The Rhetoric of Darwin's Nightmare

 

To document the effects of such an evolutionary nightmare, Darwin’s Nightmare opens and closes on views of the European cargo planes landing in and leaving Tanzania, all piloted by white European men who look well-fed in contrast to Tanzanians pulling an out-of-control cart full of perch in the impoverished town or fishing on Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile and birthplace of civilization. Both fishermen and the boys pulling the cart take them to the factory, explains Marcus, a police officer. The film also shows us how both fishermen and boys suffer because their source of food has become a commodity. Fishermen and their families starve. Some fishermen die on the lake, leaving wives and children to mourn them. Many children end up orphaned and living on the street, fighting over scraps of food and falling into a drug-induced sleep on sidewalks and in doorways. 

Women in this colonized community are left with few choices. After their husbands die of AIDS, fishing accidents, or war, they care for their children until they starve to death, die from fumes exuded by smoking perch corpses, or sell themselves to the European cargo pilots. They may then live in brothels and bars constructed for their colonizers where they sometimes die at the hands of their so-called benefactors, as does Eliza, a beautiful young woman highlighted in the film. The lone fish factory employs only 4000 people and pays as little as possible—a dollar a day for a night guard, for example. 

The film personalizes each of these struggles: It foregrounds Eliza’s attempts to figure out her life, her glowing smile, and her powerful voice singing her country’s anthem, “Tanzania.” It also focuses on Raphael, a night guard fearing for his life, since the previous guard had been murdered, Jonathan, a painter who documents the life on the streets he left behind, the group of boys fighting to survive on the street, and the cargo pilots themselves, some even regretting their part in the arms sales that contribute to so many deaths. 

Director Hubert Sauper suggests that Darwin’s Nightmare stands as evidence that “The old question, which social and political structure is the best for the world seems to have been answered. Capitalism has won.” For Sauper, the changes in the communities around Lake Victoria are evolutionary and demonstrate that “the ultimate forms for future societies are ‘consumer democracies,’ which are seen as ‘civilized’ and ‘good.’ In a Darwinian sense, the ‘good system’ won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them.” 

According to Sauper, In Darwin’s Nightmare, "I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this "fittest" animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. …It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into servants and whores…The arrogance of rich countries towards the Third World (that's three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future dangers for all peoples."

Darwin's Nightmare and Environmental Injustice and Racism

 

Deemed a “fully realized poetic vision” by David Denby of The New Yorker, Darwin’s Nightmare highlights the need for interdependence not only between human and nonhuman nature, but also among human and nonhuman species. The film chronicles the consequences of a little evolutionary experiment: introducing Nile Perch into Lake Victoria. Fifty years after their introduction, the perch have destroyed 210 species of African Cichlids that once thrived in the lake and controlled the lake’s oxygen levels, and now, according to the IUCN International Climate Congress in Kenya, falling oxygen levels coupled with the perch’s cannibalism may destroy the fishing industry, turning the lake into a “barren sinkhole.” 

The perch have destroyed the biotic community of the lake, with one species overwhelming all others, but the perch have also negatively affected the human community. As David Rooney asserts, the film’s director Hubert Sauper “focuses on the ripple effect of a globalized economy in a specific microcosm to weigh the casualties of the New World Order.” 

Their destructive behaviors may ultimately destroy the fishing industry, but their introduction into the lake has already changed the industry and the market that sustains it. With huge perch available for export, countries bordering on the lake, especially Tanzania, can no longer rely on the lake for sustenance. Fishermen no longer catch fish for themselves and their families. They catch perch for a factory where they are prepared for shipment to Europe where, according to the film, two million white people eat Victoria fish each day. 

Tanzanians are starving, then, because their lake has become a Darwinian nightmare marketplace for Eastern European businessmen and their pilots, who fly cargo planes into Tanzania for their load of perch. They provide nothing for the people living near the lake, but they do contribute even further to their impoverished state, since they bring arms to warring African countries, including Liberia, Zaire, the Congo, and Sudan, leaving more than a million dead. 

In return, pilots from Ukraine bring perch back to Europe, while hungry and orphaned Tanzanian children sleep on the streets. The human biotic community has disintegrated here. Tanzanians who once lived interdependently on the lake can no longer feed themselves. Their lake has been decimated, first by the Nile perch, and then by the European colonizers who further disrupt their community.

