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by Jack Oldham
By Paul Molyneaux, 2007. Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York www.thundersmouth.com Public television, National Geographic Magazine and National Public Radio have all had specials on fish stocks and the state oceans recently. The sea as a resource has changed dramatically in very recent times, and in a very a few years. The availability, and, in fact, the survivability of wild fish is now in question—a fact thought unimaginable to most everyone just a decade or two ago. Entering the void from this shortfall, which is compounded by the soaring demand for seafood, are investors with genetically altered fish and big plans. The more scientists look into the fish stock problems, the more causes they find for those problems. The more investors look at potential aquaculture profits, the less they see the inherent pitfalls. Scientists, government regulators, fishermen, and ecologists each have their own opinions about wild stocks and aquaculture. Few, if any, have looked at this problem with the objective, multiple lens view, found in Swimming In Circles: Aquaculture and the End of The Wild Oceans. Unlike most other published observers, Paul Molyneaux has been a commercial fishermen, is a journalist who writes on fisheries for the Fishermen’s Voice, National Fisherman and the New York Times, is an author and a recipient of awards for his research and writing on fisheries. His most recent award is a Guggenheim Fellowship for research and writing about sustainable fisheries and aquaculture. Molyneaux was fishing when the ill-fated, so-called, Sustainable Fisheries Act was passed in the 1970’s. This Act was a curious attempt to take as many fish as possible, in competition with other countries, at the same time claiming to uphold sustainable extraction, with oversight by regulators who knew almost nothing about the fish stocks, their habitat, or fish re-productivity in the wild. Swimming In Circles provides a view of the world of fisheries management and the aquaculture industry that claims to hold the answer to seafood supplies. It addresses the realities that have thwarted the first, and may undo the second. Molyneaux was a witness to the failed attempts to raise farmed salmon on the Maine coast. The latest version is offshore aquaculture pens with genetically altered versions of cod and haddock. In recent years he has spent the winter in northwest Mexico with his wife and two children. There he has observed the rapid boom and bust cycles of industrially produced, “farm raised” shrimp. The parallels to the salmon production in Down East Maine fifteen years earlier are striking. Using his experience in commercial fishing and aquaculture, Molyneaux produces a perspective that he weaves into narratives from “the road” where he meets the makers as well as what could be the victims, of the so called blue revolution. He has traveled around this country and Europe to attend scientific conferences, fisheries meetings, fishing and aquaculture operations. One of the things that sets Molyneaux apart from other observers, is that he has traveled to do research on his own earned dime. This has made an independent view and path possible. He, as a fisherman, also has a view from inside the industry. From this perspective, the reader goes along on his journalistic explorations into the vast world of industrially farmed seafood, which, for the most part exists out of sight, and therefore, out of mind, for the consumer. In the evolving new world of offshore aquaculture, there are scientists with their genetic data. There are the fisheries managers with their angle. There are fishermen who think they know what happened to their wild resource, but may not now have enough clout to keep a hold on it. And, there are the investors, with their shell game at the entrance to the experimental industrial fish farming fair. With his experience in the fishing industry, understanding of the regulatory system, knowledge of so many of the participants poised to push the blue revolution, and contacts with the displaced, a view of what is really going on comes into focus. Moreover, he is a writer who can make a complex issue both understandable and a good read. What could have been a dry scientific dissertation, a confused jumble of regulatory history or an environmentalist’s self-indulgent finger pointing fest, Swimming In Circles instead takes the reader over rutted back roads to Mexican shrimp farming disasters, into the homes of the displaced fishermen pressed into the aquaculture service, to European and American conferences with the “movers and shakers”, and to interviews with scientists being bulldozed to the perimeter of the debate. Molyneaux works his way around the gatekeepers at meetings with the major players, the power brokers, engaged in the evolving attempts to control the biology of the oceans. In a conference at Columbia University on Globalization, attended by internationally known economics experts, but no fish experts, he takes issue with one speaker’s declaration for all (others) that, “Working at a Nike factory is better than being bent over in a rice paddy.” The perspective assumes plugging in any company and any occupation is possible. Millions of tons of industrially farmed fish are speculated on by the advocates of open ocean aquaculture. But, among the points raised in the book, it takes three pounds of wild fish to raise one pound of farmed fish, whose clean water and fishing grounds are the millions of square miles of aquaculture going to be in and how many of the common owners were in on the decision. The counterpoint math and science explains why our grandchildren are not likely to be sustained by industrially raised cod. Swimming In Circles is a fact packed page turner. |
