By now, most people are aware of greenwashing; the marketing spin used by companies and organisations to convince you that their products and practices and environmentally friendly when in reality they are not. In The Empty Sea, physical chemist Ilaria Perissi joins forces with her colleague, self-styled “collapsologist” Ugo Bardi, to take a hard-nosed look at the blue economy. This is the collective term for economic activities related to the sea, and there is something decidedly fishy about its promises of prosperity and abundance.

The Empty Sea: The Future of the Blue Economy, written by Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi, published by Springer in February 2021 (hardback, 203 pages)

This book was originally published in Italian as Il Mare Svuotato by Editori Riuniti. The English translation is published by Springer and is branded as A Report to the Club of Rome, the international think tank promoting the understanding of long-term challenges to humanity. It is the third report from Bardi after Extracted and The Seneca Effect. A foreword by two co-presidents of the Club of Rome calls the book a brainchild of the Club’s first report for applying similar models to the marine economy. A second foreword by famous fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly praises it as an accessible book for a broad audience on overfishing.

Indeed, The Empty Sea mostly deals with one facet of the blue economy, fishing, in five of its six chapters. When discussing the early history of fishing, Perissi & Bardi’s narrative largely agrees with that of Brian Fagan’s Fishing of it being a subsistence activity until the rise of civilizations allowed it to become a trade. They claim that a big problem of fishing was preserving the catch, something only the Norwegians successfully managed to do with stockfish as ambient temperatures in Norway were ideal for this. Salting was used, but salt was an expensive commodity. Those claims appear hasty in light of the archaeological research described by Fagan. There is evidence to suggest that ancient Egyptians were smoking catfish and handing it out as rations to the workers constructing the Giza pyramids. Fagan similarly discussed the existence of Roman fish-salting facilities, with Sicily being a major centre and other salting workshops found around the Mediterranean.

What is without a doubt is that industrial fishing as we know it required numerous technical inventions regarding boats, engines, canning, and (later) on-board refrigeration, plus relentless funding by governments. Perissi & Bardi walk the reader through four examples of overexploitation of marine animals: whaling, Caspian Sea sturgeon to produce caviar, Atlantic cod, and Peruvian anchovy.

“Worryingly, […] global fishing effort seems to have peaked lately, despite using bigger and more powerful vessels, suggesting we might be approaching a larger collapse”

After this, they discuss their application of the Lotka–Volterra equations to industrial fishing. These are better known as the equations that describe fluctuations in population abundance of predator–prey dyads^[1]. This chapter hits many other relevant notes such as Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons and Elinor Ostrom’s work in response, how economists continue to ignore ecological models, and how fisheries concepts such as Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) and Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) have failed to halt overfishing.

The frequently observed pattern of fish landings for a species peaking and then declining, followed by a peak and decline in fishing effort looks just like one predator–prey cycle that the Lotka–Volterra model would produce. From this, the authors argue that this model can more generally describe the dynamics of overexploitation of natural resources. As a limited application of this model, this seems true. However, as the name implies, non-renewable resources such as ores will not recover after the predator (read: human) population crashes, whereas renewable resources such as fish populations or forests could theoretically rebound. Worryingly, as shown here, global fishing effort seems to have peaked lately, despite using bigger and more powerful vessels, suggesting we might be approaching a larger collapse.

A brief section on other problems (plastic pollution and sea-level rise) leaves unmentioned issues such as acidification, eutrophication, oxygen loss and dead zones, and water temperature and the potential impact on ocean circulation. This incomplete detour could have been left out and is emblematic of what troubles this book. Though the chapters are individually interesting and accessibly written, the book meanders somewhat aimlessly, lacking an overarching structure or narrative, instead dipping into a few topics here and a few topics there. And despite the friendly price for a Springer book and Pauly’s praise, the authors have stiff competition—there is no shortage of well-written popular books documenting overfishing. They mention Lament for an Ocean regarding Atlantic cod, but Callum Robert’s The Unnatural History of the Sea and Ocean of Life come to mind, as does The End of the Line that inspired the documentary by the same name. The same is true for the history of whaling.

