I happened to see an article on fishing as the cradle of civilization in the current, on line, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. I don't normally read the post, and never have, and I'm admittedly one of those people who, when they look at it, are usually looking for the cover illustrations that the magazine featured prior to the mid 1960s, which are often fantastic. This is not to say that it's a bad magazine by any means, but rather to say I'm not all that familiar with it in its current form.
The short article, and it was very short, that I read starts off with this statement:
Of the three ancient ways of obtaining food — hunting, plant foraging, and fishing — only the last remained important after the development of agriculture and livestock raising in Southwest Asia some 12,000 years ago.
I got to thinking about that, and while there's some truth to that statement, it's not completely accurate by any means whatsoever and to the extent it is, it's an accuracy that's much more recent than we might suppose. And frankly, it's a symptom of why modern people, frankly, hate their existence to the extent that they do. More on that last comment in a moment.
Fishing is fish hunting.* Let's make no mistake about it, that's what it is. I like fishing, aquatic hunting, but I like terrestrial hunting more. Still, fishing is probably my second favorite thing to do, right after hunting.
It's ingrained deep into our DNAs and people who claim they have a distaste for either activity are simply denying part of their human nature. But humans are in huge denial about much of their nature today in every conceivable way. The reaction to that is universally negative. In spite of the improvement in nearly every aspect of our lives in some ways, people often hate the modern world in a really deep down and profound way. The closer they remain to some early element of it, and frankly that includes small scale agriculture, i.e., gardening, as well as hunting and fishing, generally the happier they are. Even outdoor activities that seem to have nothing to do with these activities, if closely studied, really do. Hiking, camping, etc., are all auxiliary to them and part of them, in a deep overall sense.
Anyhow, in reality when humans took up agriculture, as we've already explored here, it turns out that in reality they continued hunting as a primary activity for many, many years. Indeed, for centuries. And even in highly developed modern cultures hunting provided meat for the table in most of them up until extremely recently. Indeed, even in the Western world, in those regions that are not heavily urban, it still does. Urban people don't realize that, but it is the case.
Market hunting is gone, but only fairly recently, and indeed not even completely. Even in the western world there'd some market hunting outside of North America. If there is none in North America, that's due to regulations and laws that sought to preserve game for all, in keeping with the egalitarian nature of late 19th and 20th Century American culture, something that we're slowly losing, egalitarianism that is, in the 21st. Anyhow, the introductory statement, the more you look at it, is wrong.
What is correct is that individual fishermen making their living from the sea does continue to exist in a form that's surprisingly recognizable over the eons.
Yet ancient fisher folk and their communities have almost entirely escaped scholarly study. Why? Such communities held their knowledge close to their chests and seldom gave birth to powerful monarchs or divine rulers. And they conveyed knowledge from one generation to the next by word of mouth, not writing.
This is an interesting question. I don't fully know the answer to that question, but it's well worth looking at
That knowledge remains highly relevant today. Fishers are people who draw their living from a hard, uncontrollable world that is perfectly indifferent to their fortunes or suffering. Many of them still fish with hooks, lines, nets, and spears that are virtually unchanged since the Ice Age.
Again, that's correct, and it is interesting in the extreme.
I'm not going to comment paragraph by paragraph on the article following that, but it makes a really good case for studying the culture of small scale, but professional, fishing.
Centuries ago, urban populations numbered in the thousands, but the demand for fish was insatiable. Today, the silent elephant in the fishing room is an exploding global population that considers ocean fish a staple. Deep-water trawls, diesel trawlers, electronic fish finders, and factory ships with deep freezes have turned the most ancient of our ways of obtaining food into an industrial behemoth. Even remote fisheries are being decimated.
Despite large-scale fish farming, humans face the specter of losing our most ancient practice of food gathering — and thus leaving behind an ocean that is almost fishless.
I"m going to pick up again here. And in doing so, I'm going to swim against the tide (yes, I know that will be seen as a pun.
That the "oceans are in peril" is well known. However, even though I'm not really an optimistic person anymore, my occupation doesn't allow for it and experience counsels me against it, I'm not pessimistic here. In actuality, over my half century of life many fisheries have come roaring back, including ocean fisheries. When I was a kid you didn't swim in the Great Lakes and nobody pulled fish from it. On a trip to Ontario as a kid we crossed into New York to swim in Lake Ontario as it was so polluted on the Canadian side you didn't swim there. And just recently it's been reported that sharks are present in numbers on the East Coast this year as seals are as well, and the seals are as the fish they feed on are back as well, back from the edge of extinction.
