and the last two on fisheries management and how the fisheries impact on human societies, in the past and with a look to the future.