Hope in the Water: "The Fish in the Sea" (Intuitive Content, Minnesota Film and Television, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, June 19) my husband Charles and I put on a couple of science shows on KPBS, including the first part of a three-part miniseries called Hope in the Water. This part was called “The Fish in the Sea” and was co-produced by José Andrés, superstar chef and restaurateur who founded World Central Kitchen to make food available to victims of emergencies, both natural and man-made; and Baratunde Thurston, an African-American filmmaker and occasional MS-NBC host. (I just did a search for him on my GoogleDocs files and came up only with a reference for my journal entry on November 14, 2020, which included a rant about him saying that people who heard the phrase “defund the police” and assumed it literally meant what the words mean – get rid of the police – suffered from a “lack of imagination.” That’s not how political slogans are supposed to work!) I was watching it not long after I’d watched a YouTube video claiming that the world’s supply of arable land is shrinking even as the human population inexorably rises, and this will lead to major food shortages as it becomes harder and harder to feed the world’s people with land-based food alone. So the world will become more dependent on the oceans for its food supply even as the oceans themselves are under assault from human-caused climate change, particularly global warming.

“The Fish in the Sea” consisted of three stories illustrating just how different people in communities around the world are working to maintain the seas as viable food sources for humans despite the relentless overfishing of habitats by commercial fishing companies. The first, and to my mind the most inspiring, was the tale of COAST, a group of fishermen on the Arran Islands off the coast of Scotland, who worked to combat the overfishing of their home waters. They were inspired by a similar group in New Zealand who succeeded in lobbying the New Zealand government to set aside parts of the country’s coastal waters as “no-take zones” in which the fish populations would have a chance to recover. The activists sent regular petitions to the British and Scottish governments (Scotland has an autonomous parliament, something like a U.S. state legislature) to set up a “no-take zone” and got exactly nowhere until they started to organize and came up with a colorful name, which stands for “Community of Arran Seabed Trust.” What made their crisis particularly dire was the fact that, having already depleted the population of free-swimming fish, the big corporations turned to dredging the ocean floor for scallops and other mollusks. This destroyed what was left of the ocean bed and drove away the few remaining fish, who had nowhere safe to spawn. After 15 years COAST finally got their “no-take zone” established and it was a huge success; both fish and scallop populations recovered big-time and independent fishermen with small boats once again had a chance to catch enough fish for their own survival, and then some.

The second – the one in which Andrés and Thurston were personally involved – was off the coast of Puerto Rico, where they came to the rescue of shrimp fishermen whose catch was falling rapidly by teaching them to fish for squid. The show gave a greatly detailed account of just how you do that: it involves an elaborate system of buoys, lines and baited hooks. The first voyage on which Andrés and Thurston went out was interrupted by a storm, which forced the crew not only to abandon their attempts to catch squid but to pull up their elaborate equipment and head back to port. But later they succeeded, and the show demonstrated not only how you catch squid but how you eat them as well: you cut their meat into long filets, bread them and deep-fry them the way you would with more normal seafood like halibut or cod. The third segment took place in Hawai’i and also dealt with a “no-take zone,” though in an inland fresh-water lake instead of the coastline. The stories on “The Fish in the Sea” offered all too rare opportunities for optimism about the future of Earth as a suitable habitat for humans despite the enormous power of governments and private corporations to block any sensible solutions to environmental crises in favor of the “burn, baby, burn” and “drill, baby, drill” policies advanced by the major energy companies and the former (and probably future) President who just demanded a $1 billion bribe from them to help re-elect him so he can complete the total destruction of the world’s environment he began in his first term.