Recently, the Columbia University Journalism faculty hosted a one day conference focusing on the problems of and potential solutions for reporting on ecological issues. In it, author and commentator Naomi Klein said that the reason why these kinds of stories don’t get large audiences isn’t because people don’t care – just the opposite – in her words, audiences turn away in “existential dread”.
It’s not that we don’t find catastrophe compelling. The news is full of disaster. But a story, must be a complete story in order to be satisfying to digest. It needs a beginning, a middle and an end. It must grant objectivity either through time or distance, and it must allow for lessons to be learned.
The catastrophe that has happened to someone else or has ended can be swallowed by the senses however grim the content, but as Timothy Morton points out in his book “Being Ecological” the ongoing ecological crises aren’t like that. They aren’t happening to someone else, they’re happening to us, and they aren’t at an end, we’re in the middle of them.
It’s a slow-motion car crash that we ourselves have caused and are trapped within, and it turns out that car crashes aren’t very entertaining to the victims while they are happening. Most of us would rather think about something else until the crunching sounds stop.
People who naturally care more about animals and plants than themselves can look at the problem head-on. I’m not saying it’s easy for them, but it makes them more angry than scared, and this anger, born out love, makes them brave. It gives them the energy to stay transfixed on the problem however disturbing the facts may be.
For the majority of people, the end of the world means not just the end of animals, but the end of people, the end of ourselves, and the knowledge that this catastrophe has been in progress for the last few hundred years and will affect us for generations is not something they can focus on for very long.
Many of us feel for nature because of it’s great beauty, but beauty is a human concept that has little to do with survival.
In a way though we have already seen the apocalypse. In a way it has happened more than once in coastal communities across the planet.
Futures Past
The collapse of the cod fishery off North America’s East Coast in the early nineties was an ecological disaster. A hole torn in the environment, and it is far from an isolated case. Studies show that over a third of commercially exploited fish species have suffered at least one stock collapse somewhere in the world.
Catastrophes all – mini versions of the greater catastrophe we are living through. And one of the interesting things about catastrophes is that while during their build-up they feature impacts that you can’t put a human face to (species at risk, rising temperatures, contaminated environments) in retrospect their effect on people is not only writ large, but written on the lives and faces of individuals–individuals that you could identify by name.
This means that if you grew up in a fishing community that experienced a fish stock collapse, then you’ve already lived through catastrophe, and you’ve likely learned a few things. About what environmental catastrophe means for ecosystems and about what that does to people and communities. You may even have decided to devote your life to trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Growing up in Newfoundland, Amanda Barney had a front-row seat from which to observe the human impact of such an ecological disaster.
“I saw the immediate impact to small communities and to the economy when the cod fishery collapsed,” she says “It has always been glaringly obvious to me how deeply connected resource health and sustainability are to economics, community viability and social justice.”
Amanda cares about the environment because she cares about people. She understands that people are a part of the environment and that their destiny is entwined with it.
A desire to become a fisheries scientist led her to Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and degrees in ecology and mathematics, but the time lag between scientific research and community impact didn’t satisfy her need to have an immediate effect on people’s lives. She also became skeptical about the ability of fisheries science to address socio-economic as well as ecological issues. Work as a fisheries observer in Alaska followed with the idea of becoming a fisheries manager, but as enjoyable as she found it, it opened her eyes to how far away managers on the front line are from taking a system-wide view.
From there Amanda went to work for a maritime lawyer in the US, and while this allowed her to have a positive influence on the lives of individuals, it wasn’t a path to true maritime law. After that, a masters degree at the University of Washington School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in Fisheries Economics brought her another step closer but left her frustrated about the measures used–single stock, maximum sustainable yield–too limited in her view. Opportunities in policy analysis brought more frustration around how policy gets watered down through the policymaking process but ultimately lead to a thesis focusing on systems and resiliency– at last, her true calling.
Balanced Outcomes from Dynamic Environments
More recently Amanda has been working with Ecotrust Canada–an NGO that seeks to tackle ecological and socio-economic issues and rights simultaneously. It is a pragmatic approach rooted in economic realism. For Amanda, it means that she, at last, has a mission that fits with her experience of how ecological collapse and social-economic impacts go hand-in-hand. A mission that not only matches her commitment to conservation and social justice, but also her commitment to the idea that they are inextricably linked. Her commitment to a way of thinking.
Amanda’s view is that there is a need, more than that, an obligation to think systemically– to consider all species including humans, to keep humans in the ecosystem from both a theoretical and practical standpoint.
Systemic thinking within her definition seeks balanced outcomes from dynamic environments and recognizes that the system as a whole is the goal, the deliverable–not the triumph of one element of the system over all others. It also implies resiliency–a system should support itself with little or no extra input, and continue indefinitely, each element of it varying slightly within a range that allows for balance overall.
Importantly it recognizes that whether we like it or not, by definition any version of the future that people are likely to support includes a place for people in it and that making that future happen requires their active participation.
