FERN’s Friday Feed: Your fishery collapses. Do you stay or go?
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
An Alaskan village tries to find its way after its crab fishery collapsed
FERN and Grist
“My small turboprop plane whirred low through thick clouds. Below me, St. Paul Island cut a golden, angular shape in the shadow-dark Bering Sea. I saw a lone island village — a grid of houses, a small harbor, and a road that followed a black ribbon of coast,” writes Julia O’Malley. “Some 330 people, most of them Indigenous, live in the village of St. Paul, about 800 miles west of Anchorage, where the local economy depends almost entirely on the commercial snow crab business. Over the last few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea. I was traveling there to find out what the villagers might do next.”
The secret movement to bring back Europe’s wildlife
Noema and Coda
“[Olivier] Rubbers is part of a secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts who are returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a ‘butterfly brigade’ that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests,” writes Isobel Cockerell. “The movement is facing backlash from farmers who don’t want wild animals wrecking their crops and a number of scientists who believe that the reintroduction process should be regulated and controlled. They say rogue rewilding is a crime, however you dress it up. The mavericks argue that the bigger crime is not to reintroduce keystone species in a biodiversity emergency.”
Paraguay’s floating everything store
The New York Times
“For 44 years, the 130-foot white, wooden vessel has been the only regular ferry service to reach this deep into the Pantanal, a floodplain larger than Greece, traveling 500 miles up and down the Paraguay River Tuesdays to Sundays, delivering everything from dirt bikes to newborns,” writes Jack Nicas. “Its bottom level is a floating supermarket, with 10 vendors hawking produce, meat and sweets from the same benches they sleep on. The ship’s canteen is the only place where many communities can find a cold beer.”
‘A symbol of what humans should not be doing’
The Guardian
“The company’s vision for a farm that could eventually provide up to 3,000 tons of octopus meat a year – requiring the slaughter of about 1 million Octopus vulgaris – came into public view in 2021 when it applied for permits. The planned farm has since become an international flashpoint, pitting the company and other proponents of octopus farming against those who argue that the solitary, intelligent animals are ill-suited to being farmed,” writes Ashifa Kassam. “‘From a scientific point of view, this project is a global milestone,’ says Roberto Romero Pérez, a marine biologist who oversees aquaculture at Grupo Nueva Pescanova. ‘The truth is that we’re finding the mood to be a bit more hostile than expected.’”
Mother sauce
n+1
“[Marcella] Hazan’s sauce alights [Rebecca May] Johnson’s investigation into the recipe as a literary text, as a mode of cultural transmission, as nothing less than a way of understanding the world,” writes Marian Bull. “‘The recipe is the most epic text that does not have reams of scholarship devoted to it,’ she writes. ‘It is epic and yet it is at the scale of a hand, a spoon, a nose.’ In Small Fires, Johnson gives the text the epic it deserves, looking at it every which way but prioritizing the living, breathing, hungry eye of the home cook. In turn she frees the cook from her long-held status as either luddite hobbyist or gender slave and turns her into an archivist, a performance artist, a pleasure-seeker, a worker.”