An Oceanic Habitus

Alone, alone, all, all alone
Alone on a wide wide sea!

— Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 1834

It is so vast, the ocean. In this first chapter, I bring together many ideas from very different sources to navigate what a kayaker would know as clapotis — where incoming waves meet with rebounding waves. It's an experience that can shake you up. Sometimes it's not bad to be all at sea — disoriented, we may begin to see new directions. Here I begin to parse the question of fish and human relations. Throughout this book I make an argument — or several — against simplistic options, solutions, reactions ... the pairing of the familiar us versus them, even as the actors interchange.

In public and academic debate, the cultural politics of food continues to be a powerful if conflicting site where forms of state policy and economic, cultural, and affective investment all compete. Individual, regional, and global concerns are all at play within this fraught sphere. It is certainly not a new area, and questions about how we are to feed humanity, and with what, have been ongoing for decades if not millennia. But increasingly it strikes me that the framing of these deep-seated questions strips them of some necessary complexity. In marine science, researchers now talk of the "simplified sea" (Howarth et al. 2014). This describes the problems caused by "fishing down" or "fishing through the food web." This is producing a vastly changed sea, a simplified sea where biodiversity has been stripped away. Once the big predators have been wiped out, "ecosystems become dominated by a handful of species such as prawns, lobster, macroalgae and jellyfish that used to form the diet of, or were outcompeted by, larger fish" (Howarth et al. 2014, 691). Bizarrely enough, there is a temporary upside to this pillage of oceanic biodiversity. In places like Maine and Nova Scotia, the west of Scotland, and Tasmania, some fishers are happy. As the big fish are depleted at the top of the food chain, the smaller ones down the web get their turn. Lobster catches have exploded over the last several years, as too have scallops and prawns. And as one could guess, the value of these invertebrate catches is many times that of the previous resource. It's a bizarre state of affairs.

I want to use the phrase "a simplified sea" to frame some of the initial thoughts that flow through this chapter. First, let me explain more precisely what marine scientists mean by the term. It has to do centrally with oxygen, which is not a substance most of us think about in relation to the ocean. As the big carnivorous fish become ever more scarce, the phytoplankton flourish — in a bloom these tiny floating plant organisms can increase a thousandfold. But they are short lived, and when they die off, bacteria consume them. This eats up more oxygen. Organisms slightly higher up the chain, such as mussels, can't get enough oxygen from the water. They then die off, which produces yet more decaying material and further depletes the oxygen in the water, which has now become thoroughly hypoxic. This provides just the niche that jellyfish love, and they can rapidly take over huge areas. As carnivorous organisms, they eat the eggs of any remaining fish (Howarth et al. 2014, 696).

This process is also called trophic cascading, where like a knife through butter one shock causes other shocks down through the complex webs of life in the sea. The result is dead zones in the oceans around the world where nothing can live. Simplified systems just don't have the resources to survive man-made or natural shocks. I am going to take this term to describe how the ocean and her dependents are being simplified across different registers of cultural representation.

The stories I collate and tell across this book, in their different ways, speak of a necessary complexity. The complex interactions of the highly diverse systems housed within even more complex ecosystems are for me a cue to up the ante against the simplified answers that are routinely trotted out by well-meaning organizations. I'll get to these in more detail later, but if the answer to the problems of fish and the oceans is no, then the question is seriously simplified. I remain at heart a Deleuzian, which is to say that I follow multiple entryways into the entanglement of humans and nonhumans, into our vexed encounters within different ecosystems. The point for me is to diagram, to model, to figure, and to story their interactions in ways that may proliferate different angles, optics, and perhaps understandings.

Turning away from the terrestrial and to the ocean compels an alternative way of thinking about the enmeshed human and nonhuman ecosystems. Perhaps because most humans can't live in water, until recently human concern has been directed to the terrestrial engagements of humans and animals. Food politics, for instance, has been overwhelmingly focused on terrestrial animal protein. Is this simply because it's easier to care about a cow than a lobster? Classic animal rights texts such as Peter Singer's Animal Liberation hesitated about where to draw the line. In the 1990 edition, Singer recounts, "With creatures like oysters, doubts about a capacity for pain are considerable; and in the first edition of this book I suggested that somewhere between shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any" (174). For many, pescetarianism (fish-eating vegetarianism) makes sense: For some, it's about not eating an organism that can cry out to human ears; for others, the driving question is how to feed the planet equitably and efficiently (and of course, land-based animals are not efficient as a means of producing protein). It sounds mercenary to talk in terms of animals as efficient or inefficient producers of protein for humans, but a looming population of nine billion requires critical thought. And even though aquaculture is in its infancy compared to agriculture, the feed conversion ratio of fish is in many instances lower than that of land-based animals — I return to this issue in chapter 5. Of course, many people choose not to eat meat because of the closeness of mammal eating mammal. Concern for some species over others may be simply because of their good looks and good luck to be anthropomorphically cute. It's hard, though not impossible, to cuddle a fish. Anthropomorphic projections can belittle animals, but they can also afford an imagined connection between and among species. In a future life, I want to be a bluefin tuna or a jellyfish. How we imagine and engage with the complex issues of human-fish relations may effect which animal is still extant.

Christopher Bear and Sally Eden argue that many of the new animal geographies exclude fish because of the "alien" spaces they inhabit: "Water environments [contrast] with the 'airy' spaces that we humans inhabit" (2011, 337). It's an environment where humans often get horribly seasick. I certainly do. But this unsettling queasiness can be productive. Gisli Pálsson, an...