Our Mother Ocean: Enclosure, Commons, and the Global Fishermen’s Movement

by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Monica Chilese

The ocean today is a central protagonist in the ongoing battle for life on earth. It is the site of a violent clash between the right to live and the right to profit, as corporate interests enclose the ocean’s vast common of living riches through tourism and industrial fishing—distorting landscapes, depleting fish stocks, and destroying barriers to protection against climate disaster.

Our Mother Ocean tells the story of the Fisherman’s Movement from its beginnings in Southern India to its central role in the struggle against neoliberal globalization. Since the 1970s, the Fisherman’s Movement has been one of the ocean’s closest and most impassioned protectors, raising key questions concerning the relationship between work and the safeguarding of common resources, the provision of community needs and environmental limits of the devastating industrialization of our oceans. While a remarkable political awareness has spread over the last 40 years around questions of food, agriculture and land, the issues of the sea have remained concealed, despite the protracted struggles between fish workers and those who oversee the sector and the exploitation of the ocean’s resources.

In this crucial intervention, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese offer the ocean to the land-locked history of food sovereignty movements led primarily workers in the global South against dispossession.

Dalla Costa and Chilese draw attention to the polyvalent functions of the ocean as a source of food, medicine, raw materials, biodiversity and culture—and as a site of human labour and livelihood threatened by vast enclosures through industrial fishing and tourism. This book is an urgent reminder that the ocean is today the site of a heroic struggle for the preservation of life on earth. It points crucially to impassioned sectors of the movement of movements that endure in the global South, and details the stakes of the struggles and its outcomes on land and at sea as central for the future of life on earth.

Genres: Politics

144 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2015

Reviews

[Sallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on a train going north. Not exactly light reading, Our Mother Ocean depicts the ways capitalism and neoliberalism is wrecking havoc on our oceans and the livelihoods of many people who are working in small-scale fisheries, as well as the ways in which these people are rising up to protect their rights to continue fishing in these commons.

I thought that the information provided about fishermen's movements was particularly interesting, and really liked the examples the authors gave about fisherfolk coming together in forums and protests to resist the hegemony of industrial fishing on the coast and high seas. I liked the discussion of alternative ways of fishing and of alternative economies, and I liked how the the authors structured the book; laying out the history of our relationship with the ocean first, and how we should - like fisherfolk - care about the marine ecosystems, and then explaining our relationship and how we're managing the oceans now.

However, I think there's still a bit of a disconnect between what is being discussed in the book and what is actually happening. The book didn't include a lot of fisherfolks' voices, and the authors didn't really help me establish a connection with the ways that people from other cultures use and value the ocean. I was expecting more on the maritime cultures that are on the verge of being lost, what are the values embedded in these cultures, and why we should preserve and fight for them.