The End of the Line offers a variety of solutions to this catastrophic future of our seas, all of which are based in organismic approaches of ecology that embrace sustainable development and biotic community. Alaska’s conservation methods are held up as one example of a better way, with a strictly enforced 200-mile fishing limit. Alaska also controls the number of fishing boats and enforces quotas on fishing levels, so that exploitation here is only ten percent, compared to 50% in the North Sea. In Alaska, fishermen are willing to take a cut in the harvest, so they can continue to catch fish. The film also suggests that consumers demand where their fish came from and how it was caught to support a sustainable fishing industry like that described by the Marine Stewardship Council. According to The End of the Line, some corporations are leading this drive toward sustainability. By 2011, Wal-Mart will only sell Marine Stewardship Council sustainable fish, for example. Two thirds of the fish Birdseye sells come from sustainable sources, and 99% of McDonalds fish come from sustainable sources.
The End of the Line argues against fish farming, however, suggesting the opening of more marine preserves where commercial fishing is off limits. According to the film’s narrator, a global network of 20-30% of the world’s oceans would help the seas regenerate themselves, an enormous change from oceans protected by marine preserves today—less than one percent. By implementing and enforcing fishing limits, changing our eating habits, abiding by rules and decreasing capacity, the film asserts, we can manage the sea for its recovery, and, as the narrator explains, we can act now. With this generalized focus on the biotic community of Earth’s oceans, The End of the Line moves beyond individualized animal rights arguments and embraces a sophisticated theory of organismic ecology.
Whether or not the film’s rhetoric will result in activist responses from viewers, however, is yet to be seen because the film is available primarily by accessing a website rather than through wide release. Despite multiple positive reviews and awards, including one from Sundance, the film has not found a mainstream distributor in the United States. Dogwoof Pictures, a UK company, is distributing the DVD, available on the film’s Website: endoftheline.com. The Website provides multiple resources for reclaiming the oceans and offers educational screenings of the film, but one screening at a Salt Lake City high school that was documented in a YouTube video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQJWPvRbqHM) resulted in laughter rather than outrage. Both Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line, then, demonstrate that arguments against overfishing that are based in organismic ecology may or may not change behaviors.
For us, The End of the Line effectively illustrates the consequences of industrialized fishing and consumerism. Despite its flaws, then, the film demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of over-using marine resources by contrasting views of oceans with and without the human impact of “fair use” fishing strategies that exploit the sea’s resources without regard for the future of sea life. The film documents evidence that validates this key argument. Our exploitation is killing the sea, making what was a renewable resource into a death pool.
The Newfoundland, Canada cod shortage is first held up as evidence. In 1992, what had once been the most abundant cod fishing area in the world had been fished out, so that 40,000 people lost their jobs, and cod became an endangered species in Canada, so much so that its population has not regenerated despite a moratorium. The levels of cod became so low that the fish were unable to recover. Near extinction of the blue fin tuna serves as a second compelling case supporting the film’s horrific assertion.
According to the narrator, once caught in the thousands, now catches of blue fin tuna have declined by 80%, probably in the last twenty-two years. Although The End of the Line does focus on specific species of tuna, it explains that these examples merely particularize a more general trend: species after species of fish have collapsed in the world’s oceans because developed nations crave seafood. Even fish in developing nations such as Senegal are sold to developed Europeans, forcing West Africans into poverty and starvation. The collapse of marine species also disrupts the oceans’ biotic community, destroying a balance of predator and prey found in the ocean food chain. Reasons for these major declines are explored, all related to a move toward large-scale industrial fishing in the 1950s, but the film primarily demonstrates that, at the current rate of fishing, the number of fish available in the world’s oceans will hit zero by 2048. Marine life is fragile, a finite resource that will disappear if we do not change the way we harvest fish.
Darwin’s Nightmare focuses on one example of species manipulation and human oppression. The End of the Line argues more generally for an ethical approach to the ocean environment that embraces sustainability. The film exclaims, “Imagine a world without fish,” and declares that, based on the current rate of fishing, the world will see the end of most seafood by 2048. By juxtaposing images of protected pristine seas with spectacles of predation, The End of the Line successfully argues for organismic approaches to ecology that see the survival of human nature indelibly intertwined with that of the nonhuman nature of the seas.
