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'seeding the water as the earth': THE EPICENTER AND PERIPHERIES OF A WESTERN AQUACULTURAL REVOLUTION
DARIN KINSEY
ABSTRACT
Historical accounts of the development of a modern science of aquaculture have tended to focus upon one or two states, particular interest groups, and, or, specific species of fish. This small and narrowly focused body of literature has left the existence of a broader movement, one that ultimately spanned the entire globe by the second half of the nineteenth century and included many dozens of aquatic species, largely unappreciated and unexamined. This essay highlights the significance of the French origins of that modern aquacultural revolution and traces the movement's diffusion into wider Western intellectual and ecological peripheries.
| DURING NAPOLEON III's Second Empire, French scientists, naturalists, and imperial authorities joined forces to launch a new campaign of conquest. It was a campaign that took advantage of the best French scientific and bureaucratic assets to elevate the last unconquered region of the planet—its aquatic wilderness—to a level of domestication. The French, responding to a perception that a "terrestrial bias" had prevented the wise exploitation of the illimitable potential of the earth's waters, developed state policies and initiated scientific inquiries that ultimately led to a major shift in human attitudes concerning aquatic ecosystems. In this case, it was no less than the commencement of a Western scientific aquacultural revolution that ushered in a global, and coextensive, cultural and ecological transformation. |
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Aquaculture, simply defined, is the systematic cultivation of the natural produce of aquatic habitats. Its etymological kinship with agriculture is obvious: In the terrestrial context, "cultivation" suggests the breaking of land for planting crops and improving disorganized wilderness through the taming effects of domestication. Aquaculture displays a similarly activist agenda. Yet systematic agriculture, along with the husbandry of domesticated animals and plants, became the central scheme around which diverse human civilizations coalesced. As such, managing agriculture became a central preoccupation of states. In contrast, husbandry of aquatic habitats, while documented from antiquity to the modern period, remained on the peripheries of state interest and control. States by and large viewed aquatic habitats as bountiful pools of resources that simply could be taken through fishing and gathering, and such methods proved wholly adequate to supplement the consumptive needs of pre-modern Western agricultural societies.1 |
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AQUATIC SCIENCE AND THE STATE | |
| NOT SURPRISINGLY THEN, one finds the epicenter of what became a global aquacultural revolution not on the fertile plains of the Neolithic Near East, but in a far more recent setting. More precisely, it was in nineteenth-century Paris where elite savants initiated an intellectual inquiry that ultimately redefined human relationships to aquatic habitats; from places of mere exploitation they became rationally organized dominions. It was the ideologies of nationalism and imperialism that ultimately gave states cause to view the waters as something more than natural larders for fish, but as fertile basins for the cultivation of a great bounty of aquatic resources. Western nations found their inspiration and, in most cases, their scientific models, in France, where in less than fifty years, the investment of vast financial and intellectual resources provoked a global appropriation of aquatic habitats, and distribution of aquatic fauna, that has continued to intensify and become more sophisticated to this day.2 |
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