The Unsustainability of Sustainability

I will start by saying what I welcomed in Sustaining Seas because the bulk of this review will be taken up with an analysis of what I found to be unwelcome. To me, the most important aspect of this collection is the way it offers an exciting illustration of what a hands-reaching-across-the-table collaboration between the humanities and the sciences can look like. The "Operation Crayweed" project led by Australian marine ecologist Adriana Vergés is a model in this regard. "If there is a message from major environmental issues such as climate change it is that scientific evidence in and of itself does not convince the broader public of the need for action or even caring about the environment" (242-43). Several chapters in this collection echo this point, which is welcome indeed, and for the most part they suggest that the sciences need to work with artists to produce works of art, stories, songs and other varieties of art work to engage the "broader public," about which I can only say that would surely be welcome. However, I would suggest that the humanities can do more than make art, as valuable as that is; it can also, I would say must, engage in what used to be known as ideologiekritik, which is the process of rigorously examining and where necessary critiquing the concepts, assumptions, and ideological positions that underpin a given piece of scholarly work. We need to unite not just the creative and the scientific, but also the scientific and the critical, if we are to develop the nascent field of the "blue humanities" into a genuine field of scholarly inquiry. I might as well be blunt here and say it is the critical element that I find lacking in this collection.

It is difficult to respond to any edited collection, particularly one as richly interdisciplinary as Sustaining Seas, without risking turning it into a grading exercise in which you single out the papers you like and the ones you don't, or worse, in typical Žižekian fashion, stipulating which papers are right and which ones are wrong. In the hope of avoiding that fate, I will instead treat it as multifaceted group project, or if that still sounds too much like a grading exercise, then as a collaborative mission. Although the collection as a whole is internally heterogeneous, particularly with regards to disciplinary background and disciplinary ways of writing (humanities and social sciences really are different!), it is remarkably homogeneous with regards the varieties of modalities of relating to marine life it espouses. This might be expected of a collection that originated with a conference, so it may just be an artifact of the self-selecting nature of conferences rather than a conscious editorial choice. The absence of debate in these pages is noteworthy because many of the positions it adopts are problematic, as I will try to show in what follows; it also seems to be symptomatic of a systematic avoidance of the kinds of discourses—Marxism in particular—that could not but disrupt the apparent consensus this set of authors has settled into. One cannot stay with the trouble as Haraway suggests is necessary in these troubling times if one is not also prepared to make trouble as I aim to do here.

To my mind, the most glaring and indeed troubling absence in this whole collection is any discussion of capitalism as a world-system. One might respond by saying: well you can't include everything, not even in a capacious volume like this. To which I would reply: it is the one thing that cannot not be included. As Jennifer Telesca writes in her recent book Red Gold on the demise of the bluefin tuna, it is capitalism as a world-system, not the practices of fishers, which drives the "predatory regime of value" that is pushing all sea life towards extinction (Teslsca 2020, 3). As such, no discussion of the present state of affairs can legitimately sidestep it as this collection consistently tries to do because to do so is to mistake symptoms for causes. I...