A young Marsh Arab. The عرب الأهوار (ʻArab al-Ahwār) “Arabs of the marshes” live in the extensive delta of the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq. Their traditional lifestyle, based on fishing, is strikingly similar to that of the ancient Sumerians.
There is finally starting to be some reporting in the media on an issue of supreme importance: the oceans are being destroyed at a spectacular rate. This disaster is every bit as serious as the problem of climate alteration, to which it is connected. It is a hundred times more serious a problem than terrorism. You will notice that I have not phrased the issue in the nebulous, blame-evaporating way that has become customary. I have not said that “we” are destroying the oceans. We are not doing this. It is being done by specific people: the gangsters of the world’s dictatorships, the elected decision-makers in corrupted and half-functioning democracies, and a host of corporate criminals. The corporate powers are not separable from government. All corporate power is in some way a manifestation of government power. The presidential Bush family, for instance, is among the oligarchs that have accumulated fortunes through devastating the seas. A small number of people, who certainly have no legitimate claim to these natural resources, grow wealthy. In the process, they are rapidly destroying something that is essential for our survival.
The scale of destruction is almost beyond comprehension. On the continental shelves, dragnets scrape clean all the benthic ecosystems every two years, and have destroyed an area 150 times larger than all the world’s forest clearcuts. Driftnets over two hundred kilometres long scoop up everything randomly. Many of these nets are abandoned, and are indestructible. They will continue to suck up and destroy fish pointlessly for an indefinite period. All around the globe, fish stocks are collapsing, not on a timetable of centuries or decades, but of years. It is not humble fishermen who are doing this — they have almost all been driven out of the seas and onto the welfare rolls. It is oligarchical and political power that does this. Lunatic waste and destruction that would never be permitted on land, anywhere, is commonplace on the sea. Because it exists in a stateless no-man’s-land, anyone with brute power can get away with anything.
We are only just now beginning to understand the crucial role of seafood in the evolution of our species. About a hundred thousand years ago, we experienced a sudden surge in complexity of behaviour. Art, and perhaps spoken language appeared. Technology began to accelerate and diversify. Previously, the human tool-kit had remained almost static for nearly a million years. The first areas where these new features appear are closely associated with sea coasts, and with fossil evidence of human consumption of a variety of seafood. It is now suspected that DHA and other similar nutrients, which abound in seafood, played a critical role in the evolution of the human brain, and that an exploitation of marine resources triggered this sudden evolutionary leap.* It coincides with a dramatic spread of human beings across the planet, a spread that could only have occurred if human beings had developed boats. Forty thousand years ago, for instance, human beings were capable of undertaking a long open sea voyage to populate Australia.
Few historians have yet grasped the importance of fishing in the human story, or even noticed that the majority of early urban centers began as fishing villages. A fishing village requires sophisticated systems of social co-ordination and co-operation, employs a complex technology that undergoes constant refinement, and houses people who travel considerable distances from their home base. Oceans, lakes and rivers provide channels of long-distance communication. And inhabitants of fishing villages consume a high proportion of “brain food”, rich in the specific fatty acids that stimulate the higher functions of the brain.
Surely these factors should excite the interest of historians, but there has been relatively little study of fishing communities in history. Check out any large university library, and you will soon notice the discrepancy. There is a curious blind spot among historians about fishing and fishing villages. Look at the earliest known urban center of urban civilization, Sumeria, from which much of our combined human heritage can trace itself. Read any book about Sumeria, and you will get the impression that civilization sprang up when farmers thought up ways to increase the yields of grain in a desert landscape. These early farmers are assumed to be direct descendents of the early farmers in the distant hill country, who have left an archaeological record of their success that predates the city-based irrigation farming of Sumeria.
