Read an Excerpt
Transforming the Fisheries
Neoliberalism, Nature, and the Commons
By Patrick Bresnihan UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8584-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Ecological Crises and Beyond
The Ghost of Malthus
In 1998 ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote a sympathetic reappraisal of Thomas Malthus's text An Essay on the Principle of Population, published two hundred years earlier (1998). He relates a parable that Malthus added to the second edition. In the parable, a man comes to the table of "nature's mighty feast" and asks if he can have a seat. Some of the guests have sympathy for him and make room. Immediately, other "intruders" appear demanding that they also be admitted to the feast. Malthus concludes, "The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those, who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect" (Malthus 1803, 531; Hardin 1998, 181). The guests thus learn the lesson that the "great mistress of the feast" already knew: they must refuse any newcomers when the table is already full.
Although this anecdote was taken out from subsequent editions, it remains a powerful metaphor for both supporters and critics of Malthusian theories of overpopulation and the "naturalization" of scarcity (Dale 2012; Mehta 2010). Thirty years before he invoked Malthus's story, Hardin had already given it new life through his own parable, "The Tragedy of the Commons." Published in 1968, Hardin's essay was only one of many stark warnings about impending social and environmental catastrophe if rapid population growth continued to put pressure on limited resources. In the same year, Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb opened with an alarmist statement about the need to accelerate the global death rate if the problems of hunger and famine were to be averted (Ehrlich 1968). These deliberately polemical accounts found support in scientific data and predictions based on current models of development and resource availability. In 1972 the newly formed Club of Rome published their well-known report The Limits of Growth, and five years later a research group based in MIT released the Global 2000 Report to the President (Pirages and Cousins 2005). These reports showed that demands on soil, forests, fisheries, and water supplies would reach critical levels by the turn of the century. The problem was growing demand on a finite planet. Instead of just defining a crisis in production or growth rates, these reports identified a wholesale crisis in the sphere of biophysical reproduction (Cooper 2008). Pointing to the potentially catastrophic consequences of unregulated growth, writers like Hardin did not then find it hard to recall and reestablish Malthus's theories of overpopulation. The basic "law" he propounded was that the exponential growth of the human population would produce demands that would outstrip available resources. Although Malthus may have provided some unsavory solutions to this problem, the validity of his arguments remained. Failure to acknowledge this law of nature would result in far worse outcomes: "injustice is preferable to total ruin," as Hardin succinctly put it (1968, 1247).
Today, multiple and mounting ecological crises appear, if anything, to be worse than the predictions of forty years ago. Scientific evidence documents the sixth mass extinction as well as disruptions to the hydrological cycle, the soil cycle, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the carbon cycle, otherwise known as anthropogenic climate change (Kolbert 2014). The media speculates and increasingly reports on "perfect storms" of food shortages, water scarcity, and insufficient energy resources with devastating social, economic, and geopolitical consequences (Parenti 2011). Mirroring these accounts, and sometimes indistinguishable from them, are the seemingly endless stream of dystopian films and books that populate our cultural imaginary (Lilley et al. 2012). The emphasis on limits, shortages, thresholds, and overcapacity is understandable, but it also reveals a recurring Malthusian trope about the narrowing of future possibilities in the face of "natural" limits and the urgent need to reorganize society in response to these limits (Mehta 2010). As historian Iain Boal writes, "Scratch an environmentalist and you'll probably find a Malthusian" (Boal 2006).
Perhaps the clearest sign of the lingering ghost of Malthus is in the growing popularity of the term anthropocene. First coined in the 1980s by ecologist Eugene Stoermer, the term has spread far beyond the concerns of the earth and atmospheric sciences. It refers to a new geological period following the Holocene when humanity, "anthropos," has played a decisive and largely destructive role in geological and environmental transformations. While there is disagreement over when "we" began having such an impact on the lithosphere (see Moore 2014), the most popular periodization dates the Anthropocene from sometime around 1800, the moment coal became the principal energy source of a carbonized human civilization (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Economist 2013). The term "anthropocene" appears to both respond to and explain the unprecedented and multiple ecological crises we are currently experiencing. It is compelling because it finally appears to take seriously what we have failed to recognize for so long: we, "humanity," are responsible for the over-exploitation and degradation of "nature," and something urgent must be done to rebalance our relationship with it. With this, the current storm of ecological crises are neatly translated into a conflict between unregulated human activity and limited biophysical nature. Establishing this as the point of consensus opens a space for policy makers, scientists, companies, and citizens to work together to rebalance a system that has fallen out of sync. A prime example of this transition from large-scale depletion of resources to consensus-based environmental management is the crisis of overfishing in the Irish and European fisheries, the focus of this book.