“As long as we keep talking of the world in terms of natural resources, as a larder to be plundered, the blue economy is just one more case of greenwashing what is business as usual.”

What keeps me coming back to Bardi’s writing, both online and in print, is that he never ceases to be a thorn in the side of optimists and relentlessly skewers overblown claims with a healthy dose of realism. Economic growth and technological development have created “many [problems] for which we can’t find solutions, except the unnameable ones that would involve stopping, or even reducing, economic growth” (p. 88). Especially the last chapter pulls no punches. It covers other facets of the blue economy, described here as “a true fish soup of various activities, seasoned with fashionable words like “sustainable”, [and] “smart”” (p. 131). I wish the authors had been briefer on the history of overfishing and developed this part more fully, as they make some really interesting observations.

For instance, estimates of how much energy we could generate from the sea’s tides, currents, or waves are not particularly impressive compared to current consumption, and the diffuse nature of the sea makes it very hard to harness them. Harvesting dissolved minerals from seawater is shown to be completely uneconomical and, for something like uranium, might cost more energy than it would generate. Deep-sea mining is put down as senseless as there is nothing of value down there, though in , Helen Scales showed that companies are exploring it and obtaining mining concessions, which suggests otherwise. Enthusiasm for the blue economy has been predominantly driven by the staggering economic growth seen in aquaculture. As discussed here, it is far from the success story of human ingenuity that it is made out to be and has many serious drawbacks.

Despite the somewhat hit-and-miss character of this book, its central message is important and comes through loud and clear. As long as we keep talking of the world in terms of natural resources, as a larder to be plundered, the blue economy is just one more case of greenwashing what is business as usual. This concept has nothing new to offer us and will become one more chapter in the continuing saga of humans overexploiting their environment.

1. ↑ What is not mentioned is that the Lotka–Volterra model has been criticized for its unrealistic assumptions. Other models have been developed, though which approach best describes reality unsurprisingly continues to be discussed.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Empty Sea

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Collapse is a feature, not a bug. This motto is almost like a mantra to physical chemist Ugo Bardi. He is interested in complex systems and how they collapse. Whether they be human-made structures, companies, societies, or ecosystems; he follows the thinking of Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BCE–65CE) who wrote, in Bardi’s words, that “growth is slow, but the way to ruin is rapid”. This led Bardi to write The Seneca Effect in 2017, which was reviewed here previously. Now he is back with Before the Collapse, a book aimed at a wider audience that promises to help readers understand and navigate collapses in their lives.

Before the Collapse: A Guide to the Other Side of Growth, written by Ugo Bardi, published by Springer in October 2019 (paperback, 242 pages)

Bardi opens his book with a chapter on modelling. Before we even get to describing the growth and collapse of complex systems, he wants readers to understand how we do this describing. The thing about complex systems is that they are… well, complex. Whether it is the weather forecast or the depletion of fossil fuel reserves, scientists often turn to models, and this approach is often eyed suspiciously or even belittled by the general public. Something that he thinks is entirely unjustified.

So, before proceeding, Bardi wants readers to understand the difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches to building a model, and their advantages and limitations. He is especially interested in the failure of models to predict rapid, unexpected changes (so-called tipping points, though Bardi calls the catastrophic variants Seneca cliffs), and their inability to foresee statistical outliers: the unpredictable, potentially devastating, never-before-experienced events that have been popularised as black swans. He also highlights the psychological biases that lead us to disbelief models, whether through emotions, biases, gullibility, inappropriate rules of thumb, or a false sense of security that makes us overestimate the chances that model predictions will be wrong.