I would venture a somewhat different scenario. The urban life of Sumeria developed from villages in the marshes and bays at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates. We have a pretty good idea what these villages were like, because very similar villages have survived in the same place, inhabited by the culturally distinctive “Marsh Arabs”, who have preserved much of this lifestyle for thousands of years. The Marsh Arabs have retreated into their maze of marshes whenever land-based empires and hordes have threatened them. Recently, Saddam Hussein attempted to exterminate them, by draining the marshes, but fortunately did not succeed. This kind of village life is primarily based on fishing. It may or may not involve spinoff activities of animal husbandry and agriculture. In most cases, it’s difficult to disentangle these “non-fishing” activities from fishing. I suspect that the familiar irrigated farming of grains was an extension of marsh fishing, with delta fisherman exploring and expanding upstream, devising ways of farming beyond their original habitat. It is noteworthy that every Sumero-Akkadian city, even far upstream, maintained a “municipal swamp” to provide the reeds and other marsh products essential to their economies. The agriculture of the delta and river floodplains may have been a relatively independent development, only slightly influenced by the type of agriculture that developed in the mountain villages of the Levant and Zagros, which is usually cited as the antecedent form.
Coastal and delta agriculture based on gathering fish and using them to fertilize crops is common to many ancient societies. The thickly populated native American farming villages on the east coast of the United States and Canada, for instance, were completely integrated into a large-scale menhaden fishery, which was essential to growing their corn and squash. The menhaden (the word is borrowed from the Narraganset language) is a filter-feeding fish that processes the phytoplanctons in the sea and forms the bottom of the animal food chain in the Atlantic. When Europeans settled the coast, they duplicated and retained this integrated aqua/agriculture of the native coastal villages. The Pilgrim clergyman Francis Higginson remarked, in 1630, that “the abundance of Sea-Fish are almost beyond beleeving, and sure I should scarce have beleeved it except that I had seene it with mine owne eyes.”
Centuries of land-based empires, usually of horse-worshiping aristocracies ruling inland agricultural peasants, have drawn our eyes away from the sea. Even where we know that most trade traveled the seas, and that the fisheries provided much of the protein to sedentary populations, fishing has usually been treated as a marginal activity, and has not been dwelt on when describing historical societies. Interest in the subject has been confined to a handful of specialists, and their findings have seldom found a place in general histories and historical theories.
Modern industrial society has shifted its focus away from the sea. Even coastal cities do not focus economically or politically on the sea any more, and many coastal areas have been allowed to decay into poverty (the Canadian maritime provinces being a striking example). Over the last century, seafood has become steadily less important in the diet of North Americans. I suspect that this shift has also occurred in Europe. One nutritionist has pointed out that we have been systematically abandoning the diet that made Homo Sapiens successful, and adopting the diet of the Neanderthals, who did not survive. Neanderthals, a line related to us, but genetically not our ancestors, lived shorter lives, and seem to have been plagued by many diseases which are now accelerating rapidly among us. The spectacular growth of heart disease, diabetes and cancer coincide with this dietery shift.
Not surprisingly in this state of affairs, ecological disaster in the oceans attracts less attention than it should. While the significant danger of climate change took decades to become clear to us, there was never any secret about the disastrous state of the oceans. Fisheries have been collapsing around the world, and some of the devastation has been so dramatic that ordinary people can see it with their own eyes, and have experienced it over their lifetimes. But, while nobody has gone to much trouble to deny it, it has not made much of an impression on the public, or filled much media space. In local areas where fishing is economically important (such as Eastern Canada), it enters the news, but usually only in a local context. And the response to these problems on the political level have mostly consisted of shoulder-shrugging, inaction, and the assumption that these economic regions should be just written off.
If the fish stocks of the world completely collapse, which they are on the verge of doing, we may find ourselves compelled to survive on a diet chronically short of the factors that played a crucial role in developing our minds and civilization. There is some scientific evidence that people under-supplied with these factors are more prone to aggression and less able to co-operate, as well as more prone to the notorious “diseases of civilization”. I have not been able to evaluate the relevant studies, so I can’t say this with confidence. But it does seem at least plausible. The prospect of a social shift that makes us nastier and stupider, and thus less likely to correct the shift, is not pleasant to contemplate.
For myself, I’m eating cold-water wild salmon every chance I get. I may not be able to in the near future.
[* see: 14854.(David Marsh) Role of the Essential Fatty Acids in the Evolution of the Modern Human Brain and 14855.(M. A. Crawford, et.al.) Evidence for the Unique Function of DHA During the Evolution of the Modern Hominid Brain ]
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