I Worry That I Sound Like I Wish Society Would Collapse
Scientists just confirmed the first extinction of a marine fish *ever* and it feels like we're programmed not to care—let alone do anything about
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Sometimes I worry that I sound like one of those people who welcomes civilization’s unraveling. I don’t. I happen to think civilization is good, and we should have one. It’s just frustrating how much urgently needs to change, and how that sense of urgency isn’t reflected by anyone in power. And OK, yes, that sometimes makes me wish society would unravel just enough to get things back on track, and then re-ravel. Just a light apocalypse, please. Hold the death.
For instance: For the first time in recorded history, a marine fish has officially gone extinct.
I guarantee you’ve never seen a smooth handfish, even if you’ve been hanging around their habitat off the coast of Tasmania. No one’s seen one in 200 years. And now no one will because they’re all dead. The last smooth handfish seen by any person is a preserved sample that looks like this:
(image by Australian National Fish Collection)
There are a plenty of extant handfish species that live off the coast of Australia, and what makes them unique is that their fins are kinda like hands, and instead of swimming, they crawl like little babies along the ocean floor. And then ships like this scallop trawler operating in the Tasmanian sea come along and drag big plows over acres and acres of their habitat all at once and kill them, or if not kill them outright, turn their habitats into undersea deserts.
What you saw in that video was an updated, and ostensibly more evolved, and less destructive form of trawling, than the method that probably killed off the smooth handfish years ago. New practices were adopted after Australia’s fisheries collapsed in 1967, according to a post about the smooth handfish on Phys.org.
But bottom trawling is still pretty awful, and we don’t like to think about how it’s our main method for acquiring tasty treats like tender little bits of hotate sushi. It’s also how we get shrimp. We don’t want to give these up, even though we obviously have to. More on this in a minute.
Historically, according to Jessica Meeuwig, director of the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Marine Futures, you don’t just label a marine fish “extinct,” because there’s this perception that you might be wrong. “Some claim that the ocean is too vast for marine wildlife to go extinct,” Meeuwig told Mongabay. But, she said, “ocean industrialization from fishing, mining, oil and gas exploration, shipping and infrastructure development is catching up with the scale of industrialization on land and with it the risk of extinction for marine wildlife.”
So that’s what makes this a big deal: the decision to brand a species extinct isn’t something the folks at The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) take lightly. If you look at the 2019-2020 IUCN Red List status change data table, you’ll see that the vast majority (90 percent or more) of status changes are due to new data, not because of some genuine change in a species’ vulnerability or raw numbers. Everything with a “N” in the second column from the right is one of these “non-genuine” status changes.
So the majority of what the IUCN does is bean-counting. This is not an organization that likes to raise a false alarm. And ever since the list was created in 1964, no ocean fish has ever had its status changed to “extinct.” But now one has. As it happens, this is one that died off ages ago, but now that the IUCN has signaled its willingness to go out on a limb and admit that an ocean fish is 100 percent wiped out, it’s a safe bet it won’t be the last.
In my book, The Day It Finally Happens, I talked about the coming manmade marine fish mass extinction:
Thanks to our species' multi-pronged and comprehensive approach, humanity's present day "Kill All the Marine Life" project is going extremely well. Here's a quick cheat sheet listing our main strategies:
We dump several million metric tons of plastic garbage into the oceans every year.
Bottom trawling, or dragging fishing equipment across the seafloor, is turning "large portions of the deep continental slope into faunal deserts and highly degraded seascapes" according to a 2014 report on the long-term effects of this widespread practice
The planet is heating up really fast, and the resulting extinctions are happening in real time. (Although, for the record, at this rate it will take a few more centuries for this effect to reach the lifeforms at the deepest depths of the oceans.)
Ocean acidification—the other major side effect of CO2 emissions besides global warming—is causing countless die-offs, most famously in corals, the backbone of coral reefs, the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth.
Fertilizer and pesticides poison the ocean, and when combined with the above factors, they help create "dead zones," nearly oxygen-free patches of ocean where almost nothing can live. According to a 2018 paper published in Science magazine, dead zones make up four times as much of the oceans as they did in 1950.
We eat the sea's living creatures—which is the number-one cause of their declining numbers. There are rates at which we can supposedly fish sustainably—meaning in such a way that we don't run out—but the fishing industry operates in volumes that meet, or surpass the peak equilibrium rate. (Right now, we're hauling up 90 percent of fish stocks globally, according to the UN.) In other words, we're killing as many fish as we possibly can as a byproduct of our industries, and then on top of that, we're also eating as many as we can.
So it won’t be long before the extinction of a marine fish is so common, it doesn’t even make headlines. Oh wait, this was the first one ever, and it already didn’t make headlines.
