The late American writer, David Foster Wallace, in his characteristically probing style, once asked, in an essay titled “Consider the Lobster”, if it was “all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for gustatory pleasure.” His intent was to pose an admittedly unsettling challenge to the way many of us live. I was reminded of this while reading the January 6 edition of The Globe and Mail. Specifically, an article titled “Fears of extinction don’t curb blue fin tuna prices.” Let me explain.

The world is growing smaller by the day due to human encroachment on nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70 per cent of nature’s yearly output; by the early 1980s, we’d reached 100 per cent; and in 1999, we were at 125 per cent. Such numbers may be imprecise, but their trend is clear – they mark the road to ecological (and other) bankruptcy. It is therefore well past time to meet Wallace’s challenge, unsettling though it is, head-on. His essay is nearly a decade old, and the reflection he desperately hoped we might engage in hasn’t happened. And so alongside the unfortunate lobster scrabbling for a way out of the pot – which may ultimately be an ironic metaphor for the human plight if we aren’t careful – I want you to consider the tuna…

On January 5, a single blue fin was sold for US$176,000 in the first auction of the New Year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market, the world’s biggest wholesale fish market. And it wasn’t alone; 2,280 tuna were sold on the 5th to feed a Japanese market that is the world’s biggest consumer of blue fin tuna.

It wasn’t always this way. Historically, the samurai considered maguro, as blue fin tuna is known in Japan, an unclean fish and wouldn’t eat it. As recently as the 1970s, the fish was even sold for cat food or thrown away. Now of course, its fatty belly meat – toro on your sushi menu – is prized for its taste and texture.

The Montreal-based writer, Taras Grescoe, reminded us in his recent book, Bottomfeeder, that by the turn of the millennium 90 per cent of the world’s predator fish – tuna, sharks and swordfish – had been removed from the world’s oceans – no surprise given the prices these fish command at auction. The result of this unsustainable harvesting, coupled with pollution and climate change, will be the total collapse of the world’s fisheries by mid-century. Remove the top predators like blue fin tuna and algae blooms expand dramatically. When the algae decays and sinks to the bottom, it releases hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas. The resulting “dead zones” support jellyfish, but little else. As Grescoe reports, these sterile swaths of ocean “regularly crop up from the South China Sea to the Oregon coast. Some of them are now as large as Ireland."

And yet the tuna harvest continues. Like the cod off European and Eastern Canadian coasts, the blue fin tuna needs a break if it is going to survive. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) has developed just such a plan, but it allows fishing to continue during the period 2008–2010. Pardon my skepticism, but haven’t we seen this movie before – in fisheries, forestry and any number of other natural resource industries? It is as if we were the residents of Easter Island, so brilliantly and poignantly chronicled by Ronald Wright in A Brief History of Progress:

The people who felled the last tree could see it was the last, could know with complete certainty that there would never be another. And they felled it anyway…The people had been seduced by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an “ideological pathology”.

Is our pursuit of the tuna (and other oceanic top predators) emblematic of our broader attitude toward nature? Is it an ideological pathology? I suggest that it is. I suggest that we are running headlong toward a future we believe will either (a) be much like the past, or (b) be something that we can manipulate to our advantage. Such hubris, especially in the face of a historical record that suggests quite the opposite has been true. We have not been stewards of the planet’s bounty. We must shift our thinking – and quickly – to avoid catastrophe. As Canada’s Thomas Homer-Dixon put it in his masterful book, The Ingenuity Gap:

We have subordinated a large portion of the planet’s resources and ecology to our interests…We will need a far better understanding of our planet’s complex systems if we are to achieve a relationship with our surrounding natural environment that is economically and socially sustainable.

Returning to the imperiled blue fin tuna, Brian MacKenzie of the National Institute for Aquatic Resources at the Technical University of Denmark, has studied the ICCAT plan and predicts that the adult blue fin population in 2011 will likely be 75% lower relative to 2005 and that quotas in some years will allow the fishery to capture all of the adult fish. Writing in Conservation Letters, he suggests that the population is at risk of collapse (a 90% decline in adult biomass within three generations – the criterion used by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature for defining populations as Critically Endangered), even under the currently agreed recovery plan.

So, how to turn things around? I believe we need to begin striking at the root of established thought. If we have learned anything from the collapse of Canada’s east coast cod fishery, once the envy of the world, it is that we do not understand natural variations in fish population ecology well. We may have approached fisheries planning with good intentions, but we have not imbued our plans with what I can only describe as the requisite humility – and therefore with the protective room of being able to make corrective adjustments in light of feedback from key ecosystem markers.

We need to tap the power of place and evoke the heart and soul of a particular geography in our approach to being stewards of the planet. Our plans should reflect a devotion to place, community identity and nature. This calls for a radical re-think with respect to our relationship with the planet. In the case of the blue fin tuna, we should stop digging the hole that will soon consume us. Yes, that means a stop to the auctions in Tokyo and elsewhere; an absolute moratorium on fishing a species that is so much more than a commodity – it is a keystone indicator of planetary health. We must stretch beyond what conventional or received wisdom says is possible and accept that the status quo just isn’t going to cut it. Let’s face it; does anyone really think that the ICCAT plan is going to work?

I might add that in thinking of how we upgrade, we should feel energized by Elinor Ostrom's recent Nobel Prize in Economics. Her work on human interactions with ecosystems, and in particular, the novel institutional arrangements for managing natural resources and avoiding ecosystem collapse is both a beacon in the realm of ecological economics, and an exemplar of the kind of thinking we need more of to forge truly resilient societies – societies that treat creatures like the blue fin tuna as something more than a commodity.

I am under no illusions; to forge the kind of change we need will not be easy, but achieving something important, on a planetary level, never is. The work that lies ahead will require a deep commitment to what Gary Hamel has called “strategizing”, the creation of new, rich and “complex webs of conversations that cut across previously isolated knowledge sets and creates new and unexpected combinations of insights.” In case anyone is still wondering, this means a good deal more than, as the high bidder at the January 5 Tokyo fish auction put it, making “an impact on the Japanese and Hong Kong economies by buying the highest-priced tuna.”

Rob Abbott (rob@abbottstrategies.com) is the principal of Abbott Strategies based in Calgary, AB.

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