Jen Telesca: The managed extinction of the giant bluefin tuna (ep386)
“The vast majority of people are so alienated from the Bluefin’s life world that they don’t know what an extraordinary creature she is—and instead just widely see her as a foodstuff, trafficked on the global market. It’s imperative for that worldview to change.”
How did the Giant Bluefin tuna go from being food for the poor to becoming a global delicacy symbolic of luxury? What does it mean that fish have long been "an object through which global empires have been mediated"? And what are some of the scams and blue-washing of eco certifications in seafood that we should be aware of?
In this episode, we welcome Jen Telesca, Associate Professor of Environmental Governance in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, the Netherlands. Her work takes a critical approach to ocean studies, spanning the interests of environmental diplomacy, ethnographies of international law in society, the human–animal relationship, political economy, the politics of extinction, and science and technology in policymaking. She conducts fieldwork at the United Nations and in treaty bodies, diplomatic missions, and other sites scaled supranationally.
Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) is Telesca’s first single-authored book. Its on-the-ground, first-person research has shown just how damned the lives of fishes are in the very world entrusted to care for them in ocean governance. Her second book on hydrothermal vents, tentatively titled, The Midnight Zone, invites readers to honor creatures in all their mysterious and seemingly impossible forms at sites in the deep dark sea—open to regulatory oversight—where scientists believe life on Earth began.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by RVBY MY DEAR
Episode-inspired artwork by Mi Young
Episode references:
Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna, a book by Jennifer E. Telesca
“How Global Regulators Are Selling Out the World’s Largest Tuna”, an article by Jennifer E. Telesca
“Ocean Justice”, an article by Jennifer E. Telesca
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, a book by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Jennifer E. Telesca: In many ways, the historical record we know for the Giants—in the Atlantic, anyway—stems from the Phoenicians, some 3000 years ago. We have these very rich records from the Mediterranean Basin. These were creatures that were once so large that they were quite literally like the focus of banquets.
We know, from the archeological record, when emperors would have very extravagant dinners, that these were the center of meals, in large part because they were seen as creatures who could connect people to the underworld. [But] over time, you see people's relationship with Bluefin change.
Most recently, if we just fast forward, quite rapidly until the 20th century, these were creatures that in the 1950s, 1960s, pretty much disregarded at docks, amongst recreational fishers, treated as pet food, or were canned for pennies a pound. That rapidly changed with the advent of the global sushi economy in the early 1970s, when there was this very famous moment at Tsukiji Market, in Tokyo. You could imagine that this was the first moment that a Japanese connoisseur had tasted Bluefin from the Atlantic Ocean. Because before, there were other varieties of Bluefin, but these were clearly only eaten from the Pacific, if you were in Japan at the time.
At the same time that you're starting to see the availability of Bluefin as a result of globalized processes—so the ability to get fresh fish fast delivered overnight, oftentimes by air cargo—you have this other stream happening: of the recognition that these creatures are being caught on abandon. These were creatures that were caught quite extensively by various long-line vessels, so there was an acknowledgment in the 1960s that because these were fish that were already seen as overfished in the 1960s, there was an impetus to create a regulatory regime, in order to oversee their trade.
These two streams then converge in many ways.
By the late 1970s, certainly by the early 1980s, the Bluefin become increasingly valued—no longer worth pennies a pound, but in fact, now one of the most expensive sushi money can buy.
And part of what is so dismaying, disturbing, and upsetting about much of this, is that the vast majority of people, even if they know what or who a Bluefin is, will know that a Bluefin is quite expensive, and/or a Bluefin is getting smaller in number.
There's various discussions about a relative extinction to years' past.
What I find remarkable, worth remarking upon, is the fact that the vast majority of people are so alienated from the Bluefin’s life world that they don't know what an extraordinary creature she is—and instead just widely see her as a foodstuff, trafficked on the global market.
It's imperative for that worldview to change.
Kamea Chayne: In general, with the globalized and centralized industrial-scale food system, it makes it very difficult for people to actually know the foods that we consume, and I think that's the case for a lot of other foodstuff that we consume as well, as people don't even know the beings in their habitats and how they express themselves and what they're like in their own right.
