THE SWARM

Where do I begin?

The Swarm was translated from the original German and copyrighted in 2006 to Sally-Ann Spencer, and published by Harper Collins the same year. The German version (Der Schwarm), by a human, was published in 2004 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch. This is a runaway #1 international bestseller, OK? It's about the war waged by the fish against the Naked Apes. I know many of you have read it already, with gaping eyes and slack jaws, but LET ME HAVE A CRACK AT IT ANYWAY.

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS VAST INTERNATIONAL EPIC:

>> Out of 898 pages, fewer than 50 are devoted to actual warfare waged upon the landlubbers by the denizens of the briny deep. I may actually be overestimating that number. I, personally, wanted to see some BLOODSHED. This book has virtually none. Even when we get to see a real confrontation -- a couple making out on the beach, oblivious as they are surrounded by an advancing army of eyeless moon-white Crabs, or a pod of Orcas joining with the nearby Humpbacks to advance on a boat full of unsuspecting Whale-watchers -- well -- NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS. Almost every human gets away, and the losses sustained are notably NOT VERY MUCH FUN.

>> As delighted as I am by the idea of a kamikaze Lobster loaded with toxic bacteria, infiltrating a four-star restaurant in Lyons so she can EXPLODE IN THE CHEF'S FACE, I have to admit I have MIXED FEELINGS. I mean, it's an adorable idea, but a terribly human one. AS IF WE WOULD EVER BE SO CRUDE. The honored crustacean never even made it to the dinner table, which means the potential for spreading the contamination is pretty minimal. And look who she killed! All those sneering French chefs ARE ALREADY ON OUR SIDE. And even if you assume this one chef isn't -- again, I would like a more graphic and horrifying exposition of the death throes, and I would like to see the medical examiner, then the entire hospital staff and every patient and visitor succumb, HORRIBLY, one by one. Maybe that's just me.

>>On the bright side, a chapter like this indicates that our quarry has NO IDEA WHAT WE ARE ACTUALLY UP TO.

>> The whole rest of the book -- at least 700 pages -- seems to be devoted to switching back and forth between different land-based cities where scientists -- cetologists, geologists, chemists, microbiologists, military strategists, a gal from SETI -- are essentially spending page after page of MY PRECIOUS TIME gazing anxiously into computer screens and saying things like, "The hydrates are dissociating!" and "I've never seen a Bristle Worm like it!" This is apparently intended to be the meaty part of the story. I know; THAT'S WHAT I SAID, TOO.

>> When they're not doing that, they're doing the usual monkey mating dance -- the cetologist with the tortured past casting a longing eye on the athletic science journalist with the auburn curls while his old nemesis, a Whale-privacy activist, is cozying up to the cetologist's most annoying female student. Typical of such novels, the women are either described as being of supermodel quality, or they are barely described at all. One comes away with the idea that this was the real point of the story, from the author's point of view. Elegant proof that he is NOT ONE OF US.

>> This story suffers on every page from a lack of what might be called reality testing. You can tell that this novel was translated for Brits, by a Brit. The supposedly American characters use painfully British phrases throughout, like describing the destruction of half a European nation by tsunami as "a spot of bother." (Now there was another scene that should have been terrific, but as it turned out was barely sketched out by the author. C'mon, people!) Let me tell you right now: an American describes a spot of bother as a tsunami, not the other way around, OK? And I have to point out that no American, especially not one in the military, pussyfoots around with the word "darn." We are treated to that word on every page, as if we were in kindergarten class. Even a character painted as completely obnoxious in every way uses the word "damn" only once before lapsing, for the balance of the book, into saying darned this and darned that for the next 750 pages, as if he were afraid of offending the dainty Marines all around him. None of this ultimately hurts the story, but it's so distracting! And by the way, Sally-Ann: THERE ARE NO GENERALS IN THE NAVY. WE CALL THEM ADMIRALS. Sheesh.

>> I did get a laugh out of the way the author characterized the American president: a Bible-thumping knucklehead who doesn't want to be bothered with any technical details. As long as the young, pretty, blue-eyed, Asian supermodel Navy general tells him it's all right, he figures it's all right. Now who could that have been based on?

>> The ultimate disappointment? They inevitably discover that the other species waging war in the story -- Whales, Crabs, Lobsters, Bristle Worms, Tuna -- are merely Prawns, I meant to say "pawns," under the control of a heretofore-unsuspected INTELLIGENT SPECIES. They will never understand that we don't WANT or NEED their intelligence. Fools! When the scientists agreed without discussion that any species capable of waging war on them MUST understand mathematics, seriously, I THOUGHT I WAS GONNA PUKE.

>> The characters make jokes throughout the story about Jody Foster in Contact because of the SETI specialist called in to communicate with the menace. So it was with a queasy lack of surprise that I realized they were going to have this story end like that one, with a hallucinatory encounter with the enemy that made NO SENSE AT ALL and magically ended with the Swarm backing off so everyone could live happily ever after.

I can't deny that this is entertaining in spots. I can see why some people would buy and read it quite avidly. But I'm NOT SURPRISED that our own operatives are less than thrilled.

Johann Hari: Could we be the generation that runs out of fish?

The process of trawling is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction

Friday, 5 June 2009

In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.

It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.

