In Britain and Ireland we have access to, and responsibility for, a huge amount of open sea. The waters covering the continental shelf around our shores cover an area much larger than the land mass of our islands. The continental shelf is the seabed down to 200 m around our shores, and our territorial waters extend out to 12 nautical miles. Much of this area is poorly known, and a substantial area of deep scattered cold-water corals has been found off our northwestern seaboard in the Rockall Trough in the last 10 years. Only just in time, it appears, given the damage already inflicted on such areas by deep-water trawling.

If we stand on the seashore looking out to sea, it is all too easy to harbour two serious misapprehensions. One is that because our seas are so vast we can safely dump any amount of rubbish into them without serious consequence; the other is that they could not easily be fished out. The first misapprehension misunderstands just how much rubbish has been and is being dumped at sea, while the other does not take into account the shoaling nature of most fish species, and the sophistication of echo-sounding kit and fish-trapping equipment now being employed by fishing boats.