Overfishing and the Biotic Community

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.