Benthos, from Ancient Greek, meaning ‘depth of the sea’ is the community of organisms living in, on or near the bottom of a stream, river, lake or sea. The benthic zone is the lowest ecological region encompassing the bed and the water layer immediately above it. Organisms; bacteria and fungi, and invertebrates such as crustaceans, exist in a close relationship or completely joined to the substrate or bed. The benthic region or continental shelf travels out to unknown ocean floors. These unrevealed spaces inhabit many creatures that wander the depths, submerged and sheltered that breathe the darkness. Within this complex world lives the bivalvia. A variety of mollusca remarkable in the freshwater and marine ecosystem. It is this group of molluscs I will be centring, whilst exploring both the human and environmental entanglements in which they exist. Within this complex world lives the bivalvia - a variety of mollusca remarkable within the freshwater and marine ecosystem. I will grapple with the significance of this organism through exploring the central role it plays within human and environmental entanglements.
Bivalves are aquatic molluscs, with two-part latched and symmetrical shells such as oysters, mussels, clams and scallops. As per their name, they possess two valves; an incurrent and excurrent siphon. Most bivalves are filter feeders, this means they feed by ingesting free-floating organic matter around them, feeding on organisms such as plankton, and then ejecting both the particles that can’t be fed on, as well as the newly purified water- cleaning water as they breathe. One oyster per hour filters up to five litres of water. Mussels are smaller and filter less per body than the oyster, but they cohabit more densely and a 40x40 feet raft of mussels will filter approximately five million liters of water an hour. Speaking macro-ecologically, the bivalve operates as the intestine of the coastal ecosystem. This essay and accompanying film, “much like a beaver” centres the bivalves molluscs as agents of the sea, and starts to unpack the ways in which they exist within many human and nonhuman entanglements.
Within this essay I will start with the context in which I began this journey, exploring the political and sociopolitical effects of Brexit on the fishing industry, specifically looking at the bivalves and the specific relation they have within the new laws, created very much in relation to their biological beings. Through this I unpack conceptions of mapping within bodies of water thinking through wet ontologies in relation to the European fishing laws. I ask what it means to create borders within spaces which are wild and flowing - where everything within moves in continual flow. From here I move to notions within Feminist enviromental theory (Neimanis and Hamilton); care (De La Bellacasa 2017) and to more-than-human (Haraway 2016) relations that take place within my film and research .
My film is very much more reflective of the latter part of the essay but I am keen to write about what’s not visible as much as what is, and I feel it important to speak through the research as I found it. In terms of my filmmaking, I moved away from the political entanglements of Brexit specifically. As an initial avenue of enquiry when beginning my journey, I veered from this path somewhat responding to the access I had. Although I contacted many cultivation sites, it was the smaller sites I was invited into. As a law only effecting businesses exporting overseas it is the larger operations very much affected by Brexit restrictions. Instead, with access to smaller more intimate sites, alongside individuals for whom the restrictions of Brexit do not fully define their coastal livelihoods, I have been able to explore quotidian experience between fishers and bivlaves and the intimate textures of these entanglements.
I have crossed the country in my attempt to research the many spheres in which the bivalvia exists. Through farming, cultivation, restoration and academia, I have enriched my knowledge in the hopes to centre a life that nourishes the world around them. With the molluscs to thank, I have built relationships with the fascinating people I have met along the way, and although I haven’t been able to include all my wonderful encounters in my film, the knowledge and enthusiasm that has been passed down to me has very much guided me. I use this essay to speak through my own theoretical and contextual journey that culminated in “much like a beaver” which sits alongside this writing. Methodologically, this process has revealed the many entanglements between the seas, the land and the beings that inhabit these spaces . This essay reflects on those relationships, human and non-human that animate these coastal sites.
Within both film and essay, I fluctuate between the bivalve species focusing mainly on oysters and mussels. Speaking of one, then another, as I meander around the shores observing waves and frequencies as they make themselves known to me. Each one with a unique temporal existence of which the babbling estuaries and breathing coastal waters can testify.