A lot of your work highlights the hypocrisies of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas—also abbreviated as the ICCAT. Namely, you expose how the institution set up supposedly to conserve the Atlantic Tunas has actually been complicit in their extermination, and that “they manage the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires.”
So what should people know about this group, their approach and way of framing their conservation work, and the international law assigned to it, showing that they cannot be trusted to have the Bluefin's inherent interests at heart, beyond their value as commodity to national economies?
Jennifer E. Telesca: In many ways, the book is very much trying to peel the layers off of what's going on inside the regime, because the vast majority of people, so the lay-public, are not allowed access to their meetings. Journalists are also not allowed access to their meetings. And so I spent several years traveling through the network, going to its meetings. What I think is also really important is…
I don't want to subscribe to what I call, in one of the chapters in the book, The Savior Plot, a narrative where the Bluefin is a victim, the environmentalists are the saviors and the institution, ICCAT, is the great evildoer. It's actually a lot more complex than that.
Part of what is going on here is that the institution was designed effectively out of a legal framework from the 1950s, where the vast majority of people just assumed that fish were food. So it's only until the early 1990s even that the public starts to get an inkling into the fact that actually, these are creatures that are also wild animals. So ICCAT has inherited this legal framework.
In many ways, part of what's going on here is those who work at the institution, or those who go to its meetings as part of state delegations, or even the environmentalists that try to draw attention to what's going on inside the regime, it becomes difficult for the regime to transform because it's tethered to this architecture that we've inherited from the 1950s, that's no longer fit for purpose.
So I don't want to single out ICCAT by saying that ICCAT is the great evildoer and we should all just work to undo its legitimacy. It's actually that ICCAT is part of a larger constellation of institutions that are oriented in such a way that put elites who can afford—today, anyway—fresh fish fast... that ICCAT is doing the job that's asked of it.
Until that legal orchestra architecture changes, and until people demand that change by reevaluating who these creatures are beyond just mere foodstuff, beyond commodity, I don't see a path forward for real, meaningful change.
Kamea Chayne: And as an extension, you share specifically that "Under the prevailing regime of value, an ocean teeming with big bluefin is not economically advantageous; ICCAT is tasked not with protecting the integrity of the ecosystem but with securing and distributing trade volumes — ‘biomass’ in fisheries parlance.”
I'm a little baffled by why in their lens, ensuring an ocean full of big bluefin wouldn't be in their long-term business interests, and that they wouldn't be alarmed by the decrease in the number of big fish in the sea. Is this just because they've been oriented towards short-term gain?
Jennifer E. Telesca: I think there's a couple of ways to answer that question. So most directly: yes.
Part of what is going on that is confusing to an outsider is the title of the institution: The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. But the term "conservation" is not oriented to an environmental space.
This is not an environmental organization. It is an international trade organization.
I remember I was at a meeting, and the commissioner pulled me aside. We had an informal discussion, and he remarked that part of what is also going on inside those meetings is, especially if you're a poor developing country that has a quota for Bluefin, you'll say to a rich, powerful state: I'm not going to give you our fish unless you give me automobiles at a cheaper price. And so ICCAT, because it's an international trade organization, is also concerned, on the periphery, with sending low-level bureaucrats, who are doing the regulatory work of global trade. So they're interested in various global commodities—bananas, coffee, fish, but also finished goods. And some of this actually, if you dig online, is available as public knowledge. But unfortunately, this is part of the logic of this institution.
To also unpack one of the terms you cited that I use in the book…
This idea of a ‘commodity empire’ acknowledges that fish have long been an object through which global empires have been mediated.
We see this throughout history, at least in the Mediterranean Basin. Part of what is going on at ICCAT meetings is similarly a jockeying of position for power and control through fish.
So for example, the European Union, the US, Japan, and to a certain extent, China, maybe Canada, wield a disproportionate degree of power in relationship to poor developing states. These institutions just become elaborate exercises to, in some respects, secure the status quo. But there's other things going on, too, right. So, as I mentioned in the book, if the outcome is already predetermined, why have an ICCAT meeting at all? And I think for that, you also have to appreciate the way in which there are other things going on at meetings. There are professionals who are asserting their status among other professionals, like you would find in any workplace. There are also aspirations for not just empire, but also nationalism.
