The redfish blues
Will Louisiana still be Louisiana once redfish are gone?
Some MISSISSIPPI RIVER reminders 🛶
To help readers experience the Mississippi River, I’m hosting a dinner at Porgy’s Seafood Market on June 21. I hope you’ll join! Find details here.
Or, if you’re more adventurous, you can accompany me on a 3-day paddle trip in late June with the Quapaw Canoe Company. Details here!
With so many Mississippi River books coming out this spring and summer, I want to celebrate! If you preorder my book and another river-themed book, I’ll enter you into a raffle for some delicious Mississippi River-themed food. More details here.
And, finally, scroll down to see a list of book tour events!
This newsletter is coming on an unusual day, at an unusual time, because I have something in the works for a while that is finally ready for you: the story of the redfish, in audio form.
Last summer, I wrote a newsletter about redfish—a species that, according to Louisiana biologists, is in sharp decline. Afterward, I realized I wasn’t done with this fish: I wanted to catch one. I wanted to taste one. I spent months obsessing. Eventually, I partnered with the Food and Environmental Reporting Network to tell the story of redfish. Today, one of the resulting stories was released: an episode of WWNO’s Sea Change podcast.1 (Spotify link is here, but you should be able to find it on any podcast app of your choice.)
One of the things that struck me in reporting the story was that for many people, it doesn’t matter if redfish disappear from Louisiana’s marshes, because they’ve already disappeared from our plates. Since 1988, it’s been illegal to sell wild-caught Louisiana redfish. If you order a filet in New Orleans, at best you’re eating a fish that was farm-raised in Texas. More likely, it’s from China or Africa.
I encourage you to listen to the episode to hear more about how that came to be. In this newsletter, I want to share some complementary thoughts that occurred to me after reading a recent essay by journalist Jess McHugh in The Atlantic about a “uniquely French approach to environmentalism.”
The French are obsessed with cultural heritage. Consider, for example, sparkling wine, which can only be considered champagne if it’s from Champagne. The idea that McHugh explored, though, is the idea is that to keep a place itself, you may have to preserve its nature. We do a bit of this in the United States, too: bald eagles, for example, are abundant—problematically abundant in some places—but, as our national bird, are as protected as an endangered species.
The redfish would be an excellent candidate for a more local version of such protections, as this species is—with the possible exception of the pelican, perhaps the foremost animal symbol of this state. They help drive a billion-plus dollar sportfishing industry in Louisiana; in blackened form, they constitute one of Louisiana’s most famous foods.
Southern states tend to be particularly obsessed with this kind of stuff. A company can place a “certified Cajun” (or “certified Creole”) label on products that are made in Louisiana. The state senate recently passed a bill that will crack down on seafood labeling, meant to clarify which products are imported, rather than local. But the species in question—crabs and shrimp and crawfish—aren’t currently threatened. So this is about keeping species on our plates, and more about keeping a traditional practice alive.
Longstanding traditions are appealing, but it’s worth noting that just because something has been done for a long time does not mean it should be done still. Consider, for example, beef. Sure, the cowboy is a symbol of America, but the beef industry as it exists today is indisputably bad for the climate and the environment. I’m supportive of small-scale ranchers, but the number of cows inhabiting this planet is going to have to go down.2
So is local seafood worth saving? I think so, though my attempts to peruse the academic literature have yielded more theory than hard data. “The assumption is that locally oriented food systems connect participants more closely to their environments, enabling them to be better stewards,” one paper notes in explaining the benefits of locally caught fish.
One interesting thing about the new Louisiana anti-import law, though: is how it’s inconsistent with the history I explore the podcast: We’re fighting to ensure that local shrimp stay on our plates, but we’ve forbidden fishermen from catching redfish. Perhaps that’s necessary, especially with the fish becoming increasingly rare. But I wonder what might have happened if, decades ago, we’d decided that the redfish was such a part of this place that we would find a way to do whatever it takes to keep them both in our marshes and on our dinner tables.
Anyway, go give the podcast a listen.
I’d love to see you this summer! See the tour dates in the image below—plus a few more below that couldn’t be squeezed in. Find more details here.
Additional events:
July 3: Two Museums, Jackson, MS
August 29: Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona, MN
August 30: Milkweed Books, Minneapolis, MN
And more to come!
Recommended reading
🦉 Becoming a birder
I loved this essay from Ed Yong, in the New York Times, about becoming a birder. Yong notes that some birders might be accused of engaging in “an empty process of collection that turns living things into abstract numbers on meaningless lists.” But his essay ultimately becomes a defense of listmaking, which, when applied to nature, can be reorienting. Yong notes that since taking up the new hobby, he’s tripled the amount of time he’s spent outside—and made him be outside differently. He takes an “aural census” each morning to hear who’s around; he attends to the small shifts in weather that will signal departures and arrivals.
⚠️ The Abundant Life Act
In another Atlantic essay, John Reid notes that focusing too much on endangered species may be the wrong approach. “Our immediate biodiversity crisis isn’t one of species loss,” he says, “it’s the lost abundance of wild things.” Even if species aren’t going to disappear entirely, their populations are plummeting.
We need laws that go beyond sustaining scarcity . . . [C]all it an Abundant Life Act. Rather than attempting to codify abundance on a species-by-species basis, as the [Endagered Species Act] does for extinction risk, such a law must consider life at the ecosystem level and reduce the causes of wildlife depletion without knowing precisely how much natural abundance will return.
Nature news
🍑 The park approaches
Bills to establish OcMulgee National Park—the first national park in Georgia, and only the fourth national park in the country that would be co-managed with a tribal nation—have now been filed in both the Senate and the House. (The Current)
Quick Hits
Climate change threatens Appalachia’s recreational economy
The South: besieged by the seas
Land conservation as climate buffer in Florida
30x30 must do more for the fish
The rise of the truffle farm
How AI is soaking up Virginia’s water
A stalled diversion could cost Louisiana $1 billion
Mangroves expand in the Gulf
There’s also a print version, for Smithsonian, still in the works.
Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the opposite direction, especially here in the South: Florida and Alabama have both recently passed laws banning lab-grown meat. In Alabama, you could be thrown in jail for selling the stuff. That’s absurd, since this product isn’t ready for market. And, say what you will about growing meat in labs, it seems un-American to outlaw the technology. Aren’t we supposed to let consumers decide for themselves?