By Conner Smith
Like a moth to the flame, I couldn’t help but comment. Defying sense, I dropped a line on Jason Momoa’s post resharing the efforts of several Icelandic advocacy groups seeking a ban on industrial whaling from their government.
While I am staunchly anti-whaling in a commercial context, I made the mistake of thinking I should try to be the herald of nuance on this famously contentious issue. I hit the blue arrow on a meticulously crafted note that did two things: 1) signal my support for the campaign; 2) point to the fact that industrial whaling is not the same as subsistence whaling practiced with deep respect and in accordance with cultural beliefs of Indigenous Peoples. The latter, I wholeheartedly support.
The reaction from the Meta-verse was swift - a torrent of responses and notifications inundated my phone for days. The spectrum of responses was broad – the more benign questioned my credentials as an ocean science professional, others went as far as to suggest I should be gunned down to see how I liked being in the whales’ place.
I could live with the personal attacks, but the blatant disrespect shown to Indigenous communities was disturbing. The disregard for the facts I was providing (for example, that the gray whales the Makah have traditionally hunted have been on the rebound and are no longer considered endangered) led me to ask questions. Who or what was to blame for the pervasive misinformation around the state of our oceans?
Naturally, my thoughts went immediately to Seaspiracy, the widely-seen 2021 Netflix documentary about the global seafood industry that essentially argues that the ultimate solution for the sea lies in a collective shift to veganism. This is not only unrealistic for many isolated communities who rely on local seafood, but offensive to the Indigenous Peoples whose culture and sovereignty is often shaped around particular food ways like salmon. The messaging of this film was so problematic and misleading it prompted renowned fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly (who deserves credit for this blog’s title) to conclude that most of its potential value to advance the cause of protecting marine biodiversity was buried in an “avalanche of falsehoods.” From misrepresenting statistics on bycatch to claiming sustainable fishing does not exist, Seaspiracy has become a poster child for ineffective environmental communication, and why we need deeper collaboration between creatives and scientists.
All-or-nothing (“go Vegan or else”) language around environmental problems isn’t helping us address our shared problems, nor has it ever been an effective way to expand the tent of climate action. What kind of message does it send to the fishing community if environmentalists argue for an end to their livelihoods? How does that produce anything other than an us-versus-them dynamic, one that scuttles real opportunity to approach conservation collaboratively in ways that recognize humans as a part of the ecosystem, not as interlopers.
Pauly gives some concrete examples of collective action that are more impactful than diet shifts geared towards people with the money and the means to forgo seafood. When he suggests “Marie Antoinette Goes to Sea'' as a more appropriate title for Seaspiracy, I can only assume he is referring to the apathy of righteous Europeans (or Americans) telling fishing-dependent communities in Asia (a favorite punching bag of the film) to “eat cake” while struggling to put fish on the table.
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t take a close look at our personal lives and make changes where we can - see Ben’s blog from last week on this. But you won’t convince me that the fish I speared yesterday in my backyard – one aspect of a thriving ecosystem that I personally help to protect through some of the same policy actions Pauly suggests – contributes more to our environmental problems than the store-bought soybean from a Midwestern monocrop.
This is no less true for fishing communities around the world, and we should be careful when lumping industrial and artisanal or subsistence methods together. Shutting down fishing isn’t always the ethically or environmentally correct answer either. There is ample global evidence showing how mixed-use Marine Protected Areas, where some fishing is restricted and others are allowed, can support both thriving ecosystems and sustainable fisheries when paired with strong enforcement and community participation in management.
While I am certainly not advocating for veganism as the solution to the loss of marine biodiversity, I am also not saying everyone should go out into the Pacific with a speargun and see what happens. There is a different, messier, but more realistic space where we can collectively shape the questions we want to see answered regarding the resources we share. Cultivating this space, through clear and thoughtful communications, is what I would like to see us achieve with Living Air. This is how we move from all-or-nothing solutions to a deeper understanding of the connections between social and ecological systems rooted in collective action.