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.
Some industrial practices are constructed as cruel in Hugo Latulippe’s Bacon: The Film through scenes of distressed piglets, which become portraits of infants taken by force from parents. These changing practices in industrial hog farms around Quebec are contrasted with pastoral scenes around the farm. But these scenes are devoid of farm animals, and shots outside slaughterhouses and images of hogs as food suggest there was no place for connections in this hyper-industrialized era.
Jason Young’s Animals, on the other hand, provides clear portraits of animals raised on a more traditional family farm. The film looks at the everyday slaughter of animals for food on the farm where the animals are personalized as pets with names before the slaughter.
Animals are included in the credits alongside their human filmmaker counterparts, as well, so the sentience of these farm animals is validated. These animals' faces are even reasserted onto the meat after their slaughter. In the film, actual slaughter of a rabbit and a yearling are shown, but we only hear the filmmaker's acts of killing. And although Young does decide to stop actually killing the animals on the farm, he and his family continue eating meat. As Young notes, this leaves him off the hook, not his favorite animals.
The message in Animals is ambiguous, then, but still points to the need to realize our meat comes from sentient beings. Despite their rhetorical weaknesses, these films articulate similar arguments against factory farming, as do popular U.S. food films such as Food, Inc. and King Corn, and European films such as We Feed the World and Our Daily Bread.
Nostalgic reminiscences serve a central role in a series of National Film Board of Canada documentaries. Beef, Inc., Bacon: The Film, and Animals all focus on the meat industry and its negative consequences, sometimes by connecting the negative environmental consequences of animal fecal matter and governmental policy.
These three films draw on nostalgia to emphasize the dangers of industrializing meat production, but they also individualize the animals being prepared for slaughter, applying an animal rights argument that constructs beef, hogs, and other food source animals as sentient. To make their arguments, all three films take a synthetic approach to documentary that pursues interviews, portraits, and nature documentary approaches.
Carmen Garcia’s Beef, Inc. and Hugo Latulippe’s Bacon: The Film both rely on tropes of unveiling and talking head interviews to demonstrate problems with fecal waste and slaughtering practices. Although the filmmakers for Beef, Inc. did not have access to the slaughterhouses, the absence of visuals and critical commentary on blood and flesh may move beyond shielding the self from the source of the foods we eat to the shock of absence of the pastoral cattle image from the process.
Latulippe's Bacon: The Film concentrates on the negative effects Quebec hog farming is having on air and water toxicity levels. To highlight a nostalgia for both a more animal and earth-friendly approach to hog farming, the film individualizes the hogs on this industrial farm through broad-based portraits, visuals of artificial insemination and separation from the mother, moving us toward what look like more ethical approaches to feeding our craving for meat.
We Feed The World juxtaposes industrial and traditional farming techniques in ways similar to those used to critique industrial fishing when exploring other foods: tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, and onions. According to one expert, natural vegetables are better tasting and more efficient because farmers can reuse the seed, but seed companies are owned by a few companies and are subsidized, so genetically modified seed and hybrid vegetables have become the norm in countries around Europe.
But when the film discusses changes to soy production, it emphasizes not nostalgia for GMO free seed but other consequences of industrialized farming: fewer companies controlling distribution. According to one expert, few foods are GMO free, including animal feed and chocolate. All this food is not sent to countries that need it, so 100,000 die of starvation. One huge food company, Pioneer, is in 120 countries, including China, and their slogan is “We feed the world,” but, according to the spokesperson, the company has no heart and sells to the highest bidder rather than feeding a starving world. This food advocate asserts that 842 million people are malnourished, so “Any child who dies of starvation is murdered and reinforces numbers” he says.
The film shows soy manufacturing as especially problematic in other ways, as well. According to one expert, because they are fed on Brazilian soy, European livestock are, in a sense, eating up the rainforest of Amazonia, causing an ecological imbalance. In Brazil, an area the size of France plus Portugal has been cleared since 1975 while children starve in Somalia, Sudan, and rural Brazil, where women feed their children stone soup. In Northeastern Brazil, water is contaminated, and women can only feed their children goat’s milk once they have outgrown their mothers’ breasts. These rural Brazilians cannot read and write, and now they can grow little food; even though Brazil is one of the largest exporters of soy and one of the richest agrarian states, its people are starving. Europeans import 90% of soy for their livestock from Brazil, the expert explains, since European corn and soy are burned for electricity.
The film attempts to reveal some of the dangers of industrialized chicken and egg production, as well, but it ends with a portrait of Nestle’s CEO and his claim to feed the world. Avene Nestle, the company’s current CEO asserts that “Nature is no longer pitiless” and advocates for GMO food instead of organic, since it will more quickly and readily feed the hungry. Although Nestle explains that his responsibility is to ensure a profitable future for the company and its shareholders, his point about feeding a starving world seems like an answer to the starvation problem broached by the film. The film ends with this portrait, leaving the viewer with mixed reactions to the film’s images of industrialized food production. Instead of the single message and point of view of Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, We Feed the World relies on a series of experts to make its point about the social and environmental consequences of turning food production into a massive industry. Yet the film loses its edge when it ends not with a clear rearticulation of its thesis but with an opposite, contrasting, and conflicting message of a new kind of hope: the hope that with efficiency and high-production counts that include GMO seed and the end of food production as a family business, factory farming can feed the world.
