Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Relatively little is known about the global diversity of species wherever they occur. The oceans, and especially the deep oceans, are far less explored than the land surface, so it seems probable that they harbour many unknown riches. Given this, it seems hardly likely that we have an accurate handle on the ocean’s total potential for food.

  There is much that consumers can do too. It is their conservative eating habits that drive up prices and bring favourite species to the brink, with cod in Stockholm at $175 a kilo and sushi tuna in Tokyo at $220. Change is not impossible. Herring, not cod, was once the over-fished staple in northern Europe. According to Mrs Beeton, the Romans would pay £15 for a one-kilo red mullet, a fish for which she was accustomed to paying a shilling. The market mechanism slows the growth in demand for such fish but does not put any block on their ultimate spiral to extinction. Here, the Marine Stewardship Council, set up by Unilever, owner of the Bird’s Eye frozen food brand, and the WWF conservation charity, may help by prompting retailers, even counting the environmentalists’ bête noire of supermarkets, Walmart, to sell more sustainable fish.

  Meanwhile, we consumers should consider alternative species. During the cod wars, it was suggested that the British try pollack and whiting for their beloved fish and chips, but they never caught on. If we are to keep eating fish, we will have to become more eclectic in our tastes. Some fish, such as skipjack tuna and chub mackerel, are presently conspicuously under-fished. Variety on the fishmonger’s slab (and more importantly in the vast quantities of fish taken for factory processing and fish-and-chip shops) would then more closely reflect diversity in the ocean. Marine ecosystems with more species are less liable to collapse than those with few species, so that the more we spread our harvest among different species, the better the chances that stocks will be maintained of them all. The overall gain is greater than the sum of the gains made by each species because of the beneficial effect of overall species richness. Furthermore, because of the observed potential for fish stocks to recover when they are given a chance, the switch away from present favourites need only be a temporary measure.

  This potential has been dramatically demonstrated not once but twice in the last century as a side effect of two world wars. By 1945, according to Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, ‘fish stocks in the European North Atlantic, after six years with little fishing, were at a level that has never been seen since’.4 A big war would do the trick again. But binding international agreement on fisheries management seems preferable.

  Not a Word

  ‘Like ancient forests displaced by houses, language is ended too’ The Times

  Any discussion about the death or loss of languages rapidly comes up against a fundamental problem of definitions making them hard to count and analyse. What is the difference between a dialect and a language? And do sign languages count? The consensus figure is that there are about 6,000 to 7,000 languages currently in use globally, but estimates in the academic literature range from 3,000 to 10,000. The practicalities also mean that it is impossible to keep an accurate tally on the number of moribund, endangered or safe languages.

  Even so, the facts seem to be compelling and show a clear trend. We are told that the world is losing several languages every month and that 90 per cent of the world’s languages will effectively vanish from day-to-day use by the middle of this century.1 Most languages are losing speakers, despite the rapid global population growth. At least 500 of them are considered to be nearly extinct in that they are spoken by fewer than 100 people. It has been quipped that some Native American languages are only kept alive by a few old parrots on the Orinoco River!

  It is a clear sign when only the elderly and a very small fraction of an ethnic group are speaking a language that it is effectively condemned to extinction. One American newspaper told the story of a German dialect spoken in Texas that is expected to vanish within thirty years.2 The paper said of one elderly couple that ‘the language will likely die with them’, as their children had not been persuaded to learn it. The adverse dynamics can also affect languages with a larger number of speakers. It is estimated, for example, that there are 500,000 speakers of Breton over the age of fifty, but fewer than 2,000 under the age of twenty-five, so unless action is taken to save it, the language will effectively die out in the next half century. Even some languages used by very large numbers – such as some Indonesian languages with a million or more speakers – are at risk due to their speakers’ age profile.

  The loss of languages is a marked change from 10,000 years ago when – although no one knows for sure – there could have been one language for every 500 or so people on the planet. The expert community estimates that there could have been anything between 30,000 and half a million languages that have come and gone without trace. Isolation and the lack of trade and transport naturally bred linguistic diversity. Now, in contrast, it is estimated that there is one language for every million people. But, as ever, averages can lie and all languages are, of course, not in equal usage. Indeed, 95 per cent of them are spoken by just 5 per cent of people worldwide and perhaps as many as 350 languages, about 5 per cent of the total, have more than a million speakers.

  It is the countries with the greatest number of languages that are losing languages the fastest. Brazil is home to around thirty nearly extinct languages, and the US has around seventy, but it is Australia in the lead with as many as 200 nearly extinct languages. Nearly 90 per cent of Australia’s languages – those spoken by aboriginal peoples – are expected to perish with the current generation. A similar fate awaits many of Africa’s tribal languages. Roughly one-third are said to be endangered, and it will be very difficult to save them since the vast majority have no written record.