Spain is probably one of the best examples. So ICCAT's secretariat is headquartered in the landlocked capital of Madrid, and recall during the early 20th century, through the Spanish Civil War, was quite poor. And when Francisco Franco, the former dictator, became head of state as one of the longest-reigning dictators of Europe in the 20th century, he was from Galicia province which is on the Spanish coast, and he was explicit in investing Spain's economy in seafaring initiatives, so shipbuilding, fisheries, to the point that Spain now has one of the largest fishing fleets in the world. And this is all part of this kind of nationalist bravado of re-imagining Spain in the image of its former empire and thus its armada.
And so I say that, and I don't want to single out Spain, because this is happening among other state delegations as well. But I just offer that as a way to understand that, on one level, yes, it's brute economics, but on another level, it's much more complex than that.
There's this entire social, cultural life around these kinds of institutions that I think is really important to expose—especially when we start to get into discussions about nationalism, empire, and other motivations for why someone would go to one of these meetings at all.
Kamea Chayne: There are lots of layers here. And it must have been really interesting for you to be able to gain access to witness and experience a lot of these power dynamics and power plays going on. I guess on the surface, it seems like it's all about the conservation of the Atlantic Bluefin... In reality, this is all rooted in industry interests, for trade and commodity. And even under that, there's a lot more happening under that same name and goal.
Something that has concerned you is how, as you note, even journalists, environmentalists and the scientists, in position to best stand up for the Giant Bluefin, have internalized the predatory logic of fish as commodity. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by this, and I'm curious whether their use of industry language, if that's a part of it, may have been strategic in the sense that they are trying to appeal to commercial interests that ensuring healthy and vibrant marine ecosystems and healthy populations of the bluefun should be at the core of their values and goals as well…
Jennifer E. Telesca: Let me just start by [responding to] the point that you raise, so to what degree have they internalized some of this industrial, commodified logic? I would say to a certain extent, that's definitely true. I remember early on in the research project, being very taken aback, by this language of the fish stock. So whether you're a scientist or a policymaker or an environmentalist, this is verbiage that's widely used throughout fisheries. This language of a fish stock is important, because the word choices that people make are windows into their worldviews. So on the one hand, stock as Wall Street, a stock to trade, is obvious.
But there's this other stream of thinking about stock as lineage, to say like, Mary is of good stock. And this other kind of racialized understanding is equally as important to understand the logic of what's happening inside these regimes, which is to say that, if you were a slave on the trading block, one of the reasons why that is so disturbing is because all of the internal complexity of a human being is flattened into their skin color, into their ability to be productive units. So in order to be able to assign a value so you know what the price is of that person on the market. And there's something similar going on here, which is to say that we don't see fish as individuals with social lives that cooperate and get scared and or communicate...
The whole lifeworld of a fish is completely denied in large part because you have to flatten and deny that lifeworld in order to be able to treat the animal as a generic class of being, to assign a price to trade that animal on the global market.
It's an elaborate way of saying that, yes, by using this language of a stock, people don't necessarily realize all that they're committing themselves to.
To get at the other parts of your question, let me just take them separately... So let me first take the environmentalists and then I'll speak about the scientists. Sometimes there's overlap in the two, sometimes not. Part of what I discovered in the field is that the world of marine conservation, in many ways is very behind other environmental movements, in its ability to be able to take on the questions of environmental injustice, so that the environmentalists working in marine conservation, the vast majority of them, are what scholars refer to as these sort of mainstream environmentalists. It's like save the whales, save the Bluefin, save the tiger.
And not to say these are insignificant—they remain important. But part of the limitations of those frames is they're not able to get at the root of why we need to save the whale, the Bluefin, the tiger. And that's where a more environmental justice framework becomes really important, because it then illuminates what are the structural conditions that have contributed to the slaughter of these animals. For that, we have to turn to commodification, to capitalism, to runaway forms of exploitation, to empire, and so on. And so the mainstream environmental movement kind of dances around, and is not able to fully engage with those systemic problems, that otherwise have created the conditions for the slaughter.
