Through the 1960’s and ‘70’s
a whole prognostication industry flourished in the US and Europe, an
industry that painted a dire future characterized by ecological
devastation, mass starvation and even nuclear winter. Such predictions have
proved worth less than the ink that was wasted on writing them. One of the
few predictors who proved accurate in his futurology was Marshall McLuhan
who, in 1967, introduced us to the phrase "the global village" to
describe the web of increasingly efficient, ever speedier communication
that made our world a smaller and smaller place.
McLuhan probably never realized how right he was, for now the internet
and satellite communications have combined to bring us news, and even open
warfare in "real time". Naturally, where information has flowed,
business has followed and, today, advocates and opponents of this trend
violently dispute the benefits and disbenefits of this new
"globalization" of economics. Globalization proponents promise to
bring new prosperity to the developing world by integrating it into a
seamless web of a universal trading structure. Critics, meanwhile, demand
that those same countries be sheltered behind protective barriers to shield
them from the dislocation of economic change.
This forum has not been convened for us to discuss globalization and its
discontents, so I will restrict myself to two observations. First, those
rapacious corporate shareholders who anti-globalization advocates invite us
to scorn are, in reality, you and me and anyone else who invests in a
pension plan, a retirement account or an insurance policy. Most of us do
not conceive of ourselves as investors but we are and we are all seeking a
return on that investment ergo we are the gasoline that fuels the
globalization engine. Second, and following from the first point, any
attempt to legislate the reverse of globalization will probably resemble
nothing than King Knut’s attempt to order back the waves from his feet.
We already inhabit a globalized economy and we will not be returning to the
days of our fathers, no matter how much we aspire to do so.
Our purpose here today is to consider the impact of globalization upon
wildlife conservation in general and on fisheries in particular.
Superficially at least, globalization would appear to have nothing but
positive implications for wildlife conservation. After all, wildlife never
knew anything of mankind’s arbitrary political borders. Elephants
blithely wandered between Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa without
passports. The Gray Whale knows only water and has no concept whether he is
navigating a Mexican or an American Exclusive Economic Zone. Under such
circumstances, any conservation program worthy of its name had to be
multilateral and, on occasions, even global. This was the premise upon
which the United Nations established the Convention on International Trade
in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the organization
that I had the distinct honor to head for 9 years.
However, let me strike several notes of caution here. First, we may have
undergone the globalization of business, trade and international
communication but we have not experienced, nor will we see, the
globalization of human culture. We may be able to pick up a telephone in
Hokkaido and speak directly to someone in Saskatchewan. An entrepreneur in
Madras may sell goods and services in a millisecond over the internet to a
consumer in Valparaiso but this new speed of communication and business
does not mean that our various cultural presupposition are being fed into
some vast blender from which we will all emerge uniform, flat and dull.
To the contrary, Japanese consumers will continue to seek out and
consume delicacies such as seaweed and raw fish, the simple thought of
which will roil the stomachs of many Americans. To the dismay of Western
Europeans, those same Americans will continue to drive SUV’s the size of
commercial trucks and will enthusiastically support, in European eyes, the
barbarous custom of putting fellow human beings to death. Africans will
view elephants as a threat to agricultural land and a potential source of
revenue from ivory sales. Europeans will view them as majestic creatures
that must be protected from all human activity. Each year, Norwegian
fishermen will put to sea armed with harpoons to kill minke whales while
American schoolchildren dig into their weekly allowances to make
contributions to "Free Willie". In short, we are a crazy, mixed
up world and, God willing, we are likely to stay that way, with a broad
panoply of contradictory or interlocking cultures professing different
values and, most notably in the context of this forum, different approaches
both to the natural world around us and to the wildlife that inhabits it.
