Monitors and a fisherman check lobster traps. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
We like his simplicity, his tenacity, his practicality; most of all we appreciate the outcome:
Scotsman’s Mission Ends in a Fishing Bay Restored
HOWARD WOOD, round-faced and jolly, was happily counting the lobsters being pulled, measured and tagged out of the coastal waters he has worked for years to protect. One weighed close to four pounds, its huge right claw dwarfing its left, which was growing back after what must have been quite a battle.
In a neoprene drysuit, leaning out of a blue inflatable boat in the Bay of Lamlash, Mr. Wood, 60, got an update from Bryce Stewart, a lecturer in marine environment at the University of York. Mr. Stewart, with the help of two graduate students, was measuring the impact of Mr. Wood’s brainchild, which was fiercely fought for and has made him quietly famous — a no-fishing zone in this bay, intended to restore the populations of lobster, crab, scallops and other marine life after years of unregulated fishing.
Back in 2008, working through the Community of Arran Seabed Trust, known as Coast, a nongovernmental organization he founded with an old friend, Don MacNeish, Mr. Wood persuaded a largely indifferent Scottish government to establish the protected “no-take zone” — the first in Scotland and the first to be initiated and managed by a community.
It took 13 years of local conversation and government lobbying, often in the face of strong opposition from fishermen used to employing large nets and ocean-floor dredges, to finally secure the 2.7-square-kilometer (just over one square mile) preserve of sea and seabed.
Now, Mr. Wood is busy pushing the Scottish authorities to adopt tough rules for a larger marine protection area of about 108 square miles around the southern half of the Isle of Arran, population about 4,650, to limit fishing and favor the smaller boats of the area’s fisherfolk.
The rules for the new marine preserve are still being debated in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Mr. Wood wants especially for government to ban dredging and trawling in the preserve.
For his work, Mr. Wood was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in April, given to a grass-roots environmentalist in every continent, and he was recently named an officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
At lunch in a small hotel in Lamlash, the largest village on Scotland’s Isle of Arran, Mr. Wood was gently teased by patrons who wanted to know when he might deign to head to London to meet the queen.
It has been a strange journey, he acknowledges, for a man whose first career was in the landlocked world of gardening.
His father, Eric Wood, grew up in Glasgow, across the Firth of Clyde from here, the son of an electrical engineer who worked on ocean liners like the Queen Mary. But Eric hated the shipbuilding business, joined the army and met the woman who became his wife in Yorkshire, where Howard was born. When the boy was 15, the family moved to the Isle of Arran, where his father’s twin sister lived.
Eric Wood worked with telephones but had a passion for plants and roses, and, in 1969, he set up a nursery on Arran with his brother-in-law. Howard and his wife, Lesley, later took over the family business.
In 1984, trawling was allowed within three miles of the shore, and the collapse of local fishing was quick to follow. “We didn’t know what an environmentalist was,” Mr. Wood said, “but it was obvious that species were disappearing year to year.”
He and Mr. MacNeish, whose family has lived on Arran for seven generations, founded Coast and focused on a small marine reserve as a trial run. But “until very recently,” Mr. Wood said, “the Scottish government was more interested in the short-term interests of the most powerful sections of the fishing industry.”
There was improvement after Scottish devolution in 1999, but the Scottish National Party government “is very pro-business and not especially environmentally minded,” Mr. Wood said. “That’s why it was so amazing to get this little postage stamp of a no-take zone.”
But there is now “a general feeling that protecting the environment means saving jobs,” he said. “There’s a slow realization by government that there are more stakeholders to the sea, which is a public resource, especially with the rapid decline of fishing in the Clyde in the last 25 years. Now in the Clyde they’re not really catching fish anymore, just prawns, scallops and razor clams.”
These days, Mr. Wood said, “I tell fishermen that what we’re doing is for their future, for the future of the fishing industry.”…
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