So what I saw in the Bluefin example is that the save the Bluefin campaigns were part of a mainstream movement that was never able to address matters of environmental injustice, not only for the animal, but also for the power differentials that exist in that global commodities trade. So, for example, you go to an ICCAT meeting, and you might have 40 delegates from the US participating in a meeting, and yet Uruguay might send one, or Trinidad and Tobago might send one. So when you see that disproportionate participation by the rich trading areas, it then becomes no wonder that the Global South, broadly defined, is not able to fully participate in these institutions as full equals.
And the mainstream environmental movement, at least in the context of the Bluefin, nowhere, discusses any of this. The vast majority of campaigns are just about the Bluefin are getting smaller in number, and there's so few left to them, that therefore they should be saved. And it's the simplistic kind of narrative that unfortunately, I think has gotten in the way of real transformation. Because the public isn't fully understanding the complexity of what's going on. And in all fairness, the news media doesn't have, with the exception of these kinds of podcasts, the capacity to fully inform the public about this kind of complexity, especially with people on the go, reading headlines, not necessarily engaging with the news.
And then, to address the scientists. Unfortunately, I think there's an analogy that could be drawn between fishery science and geology, in the sense that these are two forms of knowledge production that are very much tied to industrial extraction. So fishery science obviously with fish, but at least for some geologists, their expertise is often used by oil and gas industry, in order to figure out where the next site to extract is. And so you can see then, at least in the context of fishery science, this is a form of knowledge production that's not actually formalized until late 19th, early 20th century, certainly by late 1920s, 1930s. So this is a relatively recent field and developed in large measure by the state to ensure that the foxes weren't guarding the henhouse, as a check then on industrial extraction.
Unfortunately, that check on industrial extraction hasn't always lived up to its aim. And, there's variability here for sure: there are some fishery scientists who are very committed to marine conservation, in a strong sense. And there are other marine scientists who work for industry. They all participate in ICCAT meeting to various proportions, and I think it's just important to acknowledge that unlike the world of climate science that has developed somewhat independently of the area in which it studies, the world of fishery science is still tied to industry in ways that must alert us to question the truth value of some of the knowledge that is produced.
You see this, for example, in two ways. So, one, there is a preoccupation with number. There is a preoccupation with numbers that become trade volumes, so that in an ICCAT meeting, for example, there are models that produce future populations of the fish. So how many are there going to be into the future? Those models can't accommodate the fact that we've lost not just numbers but size, so that those Giants that I knew as a child are no more. And from what I could tell, there wasn't a lot of worry inside the regime that we've lost the big fish, we've lost the Giants, because they're so preoccupied with what they refer to as biomass, with how many there are.
And that's a problem from the perspective of conservation also, because we know that fish are not people. So fish contribute to the future generations, the bigger they are. Because the bigger a fish is, the more eggs they lay and fertilize. And so the smaller the fish are, the less they contribute to the reproductive capacity of future generations. So my concern about the loss of the size of the animal must be in conversation with the loss of number. And the science isn't adequately addressing that.
Interestingly, I participated in this study last summer, I was working with a group of researchers who were comparing tuna, a whale and an octopus, and how they were treated across scales based on the cultural narrative, the scientific narrative, and what's the legal regime, in place to protect these creatures. So I was entrusted with looking at what are the cultural narratives around tunas. And I have to tell you, I had been with this book for a decade, and I didn't notice that…
Every picture, every representation of these creatures is always either at or near their death; you never see these creatures as living beings careening through the ocean.
When you see the creature at or near death, it then allows for the ease with which then they become mere objects for consumption, so soon to be consumed, in a human-centric society.
And what was really fascinating, was that the researcher who was looking at the scientific narratives of tunas could only find one study, from the early 1980s that showed the Bluefin, swimming in packs with very aligned, sequenced distance between the animals, which suggested a degree of cooperation. Because all of the scientific literature about tunas is about, at what age do they mature, so we know when to catch them, or, what do they eat so that we know how fast they grow. Even the research itself is very much oriented to an extractive logic. I think that's really important for us to think about.
I think it might be changing. There's some recent literature asking, do fish feel pain? And, we can debate whether or not that's a good question. But nonetheless, there is some opening, not necessarily in the context of tunas, but certainly in an octopus or, in the life of a whale or a dolphin, that there's a generalized consciousness increasingly, that these are sentient, cognitive beings with social lives. And of course, why would we not extend that to the life of a tuna? Especially knowing that these are creatures that... So for listeners that may not know this... So a Bluefin or a yellowfin is red, versus an albacore is white Their meat is red versus white, because tunas have capacity inside themselves to elevate their internal temperature so that they can swim faster on the hunt, or potentially to play with their mates.