The airplane view of conservation initiatives is filled with broad, sweeping agendas. This is not a bad thing. Bold commitments to protect percentages of the global oceans or entire species, help to galvanize efforts worldwide. But real-world conservation and sustainability is managed via a multitude of fine details.
A ban on fishing on the east coast prior to the cod collapse would have saved the fishery earlier, but it’s worth remembering that the people predicting it at the time were the fishermen themselves–the local, inshore fishermen.
Amanda’s view is that if there had been more emphasis on protecting not only the fish but also the local fishermen (in preference to the industrial offshore fishery) a socio-economic disaster could have been averted as well as an ecological one. And in her view, this may mean that once a collapse has taken place, re-establishing the biomass of any species to historic levels may be unrealistic since this goal may not take human needs into account.
“What are the measures that people want to put in place to get there [conservation targets]?, and you think of something like the cod moratorium in Newfoundland… so nobody can fish. They thought it was going to be a two or three-year moratorium… the cod stocks are coming back but there was a mass exodus from Newfoundland… now you have infrastructure that the province can’t afford to support.”
In truth, the success of the East Coast shrimp and crab fisheries did much to soften the blow for a while, but now those stocks are also reaching a critical phase.
Amanda is calling for an end to the cycle of boom and bust.
We are all Ecological
The airplane view of conservation initiatives is filled with broad, sweeping agendas. This is not a bad thing. Bold commitments to protect percentages of the global oceans or entire species, help to galvanize efforts worldwide.
But real-world conservation and sustainability is managed via a multitude of fine details.
Actual, functioning, macro-level restrictions and controls on all kinds of practices that take place on the water–shipping, tourism, fishing, aquaculture–include parameters that have to do with timing, equipment, communications, monitoring and a host of other things, not least the historic cultural rights of the people who live there.
It’s all very specific.
This meshes with ideas around localism (the practice of favouring produce, provided directly from original harvesters within a certain radius of where you live), but it’s a bit different from the simple consumer/harvester relationship that gave birth to the term. It’s about the idea of favouring the local supply chain from a regulatory standpoint–of actively engaging with and incentivizing localism at a systemic level. Supporting the local owner/operator in the expectation that this will increase social justice, create positive socio-economic impact and support more sustainable ecological outcomes via measures that are specific to their time and place.
For Amanda it comes down to participation, scale and empowering people to make the right choices.
If we inhabit this worldview we find that localism is of value because it provides the most convenient–the most strategically leverageable point to disrupt the parts of the system that are currently opaque.
It was a conceit of the locavore (localism focused particularly on food) movement early on that local supply chains have none of the problems of global ones, in fact they have many of the same problems but in such a way that participants are more incentivized to find solutions, and at a scale where solutions may be easier to identify, test and implement.
As a result, we can look to local communities to lead, to become the testbed for ideas that may or may not migrate to larger systems.
Far from being the sleepy places that they often used to be, contemporary small communities have shown that they can change and adapt quickly. Displaying great energy and a willingness to change, incentivized by a desire to survive, and made credible by a maximum awareness of the issues, and maximum opportunity to create personal revolution, people in small communities across the world are innovating.
Small communities are faced with big choices though. Seeking new opportunities and responding to changes in demand can result in drastic changes in their character. The island of Fogo –another much smaller East Coast Island– is a clear example of this: a success story in many ways but via change that was more to do with transformation that preservation. Inspiring for many, less so for those whose way-of-life has been consigned to history.
And local can mean much larger geographic areas beyond small communities. We have recently seen cities and regions experiment with the consumer supply chain in innovative ways. By this example, it seems that any identifiable region at sub-landmass level has the opportunity to disrupt to create more transparency and better consumer choice as long as a localized or “more local” perspective is adopted.
So, when it comes to this car crash that we are all in together, we should all do our best to take it in. But when it all gets too much, we should remember that some have already witnessed the catastrophe first-hand and seen how it has affected real people, and remember that those people have already moved on to finding solutions, solutions that attempt to take in the system as a whole but intervene in very specific ways and very specific places.
There is always a better world, but we can’t link to it through a frozen moment in time, our bodies suspended in thin air while we wonder how bad the impact is going to be. We can’t say “today is the day we all start getting it right”. It’s a continuum. The better world exists but it exists in parallel to our own, we can steer towards it, but not as a result of one momentary decision – it requires constant nudging – a million different sized nudges in a million places culminating in the desired overall effect.
Please note: Some of the key ideas in this piece not attributed to Amanda are not my own either, principally the insight that it is difficult to take-in a catastrophe that you are in the middle of experiencing, the assertion that we are all ecological beings by default and the process of veering towards a better world. All of these belong to Timothy Morton and are from his quietly bleak, briskly authoritative and surprisingly inspiring book “Being Ecological” (Pelican Books, 2018). It was a great inspiration to me when writing this piece.–JM
