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Mark Powell has a fascinating essay on the tension between a message of self-denial and a message of desire-fulfillment when it comes to promoting sustainable seafood.
Is there a place for desire in conservation? Can a burning, insatiable longing motivate people to do right by nature? Or is desire a problem for conservation? Are people’s longings and wants the enemy--that which must be defeated in order to conserve?I hope I’m wrong, but I think most environmentalists would identify human desires as a problem. In this view, people want more…more money, more toys, more fun activities. And almost all of it means more conservation problems as we use more resources to satisfy the wants.On some level, this is ground that Noordhaus and Shellenberger tilled last year, when they argued for a growth-based, optimistic message on renewable energies rather than a lot of warnings that global warming would doom us all. In this essay, Powell looks at seafood in a similar way, arguing that you can work with the desires for delicious, healthy fish rather than berating folks for eating farmed salmon. "Sustainable seafood," he writes, "that focuses on desires denied is all about rules and commandments, what fish you can’t eat if you want to prove up as being green. There are lots of hair-splitting debates within the sustainable seafood community over which fish is ok and which isn’t ok...Sustainable seafood that focuses on desires fulfilled is different, it’s a celebration rather than a dose of guilt. Sustainable seafood that focuses on desires fulfilled is all about finding the best tasting and most sustainable fish, preparing and presenting it well, and making people lust for more. It’s marrying desire and conservation in a way that attracts people to a cause." It's an interesting point, and it builds well from the work done by Alice Waters, who's been able to create a politics around food that argues for more sustainable, organic, and even limiting approaches but does so by painting such choices as ones you want to make on your own terms -- because local ingredients taste better, and less processed foods are more healthful. And though it originally seemed she was creating a niche market for these products, Wal-Mart and others are now making an effort to accommodate these aspirational desires, which suggests the underlying argument has penetrated pretty widely.
