FERN’s Friday Feed: Redfish blues
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
An iconic Louisiana fish is in trouble again
FERN and Smithsonian Magazine
“[A] blackened redfish fillet is not just a symbol of Louisiana cuisine, but the dish that made Cajun cooking a worldwide sensation,” writes Boyce Upholt, noting that the dish’s rise in the 1980s led to overfishing and eventually a ban on harvesting in both federal and state waters. “But for complex reasons, officials believe local redfish populations are now in danger. At the same time, Louisiana’s marshes are eroding, and its coastline is fraying. The fates of its iconic fish and its wetlands appear inextricably linked. Their looming decline represents a warning—and raises hard questions about how a seafood culture can adapt to a changing world.”
New app shows just how fragile the global food system is
Grist
The app “identifies food flows through just about every major port, road, rail, and shipping lane across the world and traces goods to where they are ultimately consumed,” writes Ayurella Horn-Muller. “The developers … hope it will be used by policymakers and researchers working to better adapt to an increasingly fragile supply chain beleaguered by climate change. The model pinpoints critical global transportation chokepoints where disruptions, such as extreme weather, would have domino effects on food security and, in doing so, identifies opportunities for local and regional agricultural producers to gain a forward-thinking market foothold.”
How restored wetlands can protect Europe from a Russian invasion
Yale Environment 360
“In February 2022, as Russian forces launched their invasion of Ukraine, an unlikely weapon shielded Kyiv … from swift defeat: a restored wetland. The attackers advanced from Belarus … using roads that cut through swamps, peatlands, and waterlogged forests along the banks of the Pripjet and Dnepr rivers,” writes Christian Schwägerl. “In their desperation, the Ukrainian army blew holes into a dam on the Irpin River, situated in the northwestern outskirts of the capital, and flooded a large swath of land upstream from where the river meets the massive Kyiv Reservoir. Almost overnight, the planned staging area for Russia’s final assault on Kyiv was turned into a muddy floodplain. The attack began to falter. Images of abandoned Russian tanks mired in the mud circulated globally, earning the Ukrainian army praise for its ingenious use of ‘hydraulic warfare’ or ‘war-wilding,’ as one expert called it.”
How Pakistan learned to love sushi
The New Yorker
“In the eighty years since [Norman] Borlaug arrived in Mexico, farming in much of the world has been transformed. New tools that could make farms even more productive are constantly being developed—from CRISPR to remote-sensing drones and weeding machines that shoot out lasers. At the same time, the world, too, has been transformed, by such things as climate change, groundwater depletion, and soil contamination,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert. “The new tools and the new threats are bound up in each other—two sides, as it were, of the same leaf. If it is reasonable to imagine that we will, somehow or other, find ways to feed ten billion people, it is also reasonable to fear how much damage will be done in the process.”
A Spanish lagoon was granted legal personhood. Then what happened?
bioGraphic
“Mar Menor, a 135-square-kilometer lagoon in southern Spain, is the only ecosystem in Europe that can be named a victim in a legal case. In September 2022, the Spanish Senate granted the largest saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean legal personhood. From then on, any human who wanted to help Mar Menor could represent it in court,” writes Goldy Levy. “Protection for Mar Menor came after a series of mass die-offs ravaged the ecosystem. … Spurred by the crises, environmental activists, lawmakers, and local residents … successfully pushed a citizen initiative through the Spanish parliament’s upper chamber. … The law’s Article 6 was particularly groundbreaking. It stated that any person or relevant legal entity ‘is entitled to defend the ecosystem of the Mar Menor.’ But three years on, Mar Menor is still waiting for humans to act on their promises.”