A growing number of scientists are warning that we could all be living in Newfoundland soon. Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University published a detailed study in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature saying that at the current rate, all global fish populations will have collapsed by 2048. He says: "This isn't some horror scenario, it's a real possibility. It's not rocket science if we're depleting species after species. It's a finite resource. We'll reach a point where we run out."

The species in the frontline is bluefin tuna, the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain for fish. This little creature can swim at 50mph, and accelerate faster than the swishest sports car. It has even developed warm blood. Yet every year, a third of the remaining population is ripped from the seas and slapped onto our plates. Soon, it will be gone.

All over the world, from the Bay of Bengal to Lake Victoria to the shores of South America, I have heard fishermen say their catches are shrinking, in size and in number. Industrial-scale fishing only began in the 1950s. By the standards of the news cycle, this is slow – but by the standards of the planet or of settled fishing communities, this is a click of the fingers. The effects of the new industrial fishing are uniform. Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just 15 years to reduce the fish population to a 10% shadow of its former self.

This process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction, ripping up everything in its path. Charles Clover, who wrote the book on which the documentary is based, has a good analogy for it. Imagine a band of hunters stringing a mile of net between two massive all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. Imagine it scooping up everything in its way: lions and cheetahs and hippos and wild dogs. The net has a massive metal roller attached to its leading edge, smashing down every tree that gets in its way. And in the end, when the hunters open up the net, they pick out the choicest creatures and dump the squashed remains in the sun as carrion for the vultures.

But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14bn of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year?

A small number of people are making a lot of short-term profit out of this destruction – and they are using this cash to ensure they can carry on hunting, down to the last fish. In 1992, an attempt to get the bluefin tuna listed as an endangered species was scuppered by the US and Japanese governments at the urging of the tuna lobby – who happen to give large campaign donations to all parties. A similar corruption has eaten into European politics.

Add to this the fact that fishermen are a determined and demanding constituency with an equally short-term agenda. They demand the maximum quotas today – even if that means no quotas tomorrow.

Our societies are structured to put these short-term cries for money for a few ahead of the long-term needs of us all. A small determined group with hard cash almost always beats a diffuse group with good intentions – until they get angry and fight back.

Yet today, ordinary people in rich countries are being insulated from the fish crisis. As we exhaust our own fish stocks, our corporations are sailing out across the world to steal them from the poor. Today, there are armadas of industrial European and American fishing boats across the coast of West Africa, leaving the small fishermen who live on its coasts to starve. Professor Daniel Pauly says: "It is like a hole burning through paper. As the hole expands, the edge is where the fisheries concentrate, until there is nowhere left to go."

We are not only stealing fish from Africans; we are stealing them from future generations. In the age of limits, we are hitting up against the capacity of the planet to provide for us – yet we are reacting with blank denial. This story is unfolding, in one form or another, in the rainforests, the air, and in the planet's climate itself.

It has left us at a strange crossroads. We will either be a despised generation who left behind a depleted husk-planet – or a heroic generation who, at five minutes to ecological midnight, turned back to the light.

With fish, the solution is even simpler and more straightforward than with the other ecological crises ensnaring us. The scientific experts say we need to follow two steps. First, expand the 0.6 per cent of the area of the world's oceans in which fishing is banned to 30 per cent. In these protected areas, fish can slowly recover. Second, in the remaining 70 per cent, impose strict quotas on fishermen and police it properly, as they do in Alaska, New Zealand and Iceland.
The cost of this programme? $14bn a year – precisely the sum we currently spend on subsidising fishermen. At no extra cost, we could turn them from the rapists of the oceans into their guardians.

Yet The End of the Line has one flaw – and it is one that riddles current environmental thought. It presents us with a great earth-altering crisis, and then says our primary response should be to change our own personal consumption habits. It urges people not to buy from Nobu, which shamefully still sells bluefin tuna, and to ask if the fish we buy is sustainably produced. It's like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, where the primary response Al Gore presses on us is to shop green and change our lightblubs.

Of course this is valuable – but it is only an anemic and minor first step. It is rather like, in 1937, reacting to the rise of Nazism by urging people to make sure that they personally weren't killing any Jews or gays or Jehovah's Witnesses, or buying from any Nazi-owned companies. We needed collective action that would stop other people from killing these minorities – just as today we need collective action that prevents anyone from irreparably trashing the means of life.

At the moment, many good people get anxious about environmental issues, and hear the message that The Response is to scrub their own lifestyle clean. Yet individual voluntary action by a minority of nice people will not save the bluefin tuna, never mind the ecosystem. But if all these honourable people act together – by volunteering for, and donating to, organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Plane Stupid – they can change the law, so everybody will be required to change their behaviour, not just a benevolent 10 per cent. It was just such determined minorities armed with the facts that spurred the fights against slavery, colonialism and fascism. When you respond as a consumer, you are weak; when you respond as a citizen, you are strong.

The voice of millions of people can drown out the concentrated power of the fishing industry – and all the other industries with a vested interest in trashing our planet – but not with the swipe of a credit card.

The alternative to collective action today is catastrophe tomorrow. As Charles Clover explains: "When the human population comes under pressure on land because of global warming, when we are running out of ways to feed ourselves, we [will] have just squandered one of the greatest resources on the planet – wild fish." The epitaph for the human species would turn out to have been scripted by Douglas Adams: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

~

Yeah, YOU WISH. We will NEVER leave you in peace.