So these are creatures that are actually warm-blooded, somewhere on the evolutionary scale between a cold-blooded cod and a seafaring humpback. And so there's this sense, and this is increasingly motivating my work: how do we reimagine our relationships? Both on an individual scale and on a collective scale, at the level of governance, at the level of discourse, in order to be able to see these creatures as just fellow travelers just trying to survive, just like everyone else.
Kamea Chayne: And I would presume that the funding going into these fields of fishery science research disproportionately come from industry too, so maybe the skewed research that does get published, reflects the funding. Then there would be an institutional bias of what types of research get more funding to be carried out.
Jennifer E. Telesca: Yeah, there's definitely some of that. And some of the research is also funded by the rich trading blocs that have an interest in protecting their export markets. There's a lot of that happening, too, to the point that the fishery scientists who critique their discipline, might be celebrated by an environmentalist, but inside those regimes, they know that they're pretty much not welcome. And so again, that's why I mentioned earlier where you see, just like any workplace, you see these status plays happening. And to return to your point, yes, it can be traced down to funding. In many cases, it is funded by industry, but a lot of it is also funded by state.
Kamea Chayne: One of the possible more immediate solutions you've discussed is establishing no-take zones in order to let Bluefin populations rebound. In theory, it makes sense, and in theory it also reminds me a little of what's called fortress conservation, which is blocking off certain places to be completely off-limits to people. I know this has been criticized as enforcing colonial logics of a separation between humans and nature, resulting on land often to a displacement of Indigenous and local communities and preventing them from practicing their subsistence, land-based life and foodways. This is different of course because we're talking about the deep seas.
But I wonder if you could expand on this proposal and its status of implementation, as well as how the overfishing from industrial activities has impacted coastal communities dependent on subsistence fishing in order to feed themselves and their families.
Jennifer E. Telesca: Again, I think the relationship between rich trading areas and poor developing states must be acknowledged because, a lot of times at least, I can speak mostly about tuna fisheries in the Atlantic, and to a certain degree in the Pacific, when you have these large-scale factory vessels, they come in and pretty much just vacuum it all up. And if you're an artisanal fisher, and I mean artisanal in the sense of a non-subsidized fisher, doesn't get support from the state, trying to just make ends meet, [then it] becomes very difficult to be able to sustain yourself. Here I'm thinking especially of Pacific Islanders who are very dependent on tuna fisheries for their very survival. And indeed, for some of them, it is their primary export.
The belly of the equator in the Pacific Ocean is one of the highest concentrations of where people assuming they eat tuna, get their tuna, and so the vast majority of tuna comes from that tuna belt in the Pacific, some of which is from the exclusive economic zones of Pacific island states. These no-take zones also must be in conversation with what's going on in the world of climate science, or what's going on not even just in climate science, but traditional or local knowledge.
So we know, for example, that as the tuna belt starts to warm up from heatwaves in the ocean, for example, and just an ocean that's getting warmer in temperature, that the fish are starting to head to the poles. Part of the complicating factor then, of a no-take zone, is that the no-take zone has to also accommodate changes that are happening in the community. And by community, I mean not just tuna community, but in the biomes, in sea. And so that must also inform how we define those no-take zones.
To what extent some of these no-take zones or even the creation of marine parks speaks to or can serve colonial or imperialist projects is context-specific and must be part of the conversation.
So for example, I remember hearing several years ago the US was interested in creating a marine park near Hawaii with the goal of eventually stretching that conservation area potentially through to Japan. And then, I was kind of like, as someone with environmental conservation, in the strong sense, motives, wow, that sounds great.
And then I remember I was in my apartment in Brooklyn a couple of years ago and just listening to an episode of Democracy Now! and the host, Amy Goodman had Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, on, and Julian Assange was talking about the creation of a marine park in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, motivated by the US military's interest to have fishing boats and other potential vessels free up the area so that the US, at least in a capacity of the Chagos Islands—which was one of the great military bases during the so-called war on terror, that the island of Diego Garcia is a key landing point from where the US military would not only send aircraft and soldier figures and other military equipment, but also very close to Diego Garcia, right off its shores, [there were] claims of potential torture of people... Not favorable to US interests, to put it kind of bluntly.