In 1844 Thomas Huxley, a leading Victorian scientist, presented a paper to the "Great International Fishery Exhibition" in London. He claimed that "the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea-fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish" (quoted in Graham 1943, 111). After centuries of exploitation, greatly intensified since the 1970s, the extractive demands of the fishing industry have caught up with the reproductive capacities of most commercially targeted fish stocks (Food and Agricultural Organization 2010; Rogers 1995). The project of capitalist modernity has finally conquered the deep-sea fisheries once thought to be inexhaustible (Campling et al. 2012; Clausen and Clark 2005). This conquest encapsulates a familiar history of capitalist development that was far from "natural" or linear. The modernization of fishing fleets, the development of onshore landing, processing, and distribution infrastructure, and the opening up of new global markets required political and economic investments that excluded other modes of marine production, knowledge, and culture. Now, in place of Thomas Huxley's nineteenth-century optimism, we are more likely to encounter the catastrophist claims of someone like Charles Glover, an environmental campaigner whose book The End of the Line was turned into a popular documentary in 2007. Released in cinemas as part of a wider media campaign to inform the public about overfishing, the film, as the title suggests, is part of a new genre of eco-catastrophe. Combining footage of industrial-scale fishing with clips of international scientists predicting the future collapse of global fish stocks, its message is unambiguously stark: if the level of fishing does not reduce dramatically, the oceans will be emptied.
The crisis of overfishing is particularly severe in the European fisheries. In 2008 the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) concluded that 35 of 41 commercial fish stocks in European waters were overfished, compared to 25 percent of fish stocks worldwide (Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2008b). Another report estimated that the European fishing industry exceeded sustainable fishing levels by 40 percent (Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2008a). As I was told countless times during my research, the problem stemmed from the fact that "too many fishermen were chasing too few fish." The European Commission has described this as a "vicious cycle" as fishermen are pressured into fishing more intensively in ever more distant fishing grounds to repay debts and compete with fishermen in other parts of the world.
As with other environmental issues, the crisis of overfishing is a growing concern not only for policymakers but also for environmental campaigners, nongovernmental organizations, and the public. Growing awareness among scientific, fishing, and environmental communities about declining fish stocks and the unsustainability of the fishing industry have now pushed questions of conservation and sustainability into the center of debates over the future management of the Irish and European fisheries.
At "Back to the Future," a conference held in Dublin with environmental NGOs in June 2011, the Irish Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Simon Coveney, said that fisheries management could not return to the past, to a time when many people made a living from the sea, when there were healthy fish stocks and abundant biodiversity. There was "no choice but to become a modern fishery adapted to global realities" (Coveney 2011). Organized as part of a lobbying campaign for the upcoming reform of the European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), the premise of the meeting was to imagine a way beyond the current crisis, "restoring" the fisheries and fishing communities to a sustainable path. Minister Coveney made it clear that this would require two strategies: first, taking "courageous decisions" to limit fishing effort; and second, developing new economic opportunities around "green" growth and sustainability. Minister Coveney pinpoints what is required to move beyond the crisis of overfishing: a transformation in the mode of production, a shift away from the unsustainable extraction of limited marine resources to a mode of production based on "green" values. European fishing policy reflects this ambition with member states setting themselves the target of reducing fishing mortality by 50 percent in some fisheries by 2020. The scale of this task is vast. As the European Commission makes clear, achieving this will require "radical changes to the way Europe's fisheries are managed — changes which will reverse economic and institutional incentives to overfishing and replace them with a system which positively encourages good stewardship of our oceans and seas by all those who live from them" (Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2008a, 7; emphasis added).