Not that there's not reason to be concerned, but here's actually a topic where I'm pretty optimistic.
As part of that, the statement about the "exploding global population" is one that's really jumped the shark (yes, another pun). It's seemingly missed repeatedly by nearly everyone that we're now at or near peak human population. Every demographer concedes that in this century, which we're now 20% of the way into, the human population will start to decline.
It already is declining in Europe. It would be declining in the United States but for an odd American belief that it's always 1862 and the frontier is always open and expanding. The United States, where such comments are always written, does have an expanding population, but only because the U.S. has massive immigration rates.
Now, this isn't an article on the topic of immigration, but simple math demonstrates that the U.S. population would be declining, as the U.S. birth rate is largely below replacement, but for immigration. Proponents of large scale immigration, which is unique to the United States, have ironically begun to cite that as the reason that it must be kept up. So, at the same time that its common to read about the "exploding global population" the same quarter argues that the collapsing Western world birth rate means that a high level of immigration must be maintained.**
This is largely based on some false demographic and economic concepts. Immigration isn't a bad thing in and of itself by any means, and in some instances justice and morality demand that immigrants be allowed into countries that can absorb them. But the concept that the economy depends upon it is incorrect as that ignores the wage depression aspects of it. Further arguments about needing to have lots of (low paid) immigrant laborers to pay for the retirements of (formerly much better paid) retirees is also based on a false premise. In reality, in the age of work place automation, which is coming in at a blistering level, those arguments are a house of cards.
Population growth does damage the environment, to be sure. But that growth is slowing or reversing in the entire northern hemisphere and it will be everywhere else, fairly soon.***Only, once again, in the US and Canada, in the opposite really true, and in at least the US there's been some massively impacted areas due to internal emigration, as well as immigration, the two not being the same. This has to do, however, once again with the American belief that this sort of thing doesn't matter as the country is always somehow expanding. But even in the US there are regions in which the trend has been in the other direction, while there are also those where the opposite is very true. What's significant, however, is that for political reasons, rather than the economic ones we tend to cite, this has been the choice of the country, or at least of its leaders, and not simply something that occurred.
Irrespective of all of that, what is clear is that in advanced societies, setting aside whatever it may mean and the morality or immortality of what may be causing it, the population is going down, save for the United States, and Canada, where immigration alone is causing it to go up.**** This trend crosses cultures and regions, and is true of advanced nations in the East, such as Japan, as well as advanced nations of various cultures in the West. It's known that it applies to all cultures everywhere. So, while right now there are serious articles about a demographic collapse in Japan (which isn't really the disaster its portrayed to be), in the foreseeable future there will be such articles about the more advanced nations of South America.
As this occurs demands on resources decline and we're seeing the "rewilding" of places, such as the "rewilding of Europe".
Which takes me to the next point.
Whether every aspect of all of this is good or bad can be left for discussion elsewhere or to another time if discussed here. But with rewilding we should hope for the rewilding of people. That is, not turning people into absurd pseudo pagans or something, but getting them back out there. Back to the streams, back to the beach, and back to the fields.
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*Ironically, this article includes an image of an ancient Egpytian couple in a marsh. They're not fishing, however, they're hunting, as the caption demonstates:
Featured image: Menna and Family Hunting in the Marshes (c. 1400–1352 B.C.); Metropolitan Museum of Art.
**As we've discussed elsewhere, there's an odd human tendency to believe that we live in the worst of all possible eras, which is far from true. This inclination causes us to exaggerate the risks of many things and to believe that the news fo the past remains the news of the day.
I'm constantly hearing about how the whole world is at war. It isn't. Likewise, I'll hear how the current era is the most violent of all time. That's the polar opposite of the truth.
I'm not going to get into the many environmental issues that are frequently in the news today in any form. So I'm not going to argue one way or another about them. But I'll note that today there's a panicky article in our local newspaper about the absolute the need to eschew lead bullets in hunting. The real message should be get out hunting. Sitting around in the house worrying about lead bullets is a lot more damaging that the lead could ever be.
***There are real moral issues to this. The means of achieving the slow down aren't being endorsed here. I'm merely observing the actual trends.
****Once again, note the footnote above.
