Cod Is Dead
The Empty Ocean
By Richard Ellis
Shearwater Books (July 2003)
Review by Elizabeth Grossman
July 24— “It’s a fire alarm,” says
Richard Ellis about his new book, The Empty Ocean, which joins a chorus
of recent publications documenting the precipitous decline of world
fisheries and the dire state of the marine environment. That alarm should
make you think long and hard about your lunchtime tuna sandwich or the
sashimi you order at your favorite Japanese restaurant.
Ellis, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History
in New York, is the author of over a dozen books about marine life.
From 1980 to 1990, he was a member of the US delegation to the International
Whaling Commission, and he is also a renowned painter of ocean life.
“I’ve been working on this subject for over 20 years,”
Ellis says over a cup of coffee in Portland, OR, “and we are entering
a moment of serious peril as far as fish stocks are concerned.”
In The Empty Ocean, Ellis recounts the historical eradication of entire
marine species, including Caribbean monk seals, Labrador ducks, and
Steller’s sea cow, which was slaughtered to extinction in less
than 30 years. “Only recently have biologists come to understand
the intricacies of fish breeding, recruitment, and migration, and for
many species the revelations have come too late,” Ellis writes.
Yet despite all we have learned about ecology and biology, he says,
we continue to decimate ocean species: “We have entered an era
in which the lesson of the sea cows has been ignored, usually in the
name of short-term profits.”
His assessment dovetails with that of the Pew Oceans Commission’s
report, “America’s Living Oceans,” released this May.
According to the report, only 22 percent of federally managed fish stocks
are fished sustainably. At the same time, coastal development, nutrient
runoff, and other pollution sources are hastening the loss of wetlands,
estuaries, native aquatic plants, and coral reefs, all of which are
vital to nurturing marine species. Meanwhile, those same species are
also suffering from problems caused by invasive plants and animals,
aquaculture, and climate change. If we don’t curtail these trends,
says Ellis, “we face a dim future.”
Ellis’s claims are also supported by an article published in the
May 15, 2003 issue of Nature. There, scientists Ransom Meyers and Boris
Worm show how industrialized fishing of large predator fish in coastal
regions has depleted stocks by at least 80 percent, with potentially
serious consequences for ocean ecosystems worldwide. Recent research
described by author and marine biologist Carl Safina and others reveals
that many of these fish depend on enormous expanses of habitat that
are adversely affected by fishing, land-use practices, development,
and industry.
Nor is it just our consumption of large fish (such as cod, swordfish,
and tuna) that threatens these species; it is also our depletion of
their food sources. Fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly calls this “fishing
down the food chain.” That chain, says Ellis, is actually more
a web of interdependence; for example, when California sea otters were
hunted almost to extinction, their preferred food, sea urchins, proliferated.
The urchins in turn destroyed kelp beds, which once provided habitat
for numerous fish — and thus the cycle of destruction and alteration
persists and magnifies.
Another factor increasing the pace of “fishing down the food chain”
is aquaculture, or fish-farming. According to Ellis, fish-farming tripled
in volume between 1990 and 2000, with the result that aquaculture currently
accounts for over 25 percent of all fish eaten by humans. Among the
problems with aquaculture is that most carnivorous farmed fish are fed
fishmeal, which is made from wild ocean species. Other industries are
gobbling up vast quantities of wild fish as well. The poultry, pork,
cattle, sheep, and pet food industries consume enormous amounts of fishmeal.
Ellis notes that the chicken industry is the largest industrial user
of meal made from menhaden, an Atlantic coastal fish that is also used
to produce cooking and food-processing oils. Menhaden numbers have dropped
60 percent in the past four decades.
Among the other species whose fate Ellis describes are cod, salmon,
sea turtles, sharks, whales, sea lions, seals, rockfish, and tuna. Since
1980, stocks of bluefin tuna have fallen by 80 percent in the European
Atlantic and by 50 percent on the U.S. side. While those fisheries are
now tightly managed, a “loophole big enough to drive a factory
ship through has been discovered in the regulations governing Mediterranean
bluefin tuna fishing”: Although numbers of those fish legally caught
by net or harpoon are strictly limited, there are no restrictions on
the number of bluefin that can be caught and kept in what are called
“post-harvesting pens,” where they are fattened up before
slaughter.
Although you could find much of the information contained in The Empty
Ocean in environmental reports or scientific journals, Ellis’ poignant
narrative provides a thorough and readable overview of the damage inflicted
on ocean ecosystems by global pollution and industrial fishing practices.
While Ellis is an expert in the field and has visited nearly every place
that figures in the book, The Empty Ocean is not built around his own
fieldwork, nor does it offer much in the way of scenic detail; but it
is evocative nonetheless, thanks to his careful interweaving of historical
accounts and marine biology. As he makes abundantly clear, unless urgent
action is taken, we are facing a tragedy—one in which far too many
of us are complicit. “There is no great mystery about what happened
to the codfish of the North Atlantic,” writes Ellis. “The
fishermen caught them, and the rest of us ate them.”
