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David O'Hara

Thinker. Tinkerer. Thinkerer. Professor of Philosophy, Religion, Classics, and Environment.

fishing

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    Watching the Fish

     I've been publishing some short pieces on Medium lately. It's a way of doing some quick writing about things I've taught about for years. 

    This latest one is about watching fish, and I hope you enjoy it. Here's a sample:

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    Steinbeck on Overfishing

    "In about an hour we came to the Japanese fishing fleet.  There were six ships doing the actual dredging while a large mother ship of at least 10,000 tons stood farther offshore at anchor. THe dredge boats themselves were large, 150- to 175 feet, probably about 600 tons. There were twelve boats in the combined fleet including the mother ship, and they were doing a very systematic job, not only of taking shrimp from the bottom, but every other living thing as well.  They cruised slowly along in echelon with overlapping dredges, literally scraping the bottom clean.  Any animal wich escaped must have been very fast indeed, for not even the sharks got away.  Why the Mexican government should have permitted the complete destruction of a valuable food supply is one of those mysteries which have their ramifications possibly back in pockets it is not well to look into."
    John Steinbeck, The Log From The Sea Of Cortez. (Penguin, 1995, p. 205)  Emphasis added. Feel free to substitute the name of any other coastal government for the word "Mexican."
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    Professors of Trout

    In the course of writing Downstream (my book on brook trout) I did a lot of research about trout and fly-fishing.  Thankfully, it turns out I'm not the only academic interested in brook trout and fly rods.  Far from it! 

    Really, this shouldn't be too surprising.  Fly-fishing requires us to look attentively, seeing past the surface of the water in order to discern what is happening deeper down.  Far more than simply catching fish, fly-fishing is a practice of reading water as though it were a natural text.

    Several authors, professors, and fellow-thinkers have been helping me to deepen my literacy in these streams of thought lately. Among them are Kurt Fausch, Douglas Thompson, and David Suchoff.

    Fausch is one of the world's authorities on trout biology and ecology.  I had the privilege of reading a draft of Fausch's forthcoming book, For The Love Of Rivers, (see the book trailer here) and I highly recommend it.  It is a lovely marriage of science and lyrical writing.  You'll learn a lot about the life of rivers, written by a remarkable writer who loves them deeply.

    Thompson's book, The Quest For The Golden Trout is next on my to-read list, but I've already snuck some glimpses at it and I am eager to get to it.  I'll post more about it when I'm done.  Meanwhile, check out his webpage. 

    I discovered Suchoff recently when I saw one of his students fly-fishing for bonefish in Belize.  I teach a January-term field ecology course for Augustana College in Guatemala and Belize.  One morning I looked out over the intertidal flat and saw a young woman casting a heavy fly in turtle grass on South Water Caye.  I ran into her later on shore and she told me about a terrific class Suchoff teaches at Colby College in Maine.  He teaches them the literature of fly-fishing, arranges professional instruction, then takes his students fishing in California, and teaches them to write about it.  You can find him on Twitter, too.

    One of the joys of research is that it gives me the excuse to write to strangers who share my interests and ask them to teach me what they know.  My acquaintance with two of these professors is quite new, but already I've learned from them.  The third, Fausch, I've known for long enough that he reviewed a draft of my book and kindly pointed out a few errors before I made them permanent in print. 

    These are, as I've said, just a few of the university professors who study trout.  Are you another?  I'd love to hear from you if so.
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    Leopold On Sport And Ethics

    “Voluntary adherence to an ethical code elevates the self-respect of the sportsman, but it should not be forgotten that voluntary disregard for the code degenerates and depraves him.”
     - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
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    Green Mountain Creek

    Matt and I stand thigh-deep in one of the small streams that tumble down the eastern slopes of the Green Mountains.  Many of those streams, including this one, have carved steep gorges over the millennia.  As the water falls it strips away the sand and loam, leaving a course choked with jumbled boulders.

    Every year a few more trees, undercut by the current, tip over into the stream, where they lodge against the boulders and form temporary dams.  As the water flows over those dams it digs deep plunge pools, bubbling and swirling for a few feet, then quickly settling into swift, clear, tea-colored glassy pools.  The water slows only long enough to catch its breath before it plunges again, stair-stepping down the mountain, moving the mountain itself downstream one grain of sand at a time.

    Beside us, logs carpeted in moss play host to uncounted lives of plants and animals. Trees reach their branches down into the cleft cut by the river, searching for sunlight wherever they can in this steep gorge.  Small flies whirl restlessly across our vision.  Their blue wings and olive bodies seem an unnecessary and extravagant dash of color on something so small, so ephemeral.

    Vermont is named for the greenness of its mountains, or les monts verts as the first French settlers called these ancient hills.  One of the rivers nearby is called the Lemon Fair, its name preserving the French sounds in misplaced English words.  A sweeping glance would call this place green, but it only takes a moment of slowing down to really look before you see all the rainbow represented here.