Brexit, Bivalves, Benthic
I start with January 2020, as the UK leaves the European Union. New legislation is negotiated that governs the borders separating the two now departed economic zones. Conservative MP Micheal Gove speaks of the initial ‘bumpy moments' in the preparation for a ‘smooth path’ ahead as the UK government takes sovereign power in negotiating new trade deals with the rest of the world. The changes underway are to drastically alter the global landscape in ways known and unknown as new legislation fosters consequences within sectors such as environmental regulation, human rights and public services. A further deepening of social and economic disparity will emerge within domestic uncertainties and environmental injustice. Performed through the posture of an existential crisis, Brexit strategists and their media puppets ask the looming and devious question, “Who are we?”. Brexit hosts the aim to regain control of borders; a state of homogeneous cultural identity and dominance, obsessed by, and reacting to the paranoid drive for separation and segregation.
As we think through borders both concrete and metaphorical, between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, as markers of otherness, they reveal conflicts between the stable and the destabilised. Socially, temporally, spatially and legislatively, the relationality of alterity works both as a device to protect (both actually and as entrapment), and to disassociate and deprive of belonging. The border as a relation creates two conditions; the chaotic and the unchaotic , the disorder and the order - and crossing this line from the former to the latter, only this way, is ruled an illegal act. The Brexit mantra “take back control” says that if a border is to be erected the power will lie on this side.
In between these two zones lie the oceans. Oceans that are now appropriated, and turned into tools of sovereignty and domination. Do they connect or separate? Within these waters, within the currents, the waves, the seabeds, areas that not a single human has ever seen, is a whole population of inhabitants subsequently forfeited in the wake of this structural human endeavour. Within the waters, the lives of many are dependent; both human and non-human, the seas are host to many. And not just within, but as a network of survival, a web of reverberations take place. In the middle of this political ball game, the waters are seized as mere devices of capture, disregarded as a lesser terrain, and vital watery economies and ecologies are manhandled and brutalised. This was a moment in which the fishing industry was divided and upturned.
Being part of the European Union (EU) means being a member of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The CFP is an organisation designed to manage fishstock and regulate production operating within the European Economic Area (EEA). The policy organises fishing as a shared commodity, meaning a monopoly won’t apply to a countries ‘own’ waters. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (as opposed to EEA) is the oceanic 200 nautical mile area from the countries coastal baseline. This includes the territorial ownership of overseas colonies, i.e France has the largest EEZ in the world due to its colonies outside of Europe. The EEZ of France covers approximately 8% of the total surface of all the EEZs of the world, whereas the land area of the French Republic is only 0.45% of the total land area of Earth. For many decades, fishing communities have been entrenched in ongoing feuds regarding the EU law surrounding the ownership, regulation and division of waters, and Brexit tactics led fishers to believe that many of the historical demands were finally being listened to. As a result, the fishing industry became the highest Brexit voting industry in the UK with 92% voting leave on promises around this regaining of control to the UK fishing zones and quotas. Within the UK, there are only 12,000 fishers employed, and in terms of the economy the impact of the industry is small. Thus for the British government the industry is insignificant. Merely a political device and an easily dismissed bargaining tool. This is a typical example of political and social inclusion/exclusion when it comes to the roles of agents such as “small-scale producers, trade unions, fishing communities and Indigenous people”. (Foley, P, Mather, C 2018) Negotiations since the referendum are still somewhat ongoing, but for many it is clear these promises are still mainly unkept. This has meant that many of these coastal businesses have crumbled, communities where the fishing industry is a means of survival and togetherness.
Within this, it is the bivalve mollusc that has very much been caught in the net of this volatile and ongoing divorce. At the core of this is the stratification of water quality. In the UK, water is graded A, B, and C dependent on levels of E-coli. Grade A waters are high quality whilst both grade B and C waters (most UK waters) have enough E-coli to require a mandatory depuration process that assures the molluscs are safe for consumption. This is a cleaning process whereby the molluscs are transferred into fresh water purification tanks encouraging them to rid themselves of E-coli through their natural filtering. As an EU member, Britain was exempt from having to preclean the molluscs before exportation. Purification tanks are majoritively on EU land and the UK have not got the resources on the scale required for exportation. Furthermore, even with tanks in the UK the bivalves cut off from their natural food source would not survive the journey.