  The speed of loss is accelerating as languages become a victim of rapid globalization. New languages have traditionally appeared through pidgins and creoles, merging with other languages into families, sometimes taking on a written form. They grow and increase their influence, as did Greek and Latin, and then mutate. Accidents of history, such as colonization and trade, gave some, mainly European languages and in particular English, an importance well above their original geographical and cultural weight. But while some languages are vibrant and evolving, many more are being abandoned and few are being created, as the old dynamic has ground to a halt. When communities find that their ability to survive and advance economically is improved by the use of another language, native tongues naturally fade away, often rapidly as the young seek new opportunities. If languages are used just for religious ceremonies and bedtime stories, rather than trade and government, they are much more likely to die.

  But how important is it to save languages? Some people feel this loss really matters – describing it as a disaster for humanity – believing it to be a more fundamental concern than a reduction in plant and animal diversity or the destruction of culture per se. One newspaper referred to the ‘extraordinary interaction between language biodiversity’, alluding to the fact that native tongues can also be rich in knowledge of the environment – flora and fauna – and of traditional, herbal medicines, knowledge that could be irretrievably lost.3

  Languages can be full of cultural knowledge that facilitates different ways of understanding and discussing the world. For example, the Australian aboriginal language of Guugu Yimithirr does not have a concept of left and right, relying instead on the concepts of north, south, east and west. Your left hand, in other words, could be your north hand unless you are facing in the opposite direction, in which case it would be your south hand! The language requires a constant awareness of where one stands within the landscape geographically speaking – an alertness that is utterly lost in modern speech. One linguistics professor put it more starkly: ‘If you lose your language, you lose a big chunk of your identity.’4 UNESCO, the education, science and cultural wing of the United Nations, has responded to the concern by declaring the 21st of February as International Mother Language Day, in an attempt to promote linguistic diversity.


  A few minority tongues have been saved and perhaps rejuvenated. In 2005, the European Union added Irish Gaelic to its list of official languages – the hiring of translators and its use in speeches will help to preserve Ireland’s native tongue, but at a cost to Europe’s taxpayers of about €4 million. In Kahnawacke, a small community near Montreal in Canada, the use of Mohawk has been encouraged in schools, church services and even a local radio station. The University of Manchester is identifying and transcribing the many Romany dialects – spoken by small groups in many European countries – aiming to preserve the endangered language. Hebrew, essentially extinct for day-to-day communication until the nineteenth century, is perhaps the most successful revived language as it is now spoken by over 7 million people – it is the official language of Israel and is studied in many Jewish communities around the world.

  There would seem to be no such grounds for concern for the world’s most popular languages – around ten of them have at least 100 million speakers. Yet even among those who use widely spoken languages, it would be wrong to underestimate the concerns about the future.

  The Académic Française, for example, the pre-eminent learned body on matters relating to the French language, is not resting even though the language is spoken by over 70 million (and at least double that number according to French sources!). Notably, the Académic has tried to prevent the anglicization of the French language, suggesting that words such as walkman and software be avoided in favour of words derived from French. One of its past chairmen launched a campaign to try to make French the official language of European law and said that the defence of the language should be ‘the major national cause of the 21st century’.5 One suspects that, in downgrading world peace, the environment and global poverty, he might not be speaking for the French population as a whole. The campaign reflected the declining international clout of French – in less than twenty years, the proportion of EU documents originating in French has been more than halved. The French might see the use of their language fading but they pointedly say that the English must protect their language if it is not to be overrun by a bastardized Anglo-American.

  There are conservatives in America who believe that English should be added to the endangered list. Their particular worry is that English will not survive the ‘immigrant flood’ of Spanish-speaking migrants. This seems an implausible scenario, but the American continent has a long history of immigrant languages killing off the indigenous ones. They argue that it would be unfortunate if future generations of Americans were unable to read Shakespeare in the original, but that rather presupposes that many people are reading it now!

  None of these problems affects the most widely used language in the world, Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by nearly 1 billion people. Nor should they really affect Spanish and English, which are a distant second and third, with about 350 million speakers each, followed by Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese and Russian, with between 150 and 200 million speakers.

  English is not only the most commonly spoken second language but also the lingua franca in international business, media, scientific and academic worlds. That is just as well as there are concerns that the English themselves are becoming increasingly monolingual – in an ever-shrinking world, the ability to speak several languages should be prized. In 2004 the British government decided that learning a foreign language need no longer be compulsory beyond the age of fourteen, and modern language departments of universities are closing as demand for places tails off.

  The English might be relieved that it is their language that is becoming the world’s language, but it comes at a cost as the new global language looks less and less like English every year as it absorbs approximations and distortions. As distressing as this might be to many English people, such concerns are surely misplaced. While it is no doubt a bad thing to force people to stop using their language, it is hard to see why it is a bad thing if their language evolves – or even disappears – naturally. Our language is the one that we speak, that suits our needs, not the one that our ancestors spoke. Languages have always developed and expanded, withered and died, reflecting the ebb and flow of human politics, economics and migration. They fade away with little fanfare. The many language projects, such as those in Birmingham (collecting songs and phrases from African Caribbean patois) and in the north-east (saving old-fashioned words from the local dialect), are to be applauded but the realistic aim can never be higher than recording a little bit of social history for posterity.

