Wild Living Marine Resources Belong to Society as a Whole - On art and laws
Artica Writings 2019
Randi Nygård
What can laws and natural resource management tell us about our relationship with nature and our surroundings? The name of the art project “Wild Living Marine Resources Belong to Society as a Whole” comes from Section 2 of the Norwegian Marine Resources Act. It explores the wording of the act not just in terms of standard, legal definitions, but also by taking an open, poetic and profound look at different ways of viewing nature, natural resource management, societal responsibility, language use and values. As an interdisciplinary project, it involves biologists, poets, anglers, lawyers, philosophers, fishers, young people and artists.
In 2017, Karolin Tampere and I published an anthology with the same name as the project. Our work will continue this autumn with a series of events at the art gallery Kunstnernes hus in Oslo.
As an artist, I believe that as artists we can pose naive questions, but also profound and occasionally good ones, to people from other disciplines such as biology, climate research, law and philosophy. We don’t always understand the methodologies of their fields, but we have been trained to cast an inquisitive, sensitive and poetic eye on things that other people understand and perhaps take for granted.
In today’s complex world where we suffer from information overload, people are increasingly alienated and removed from nature and from how society and resource management operate. If we are unable to see how our life relates to bigger societal structures and natural cycles, it becomes difficult to imagine other possible communities, social structures and ways of living with and in nature. I believe that knowledge, emotions and poetry are all needed to feel and understand the various relationships we have with our surroundings and hence with ourselves.
The project “Wild Living Marine Resources Belong to Society as a Whole” is part of Ensayo #4, an international, interdisciplinary project to explore resource management, language, values and identities related to coastal areas and seas. The aim is to find new and better ways to study, understand, explain and respond to the big resource-related, environmental and climatic problems we face.
In Norway, Søssa Jørgensen, Geir Tore Holm, Karolin Tampere and I are taking part in Ensayo #4. In 2015, we started looking into what the law has to say about the management of Norway’s coastal areas and seas.
In Norges lover, a book containing all of Norway’s statues, I found the Marine Resources Act of 2008. Section 2 really leapt out at me: “Wild Living Marine Resources Belong to Society as a Whole.” I found it poetic, romantic and paradoxical. How could a sentence like that be a law? Why does it say “wild living”? What is meant by “belong to”? What is the relationship between society, the resources and the wild living resources? What conception of nature lies behind that sentence and our natural resource management? What meaning and value do the sea and nature have beyond being a resource for us? What is meant by a whole ecosystem? Must we view ourselves as being outside nature in order to manage it? What is a resource, and what is not a resource? Is society part of an ecosystem and are ecosystems part of society? And what is ecosystem-based management, the system introduced by the Marine Resources Act of 2008?
In March 2016, at the Kurant exhibition space in Tromsø, Karolin Tampere and I put various questions of this kind to artists, fishers, environmentalists, lawyers and researchers with backgrounds in both the social and natural sciences. Those conversations and people’s answers formed the basis for the book we published the following year, with contributions from several people from Tromsø.
Wild living resources are taken for granted by my uncle, whose livelihood involves harvesting from the sea, as my family has done for many generations. “We have to make a living somehow”, he says, “and for us, fish are a resource”. Why did the wording of the law seem so strange to me? Doesn’t it reduce wild living fish to a mere resource? What about the intrinsic value of the individual? Can fish at the same time be individuals, resources and part of our society? The Animal Welfare Act states that all animals have an intrinsic value irrespective of their utility value for humans.
I think we sometimes ignore the wild animals and plants in our immediate surroundings, paradoxically because they aren’t resources for us. In towns they are often seen as a nuisance that doesn’t belong there. With that in mind, the word resources may in this case also mean that we notice the fish and are conscious of the fact that we are taking their lives so that we can live.