For Trevor Jones, a mussel farmer I met on the Menai Stait in Wales, who for decades has been exporting mussels to countries such as Belgium and France, his family business has come to a complete stand still. Trevor’s three large mussel farming boats worth seven million pounds sit empty, they haven't left the harbour since December 2020.
Lines, Lubriciousness, Landscapes
“Below the surface is the inconvenient behaviour of fish, which refuse to recognise territories or borders, and swim where they will.” (Etkins, P 2017)
As a somewhat hidden and invisible creature of the sea, bivalves and many other astonishing and tiny nonhuman existences are weaved into the tangled web of human infrastructure. A globalised economy that prioritises power and expansion over the natural world and further, the extraction of the natural world for globalisations perpetuation . This catastrophic disregard (by some) for the womb that protects, feeds and nurtures has plummeted us into an era of desperation, but by countering the overwhelming force of human greed and relentless consumption of modern capitalism many questions and ventures, collectivities and purposes arise. Questions around how we un-destruct self-destruction, how we care for the landscapes and ecologies. Most importantly, much of this knowledge that comes to the foreground is the indiginous, post colonial and feminist thinking that enables productive, thoughtful and informed responses but are so often overlooked. (Haraway, 2016)
In reaction to this one particular endeavour to divide the oceans into bounded domains, I will call upon writings from Kimberly Peters (2015, 2020) and Eyal Weizman (2004) on wet ontologies to argue how these borders are rendered problematic. Thinking from the bivalve mollusc as a native and nonnative inhabitant of this land, I want to inspect the territorialized blue environment and seek further political, ecological and spiritual knowledge that will shine a light onto this complex domain. By taming the wild bodies of water to that of a Euclidean conception of matter , a meaningless two-dimensional plane the innate materiality of water and fluid existences within are refused. What about the fish that swim? The ice that melts into new paths? The coastlines that erode? The boats and ships that carry aquatic hostages on their hulls? The tides and waves that travel at all directions of the compass? The moving tides at the mercy of the moon?
As a spatial formation (Keenan, T and Weizman, E 2012) that counters geometric modes of capture that govern the earth’s bodies of water, it is vital to recognise the voluminous, fertile and unruly wet spaces that exist in opposition to the strict assemblages (Latour 2005) of governance that circulate them. Many academics have engaged in the notion of “wet ontology” “imagining the world from the perspective of the sea, and not just the land.” (Peters and Steinburg in Lo Presti, 2020, p1). They argue that scientific strategies of aquaculture planning are all well and good but wet ontologies argue that to reach transformative futures it is essential to think much more critically drawing upon ontologies and geophilosophies as a vital adjacent conversation. Kimberley Peters (2020 p6) compares authors both empirical and theoretical, and finds interestingly, that through clashing approaches and comically contrasting academic languages that the authors argued something similar. Peters (2020) gives examples of the works and deliniates from them an agreement that “[...the sea] is geophysically liquid, mobile, [and] three-dimensional. You can draw a line on a map, but not the ocean itself. You can attempt to designate a zone, but the sea and life at sea move. More so, because the deep sea is legally an international space and for the most part is beyond state jurisdiction, it cannot be territorialized in the same way.” They are both arguing how the materially incongruous juxtaposition that this form of mapping creates is wholly unrealistic and futile. The wet materiality holds such strength in depth that it renders the fractioning of the ocean even to authorise more power to nations, ineffectual.