Reviews laud the film’s expose of what Andrew Schenker calls “a new threat to the planet’s sustainability.” As an Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival, Nathan Lee of The New York Times declares, The End of the Line “expos[es] the damages wrought to the sea by the usual suspects: industrialized food production, unchecked capitalism, and soaring consumer demand,” for example, and highlights the film’s focus on “an overfishing so severe that the world’s piscatorial stock may be completely depleted by 2048.” Roger Ebert also notes the film’s documentation of “what threatens to become an irreversible decline in aquatic populations within 40 years.”
Measures of how effectively the film conveys this horrific message vary, however. Although Roger Ebert asserts that the film “is constructed from interviews with many experts, a good deal of historical footage, and much incredible footage from under the sea, including breathtaking vistas of sea preserves, where the diversity of species can be seen to grow annually,” Nathan Lee states that the film’s propositions “are slathered in laughable scare music.” Andrew Schenker goes further, nearly condemning the film’s effectiveness, declaring, “the picture fails to build a rigorous enough argument to sustain [its] indignant tone.” According to Schenker, “If overfishing is to take its place among that growing catalogue of woes already assaulting the American conscience, … it will certainly take a far more cogent polemicist than [director] Rupert Murray to make it stick.”
Although they elucidate disparate issues surrounding our hunt for seafood, both The End of the Line and Darwin’s Nightmare draw on the biotic arguments of organismic ecology rather than animal rights ethics to substantiate their respective arguments against humanity’s exploitation of marine life. The End of the Line asserts and supports a straightforward argument against overfishing in our oceans around the world, and Darwin’s Nightmare effectively demonstrates the negative consequences of introducing non-native (and carnivorous) species into a fresh water lake (Lake Victoria), but they both highlight the need for a biotic community undisrupted by human intervention—either by industrializing the fishing industry or experimenting with a marine biosphere in Africa.
This perspective draws on organismic approaches to ecology, which are based on Frederic Clements’ view of a plant community as a living organism that evolves through succession. According to Clements, as a living organism, a plant community changes over time: “The unit of vegetation, the climax formation is an organic entity. As an organism, the formation arises, grows, matures, and dies…. The climax formation is the adult organism, the fully developed community” (Clements 124-25 quoted in Merchant 182). This process of succession paralleled both the life cycle and the developmental history of the United States, with pioneer species invading ecosystems until climax communities of species were established: the deciduous forest climax, the prairie-plains climax, the mountain range climaxes of the Rocky Mountains, and the desert climaxes of the Southwest. A plant community is also vulnerable to disruption or death by technologies such as those that caused the Dust Bowl; however, when humans as pioneer species “had not appreciated or understood the grassland biome native to the Plains” (Merchant 184).
The organismic school of ecology “rejected Social Darwinist assumptions of a nature characterized by Thomas Henry Huxley as ‘red in tooth and claw,’ for a nature of cooperation among individuals in animal and human communities” (Merchant 184). Warder C. Allee and Alfred E. Emerson, organismic ecologists at the University of Chicago after World War I, saw the workings of the natural world as a model for healing societal problems. Organismic ecologist Aldo Leopold, on the other hand, applied human ethics to the natural world, constructing a manifesto, “The Land Ethic,” which encouraged an ecologically centered view of the land as a biotic pyramid in which humans were a part. In Leopold’s view, humans had “the scientific and ethical tools to follow nature and heal it” (Merchant 185).
An organismic approach to ecology views the natural world as a set of communities where living creatures cooperate in interconnected relationships. Ideally, humans, too, interact with the natural world cooperatively rather than seeking to exploit and ultimately destroy it. For Leopold and other organismic ecologists, humanity should see both nature and society as an organism in which each natural element, both human and nonhuman, contributes a part. From this perspective, humans thrive only when they seek to sustain rather than exploit the natural world around them because they too are part of this whole organism, a Gestalt, of sorts, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our societies too prove most effective when each member is seen as equally important because he or she contributes to the success of the whole.
Both The End of the Line and Darwin’s Nightmare emphasize the need to work toward sustainable development, sustaining the natural world rather than exploiting it as only a source of food. The End of the Line warns us against the corporate fishing that is depleting our seafood supply so astronomically that our oceans will be virtually empty of fish in a few decades. Instead, the film asserts, we should implement sustainable fishing practices that maintain aquatic life and nurtures the oceans’ biotic communities. Darwin’s Nightmare, on the other hand, demonstrates how our greed for a particular type of fish—perch—has irrevocably disrupted the biosphere of Lake Victoria. Because of the changes in the fishing industry caused by the overabundance of perch and Westerners’ taste for this fish as food, human nature has also been irrevocably disrupted according to the film, demonstrating how interconnected human and nonhuman nature remain.