In Tromsø, the lawyers explained that the term “wild living” was used because we have a separate law on aquaculture, so farmed fish had to be excluded from the Marine Resources Act. As one of them said: “In the old days we had salmon, and everyone knew that it was wild, but now most of our salmon is farmed.”
To me, wild living still resonates of power and freedom.
The law says “belong to”. One reason for this is that the Sámi Parliament of Norway protested against other wordings like “are owned by” when the Marine Resources Act was revised in 2008. Because how can wild and living things be owned by anyone at all? And different people may have different notions of who is part of “society”. “Belong to” implies that something belongs, but it’s less strong, and it doesn’t claim ownership rights. It also suggests that society has a responsibility for the wild living resources. The wording is supposed to ensure that the resources benefit society, even if we have a system of private rights to fishing quotas.
A successful management of the oceans, we also learned, is not about managing the fish, but rather about influencing people and their actions. Because you cannot control wild things, so management is largely about building knowledge and spreading the right values amongst people.
That involves using models, such as ecosystems. An ecosystem is a representation, not something that exists in nature. It gives a picture of how some things interact with each other in a given environment. But no model can include everything.
Most of the people we interviewed in Tromsø didn’t see any contradiction between considering themselves to be part of nature and being able to analyse, plan and manage. And no-one claimed we had a right to harm the environment. Nevertheless, the human race is in the process of causing irreversible damage to the world in which we live: nature. Why is our conduct at odds with our values? Shouldn’t we manage the use of all natural resources in new ways based on new mindsets, models and laws?
When I interviewed Arne Johan Vetlesen for our book, we were sitting by a window in the University of Oslo. I asked the professor to imagine nature as a language that is constantly developing, and which expresses something that we cannot grasp. In response, Arne Johan asked me to look at the trees that were moving in the wind outside. He said that normally we think that the wind moves the trees. Although we say that a tree is moving in the wind. In our mechanistic and simplistic worldview, lifeless things are moved by external forces. And although I was searching for new ways to see plants and animals as living things, I also viewed the trees like that, as static, only moved by the wind. Could the tree put up resistance? Or was it moving with the wind so it wouldn’t break? Suddenly I understood what is meant by a mechanistic worldview. Vetlesen went on to say it is unlikely that the wind is the only force acting here, as we know that trees are living things capable of movement, for example towards the sun. But we have a tendency to forget that and to be blind to their way of being.
In psychology, the term oceanic feeling refers to an existential feeling of the self dissolving and becoming one with the world, in a limitless moment. I believe that artists often seek those moments, as part of the flow of their creative process; in their encounters with other things, beings and people. Freud, who had never experienced this oceanic feeling himself, saw it as a narcissistic longing for the stage of childhood when the child is still unaware that the external world isn’t part of it.
The text of the Marine Resources Act juxtaposes wild living things, resources and society. Perhaps oceanic feelings can also shed light on the relationship between them. In those moments, we have no fixed reference points. When art and poetry are at their finest, they can elicit a strong experience of something that cannot be reduced to information, or be understood or explained.
I think it makes sense to draw on poetic experiences if the goal is to represent animals and plants better in our laws. Of course we need rational laws and rules and models to follow, but I believe that there should be greater emphasis on poetry and mystery, to help us conceive of ourselves as part of nature and nature as part of society. We need some new models.
The philosopher Derrida wrote in his book The Animal That Therefore I Am that ideas about the animal, if they are possible, must come from poetry.
Derrida started thinking about this after being seen naked by his cat. He wrote a whole book as a result of his encounter with the mysterious and inscrutable gaze of the cat on him as an old man.
Normally, poetic experiences cannot be pinned down. And Derrida couldn’t know how the cat experienced the situation, but he felt something powerful at the moment when their gazes met.
At their best, that is precisely what art and poetry do: bring us closer to the unfathomable. Art can tell us things that cannot be expressed in words, and thus gives us another kind of knowledge about the world. And as I see it, artists don’t need to make the world poetic, because the world is inherently poetic.