The ocean today is a central protagonist in the ongoing battle for life on earth. It is the site of a violent clash between the right to live and the right to profit, as corporate interests enclose the ocean’s vast common of living riches through tourism and industrial fishing—distorting landscapes, depleting fish stocks, and destroying barriers to protection against climate disaster. Our Mother Ocean tells the story of the Fisherman’s Movement from its beginnings in Southern India to its central role in the struggle against neoliberal globalization. Since the 1970s, the Fisherman’s Movement has been one of the ocean’s closest and most impassioned protectors, raising key questions concerning the relationship between work and the safeguarding of common resources, the provision of community needs and environmental limits of the devastating industrialization of our oceans. While a remarkable political awareness has spread over the last 40 years around questions of food, agriculture and land, the issues of the sea have remained concealed, despite the protracted struggles between fish workers and those who oversee the sector and the exploitation of the ocean’s resources. In this crucial intervention, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese offer the ocean to the land-locked history of food sovereignty movements led primarily workers in the global South against dispossession. Dalla Costa and Chilese draw attention to the polyvalent functions of the ocean as a source of food, medicine, raw materials, biodiversity and culture—and as a site of human labour and livelihood threatened by vast enclosures through industrial fishing and tourism. This book is an urgent reminder that the ocean is today the site of a heroic struggle for the preservation of life on earth. It points crucially to impassioned sectors of the movement of movements that endure in the global South, and details the stakes of the struggles and its outcomes on land and at sea as central for the future of life on earth.
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Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Our Mother Ocean
OUR MOTHER OCEAN
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
ONE “THE FOUNT ANDSCOURGE OFOCEAN LIFE”
A MASS OF WATER, A RESERVOIR OF WONDERS
THE CRISIS AND ENCLOSURE OF THE ARCHÉ OF LIFE
TWO. THE IMPOVERISHMENTOF THE MARINE FAUNA:SOCIAL AND POLITICALPROBLEMATICS
EXCESSIVE FISHING
ILLEGAL FISHING
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTOF INDUSTRIAL AQUACULTURE
POLLUTION
THREE. NEITHER FISH NORFISHERMEN
ALWAYS LESS FISH IN THE NETS
COMMERCIAL SPECIES AT RISK IN ITALY
ARTISAN FISHING: A PATRIMONY AT RISK
FISHING AND VALLEY CULTURE OF OTHER TIMES:A LOOK AT THE VENICE LAGOON
FOUR. THE FISHERMEN MOVEMENT
FARMS THAT KILL
OTHER SIGNIFICANT STRUGGLES
SELF-ORGANIZATION INITIATIVES
NATIONAL FISHWORKERS FORUM AND THE WORLD FORUM OF FISHER PEOPLES
APPENDIX ONE
APPENDIX TWO
AIMS
PREAMBLE
OBJECTIVES
MEMBERSHIP
STRUCTURES
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
THE COORDINATING COMMITTEE
CONTINENTAL FORUM
GENERAL CONDITIONS
APPENDIX THREE. WORLD FISHERIES DAY 20041
BIBLIOGRAPHY
About the Authors
About the Translator
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Praise for Our Mother Ocean
“Through overfishing, industrial aquaculture, and poisoning, capitalism is killing ocean life—upon which all of life on Earth depends—but the people who are most directly threatened by this destruction are fighting back, and the rest of us urgently need to join their struggles. That is the story that unfolds in this remarkably detailed but compact book by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese. To date, awareness of the killing has been mostly limited to the environmental movement. At the same time, awareness of the ways in which capitalism has been slowly destroying traditional communities of those who live by, on, and with the seas has been mostly limited to the peoples of those communities and, in the case of indigenous fishing communities, a few anthropologists. This book not only illuminates the interrelationships between these two patterns of destruction, but also highlights the emergence of a worldwide movement of resistance on the part of some of those most directly threatened.”
.....
—María Mies, author of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale and coauthor of The Subsistence Perspective with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen
“The emergence of the fisher as part of the movement against neoliberal globalization is beautifully understood in this book. I applaud the authors’ passionate portrayal of workers on the sea as an organic part of those of us who wish to protect Nature against the rapacious excesses of capitalism.”