So what do we do now? “I wish we could turn the clock back,”
says Ellis. Barring that, he says, we must take steps to protect and
restore what’s left. “Marine reserves that incorporate no-take
zones, which means no fishing by anybody,” are essential to stemming
the decline of world fisheries,” he writes. But, he adds, “even
penicillin won’t work if you don’t take it.” How, then,
to ensure that marine ecosystems get the protection they need? “We
have to keep this going,” says Ellis of the current barrage of
books, articles, reports, and editorials detailing the plight of the
oceans. Otherwise, he says, “the only way these lessons will get
driven home, is when fish is no longer on the menu.”
Source: Grist Magazine
Anti-Belle Chere Fest kicks Belle Chere
in the teeth
By Shane Perlowin
During Belle Chere weekend, Asheville was alive with merchants
hocking their wares, fried food, hateful right-wing “Christian”
zealots, countless undercover cops, and all of the homogenized and stultifying
music that our local Clear Channel radio station managers could serve
up. For the thoroughly engrossed festival attendee, the most exciting
moment of the weekend was undoubtedly Asheville Mayor Charles Worley’s
flamboyant photo op. A silver-streamer-bedecked Mayor Worely almost
certainly ensured his 2005 re-election when he participated in the Belle
Chere Belly Flop Contest, looking oh-so-cute on the cover of the Sunday
edition of Gannett’s Asheville Citizen-Times.
While all of the unrelenting fun was occurring throughout most of downtown,
something truly special was happening on a little forsaken street called
Lexington Avenue in a little record shop called Green Eggs and Jam (GE&J).
Stacey Leek, owner of GE&J, opened up his doors for the most exciting
musical talent in Asheville to perform for the Belle Chere-wary “undesirables.”
The Anti-Belle Chere Fest featured an eclectic mix of passionate, original,
and raw talent. The lineup included Doom Ribbons, Ether Bunnies, Lube
Royale, Iron Fist, Descolada, Dirty Pink, Greenwich Mean, Throwing Myself,
A Kiss Before Dying, Piedmont Charisma, Delicious, and many more groups
that I cannot recall off the top of my head at the moment (please don’t
be mad at me).
Free Radio Asheville (107.5 FM) broadcast the event with commentary
live throughout the weekend. The street in front of GE&J was filled
with skateboarders doing tricks.
Many of the Anti-revelers expressed their disdain for the music that
Belle Chere’s planners choose to book year after year. Josh Carpenter
from Piedmont Charisma and Dirty Pink remarked, “It’s amazing.
This year they managed to get the same band to perform at Belle Chere
on all of the stages at the exact same time.”
The weekend was not without controversy. Leek, as a joke, posted a notice
on the door that said no Insane Clown Posse (ICP) tee shirts were permitted
in the store. In the ensuing couple of days GE&J received two dozen
emails from across the US threatening and chastising the record shop
for attempting to “silence” the voices of “juggalos”
(ICP fanatics) everywhere.
After experiencing this year’s AntiFest, one thing is certain:
Asheville has an amazing underground music scene. As the empire races
towards imminent destruction, inspiring cultural achievements are occurring
below the radar of the corporate culture industry. While drunk shirtless
rednecks were swaggering to glorified cover bands, a memorable and unique
thing happened on Lexington Avenue.
Will you laugh for me, please?
By Slavoj Žižek
July 18— On Apr. 8, Charles R. Douglass, the inventor
of canned laughter — the artificial jollity that accompanies comical
moments on TV shows — died at 93 in Templeton, California. In the
early ’50s, he developed the idea to enhance or substitute live
audience reaction on television. This idea was realized in the guise
of a keyboard machine; by pressing on different keys, it was possible
to produce different kinds of laughter. First used for episodes of The
Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy, today its modernized version is present
everywhere.
The overwhelming presence of canned laughter makes us blind to its core
paradox, even as it undermines our natural presuppositions about the
state of our innermost emotions. Canned laughter marks a true “return
of the repressed,” an attitude we usually attribute to “primitives.”
Recall, in traditional societies, the weird phenomenon of “weepers,”
women hired to cry at funerals. A rich man can hire them to cry and
mourn on his behalf while he attends to a more lucrative business (like
negotiating for the fortune of the deceased). This role can be played
not only by another human being, but by a machine, as in the case of
Tibetan prayer wheels: I put a written prayer into a wheel and mechanically
turn it (or, even better, link the wheel to a mill that turns it). It
prays for me —or, more precisely, I “objectively” pray
through it, while my mind can be occupied with the dirtiest of sexual
thoughts.
Douglass’ invention proved that the same “primitive”
mechanism works also in highly developed societies. When I come home
in the evening too exhausted to engage in meaningful activity, I just
tune in to a TV sitcom; even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at
the screen, tired after a hard day’s work, I nonetheless feel relieved
after the show. It is as if the TV were literally laughing in my place,
instead of me.
