Racing ourselves to the edge

I have absolutely no idea how we’re going to get out of this mess. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in his review of Jared Diamond’s Collapse, a population’s insistence on cultural survival often cements its biological death. He mentions the Norse settlements perished after 450 years in Greenland because of fish. They didn’t eat it. Beef was the food of status, so they razed forests to raise cows and washed away the topsoil. Then they starved. The Norse in left behind lavish churches, as well as silks and linens and other goods they acquired in trades in Europe, indicating they placed greater economic and cultural value on their traditional ways than on practical considerations of survival.

We’ve got the same kind of problems today, though here we’re relying too heavily on fish, not too little. Still, we’re so wrapped up in our taboos and priorities that we sputter and huff over suggestions to change. About 80% of ocean stocks have been fished to or beyond their limit. Even our words to describe wild marine animals–stocks and fisheries–connotes that they’re sitting on a shelf in the pantry like apples from your tree, or put on Earth by God for us to tend. Only we’re not tending; we’re taking.

On the day-to-day, we make silly jokes that salmon and tuna are too delicious to resist, revealing that humanity has no more control over its impulses than a child; as though being slave to our tastebuds absolves us of ecological collapse. Meanwhile, the recent health recommendation of two helpings of oily fish a week doesn’t seem to consider the environmental impact of 56,000,000,000 fish servings sliding down our throats each month.  (Or did they mean that only their kind should be entitled to the purported health benefits?)

There are, of course, some efforts to save the wild populations. Moratoriums exist on low and collapsed fisheries. Catch-shares splashed on the scene last fall as a trend toward privatizing populations to save them. The trade of a percentage share in a wild animal seems to be helping–if being half as likely to collapse as other fisheries qualifies as a hopeful indicator. I’m glad solutions exist, but it would help if they solved the problem instead of prolonged the inevitable. Apparently the answers ‘eat less,’ ‘waste less,’ and ‘let’s all take responsibility for what we eat’ are unpalatable and may inhibit economic growth.

Unsurprising in a capitalist culture, we have to sell the idea of caring for a species. And the animal–or, even harder, the plant–has to be entertaining, whether it’s majestic like the tigers that are vanishing from the tiger parks in India, or a pawn in the titillating tale of mafia-controlled tuna, or mysterious like blue whales.

The arrowtooth flounder is less of a poster child. It’s a run-of-the-mill flatfish: it swims into the world upright like a perch; sometime later, it flops to its left side and the left eye migrates to the right side. It’s ugly, and its flesh easily turns mushy, but it has found a market when sold as fake turbot. Unprepared by the sudden interest, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans imposed a Total Allowable Catch based on nothing scientific and asked us please not to eat any until they have more data.

Will anyone care–really care–about climate change once the last polar bear dies? Or will the ‘reason’ to save the Arctic melt like its glaciers, leaving people to make jokes about cheap real estate and increasingly lovely weather as we buy Baffin Island waterfront?

We can calculate, extrapolate, model, and apply. But we can’t plan for the security of our resources (and thus of our economies) 80 years down the road, let alone work together across nations to ensure endangered species recover. Our exceptional abilities to innovate and adapt are no match for our myopic, stubborn, lazy, greedy ways. As Gladwell puts it:

The lesson of “Collapse” is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

I’ll wager drops are already dripping.

posted by Krista Zala

image: offbeattravel.com