But it’s not just cartography that is under scrutiny, Steinburg and Peters (2015) draw upon many thinkers’ approaches to understand the arrangement of the ocean but who in doing so unavoidably fall into contained conditions or anatomies. “Whether one divides the ocean into its noises (Serres, 1996), its microbes (Helmreich, 2009), its molecules (Steinberg, 2011a), or its affective resonances (Bachelard, 1994; Michelet, 1861), one is continually faced by the paradox that any attempt to ‘know’ the ocean by separating it into its constituent parts serves only to reveal its unknowability as an idealised stable and singular object (Connery, 1996).” (p249)
Certainly in terms of EU law disregarding the ocean as a relational space, disruptions in bivalve farming clearly are not taking into consideration how molluscs live. There can not be one brush that tarnishes the whole sea life population, and by doing so disruptions in mollusc cultivation could potentially bring with it unknown but destructive consequences to the harvesting of a species that depollutes the waters, plus many more environmental and societal repercussions. I am not arguing that supervision over an overfished sea is the problem, but the way in which these laws are enacted does not allow for any kind of nuanced understanding of water space, and too the criticalities and complexities of ecologies within. This further hghtlights the necessity to resituate conversations and engagements within bodies of water through an ontological lense as the bureaucratic centring on human and non human relationships disregards the multiplicity that exist already, without human intervention.
Moving from sea to land and vice versa allows for the altering conceptualisations of territory to be juxtaposed bringing new knowledge to each. Micheal Serres (2008) writes, “Just as we are identified by our thumbprint, the earth's identity card, a veritable map of the world, can become the model for highly formal meditations. Once again, we find that aesthetics constitutes a body of knowledge, in this case topological, without always having to invoke the reality to which it refers.” (p273) In this important likening in these two forms of cartographic control Serres makes reference to a kind of structural violence. Are the oceans not as disconnected from their mapping as we are from our own? These sanctions and unfreedoms are threats and contain the conditions of colonial pasts/presents that repeat systems of depossession. If these cartographic organisations can’t allow for alternative ways of thinking and knowing then a critical gap will always exist in the equation of solution.
Steinburg and Peters (2015) (p251) recalls Eyal Weizman’s politics of verticality rethinking these cartographic techniques in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Weizman writes (2004) “The border ceased long ago to be a single continuous line and broke up into a series of separate makeshift boundaries, internal checkpoints and security apparatuses.” Weizman , within this essay speaks of the many vertical layers of domination within Palestine. He talks about the way roads and infrastructure is built that stretches above the land, disconnecting the settlements from easily being able to access outside of itself, illustrating how the dominance is exerted from height. He goes on to speak on how it's the militarisation of organisation that creates such un-complex understandings of space.
Although Weizman’s dismantling of a horizontal mapping is important, it is also necessary to go further than the straight axis and recognize the ways in which power is nonmaterial. By moving away from the notion of territory as something voluminous, and acknowledging that it is not the ground that humans make contact with that defines that point to a singular dimensional space. Thinking otherwise starts to a) decentre the human and b) decapacitiates humans power to determine sovereignty over territory. When we critique forms of horizontalism is it important to understand this hierarchy of axis geopolitically, to register the three-dimensional.
For the terraqueous dimension of the farmed oysters the boundaries and penalisations make little sense to the realities of aqualife. Farmed oysters grow in pillow case shaped nets that sit on rows of seaweed covered trestles. They are lined up, and face the ocean like barricades looking out guarding the waters. As the tides come in the trestles are submerged into the waves, but in a moment, as the tide goes out, they reemerge becoming land creatures- perhaps land, or even creatures of the air. Or in fact none of these. And thus, with the strictness and disregard these governmental borders impose, both the molluscs and the tides are stripped of their agency and misunderstood entirely. Thinking through vertically in this way, disrupts inherent frameworks of thought that remove agency from nonhuman worlds and disregard complexities of actants (Latour 2005).
Haptics, Hilations, Habitats
Though bivalves once flourished all around the world, the population has seen a rapid decline and consequently a detrimental degradation of the waters. Within British waters, oyster stocks have been on the decline since the beginning of the 19th Century and by mid-century were showing worrying signs of depletion. This depletion has been due to a few main factors ; one, a vast overfishing in the 1800s, a time oysters were extremely accessible, cheap and substantial. More recently, within a globalised world, pollution, disease outbreak and invasive species are the factors which have led to an almost dissolution of their natural range- current figures in the UK show that 95% of native oyster beds and reefs have been lost.