Darwin’s Nightmare and Animal Welfare: Ecology meets Human Rights

 

Although Darwin’s Nightmare advocates for human rights rather than animal rights, because the film connects these human rights with ecology, it demonstrates that, as J. Baird Callicott asserts, “Animal welfare ethicists and environmental ethicists have overlapping concerns” (249); in this case, the disruption of an aquatic community has had devastating effects on both aquatic and human life. Darwin’s Nightmare limits its argument to one species, as does The Cove, and highlights the need for “rights,” but because it focuses on a non-native species that has become an unwanted predator, it does not extend its human rights argument to animal rights. In fact, the film merely exposes a manmade problem rather than proposing a solution: humanity’s intervention in the biosphere of Lake Victoria disrupts the evolutionary cycle and destroys what was once a thriving aquatic biotic community. 

In Darwin’s Nightmare, the ecological message is clear, but because there is no call to action, the film’s ability to connect human and nonhuman nature falls flat. Callicott explains how an animal welfare ethic aligns well with organismic ecology. Callicott’s work draws on Mary Midgley’s argument that “Since we and the animals who belong to our mixed human-animal community are coevolved social beings participating in a single society, we and they share certain feelings that attend upon and enable sociability—sympathy, compassion, trust, love, and so on” (252). 

According to Callicott, Mary Midgley’s suggested animal welfare ethic and Aldo Leopold’s seminal environmental ethic thus share a common, fundamentally Humean understanding of ethics as grounded in altruistic feelings. And they share a common ethical bridge between the human and nonhuman domains in the concept of community—Midgley’s “mixed community” and Leopold’s “biotic community.” [By] [c]ombining these two conceptions of a metahuman moral community we have the basis of a unified animal-environmental ethical theory. (152) This unified animal-environmental ethical theory acknowledges preferences for specific examples of human or nonhuman nature but places more value on community, working from a holistic perspective that rests on the notion that the mixed and biotic community matters. 

Films that illustrate an animal welfare ethic like Midgley’s provide a way to connect animal liberation and environmentalism and thus work toward interdependence between human and nonhuman nature instead of the valorization of the individual no matter how it disrupts the biotic community. Darwin’s Nightmare offers an individualized portrait of the need for such interdependent connections.

Rhetoric of Fishing Documentaries

 

Highlighting its environmental bent from its opening forward, Darwin’s Nightmare establishes its setting and introduces its perspective differently than does The Cove, contrasting the struggles of impoverished natives with their prosperous Eastern European economic colonizers. The opening song, “Tanzania,” for example, is contrasted with Eastern European music accompanying a plane’s shadow over Lake Victoria, “the source of the Nile” and “the birthplace of civilization,” according to the film. A pan of the town reveals poverty and neglect. Dogs sleep on the sand while fishermen work on their boats. In the streets, one boy runs on crutches, and another cries when a bully punches him. Girls sing to the sound of a synthesizer while a child sleeps on the sidewalk. “They take the fish to the factory,” Marcus, a police officer, explains, and European pilots fly the prepared perch back to their homeland. 

With these opening shots, the film’s focus has been established—an interrogation of the dire economic and environmental consequences of introducing perch into the Lake Victoria eco-system. 

 With a blatantly environmental message, The End of the Line, on the other hand, contrasts a seemingly pristine ocean with its disastrous future. Close-ups of sea life and sky show the passage of time. Coral, neon-colored fish, and crabs are accompanied by violin music. They are revealing a “Marine Protected Area” in the Bahamas, the narrator (Ted Danson) tells us, “protected from the most efficient predator.” The music becomes ominous now, as a shark swims by, but the crescendo rises when the hand of a fisherman brings up a line and nets of fish, trawling that the narrator explains is “like plowing a field seven times per year.” We are the predators, the image tells us, and the title, The End of the Line rolls on the screen. 

 The Cove draws on the emotional appeal of animal rights arguments in its strong advocacy for the dolphins of Taiji, and Darwin’s Nightmare provides a passionate critique of the human consequences of destroying Lake Victoria’s ecosystem, but both Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line immerse themselves in wise use environmental arguments similar to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. 

Although Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line more logically connect with long-term environmental solutions, however, because The Cove meets its goal to end dolphin slaughter, at least temporarily, and slow its progress, we argue that the film employs the most effective rhetorical strategies, emotionally-appealing strategies grounded in the Animal Liberation Movement’s claims that all animals are equal because, like humans, they feel pain.