To those critical of attempts to "green" capitalism, this aspiration toward a sustainable fishing industry might appear naïve at best and meaningless rhetoric at worst. In familiar Malthusian terms the phenomenon of overfishing is "naturalized," becoming the fact around which fisheries managers, policy makers, and scientists can come together to negotiate and work out pragmatic and measurable solutions. The only questions posed in this account are how to ensure the continued biological reproduction of fish stocks ("Nature") and how to provide new opportunities for the creation of profits ("Capitalism") (Kenis and Lievens 2014). This obscures one of the critical insights of Marxist analysis and, more recently, political ecology (Blaikie 1985; Moore 2003; Peet and Watts 1996): scarcity or the degradation of ecosystems is not "natural" but the result of specific, uneven, and contestable processes of social production. In neglecting this we are prevented from asking "the politically sensitive, but vital, question as to what kind of socio-environmental arrangements do we wish to produce, how can this be achieved, and what sort of natures do we wish to inhabit" (Swyngedouw 2007, 23).
But what does this critique tell us about how these dominant, bioeconomic narratives are reshaping the interactions between society and nature? What do Coveney's seemingly benign words mean when translated into new scientific, economic, and regulatory practices in fisheries management today? Is it just "business as usual," or are these cumulative efforts to manage ecological crises such as overfishing giving rise to new ways of knowing, valuing, and producing nature? These are important questions for understanding what is at stake in contemporary environmental governance: as "nature" transforms from being a raw material for extraction to something that must be cared for and valued within a "green" economy, certain ways of knowing and doing will be counted as "productive" and "environmental" and others will not. At its heart then, this process is about the redrawing of boundaries, the generation of novel forms of inclusion and exclusion. This book examines these transformations and the different ways they are being justified and implemented.
In this sense the book also tries to take Malthus seriously. "Malthusianism" has meant different things at different times, but a common understanding is that Malthus was politically and morally conservative, advocated all manner of forced population control, and favored natural checks on the poor such as famine and disease (see Mayhew 2014; Ross 1998). He is commonly cast, and thus dismissed, as an ideological advocate of the elites, a high priest of capitalist enclosure (Dale 2012). There is a general (and justifiable) tendency to focus on the negative social consequences of his thinking and the policies he inspires: "Somebody, somewhere, is redundant, and there is not enough to go round," as David Harvey rightly concludes (Harvey 1974, 273). However, while his ideas and writings undoubtedly help to justify social inequality, defining him solely as an apologist for particular interests misses the real force of his analysis and thus limits our capacity to effectively move beyond it. A different reading situates Malthus more broadly within the liberal current of thought that emerged during the eighteenth century in Britain and elsewhere (Mayhew 2014; Winch 2013). This historical framing also reminds us that Malthus and others were responding to particular social and material conditions: at the end of the eighteenth century, there were real and urgent problems of food scarcity and associated social and political upheavals. Malthus was part of a generation of thinkers that began to problematize such crises in a radically different way. I trace how the force of this liberal reasoning still operates today through the management of ecological crises such as overfishing. In the following section, I will briefly outline how my book contributes theoretically to the study of ecological crisis and transformation and where it sits within existing debates on neoliberalism and nature.
Neoliberalism and the New Enclosures
Over the last thirty years different biophysical resources in more and more parts of the world have been subjected to processes of commodification and privatization (Castree 2008a, 2008b). Continued and expanding commodity production has fed demand for raw materials, including land, water, and energy. This expansion has given rise to "classical" forms of enclosure, such as widespread land grabs in the Global South (Heynen et al. 2007; McMichael 2011). However, new forms of environmental management have also turned to the market to achieve its goals: mounting environmental problems at regional and global scales, the inability of existing state institutions to deal with them, and new commercial opportunities arising from the "green" economy have all promoted the embrace of market-based instruments for managing environmental problems such as overexploited resources, pollution, or habitat destruction (Heynen and Robbins 2005; Mansfield 2004; McCarthy and Prudham 2004). In water resource management, not only has the private sector become more involved in water services but the extension of the user-pays principle reflects the normalization of economic values when it comes to resource allocation (Bakker 2003, 2005; Budds 2004; Kaika 2003; Smith 2004); managers of global fisheries have introduced individual transferable quotas (ITQs) that effectively facilitate new markets in fish quotas (Mansfield 2007a, 2007b; St. Martin 2000, 2007); there are ongoing efforts to address the problems of climate change through carbon markets (Bond 2012; Lohmann 2009; Leonardi 2012); and Natural Capital accounting and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) provide a seemingly limitless field for commercial opportunities in the areas of biodiversity conservation (Büscher et al. 2012; Sullivan 2013). This general and multifaceted process of marketization in the area of environmental governance has led some scholars to describe it as the "neoliberalization of nature" (Heynen et al. 2007).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transforming the Fisheries by Patrick Bresnihan. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