Before I say this next part, know that I am not a part of the very important field known as “science communication”—PR for scientists, basically. In some ways, science communication is a method of fundraising, but in other ways, it’s a crucial part of science that’s mostly been botched since the beginning. Science is simply the process of gathering falsifiable evidence about phenomena, falsifying some of it, and then finding better evidence. I’m not sure who to blame, and, but the inability of the science community to get its messages across successfully is how we’ve ended up with the Scopes Monkey Trial or Breitbart climate pest James Delingpole, or the entire state of Arizona right now.
I said all that to say this: Wow, the science communicators could have probably earned themselves little more press about the extinction of the smooth handfish. It hasn’t made any waves, even though it’s the first official extinction of a marine fish ever. And I did my best to tweet about it, maybe that’ll help, Lol.
It is almost as if people don’t know what to do with a piece of news if you can’t either a) simply do nothing, or b) do something hollow and consumerist. The stuff on the news rarely translates into any sort of actual personal sacrifice.
It makes me think of an old Salon article by Lindsay Abrams about trying to find a way to eat fish sustainably, only to find out that ecologist Carl Safina, who pretty much invented the concept of sustainable fish, ended up jaded by the shallow response his ideas received from consumers. He wanted consumers to have a nice long think about the animals they were so cavalierly stuffing into their faces, and consumers wanted, basically, a guilt-reduction app.
For people like me, who live in cities and don’t have the time or inclination to cast out a line, indifference can come to feel inevitable. It’s a problem that comes up with most “green” issues, involving a big picture that’s hard to see from one’s own small-impact, individual perspective. Another thing Safina said, which I didn’t at first understand, is that he was disappointed by how popular his guide, and its many imitators, was:
It would be even better, in my opinion, if people wanted to appreciate fish for everything that they actually are. Mainly they’re animals, and they have lives and they live in the ocean and they interact in incredibly interesting ecological ways. And most people have really no interest in any of that. They just want to know, ‘If it hits my plate, should I eat it?’ … They miss everything else that there is about fish, and the whole living world really, that makes them so interesting and beautiful and wondrous.
In other words, the guides are like a CliffsNotes version of an issue that’s much bigger than anything we do or do not decide to put in our mouths. Perhaps if we all saw the ocean and its inhabitants the way Safina does, trying to do better by them would seem less of a burden.
Zooming out from fish to the bigger picture of global ecology, it’s the same story. What passes for a serious, high-minded approach to tackling climate change in the European Union is the new Green New Deal law, passed in March, which will make Europe “the world's first climate-neutral continent by 2050,” which, to save you from having to do any match, is thirty years from now, which is way too late (And Democrats in the US are pushing for the same timeline). Extinction Rebellion’s plan is net zero emissions within five years.
Back in March, Greta Thunberg said of the climate change law, "This climate law is surrender. Nature doesn't bargain, and you cannot make deals with physics." I thought about that Thunberg quote when I saw this event in Barcelona from last month where a string group performed classical music for an audience of plants.
Eugenio Ampudia, a conceptual artists (of course) set up the performance. His explanation was that he was inspired by all the nature he saw during the quarantine, “I watched what was going on with nature during all this time. I heard many more birds singing. And the plants in my garden and outside growing faster. And, without a doubt, I thought that maybe I could now relate in a much more intimate way with people and nature,” he told The Guardian.
Filling a concert hall with plants and playing music to them has this eerie air of penitence about it. I haven’t been able to get this image out of my head for weeks now. It feels like some kind of coda to the M. Night Shyamalan movie The Happening, where (spoiler) after the trees murder most of humanity in revenge for our environmental crimes, we try to calm them down by playing them some Puccini.
That impotent, guilty feeling may or may not have something to do with a new aesthetic trend spotted by eagle-eyed UK-based culture reporter Al Horner. His piece for the BBC website is called, Why the apocalypse is being reimagined as a beautiful event. He finds a bunch of examples of this concept—particularly in the Last of Us game series—and traces the trend back to Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, which by the way, was edited by the same guy who edited my book, Rick Horgan.
I got in touch with Al, and showed him the Barcelona plant thing, and generally picked his brain. Here’s an edited version of our conversation (For one thing, I Americanized his spelling, and there’s nothing he can do about it now).
Mike: What do you think of this?
Al: The Barcelona potted plant thing is interesting! And oddly moving? That just me? I don't know if this is the nature apocalypse aesthetic spilling into real life but what I do know is that, I don't think had the virus struck five years ago, the Barcelona opera would have done this. There's a lot more awareness about environmental causes, so the issue is percolating constantly in everyone's heads a lot more now. Hopefully that awareness and connection to nature will be sharpened post-lockdown: nothing heightens your appreciation for the outdoors and birdsong and fresh air and sunlight like having it rationed to you, one hour a day, which was the case at one point here in the UK. We were allowed one 60-minute walk a day in late March. Hopefully all of this offers an opportunity for people to hit a bit of a reset button when it comes to their habits and mindsets regarding carbon, and this room full of potted plants enjoying a string quartet is the only real-life manifestation of the nature apocalypse aesthetic we have to see in the real world, hah.
