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Red Gold

The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna

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Jennifer E. Telesca

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The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is the world’s foremost organization for managing and conserving tunas, seabirds, turtles, and sharks traversing international waters. Founded by treaty in 1969, ICCAT stewards what has become under its tenure one of the planet’s most prominent endangered fish: the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Called “red gold” by industry insiders for the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands in the sushi economy, the giant bluefin tuna has crashed in size and number under ICCAT’s custodianship.

With regulations to conserve these sea creatures in place for half a century, why have so many big bluefin tuna vanished from the Atlantic? In Red Gold, Jennifer E. Telesca offers unparalleled access to ICCAT to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. ICCAT manages the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires—and, as a result, has become complicit in their extermination.The decades of regulating fish as commodities have had disastrous consequences. Amid the mass extinction of all kinds of life today, Red Gold reacquaints the reader with the splendors of the giant bluefin tuna through vignettes that defy technoscientific and market rationales. Ultimately, this book shows, changing the way people value marine life must come not only from reforming ICCAT but from transforming the dominant culture that consents to this slaughter.

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A CONVERSATION BETWEEN AUTHOR JEN TELESCA
AND EDITOR JASON WEIDEMANN

University of Minnesota Press · Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna

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  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Abbreviations
  • Prologue. The Life and Death of Bluefin Tuna: Homage to an Ocean Giant
  • Introduction. The Very Elder Gods Become Red Gold: Value on the High Seas
  • 1. A History of the Bluefin Tuna Trade: The Emergence of Commodity Empires
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • About the Author

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  • rights
    The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges support for the publication of this book from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

    The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for the publication of this book by the Offices of the Dean and Provost at the Pratt Institute.

    An earlier version of chapter 5 was originally published as “Consensus for Whom? Gaming the Market for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna through the Empire of Bureaucracy,” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33, no. 1 (spring 2015): 49–64.

    Copyright 2020 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
  • publisher
    University of Minnesota Press
  • publisher place
    Minneapolis, MN
  • restrictions
    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
  • rights holder
    Regents of the University of Minnesota
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