immanence

Two kinds of historical turning points define our era.

The first kind involves the retrospective identification of new forms of enclosure, exploitive intensification, or system derailment. Debates over the beginnings of a recession, or of a war, or — on a larger scale — of the Anthropocene, are about this kind of backdating: how far back do we trace the beginnings of a crisis we are well in the midst of, but which we have only belatedly come to recognize?

The second kind identify “peaks” of a certain form of exploitation, such as “peak oil,” which mark the moments at which the viability of a crucial resource begins to reverse direction and force a scramble for replacements.

To the latter kind we can now add 2014 (roughly) as the year of “peak wild fish.” As the Breakthrough Institute‘s Marian Swain details in this Slate article, aquaculture surpassed wild capture as our main source of seafood for the first time this year. Swain accepts that there is no going back, and optimistically describes a scenario in the “not-so-distant future” when consumers “may be aghast to find out that their sustainably farmed halibut was actually trawled from a commercial fishery.” What, not from a farm? Throw it out, then.

That seems a bit like arguing that fresh air sucks compared to the exhaust you breathe in the middle of Boston’s Central Artery Tunnel. But whether it’s preferable or not isn’t the point. The point is that we are crossing these thresholds regularly now, like salmon on their way to an ocean who won’t have a river to spawn in when it comes time for that.

No going back. (Notch up one more point for the increasing relevance of Whitehead, for whom there is only always the movement forward.)