Accounting for Loss in Fish Stocks

A Word on Life as Biological Asset

Bibliographic Data

ID2615930
AuthorsJennifer E Telesca (corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume8
Issue1
Publication date2017-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2150-6779 • E-ISSN: 2150-6787
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/ares.2017.080107
OpenAlexW2758424948
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited50

Why have sea creatures plummeted in size and number, if experts have at their disposal sophisticated techniques to count and predict them, whether tuna, cod, dolphin, or whale? This article conducts a literature review centered on a native category that dominates discourse in marine conservation-stock-by emphasizing the word's double meaning as both asset and population. It illuminates how a word so commonplace enables the distancing metrics of numerical abstractions to be imposed on living beings for the production of biowealth. By tracking the rise of quantitative expertise, the reader comes to know stock as a referent long aligned with the sovereign preoccupation of managing wealth and society, culminating in the mathematical model recruited today as the principal tool of authority among technocratic elites. Under the prevailing conditions of valuation, the object of marine conservation has become not a fish as being but a biological asset as stock

Fish stock · Referent · Stock (firearms · Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access