thoughts – « stocks »
Today, when you go to any website that talks about fishing, whether it’s labels, whether it’s quotas, whether it’s fishing companies, they all use the term “fish stock”. Often the redundant phrase is “maintaining fish stocks according to quotas for long-term fishing.”
But what is the long term if not a temporal notion that has an end in time.
Is it not a term that completely denatures the ocean to talk about stocks? A stock of fish reflects an image where the Ocean is a giant fridge from which we help ourselves with “moderation”. However, the Ocean is not a fridge but an ecosystem, a giant organism with a fragile symbiosis. Schools of fish are not stocks but populations.
What about the suffering we cause these living beings? You can catch a stock of fish with a factory trawler, but if you were to collect a stock of cows with a giant combine harvester, would you not give it a second thought?
The term stock stigmatises the fish, objectifying them, reducing them to nothing more than a belonging, a commodity to supply the industry. Yet they are as wild as the whale, the eagle or the giraffe, in their service of the ecosystem.
It is time we used the correct and respectful terms. Let’s give the ocean back its true nature.
thoughts – post-inspection
We are living in crazy times but we’ve probably always lived in crazy times. The human being is the only being that defines crazy and defines time. Still, right now a time where comfort grows, hunger slows down, there are still some places, remote, forgotten, where the dark side of the human mind lives like a pasha.
On the 22nd of last June (2022), we encountered such a place. What lives there was, on a polite note, a nest of disrespect to life in general.
Within a few minutes of our forced boarding of the vessel, the inspector said that there was something wrong with this ship. It was as obvious as the sun in the sky in summer. As you may have seen on the posts and articles already out two weeks ago, indeed many irregularities were there.
Some people were at sea for like 20 months already, which is an insane amount of time. Many will testify. The physical and mental abuse, the 24 to 48 hours of hard labour without any sleep, the conflicts, the great danger of some of the activities they are forced to do, and then all the illegal activities, or the unloading of the bodies of sharks that are still alive after having cut off their fins. I immediately found shark fins on the deck so we took a look in the freezers and found hundreds of shark fins that are supposedly destined for the fin soup market that is so popular in China. An absurd market, one more.
Once the decision was taken to bring them back up to port they have to reel in the whole line and the buoys. The captain sounded the alarm, and everyone went on deck and got ready to work. it was late in the evening, it had been dark for a long time, and it would be over 15 more hours of line hauling. The m/v Ocean Warrior sent us supplies as a storm was coming up and they wouldn’t always be able to supply us later.
All these men on board who are from different nationalities, don’t particularly like each other and yet have perfect cohesion and turn in their tasks like a smooth dance. The job is extremely difficult, the conditions are laborious, the hours are endless, the cold, the salt, the night, the rain, the motion, the difficulty. Yet they are all there, active, present. G*d, I would like to put an end to this job with a snap of my fingers. It is so unfair that men have to do such a job to survive, to provide for needs that should be due according to human rights. The injustice of this world is truly appalling.
I will watch them wear out their hands, pull the lines, unwind them, reel them in, slide them, push, kill, cut, and cut them, for long hours. The tuna will arrive en masse, but also an absolutely magnificent fish that I didn’t know before that they call ‘the sunfish’. A huge fish that looks like the mola mola, but with shiny red lips, and silver, pink and orange scales. A fish straight out of a magical dream. That i will see being cut with a machete hundreds of times, wide-eyed as if astonished, its body cut in two, on the deck of a dirty and bloody ship.
Sometimes the huge, monstrous tuna will be reeled in and not be dead yet. They will then slam their fins like fury on the deck, their lives trying for any last hope of survival, their nerves agonising from the pain of the air in their gills, the noise will be deafening and will only subside when they have received enough hammer blows to their heads by the man who will then cut them off with his machete as he would cut a coconut. A quick, brisk, automatic movement to put away this life that is now no more than a piece of nothing, in a freezer that denatures all that the Ocean patiently creates.
I will also see sharks being reeled in and cut up, alive one moment, dead the next. Birds are also caught in the trap of this fishing. A little black shark from the depth, a velvet dogfish, that glows in the dark, with blind eyes like ivory beads and 7 huge eggs in her belly. One hook, 8 lives. All sorts of great creatures of the sea will be brought up to die on this deck where men walk.
These men, I could observe a lot of complicity between them. Men who are not only colleagues but also brothers. But men who laugh together, help, and hug each other a lot. it’s a crew and a captain. not a crew with a captain. There seems to be a very special connection between them. perhaps they would easily turn their shirts inside out when they told me about the conflicts, but were they sincere or was it just a grudge built up over months that came out like a release when they spoke to me, a stranger to them. I couldn’t tell, but my surely naive testimony on board showed me that man loves themself especially when the rest of the world turns its back on them.
I will sleep for a few hours and wake up before dawn. the deck will be as I left it, in full activity. But I will have slept, they will not. The fridges have filled up greatly, there’s a shark that’s going to be reeled in, wrapped in several fishing lines, its skin lacerated in a cross, its agony must have been terrible. The sun will rise one more time, the albatrosses will invade the sky, and squabble over the remains that are thrown into the water. what a spectacular bird, the angry look, the imposing beak.
There is much to ponder and reflect on after seeing all this. The concern for the human condition and the Ocean is growing in me. I didn’t expect that to become bigger than it was already, wrong I was. before, my privilege made me feel the need to be where i am. because I’m european, white, and from a modest background. because I have absolutely everything. and I’m not even a male gender. I thought I wanted to help because I can and therefore I must. If iIdidn’t, i couldn’t live with myself for being aware of what’s happening in this world and not doing anything.
Today, i think it’s much simpler than that. Whoever i am, injustice burns my concerns and keeps me awake at night. It is absolutely unacceptable that animal suffer and men suffer while other men profit. Everyone should enjoy their life on earth, and I am glad I found like-minded people and an NGO with a strong will, conscience and ethic and direct effective action. I wish to stop and banish the terrible work of fishing on the high seas on illegal, miserable and dirty boats. it has nothing to do with me and my privilege and looking myself in the face. It is only the path I choose to take in this world, because the incredible planet is worth all my seconds and energy. I don’t have to prove anything to myself anymore, but there are many lives that need help and I want to be there. it started in what food i choose to buy and have my energy from, and a long way later, I still know that i will never do enough but i must still continue.
SISO VI – 2023
Ocean Killers – 2022
Tuvalu’s Waters – Spring 2024
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