Cohabitation for molluscs, the assembling, creates incredible biodiverse environments for many organisms and other aquatic life from which to flourish, something I focus on in “much like a beaver,” highlighting the importance of the species and the significance of their material. This close extinction has created many biological consequences and thus in the last few decades, many environmental agencies have been utalising the cultivation of bivalve ecosystems to build and sustain healthy ecologies within ponds, rivers, estuaries, seas and oceans.
It is within context, I now wish to highlight the significance and possibilities profited by affective, embodied care and its inherent relationality within the ontological debate (De La Bellacasa (2017), Haraway (2016), Hamilton and Neimanis (2018). These contexts offer a point of departure from which to engage with the enmeshment of human and non-human worlds outside of the anthropocentric paradigm, in turn offering opportunities to resituate/redefine notions of care, cohabitation and co-laboration. (Haraway 2016).
First I will speak about the way in which Hamilton and Neimanis (2018) use composting as way to emphasise the absented source of feminist knowledge, and how that knowledge is reappropriated and origins become neglected. This will lead me to speaking about Bellacasa (2017) writing that expands notions of care outwards from humans , and the haptic qualities that this encompases , and my centering of this within “much like a beaver”.
Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis in their paper “Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities” (2018) explain their metaphor of ‘composting’ as a way to understand the way Feminist thinking has historically been circulated within scholarly thinking. Compost as we domestically understand it is the recycling of organic waste which creates a nutrient rich byproduct used to fertilise and improve soil. Hamilton and Neimanis apply this to the repetitive and cyclical denying and undervalued knowledge which they term as “named but not claimed” (p504) . Through this , Neimanis and Hamilton call for a more inclusive feminism that counters the white heavy landscape of contemporary environmental humanities. This points to all manors of metholodoloical thinking, theoretical knowledge and practical application. Hamilton and Neimanis hold an ongoing cross disciplinary reading group named “Composting”. This reading group is meant as a space in which writings old and new are ‘dug up’ and resurfaced, given a physical and online space which to be reread and grown from.
As other feminist ways of living that become negated, Bellacasa speaks about the physicality of care in being to being relations through touch and the ways in which this tactility has been so overlooked. She writes, “[...]much like care, touch is called upon not as dominant, but as a neglected mode of relating with compelling potential to restore a gap that keeps knowledge from embracing a fully embodied subjectivity.” Much like many forms of care that are majoritively enacted by women, this exchange becomes a lesser valued part of life. Within ‘much like a beaver’, the male representation is important as an insight into this male led industry (mainly with the fishing) an industry that is led by passion with a real sense of ‘responce-ability’ by men.
Bellacasa draws upon Haraway's notion of “respons-ability” that wonders about seeing , human to nonhuman through touch as opposed to through sight, and the response mechanisms that take place when contact is made, through the returned touch. “This vision challenges the framing of knowing within epistemologies of representation and “optics of mediation” (Barad 2007, 374–77)—in social constructivism, for instance, “nature” never comes to “us” but is mediated by the knowledge social beings have of it.” (p114) A knowledge unfolds through this response, Bellacassa names this “touching vision” as a mode of seeing which works relationally and subjectively. The “...haptic image is not the identification of/with a distinct “figure” but to engage viewer and image in an immersed “bodily relationship.” (116) Representation through touch becomes a reciprocal acknowledgment , an intimate reverberation that works all the senses.
Throughout my filming process I was constantly conscious to create an intimacy with the visualisation of touch, making sure to really follow these integral connections and moments of relations. It was only through my editing process that I both intentionally and unintentionally created a film which centred hands in the way that we expect to centre heads/faces within film. It’s not to fragment necessary, but to centre the hands as an important origin of embodied knowledge.