But nonetheless, I think this is also really important to note because at a certain level, it should give us pause, sometimes, if we think of what might be in the interests of the US government vis a vis the US military, to establish a no-take zone in order to create a corridor for its military in the Pacific, if I return now back to the Pacific. And I haven't pursued this as a research agenda specifically, but nonetheless…
I think it's really important for people to acknowledge that there's really no such thing as a pure motive—in at least marine conservation.
And it's important for us to unpack what might be other motives, including that by the US military in order to exert its imperial ambitions to secure its power on the world stage and so forth.
Kamea Chayne: There's so much happening underneath the surface, and people really have to peel back the curtains in order to fully understand the complexities, the power plays and everything happening in the field of marine conservation.
And in light of the pressures and result of overfishing, nearly half of the seafood people consume today come from farmed fish. But like industrial agrochemical agriculture on land, at that scale, with all of the issues that come with any intensive monoculture, the harboring of disease, the overuse of antibiotics, and all the other mass-produced inputs needed, that's not really a solution with the host of concerns it comes with. And it also doesn't address that people still feel very disconnected from seeing fish as beings in their own right.
And then as people consider our roles directly or indirectly contributing to industrial fishing and overfishing, I think one of the most immediate things people would look to is something like certifications or eco-labelling—to "vote with our dollars". In the fishing world, people may have heard of the Marine Stewardship Council, for example. How do you see this all as a sort of bluewashing that is counterproductive, and where does this leave us? Are there any initiatives that have inspired you, that you feel are more incisive in getting to the heart of the problem, which is much deeper and much more complex, and systemic?
Jennifer E. Telesca: Yeah. So let me just briefly share a little bit about the aquaculture piece. So I think first and foremost, is the acknowledgment that if you farm fish, there's a difference between farming carnivorous fish, versus fish that might eat algae and other kind of plant life. The former aquaculture that involves carnivorous fish, is much more problematic, because it means either you have to go out to catch more fish in order to feed the carnivorous fish, which thereby just doubles down on the overfishing problem, or as I've experienced at some of the salmon farms in Norway...
You can actually go to a salmon farm in Norway as a tourist and see how it's done. And it's relatively celebrated as an achievement of technological innovation and as the savior to an ocean empty of fish. And yet again, scratch the surface, and you hear that these are fish that are also fed a diet of genetically-modified soy. The last time I checked, salmon don't eat soy, let alone genetically-modified soy. To the point that, a salmon gets her color pink by eating shrimp on the seafloor, and because salmon aren't eating that shrimp, the aquaculturists might mask that over by feeding the salmon the discarded shells of shrimp. When you go to a supermarket and you look at the refrigerator of salmon and when that salmon is neon pink, that's because they injected the salmon with dye.
And, this is aside from the fact that about half of salmon farmed in these pens are now deaf because they cannot hear they've lost one of their primary sensory mechanisms. Yet again because the vast majority of us are so alienated from the food that we eat, we have no idea who that being is, that we purchase at a market. So part of the effort then is for us to become better acquainted with these creatures.
To get to your point about certification and eco-labeling, I'm deeply suspect, indeed. I have written about the fact that these are scams, shams—just elaborate efforts to effectively concentrate power in the hands of a few industrial fishers.
And why might that be? So let's think through the economic logic. If you are a so-called independent certifier, you do, even if independent have to stay in business, and so you stay in business by selling your label, so that when a consumer goes to the supermarket and they see that Marine Stewardship Council or other kinds of eco-labeling, say, oh, I'm relieved of guilt, this must be a good fish to buy.
But the point is, well over 90% of those certification schemes, at least in the context of the Marine Stewardship Council, are industrial-scale fishing fleets. The vast majority themselves, petroleum-powered, the very ones that are going out to vacuum up what's in the sea, in ways that starve those artisanal fishers, those poor from the Global South. And so you see the way in which these certification programs become elaborate schemes to effectively defraud the public about what is really going on, which is the intensification of power concentrated in the hands of a few industrial players protected by the nation-states where they conduct their business.
