“More to Sea” is a photojournalism project I engaged in May 2018 to June 2019. This project was an independent project, which was done after I graduated in a marine governance course. I’m currently a PhD student at Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Technology in Sydney where I study livelihood sustenance of small-scale fishers and local food systems. With More to Sea, I aimed to learn how small-scale fishers were doing. Photographs were combined with fishers’ stories and published on a website (moretosea.nl) and social media. An ebook is about to be launched by Too Big To Ignore, which discusses problems faced by fishers, solutions found, and future scenarios. For the EnviroSociety blog, I have created this short video which shows a number of quotes and photos of fishers that illustrate relations to fishing livelihoods, and people’s knowledges of their environment.
A fisherman who I met with several times expressed that he feels that people in ‘the city’ see him as a threat to nature and desire to chase him out of his natural habitat. Small-scale fishers are often (made) invisible and are generally neglected as stewards of the seas. Narratives around fishers are negative, and fishers have to work hard to be respected, or even listened to. Recently, I heard a fisherman in a meeting say that when he engages with government officials, he explains and shares business perspectives and rationales, but he isn’t listened to. Rather, he gets treated as someone who should just go get fish. Another fisherman told me that more than a lot of money had been spent on a fisheries biology research to understand the relation and importance of the moon and the tides on a fish population. The fisherman was not amused— he felt it had been a waste of money and energy. Fishermen know very well what these relationships are, and even when researchers had a non-fishery interest in the topic, they could have just asked them, rather than do their expensive research. I also heard multiple fishers at different occasions express that they take researchers on board, but that as a consequence of that research their fisheries are often closed or diminished. Rather than absorbing fishers in policy making, under co-management systems for instance, management of fisheries easily and widely turns into management of the fishers themselves.
This 8-minute video shows fishers’ relations to the sea and their livelihood, changing fisheries, ideas, and adaptations. I hope that fishers can be recognized as people who know the sea. It is my ambition to sustain fishing livelihoods, as it will sustain humanities’ connection with the sea, as well as practices of living within nature. Rather than neglecting, marginalizing, and exploiting fishers, let us respect, listen, and learn.
Mariëlle Klein Lankhorst is a PhD student in the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research interests include human relationships with each other and with(in) natural environments, slow life, degrowth, local food, small scale food production, food traditions, and contemporary and future food systems. Her doctoral research leverages an anthropological and diverse economies focus to understand relations between direct or short chain seafood markets and the sustenance of fishing livelihoods. She conducts fieldwork in South Australia with fishers, chefs, and others involved in the fishing industry. Email: Marielle.KleinLankhorst@student.uts.edu.au