Living Wittily

The fish of the sea, the mind of the Creator, and Brussels

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I lived in Aberdeen for years, and knew Robert who was a big player in the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation. He used to talk about quotas, black fish, Brussels, the common fisheries policies, the way it was and the way it is. The balance between the needs of the industry and of the fishermen whose livelihoods depend on the sea, has been hard to maintain ever since the advent of factory scale fishing and declining stocks.

_41076815_fishingnets203 Today we discover that around 50% to 60% of catches are dumped as dead fish because they can’t be landed, and much of these are cod, one of the most threatened species in the North Sea. The chief fisheries officer in Europe says it’s immoral – which is about the least that can be said about it. I know the world is complicated, complex and that simple common-sense often doesn’t make sense when applied to the realities of modern economic activity. But in a world where millions are malnourished, on a planet already over-harvested, at a time when the proportion of world population to global food capacity is narrowing dangerously, to toss tens of thousands of tons of fish back into the sea, dead and thus unusable, is accurately described as an environmental crime. Theologically such required practices are a demonstration of structural sin; that is economic laws, national vested interests, technological power, market forces, and each of these driven and shaped by human activity, create a situation where such moral nonsense enables such iniquitous policies.

Somewhere around the glossy executive conference tables, in Brussels or elsewhere, decisions are made about the stewardship of our natural resources. In that hierarchy of arguments that are presented and debated, where is the weight placed – on scientific data, economic necessities, political constraints, social consequences or moral principles? And where in the entire debate is the idea of stewardship allowed to balance such ideas as exploitation, waste, ownership, market, national interest? Because only when stewardship means more than conserving in order to go on exploiting, only then will we be able to prevent the obscene spectacle of men feeding the seagulls thousands of tons of fish suppers.

None of us can claim to know the mind of the Creator, but in Genesis 1.26 when God said of human beings, ‘let them rule over the fish of the sea’, I respectfully suggest, as a consideration worth weighing, that it is probably unlikely and therefore a reasonably safe conclusion to draw, when due allowance is made for other viewpoints, that God didn’t have any of this in mind!

Comments

4 responses to “The fish of the sea, the mind of the Creator, and Brussels”

  1. brodie avatar
    brodie

    Jim – while stewardship must be part of a Christian eco-theology I wonder if stewardship is deep or robust enough to both engender and support the kind of environmental action we must participate in.
    The fishing issue does seem to exemplify what people suggest is the moral ambiguity of environmental action, i.e. in trying to solve one environmental problem we both fail to solve it and commit further immoral acts. Yet you point towards on eof the main issues and that is the factory or industrial nature of fishing. Thus the solution is not in changing quotas but the way we fish, for the issue in the way we fish is not just the waste but the damage that is done to the sea bed.

    Reply
  2. brodie avatar
    brodie

    Jim – while stewardship must be part of a Christian eco-theology I wonder if stewardship is deep or robust enough to both engender and support the kind of environmental action we must participate in.
    The fishing issue does seem to exemplify what people suggest is the moral ambiguity of environmental action, i.e. in trying to solve one environmental problem we both fail to solve it and commit further immoral acts. Yet you point towards on eof the main issues and that is the factory or industrial nature of fishing. Thus the solution is not in changing quotas but the way we fish, for the issue in the way we fish is not just the waste but the damage that is done to the sea bed.

    Reply
  3. Jim Gordon avatar
    Jim Gordon

    You make good points Brodie – which I think show the complexities and ambiguities of what leads to discarding buckets of fish. Environmental policies are deeply compromised by economic policies, which in turn are driven by national or corporate interests. So the long term nature of environmental responsibility is hard to argue when confronted by short term and locally partial economic interests, pursued with mechanical and destructive efficiency.
    I suppose what I want to do is protest the unacceptable end product of deliberately imposed waste, and point to it as a moral outrage that ought to compel changes to the process that leads to it. And I want theology, eco-theology if you like, to have a voice in how we see the world and how we care / don’t care what happens in it.

    Reply
  4. Jim Gordon avatar
    Jim Gordon

    You make good points Brodie – which I think show the complexities and ambiguities of what leads to discarding buckets of fish. Environmental policies are deeply compromised by economic policies, which in turn are driven by national or corporate interests. So the long term nature of environmental responsibility is hard to argue when confronted by short term and locally partial economic interests, pursued with mechanical and destructive efficiency.
    I suppose what I want to do is protest the unacceptable end product of deliberately imposed waste, and point to it as a moral outrage that ought to compel changes to the process that leads to it. And I want theology, eco-theology if you like, to have a voice in how we see the world and how we care / don’t care what happens in it.

    Reply

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