I'm sorta curious about the genesis of that article. Both the idea that led to it, and how you pitched it? (Assuming it was a pitch)
The idea hit me a couple of months ago, after re-watching Alex Garland's Annihilation over Christmas. Like a lot of other movies I'd watched over the festive break, it seemed to explore the idea of apocalypse through the lens of nature, something I'd totally missed the first time I watched it. To be totally honest, I wasn't sure if it was in my head: I was deep into research on some extremely anxiety-spiking projects around climate at the time, and was conscious I might be projecting my own climate anxiety onto these movies. It was just on my brain 24/7. But as weeks went on, I kept seeing more and more apocalypse fiction across all kinds of mediums that years ago would be have full of smoldering greys and dark, urban ruins. Instead, they were full of really jarring beauty and vibrant nature. I wasn't sure if it was just an interesting visual contradiction for filmmakers to use; plain science (nature, by all accounts, really reclaim urban spaces if we all disappeared overnight); or if storytellers were consciously or unconsciously expressing something deeper. I followed the thread backwards trying to find out where the trend began, and ended up at The Last of Us. (I'm sure there are other films and pop culture predating TLOU that have experimented with similar aesthetics, but all the conversations I had with filmmakers etc pointed towards the game popularizing it.) Once I remembered there was a sequel coming out, I decided I'd pitch it to the BBC, who were awesome to work with. The original Last of Us came out in 2013 and was rooted in science. But I feel the pop culture that has adopted its aesthetic has done so to process worry or in some cases warn about environmental catastrophe.
You don't go into the ethics of picking an aesthetic for apocalypse fiction (I'm thinking of Malthusianism, and the whole "nature is healing" concept). Do you have thoughts on that? Did anyone talk about it while you were interviewing them?
It's really funny you should mention Malthusianism—one of the people interviewed in the piece, Alan Weisman, wrote The World Without Us, which was one of the inspirations behind The Last Of Us. His follow-up book, however, Countdown (which I don't mention in the piece) grappled with the problem of population, and was conflated with Malthusianism a few times along the way. It's tricky: any question of apocalypse in 2020 is tangled up in questions of climate change, and any question of climate change is tangled up unfortunately in the fact that our population has doubled in size worldwide since 1970.
A lot of the people I spoke to both for the piece itself and for background on the article spoke about an ethical duty among storytellers to bring environmental themes and aesthetics into their work. I'm inclined to agree, I think. It can be reductive, and a bit cheap in some cases, but I think there's a belief among a lot of them that pop culture has a trickle down effect. A good, totally anecdotal example of this for me is Jurassic Park: I realized on a recent rewatch that, although I had no idea until now, a lot of my attitudes towards nature as this unfuckwithable force that man can't tame—it's hubris to think you can—probably stem from me watching and rewatching that movie about Jeff Goldblum being chased by velociraptors. (Love the chapter in your book about the real-life potential of a Jurassic Park btw!) So I can understand their argument that ethically it's a responsible thing to be threading into apocalypse fiction right now. There'll no doubt be examples of it that are a bit crass or feel a bit like all those "nature is healing" memes, but on the whole it stuck me as pretty much admirable. (I didn't build it into the piece simply cos I ran out of word count, as usual, haha)
There's something almost naive about what we call the "dystopian" aesthetic. It feels like maybe it's had its day. You can google image search "dystopian aesthetic" and the results will make you go "Sure. That..." So there's something about this shift that feels potentially like progress. That's not a question, but maybe you can help me square that circle...
“Dystopian aesthetic” is funny—have you ever seen a Brad Bird film called Tomorrowland? It's a bad film from (imo) a great director, based on the Disneyland area. Despite its objective badness, there's one idea in it that's really stuck with me. The film posits that, as a culture, we fetishize dystopia and as a result end up in a loop: when the only future pop culture has trained you to imagine is one of destruction, of course that's what we're going to head towards. What I think I like about the nature-ization of apocalypse stories is that they invert this. The idea of nature adapting and existing after our demise (which seems to be rooted in scientific truth) is humbling and communicates an awe towards our environment that I think is helpful. It's also just different, refreshing. I think there was definitely some fatigue when it came to traditional dystopian imagery, and at the very least, nature-apocalypse stories offer something new.
I appreciate you giving me you thoughts, and I think you're dead on except about one thing: I actually like Tomorrowland. For one thing I think it's hilarious when George Clooney is yelling at that tiny little robot girl as if she's his ex-wife or something. And then the other thing is the themes you were talking about in your answer. Totally agree with all that.
Hahahahahhaaha YES! Love that scene, I'm absolutely due a rewatch.
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