  9. Modern Science

  Technology used to promise wonders. Now, it seems, it merely breeds distrust and fear. Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So why is the magic now black? Scientists insist that they are not moral agents, that their innovations can be exploited for good and ill. The public is dismayed at this abdication of responsibility and hankers for the days when scientists were heroes.

  Frankenstein Foods

  ‘Harvest of the damned’ Daily Mail

  On 16 February 1999, the Daily Mirror’s front page showed a picture of Tony Blair, whom it termed in the accompanying banner headline ‘THE PRIME MONSTER’. What had the prime minister done that was monstrous? A subheading explained: ‘Fury as Blair says “I eat Frankenstein food and it’s safe” ’.

  ‘Frankenstein food’, for those unfamiliar with British tabloid argot, describes foods derived from genetically modified crops, such as bread made from GM wheat, or soya milk in which some fraction of the soya is genetically modified. The term has become the inevitable media shorthand for this major development in agriculture, but in 1999 it was a new coinage.

  By invoking Frankenstein’s monster, the critics of this biotechnology, led by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and backed by the organic-farming Prince Charles, played on age-old fears that, if we mess with nature, nature will mess with us: GM food is not merely modified, but mutated, and if you eat it, you will be mutated too. This is as absurd as suggesting that if you eat a hybridized tomato, you will become a human–tomato hybrid yourself. We eat conventionally hybridized produce all the time, and there have been no recorded instances of human–vegetable hybrids. Zeneca had launched a GM tomato paste without controversy. But vague unease was transformed to widespread public fear in 1998 when laboratory research by Arpad Pusztai at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen appeared to show impairment of the immune system in rats fed with genetically modified potato. (The research was later discredited.)

  Americans had by this time had some years to get used to GM foods, but there had never been anything like the controversy seen in Europe. Yet the risks – to human health, to the environment – are essentially similar on both continents. There is no intrinsic biological difference between Americans and Europeans, and little aside from its scale between American and European agriculture. So the fact that panic in the European media was matched by indifference in the United States needs to be explained.

  One factor is a recent history of biological food scares, especially in Britain, related to farming on an industrial scale, ranging from salmonella in eggs to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in beef cattle. In the United States food safety is looked after by the Food and Drug Administration whereas in Britain at the time it was overseen by the ministry also responsible for agriculture, producing a clear conflict of interest. But perhaps the major distinction is cultural, to do with the closer connection felt (rightly or not) to exist in Europe between the field and the table, an orthodoxy to which both picturesque countryside and culinary tradition are intimately bound.

  This bucolic scene seems to be in stark contrast to the vision of agriculture opened up by biotechnology, a young and optimistic industry eager to show its potential. The mid-1990s saw the successive introduction in the US of the FlavrSavr tomato, an insect-resistant corn and a herbicide-resistant soybean. Monsanto’s insect-resistant corn promised to save farmers insecticide, while the herbicide-resistant soya would help the man
ufacturer sell more of its Roundup weedkiller. In 1996, just 1.7 million hectares were planted to GM crops. The figure rose to 11 million hectares in 1997, 28 million in 1998, and 40 million by 1999, an area the size of California. This astonishing growth continues at 10–20 per cent a year, and has spread from North America to Argentina, China and a number of other non-European countries.

  Britain’s anti-GM campaign shifted into high gear when the Daily Mail launched a ‘Genetic Food Watch’ campaign in January 1999, and began using the scare label ‘Frankenstein food’ on its stories. Consumer attitudes to GM technology hardened, and the supermarkets judged that greater commercial opportunity lay in organic produce, which it could sell at a huge premium, than in food required to bear labelling revealing GM contents that nobody wanted. By 2003, farm-scale government trials of herbicide used on GM rape and sugar beet indicated that widespread planting would be likely to damage the environment, and the campaign seemed to be over. ‘The death knell sounds for GM’, crowed the Daily Mail as Monsanto shut down its operations in Britain.

  In the United States, meanwhile, GM food ingredients have become widespread without labelling regulations. Any European who has visited the country during the last decade will almost certainly have eaten GM food – an irony apparently unnoticed by the Daily Mail as it promoted Florida holidays to its fearful readers. Very occasionally, the American press has sided with the environmentalists, but the more general reaction has been bafflement and hurt that other countries don’t want their hi-tech chow. ‘Food that starving people won’t eat: poor countries foolish to turn down genetically modified produce’, was how the Chicago Tribune responded when the Zambian government rejected US food aid offered in the form of GM corn.

  There are many reasons why people might be ambivalent towards GM food, some of them more rational than others. This transformation of agriculture raises environmental, economic, social and ethical issues, but the most pressing concern is always human health.