Must We Eat Fish?

If only I could reason with those who deliberately slaughtered the societies of great whales! If only the last Great Auks and Stellar's sea cows and Atlantic walruses had not been killed! Perhaps other choices would have been made, if only the dire consequences of draining wetlands, cutting primeval forests, polluting rivers, filling productive bays, had been known to those who forever closed options for me, for all those who share the present, and for all who will come in the future.

—Sylvia Earle (1995, 321)

Art, Deleuze argues in his books on cinema, has the task not of addressing a people, "which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people" (1989, 217). Art has the unenviable and perhaps impossible task of helping to create the conditions in which a certain kind of politics becomes possible. The people it must invent, the people who are presently lacking, are people capable of hearing and acting on its message. I was reminded of this passage in Deleuze as I read Elspeth Probyn's Eating the Ocean because from the opening pages it was apparent it was going to be an extended argument in favour of maintaining the status quo, something all marine scientists agree would be a disaster for the ocean. We cannot have our ocean and eat it too. Today, as we face up to the devastation humans have wrought on this planet, we must acknowledge the deep truth and uncanny prescience of Walter Benjamin's insight that preserving the status quo is literally the last thing we should be trying to do. As Benjamin put it, the "'status quo' is the catastrophe" (2003, 184). Once a species disappears we cannot bring them back and unless we act now generations into the future will be asking us the kinds of questions Sylvia Earle wants to ask the people of the past. Probyn says she wants to find ways for us to care more about the ocean, which one can but applaud, but it is uncertain whether what she has in mind is palliative care or critical care, is she concerned to save a life or help ease one into the final darkness. Moreover as the scale tips toward extinction for countless species, it is no longer enough to talk about conservation, we need to act urgently for the sake of preservation of what remains.

"Again and again through this book," Probyn writes, "I wonder how we can care a bit more, or a bit better, for the entire entangled marine elements that we devour when we eat the ocean" (2016, 7). I imagine that Probyn frames her ambitions in this bitty way out of modesty, which is doubtless commendable enough in an era of overblown claims, but it has the unfortunate effect of diminishing both the scale of the problem of overfishing and marine species loss and the need for urgency in responding to these problems. If one reads Probyn alongside the work of marine biologists like Sylvia Earle or Callum Roberts, the contrast between their positions is absolute, not because their view is more complex—if anything their position is even simpler than Probyn's. Where Probyn asserts that "we" cannot afford not to eat fish, they say "we" cannot afford not to stop eating fish. In contrast to Earle and Roberts, Probyn treats the dire situation of the ocean today as something that can be remedied by a few minor adjustments to the way we do things. The reality is in fact very different, as Probyn herself fleetingly acknowledges. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, she notes that "we are at risk of eating it up, devouring it until there's nothing left except the not-so-apocryphal jellyfish-and-chips" (2). One might expect then that her argument would be that humans must act now to save the ocean from human predation. But that is not the course she takes, her argument pivots in precisely the opposite direction. Can the ocean help feed humanity? (7). That is her question and her answer is that it must! This is an argument for the status quo...