Bellsacassa quotes Laura U. Marks in thinking through this visibility. “[T]he closeness of haptic visuality induces us to acknowledge the “unknowability of the other.” When vision is blurred in close imagery, objects become “too close to be seen properly,” “optical resources fail to see,” and optic knowing is “frustrated.” It is then that the impulse of haptic visuality is stirred up, inviting us to “haptic speculation”. Imagination plays an interesting role here, Marks draws our attention to the abstract or projected illusions we conjure when experiencing something out of clear focus. We are not to know the trueness of the thing in which we encounter, and isn't this guarding a component to what holds agency for the thing that it is? Within “much like a beaver”, I have created spaces that are led by speaking on top of a black screen to allow for this speculation to take place. Both this and the inclusion of blurred images I spoke of earlier were tools I employed to work within these notions of haptics. Bellacassa goes on to speak about haptic speculation as not necessarily about futurity but speculation in the now , the “everyday survival strategy” in “ “life below the radars” of optic orders that do not welcome, know, or not even perceive the practices that exceed preexistent representations and meanings.” (p117). These are the important ways in which to talk about care; by taking notice of the mundane routines and concerning ourselves with the modest materials that circulate as if nothing - but making everything possible.
To add to these writings and conversations that are composted, I like to situate the hidden bivalve and draw attention to the way in which they care unconditionally. Secreting carbon in life and decomposing it in death. Their afterlifes, their own bodies decompose in a way which cares for ecologies ongoing. This is the basis of the restoration project I include within “more than a beaver” - an existence that is overlooked but deeply integral. When alive, bivalves through the very motion of breathing, clean the water, giving life to coastal aquaculture and thus the human world. This hydrocomming (Neimanis, 2017) multispecies breathing is one of the many ways these acts of care are not only reciprocated but exist as conditions of life for the bivalves. If humans are able to reciprocate the same maintaining of the world, as an ontologically wired embodiment, that is a place that with the writings of so many i have referenced we are able to create futures that “ maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (Tronto 1993, 103, emphasis added).” (p3, Bellacassa).
Throughout my research travelling to many sites of mollusc cultivation, I saw something special. Something remarkable about the temporal nature of this work. Whether it be for restoration or consumption purposes, the molluscs are uncompromising in their growth, and (as of yet) human interference hasn’t enabled technological invention to intervene. Growth is slow. This is slow food. There are no corners to be cut, there is no pesticide or environmental tampering that has accelerated the formations of growth - patience is process. Here, the molluscs embody a rejection of the global mass production of foods, this farming is about nurture. It brought to my mind Donna Harroway [2019 ] quoting Eric Stanley on his notion, “forced life”. These are industrial agricultural (also relevant within aquaculture) lives that are involuntary and that are violent. Lives which order the sole purpose being the slaughter, and where the living part is of utility and speed. Forced life , something like ‘pro life’, eliminates agency from the thing that is nurturing or being nurtured. For the molluscs and indeed their carers there is a quiet force to be reckoned with. This food source presents to us a process otherwise - that illustrates that capitalist food production can operate through care. I really wanted to respond to this in my film, to the agency that each of these actants hold, the steady nature of life that makes the demands on humans.
Through theoretical notions and academic texts, I hope to illustrate something I have seen. However, I want to present as a final thought, a little rebuttal to the context in which I write. I want to comment on the conflicts of knowledge application that I become very aware of within my field work. As I made my way (from university) to farms and to environmental departments in other universities meeting researchers and of course many cultivators, what I discovered was a real tension that lived through these differing knowledges and practises. For the fishers ‘on the ground’ holding, handling, living with the molluscs, there was a real injustice felt. A bias in the division of funds and attention towards that of academia. There was a real feeling that the fishers were used by the researchers as a way to extract money from the funding bodies. They spoke of the little dialogue that existed between them , and the almost comical way they spoke about how little the academics knew.
This being said, I thank all involved , all species , humans , textures and curiosities that guided me through this wonderful journey. I will carry this work onwards and hope to expand and reflect further on all I have learned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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IMAGES
Fig 1 Authors own image
Fig 2 https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-brexit-eu-fisheries/
Fig 3 Authors own image
Fig 4 https://www.livain.com/2021/01/28/earth-2-land-classes-explained
Fig 5 Authors own image