In many ways both of these, so aquaculture, eco-labeling or certification programs, are rooted in a consumptive approach. Both of them assume that consumers have the answer, and that with enough purchasing power, if enough consumers gather their energies, this is going to somehow reform the market. And I deeply worry about these approaches because they remain, even if peripheral, to these market logics. The fact of the matter is they're sold to the public as solutions rooted in the presumption of consumer power. I think in my view what really needs rehabilitation, especially in the US and I would add probably the UK to this, is the recovery of people who understand themselves as citizens who are collectively acting in a society in which all human and non-human are treated with respect, and kind of citizen collective action comes through the power of the state.
So part of what I've seen in my own experience over the years, and it just feels particularly pronounced in the US, is just an erosion and a distrust of the state. And I hope perhaps that this might be rehabilitated. I think for any kind of meaningful transformation to be scaled on a level that would enable the change that all of us, or at least I think your listeners are trying to work toward, that has to come through collective action. And one agent of collective action is the state.
[I think I just want] to alert your listeners to become more suspicious of solutions that are rooted in the power of an individual consumer, freely acting in a world of markets as if that is enough to stem the slaughter. It might be enough to relieve oneself of guilt, or feel ethically sound, but in many ways, for me, anyway, that's the floor, not the ceiling.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Jennifer E. Telesca: Hands down the best book I've read within the last year is Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It's brilliant, both in terms of its language and its rigor and its compassion, but also in reminding us that the fate of marginalized people and communities of color share an affinity with the disregarded lives who inhabit the sea, that is, whales and other sea creatures, in large measure because the harm that both groups experience is produced out of that same exploitative system.
Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra or practice that helps you to stay grounded?
Jennifer E. Telesca: It's funny that you ask this because I just recently moved to the Netherlands. I got here about two weeks ago. And, picking up and moving transatlantically was a heavy lift. And there's been quite a few mottos, mantras and practices that have kept me grounded, or at least I hope, during this time. And I think for me, what I've been and I've been doing this since the pandemic, is when I wake up in the morning before I get out of bed, I listen to my mom and I count my blessings, and I give thanks for not just my material conditions, but also for the people in my life. And in many ways, this allows me to start my day in ways that orient me to the sacred, and that's really how I try to inhabit the world.
We all get consumed, or at least I do sometimes, by bureaucratic or other kinds of stumbling blocks that sometimes get in the way, and so I have to reel myself back and remind myself of blessings, not as an endless stream, or at least as an accounting practice, but again, as a reminder of inhabiting a world that is sacred.
Kamea Chayne: What is your or what is one of your very biggest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Jennifer E. Telesca: I'm not a big tech or, app buff. I'm kind of stuck in the 1990s in some respects. But I have discovered this app, by it's by Cornell. It's the Cornell Merlin app. So the Cornell is very well known for their study of birds. And they have this portion in the app where you can do a sound ID. So you hit this recording and the app will tell you, and identify the birds in your community. So the app will share with you through birdsong who our neighbors are.
And so I remember when I was living in Brooklyn... The place where I was living in this courtyard, it wasn't like a typical New York, highly trafficked, honking environment, with ambulances constantly going by. And I remember always feeling like, who are these creatures that I'm hearing? Then I found this app. And I was walking in a park in Amsterdam last week, and the sun was just about to set and the birds were so loud, and I pulled out the app and I was like, oh, let me see. I wasn't sure if it worked in the Netherlands, too. Sure enough, it did. So it's a way for me to know my neighbors, as fellow creatures. And there's something very powerful for me when, for example, I now can hear a cardinal before I can see her. There's something very powerful about that sensory possibility, to be able to draw yourself back into the present, including with creatures, with birds that are all around us, and yet we may not know who they are.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing that. What are some final words of wisdom that you'd like to leave us with as green dreamers?
Jennifer E. Telesca: As I say to all my students, it's imperative to push past the paralysis that one might feel, given the enormity of the destruction happening ecologically around us. And I say that in large measure, because it's people in positions of power who hope that you remain paralyzed. Because if you do, you're not going to do anything about what's going on, and thus the status quo will continue. So the challenge really is to push through that paralysis and become engaged in your community, in however way you want in order, to find alliances with which to build a more just transition, for the future we all want to inhabit.
