The Mortal Sea Fish Analysis

W. Jefferey Bolster’s book, “The Mortal Sea”, is viewed by many as an explanation of marine ecosystem depletion by the hands of the fisherman with a desire for more. With stories that end in such tragedy or environmental degradation, it often requires readers to place blame or vilify a player in this story, and that villain is most commonly made out to be the fishermen. This accusation would not be a careless one, since it was the fisherman that physically participated in this mass depletion of fish in the North Atlantic, but to place the full responsibility of the ecological and environmental dame on the ocean solely on the the fisherman is disregarding a major aspect of Bolster’s book. Bolster is not just explaining the results of a fisherman’s …show more content…
Locke wrote that whatever “made use of, before it spoiled, that was his peculiar right” and “hat every man should have as much as he could make use of” (Locke 12). John Locke wrote this with the intention of explaining how people do not need to excessively take from nature, because it would be wasteful to have that excessiveness rot due to such greed. Unfortunately, this proclaim of “land should not be wasted” was not very successful in encouraging men of that time to only take what was needed, but it instead encouraged them to find a way to hold everlasting value in what nature provided. The assumption that wild nature is wasted until human labor is applied gave nature economic value and humans the right to accumulate nature’s produce and un it into money. The use of nature as a commodity and deeming it a profitable value, such as gold, makes it possible for people to accumulate more than you need and receive the value for all of your labor. This use of nature as a commodity solves the problem of rotting and wastefulness and allows people to accumulate capital. Locke’s theory of how man should not waste nature led to an emphasis of money and growth of an inherit accumulation of a good, thus creating a capitalist view of nature. Nature now became reduced to a commodity and allowed it to be standardized with other entities like gold so that it could be bought and sold on a market. This is exactly the same mindset and ideals shared by the Vikings in Northern Europe regarding swordfish. In Bolster’s book “The Mortal Sea” he describes how the Vikings found a way to preserve cod and stop it from rotting by preserving it with salt, which was commonly called stockfish. This stockfish, which was a staple for the Vikings, was used as a commodity for trade, which in turned changed the broad