“[Bardi] is especially interested in the failure of models to predict tipping points, and their inability to foresee statistical outliers: the unpredictable, potentially devastating, never-before-experienced events popularised as black swans”

With the value of models sufficiently established, Bardi moves on to describe the anatomy of complex systems and the various growth modes by which they can develop. But the bulk of the book is a catalogue of catastrophes. As in The Seneca Effect, this includes human-engineered structures, financial and societal collapses, resource depletion, famines, and ecosystem collapse, but also some new categories such as natural disasters, warfare, epidemics, and depopulation. Some examples were already covered in his last book, including the peak oil concept and the Irish famine of 1845. Others, though, are new, such as the 2018 collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa, the bankruptcy of video rental company Blockbuster, the great 1966 flood of Florence that Bardi experienced personally, and some of history’s most fatal wars. Bardi writes of them with his typical sense of often grim and ironic humour, and a bold, fearless attitude that sees him confront uncomfortable facts of life with almost Stoic calm.

The book’s preface promises that this is a completely new and different book, though I feel he only partially delivers on that promise. If you have not read The Seneca Effect this, of course, is not much of an issue. The blurb mentions that “this book will help you […] face failure and collapse at all scales […] and navigate the swirl of events that frequently threaten your balance and happiness“, and the preface expresses the hope that “you will find this book useful for your life and your career“. Based on this I was expecting if not a kind of self-help book, at least something in the way of applied lessons on a personal level. But it seems that once Bardi gets to his chapter on strategies to manage collapses, he has abandoned this plan and partially retreads his last book, though, admittedly, with some new examples.

“Given that we have depleted easily accessible fossil fuel and mineral resources during the past few centuries, could we reboot civilization after a crash?”

So, the option of technological progress against collapse is new. Here, Bardi focuses on new ways to meet our energy needs, covering the pipe dream of cold fusion research, futuristic concepts such as universal mining machines, and our likely saviour, renewable energy. The section on avoiding overexploitation is confusingly more a showcase of how not to avoid collapse, highlighting how politics and greed often come together to deplete the resources we depend on.

Not new is the section on the Iago strategy, previously covered as hostile collapses – this is the dark side of the Seneca cliff, the use of deception and betrayal to avoid ruin by destroying an opponent in, for example, warfare. Also not new is the discussion on different forms of governing resources, the tragedy of the commons, the question of whether democracy and privatisation can stave off collapse, or the example of Japan during the Edo period as a rare case of a zero-growth society with exceptional long-term stability.

“[…] unless you are in a position of power, you have little influence to change or avert collapses. For most people, the best strategy is to familiarise yourself with the concept of collapses so that you may both understand and recognize them”

And The Seneca Effect also already explored the possibility of rebound after collapse, though Bardi here asks the interesting question if this would be possible after the collapse of our current society. Given that we have depleted easily accessible fossil fuel and mineral resources during the past few centuries, could we reboot civilization after a crash? Keep in mind that geochemical processes will not replenish these reserves in our lifetimes, if ever. Still, he thinks recycling mineral resources to kick-start a renewable-energy–based infrastructure could be an option. I would add that we might also want to have at hand ample copies of Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge.

If I have to be critical, I have two gripes with this book. One is that I feel the book wanders a bit. I personally very much enjoy the subject matter and am happy to accompany Bardi as he muses his way through the book. But I do think it would have benefited from both proofreading to catch out grammatical errors, and especially from some critical editorial attention. A revision of the text might have resulted in something more coherent and novel that truly sets itself apart from his previous book, something it now only partially succeeds in doing.

Second, as mentioned above, based on the blurb and the preface I expected a slightly different book with more actionable advice (a six-point summary at the end of the book contains a few pointers). However, given the nature of complex systems it appears that, unless you are in a position of power, you have little influence to change or avert collapses. For most people, the best strategy is to familiarise yourself with the concept of collapses so that you may both understand them and recognize when they are imminent or already underway. And that is something this book does succeed in. I am convinced that readers will come away with plenty of ideas to mull over.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Before the Collapse hardback or ebook

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