Yet before one gets used to canned laughter, there is nonetheless usually
a brief period of uneasiness. The first reaction is of mild shock, since
it is difficult to accept that the machine out there can “laugh
for me.” Even if the program was “taped in front of a live
studio audience,” this audience manifestly did not include me,
and now exists only in mediated form as part of the TV show itself.
However, with time, one grows accustomed to this disembodied laughter,
and the phenomenon is experienced as “natural.” This is what
is so unsettling about canned laughter: My most intimate feelings can
be radically externalized. I can literally laugh and cry through another.
This logic holds not only for emotions, but also for beliefs. According
to a well-known anthropological anecdote, the “primitives”
to whom one attributes certain “superstitious beliefs,” that
they descend from a fish or from a bird, for example, when directly
asked about these beliefs, answer, “Of course not —we’re
not that stupid! But I was told that our ancestors did believe that.”
In short, they transfer their belief onto another. Are we not doing
the same with our children? We go through the ritual of Santa Claus,
since our children (are supposed to) believe in it, and we do not want
to disappoint them; they pretend to believe not to disappoint us and
our belief in their naiveté (and to get the presents, of course).
In an uncanny way, some beliefs always seem to function “at a distance.”
For the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor
of it, yet this guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present
in person. The subject who directly believes need not exist for the
belief to be operative: It is enough merely to presuppose its existence
in the guise of, say, a mythological founding figure who is not part
of our reality.
Against this background, one is tempted to supplement the fashionable
notion of “interactivity” with its shadowy and much more uncanny
double, “interpassivity” (a term invented by Robert Pfaller).
Today, it is a commonplace to emphasize how, with new electronic media,
the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer
merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering
into a dialogic relationship with it, from choosing the programs, through
participating in debates in a virtual community, to directly determining
the outcome of the plot in so-called “interactive narratives.”
Those who praise the democratic potential of such new media generally
focus on precisely these features. But there is another side of my “interaction,”
which the object of interaction itself deprives me of: my own passive
reaction of satisfaction (or mourning or laughter). The object itself
“enjoys the show” instead of me, relieving me of the need
to enjoy myself. Do we not witness “interpassivity” in a great
number of today’s publicity spots or posters that, as it were,
passively enjoy the product instead of us? Coca-Cola cans bearing the
inscription, “Ooh! Ooh! What taste!” emulate in advance the
ideal customer’s reaction.
When a man tells a tasteless bad joke and then, when nobody around him
laughs, he bursts out into a noisy, nervous laughter, he has found himself
obliged to act out the expected reaction of the public for them. This
supplied laughter is similar to the canned laughter of the TV set, but
in this example, the agent that laughs instead of us (i.e., through
which we, the bored and embarrassed public, laugh) is not an anonymous
audio track claiming to laugh for an invisible public — the “Big
Other” — but the narrator of the joke himself. He does this
in order to ensure the inscription of his act into the “Big Other,”
the symbolic order of all those around him. His compulsive laughter
is much like how we feel obliged to utter “Oops!” when we
stumble or do something stupid. If we do not say “Oops!” —
if we do not inscribe our acknowledgement of the error onto the public
order — it is as if, by allowing an imaginary dialogue between
ourselves and the “Big Other” to remain incomplete, we commit
ourselves to symbolic oblivion.
VCR aficionados who compulsively record hundreds of movies (myself among
them) are well aware that the immediate effect of owning a VCR is that
one effectively watches less films than in the good old days of a simple
TV set without a VCR. One never has time for TV, so, instead of losing
a precious evening, one simply tapes the film and stores it for a future
viewing (for which, of course, there is almost never time). So, although
I do not actually watch films, the very awareness that the films I love
are stored in my video library gives me a profound satisfaction and,
occasionally, enables me to simply relax and indulge in the exquisite
art of doing nothing —as if the VCR is, in a way, watching and
enjoying them for me, in my place.
In the interpassive arrangement, I am passive through the Other; I accede
to the Other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain actively
engaged—that is, I can work longer hours with less need for “nonproductive”
activity, such as leisure or mourning. I can continue to work in the
evening, while the VCR passively enjoys for me; I can make financial
arrangements for the deceased’s fortune while the weepers mourn
in my place.
One should therefore turn around one of the commonplaces of conservative
cultural criticism: In contrast to the notion that new media turn us
into passive consumers who just stare numbly at the screen, the real
threat of new media is that they deprive us of our passivity, of our
authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for mindless frenetic
activity — for endless work.
So then, would it not be a proper funeral for Charles R. Douglass if
a set of sound-machines were to accompany his coffin, generating whispered
laments, while his beloved surviving relatives enjoyed a hearty meal,
or perhaps got some work done elsewhere? Far from finding it offensive,
I think perhaps he would appreciate the recognition of such a burial.
Source: In These Times
