Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna

Abstract

On its face, Telesca's nonfiction work on tuna extinction has little in common with Alan Furst's novel of the same name. How could a nonfiction book concerning the extinction of the great bluefin tuna have anything in common with a fictional story of a corrupt and shadowy underworld during the French Resistance? However, upon closer examination, Telesca's exploration into the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) uncovers some shared themes: secrecy and lack of transparency, internationalism, greed, law, injustice, inequality, morality, and ethics. Telesca's book sadly deals with facts and not fiction.Bluefin tuna are known as “red gold” as a result of the exorbitant price their ruby-colored flesh is traded for in the sushi economy. The bluefin is not a typical fish in that she is warm-blooded. That's why her meat is red. Just one bluefin tuna from the Pacific sold for a record of US$3.1 million at Tokyo's Tsukiji marketplace in January 2019 (Telesca, 2021, p. 10). But as Telesca emphasizes, she is much more than a commodity. Bluefin are the largest tunas and can live up to 40 years. They migrate across all oceans and can dive deeper than 3,000 feet. We now know, because of modern scientific research, that it is extremely likely that they are more like us than we once thought—sentient creatures who experience pain, suffering, and pleasure in ways similar to other animals, like us. As the late Professor Victoria Braithwaite (2010) wrote: “I have argued that there is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as there is for birds and mammals—and more than there is for human neonates and preterm babies” (p. 153). And yet, the bluefin tuna's commodification, slaughter, and species journey toward extinction continues today.Red Gold is a dense but worthwhile read that explores the history and current status of the bluefin tuna trade, the limits of environmental activism in this area, the mistakes of fisheries science, and a confrontation of the sixth extinction we are currently living in. Telesca makes the case that despite the endangered status of this tuna, the ICCAT has not failed its institutional mission, but rather it is succeeding in its mission under international law. Its mission is not the preservation or conservation of aquatic animals but rather to maximize fishing in order to grow national economies. Telesca posits that in order to address this issue, we need more than just institutional reform alone, such as a more holistic reform of the dominant attitudes toward fishing in our cultures.Despite stringent restrictions on journalists’ access to ICCAT talks, ICCAT accredited the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University to become an observer in 2010. In this capacity, the author spent three years attending various ICCAT meetings and another two years interviewing some 40 ICCAT representatives. Archival materials and news media accounts supplemented hard-to-get data based on first-person, on-the-ground research. Through this experience, Telesca offers unparalleled access to ICCAT to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. ICCAT manages the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for what Telesca (2020) describes as “commodity empires,” and, as a result, it has become a complicit agent in their extermination (p. 14).Telesca's exploration excellently strikes the balance between accuracy and empathy for the sentient beings at the center of this international conflict, which can sometimes be lacking in more academic-leaning nonfiction works of social science. An example of this style of writing is evident in the book's discussion guide: The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists Atlantic bluefin tuna as “endangered” on its “red list” of threatened species. Preoccupation with counting the number of bluefin tuna detracts from how small she has rapidly become. Only a few decades ago, fishers along the US Atlantic seaboard called the bluefin “giant” because she once grew to the size of a horse and weighed well over a ton. Unlike people, fish produce more kin the older and bigger they are. To rob the bluefin of her capacity to become giant robs her of a future to flourish. (Telesca, 2021, p. 145)Telesca's work ambitiously but quite effectively tackles a myriad of complex and interconnected issues including the limitations of international law and policy, the influence of corporate power in law making, the continuing impacts of colonization on international power dynamics, and the devastating impact the food economy and cultural and consumer habits and preferences can have. The culmination of all of the above, combined with an anthropocentric worldview, has reduced animals to commodities. The bluefin tuna represents a case study of this difficult reality.The understanding and insight this book gives the animal ethicist of international treaties that “manage” animals is very important knowledge. Within the conservation and sometimes even animal protection communities, it is sometimes suggested that more international treaties such as the subject of this book, ICCAT, may be a key strategy in moving toward a world in which animals are better protected from extinction, suffering, and exploitation. However, this book may be read to suggest that a more fundamental shift in the commodity status of animals may be a necessary prerequisite for any such treaties to achieve the aforementioned goals. Efforts such as those proposed by the committee for the Convention for the Protection of Animals attempt to grapple with these tensions (Favre, 2016; 1988).Red Gold is a complex book on a complex topic. It highlights many problems nonhuman and aquatic animals are subject to in our anthropocentric world in which what the author calls “extractive capitalism” is a feature (Telesca, 2020, p. 10). The author offers no simple silver bullet solution to this problem. The author does, however, offer a complex web of interconnected solutions. These solutions are mostly predicated on the need for our dominant cultures to contemplate and fundamentally alter our individual and collective attitudes to other animals to one about “mutual care and stewardship of a shared planet” (Gaworecki & Telesca, 2021).