Praise for Our Mother Ocean
“Through overfishing, industrial aquaculture, and poisoning, capitalism is killing ocean life—upon which all of life on Earth depends—but the people who are most directly threatened by this destruction are fighting back, and the rest of us urgently need to join their struggles. That is the story that unfolds in this remarkably detailed but compact book by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese. To date, awareness of the killing has been mostly limited to the environmental movement. At the same time, awareness of the ways in which capitalism has been slowly destroying traditional communities of those who live by, on, and with the seas has been mostly limited to the peoples of those communities and, in the case of indigenous fishing communities, a few anthropologists. This book not only illuminates the interrelationships between these two patterns of destruction, but also highlights the emergence of a worldwide movement of resistance on the part of some of those most directly threatened.”
—Harry Cleaver, author of Reading Capital Politically
“In this lyrical text, two political scholars—feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa and ecologist Monica Chilese—contest the global neoliberal assault on life through the prism of the sea, with its threatened species and courageous fisher peoples. Their impeccable research will bring validation, inspiration, and empowerment to the worldwide struggle of communities for food sovereignty and sustainable, life-affirming cultures.”
—Ariel Salleh, University of Sydney, author of Ecofeminism as Politics and Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice
“This book about the world’s fishermen movement provides us with new insight about a phenomenon that is completely ignored, not only by the mainstream media, but also by independent researchers. Yet the questions it raises about the safeguarding of resources, the right to live, and the satisfaction of needs are strategic. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese have achieved a great and highly enjoyable book.”
—Claudio Albertani, History Department, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México
“This book is indeed a timely one. With climate change and the exhaustion of natural resources, patriarchal capitalist civilization seems to be coming to an end. The authors remind us that Mother Earth and Mother Ocean are indeed the sources of all life on our planet. Without Earth, no life; without oceans and water, no life. The authors argue that the vital connection between humans and the sea, between humans and the Earth, has been disrupted by capitalist and patriarchal exploitation. The victims of this exploitation, among others, are the small coastal fishermen who lose their livelihood. However, the authors do not stop at analyzing their problems, but show how people everywhere are fighting against this destruction. I warmly recommend this book to all who are concerned about the future of life on this planet.”
—María Mies, author of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale and coauthor of The Subsistence Perspective with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen
“The emergence of the fisher as part of the movement against neoliberal globalization is beautifully understood in this book. I applaud the authors’ passionate portrayal of workers on the sea as an organic part of those of us who wish to protect Nature against the rapacious excesses of capitalism.”
—George Katsiaficas, author of Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Vols. 1 and 2, and The Subversion of Politics
“In Our Mother Ocean, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese sound an eloquent warning about the precarious state of not only the planet’s fisheries but of the health of the world’s oceans themselves. They foreground the dilemmas facing fishermen’s movements in various continents, caught as they are between economic imperatives, the need to fish sustainably, and the pressures of multinational capitalism. This book is a thoughtful and necessary call to action.”
—David Gullette, Simmons College, author of Dreaming Nicaragua
“There is no apocalyptic randiness in this amazing account of horror. Instead we get a call as rigorous as it is passionate for what we all need to do now. The authors distill for the reader the almost overwhelming documentation they use in their very solid exploration of the subject, covering almost every aspect of it, and they share their insights in an elegant and direct style. The world fishers movement, brilliantly described here—the biggest fishers movement in history—begins to do for Mother Ocean what Via Campesina, the biggest farmers movement in history, is doing for Mother Earth. In resisting the new enclosures, hundreds of millions of people are thus attempting to stop the devastating activity of corporate capital, in order to sustain their ways of life, and ours. They need both our awareness and our action. This is the book we need for both.”
—Gustavo Esteva, author of Grassroots Post-Modernism
“Our Mother Ocean is an engaging and critical effort by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese, who bring attention to the concerns, questions, and struggles relating to the seas and their remarkable social, economic, cultural, and ecological importance to human beings. This appealing book not only questions our relation with the sea but aims to raise consciousness about the way we live our lives and the ecologic problematic we all face globally. It is in this context that the authors brilliantly relate the path of the movement of fishermen, a movement born in the seventies in India that has now spread all over the world. Under the banner of food sovereignty, this movement fights the neoliberal predatory assault and view of sea life as mere products, while struggling to establish a different relationship with the sea, a sustainable relationship with this source of life that ensures the protection of both the small coastal communities who ‘have always lived on the sea and of the sea’ and the sheltering of the beauties, habitats, and ecosystems of our mother ocean.”
—Massimo Modonesi, professor of history, sociology, and Latin American studies, director of the Department of Sociology of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City
Our Mother Ocean: Enclosure, Commons, and the Global Fishermen’s Movement
© 2014, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese
Translated by Silvia Federici
This edition © 2014 Common Notions
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Originally published in Italy as Nostra madre Oceano: Questioni d lotte del movimento dei pescatori in 2005 by Derive Approdi, Rome.
ISBN: 978-1-942173-00-7
LCCN: 2014949635
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Common Notions
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Printed in the United States of America.
OUR MOTHER OCEAN
Enclosure, Commons, and theGlobal Fishermen’s Movement
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese
Translated by