    Much of the color is underwater, on the scales of the fine-featured trout that fin the current before us.  The native brook trout are dappled a vermiculated green above, fading to pale bellies below.  Their fins are slashed with bright red and white.  The rainbow trout, imported from the west coast, iridesce when a beam of sunlight finds its way down through the leaves and the water.  The young brown trout - far from their native Europe - shine like salmon.  Under the rocks small tan sculpin harvest tiny invertebrate meals.

    Gray stones slide slower than glaciers down the bank, moving imperceptibly and irresistibly toward the sea.  On the bank, seven tiny mushrooms stand up, no taller than my thumb, their caps bright orange like yearling efts.

    It is a perfect day.  We are grateful to receive it, grateful to be here, to stand in these waters as their life flows around us.

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    As I think of standing in the river, I am reminded of this passage from Thoreau:

    My friends Bill and Brian paddle the Concord River, as Thoreau once did.
    “Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole, its silvery bark left on, and a dog at his side, rowing so near as to agitate his cork with our oars, and drive away luck for a season; and when we had rowed a mile as straight as an arrow, with our faces turned toward him, and the bubbles in our wake still visible on the tranquil surface, there stood the fisher still with his dog, like statues under the other side of the heavens, the only objects to relieve the eye in the extended meadow; and there would he stand abiding his luck, till he took his way home through the fields at evening with his fish. Thus, by one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses [….] His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles."  H.D. Thoreau, A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, (New York: Signet, 1961; emphasis mine) p. 31-32.

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    I'm also reminded of a sentence I recently read in Stephanie Mills' book, Epicurean Simplicity:
    “[F]ishers can be natural historians and waterside contemplatives par excellence."
    By “fishers” she means those who fish, fishermen and fisherwomen and fisherchildren. This comes at the conclusion of a story in which she almost reprimanded a small boy who was catching fish for bait, but then decided not to do so. She was afraid he was catching too many, or juvenile fish that would not grow to maturity.  Later, she considered the fact that if he was fishing, he could well be learning about fish in a way no one else does.  She reports that she was glad she didn't reprimand him.  

    It's true that in hunting and fishing some people learn practices of cruelty towards animals, or learn to regard animals instrumentally; but my experience is that most of the people I know who hunt and fish know a lot more about nature than the average person who does not.  Harvesting wild food often makes people naturalists, and can indeed make us much more "mindful carnivores" as Tovar Cerulli puts it. 

    Anecdotally, I find that hunting and fishing have made me less of a carnivore, and increasingly concerned with animal flourishing.  (The quote from Stephanie Mills is found in Epicurean Simplicity, published in Washington, Covelo, and London: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2002 p.125.)


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    Note: I think Matt intended his gesture of catching water in fun, but I like the way it looks like a gesture of gratefully receiving the waterfall.
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    Hunting, Fishing, and Climate Change

    Trout angling in the Black Hills of South Dakota
    I've been saying it to my students for years: more than just about any other group of non-scientists, hunters and fishers know the land we live on.  This means that they also are the ones who most notice changes, just as you notice when something in your home is moved to a new place.

    This article in Outside makes just this case, with the additional point that we who seek our food in the wild are the people who ought to be advocating for real conservation: not just changes to game laws, but changes in the way we live in relationship to our world.
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    Two kinds of ducks

    Recently I was speaking with some students about environmental philosophy, and about the ethical dimensions of hunting and fishing. Most of those students were not hunters, but all of them seemed to care about the environment.  I asked them at one point if they knew how many species of ducks live in our region.  I think the best (and most entertaining) answer I got was “Two: mallards and non-mallards.”

    What struck me was how little, in general, my conservation-minded students know about the wildlife around them.  And I think they are not unique in this.  In fact, they may know a good deal more about nature than most of their generation.

    Recently, Smithsonian published an article about conservation ecologist Patricia Zaradic.  Zaradic worries that we are becoming ever more attached to video screens, and that, as a result, our knowledge of the natural world is suffering.

    My fear is that we are, in a way, becoming modern-day Gnostics.  (Gnostics hope to liberate the spirit from materiality by means of esoteric knowledge.)

    But this is dangerous.  Rejecting materiality–rejecting the body, its world, and its boundaries–seems like a bad idea.  Maybe I’m wrong, and the transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil and his disciples have it right.  But the body, it seems to me, is just as ethically significant as the soul or mind.

    Losing touch with the material world makes it harder for us to notice when ecosystems are suffering.  It also might make it easier for us to undervalue the bodily suffering of other people.  And, speaking for myself, at least, I know that the pleasures of video screens are almost always more alluring than taking care of my own body.  In fact, I’d be exercising right now–or duck hunting–but it has been a while since I checked in with my Facebook friends.  I wonder if any of them can help me learn about ducks.