Academic literature on the topic 'SEA-FOOD MATTERS'

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living t

AbstractSeafood consumption is considered a key element for food security and for nutrition related policies. However, seafood is often not easily accessible or perceived as a popular option even by those living in close proximity to the sea, especially in the western world. Common culprits are usually identified as a lack of specialized shops, culinary knowledge or as the disconnection with local coastal cultural heritage. This is, for instance, the case in Ireland: Irish waters provide a great diversity of seafood and yet, its domestic consumption remains unusually low for an island nation. Most of Ireland’s seafood is exported to other countries, whilst the Irish stick to the popular salmon, cod and tuna; a consumption habit that has obvious sustainability externalities. This contribution aims to unpack the issues connected to seafood consumption in Ireland’s coastal capital Dublin and offers a window into the city’s seafood scene. Data presented were gained within Food Smart Dublin, a multidisciplinary research project designed to encourage a behavioural shift of consumption towards more sustainable local seafood. The project’s purpose was to reconnect Dublin’s society with their tangible and intangible coastal cultural heritage by rediscovering and adapting historical recipes. The paper thus connects past, present, and future perspectives on the topic. First, the past is explored by delineating the potential of marine historical heritage in stimulating sustainable seafood consumption with the reintroduction of traditional Irish recipes. The present offers a data snapshot on consumption patterns towards seafood gathered from structured online questionnaires results from the Food Smart Dublin project. Respondents offered insights into their relationship with the sea, on the frequency with which they consume seafood and the obstacles they see in consuming more of it. Finally, these perspectives delineate possible future scenarios and recommended governance actions to support policymakers in designing a better and more sustainable seafood system.

My first visit to a battleground was during a family holiday to Scotland. We were staying in Applecross, a small, isolated village on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands that looks over the sea towards the Island of Raasay. On the way back we passed through Inverness, the most northerly city in Scotland. To break the long journey we decided to stop off at Culloden Moor, the site of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, between the Government forces, which were mainly English, and the Jacobite army, made up of Scottish Highlanders led by Bonnie Prince Charlie. I had never visited the site before, but I recall thinking that it was an odd place for a battle; it is exposed moorland and the ground is rough and boggy, which would be difficult ground on which to go to war. I later learned that Bonnie Prince Charlie’s choice of this site for battle was catastrophic; not only did the exposed ground leave the Jacobite forces vulnerable to the superior artillery of the Government forces, but also the boggy soil hampered their attack, rendering them even more exposed. These factors led to the slaughter of the Jacobite forces and the collapse of the Jacobite campaign. I don’t know exactly how much the boggy soil contributed to the outcome of this war but it certainly played a part. For centuries, soil has played an enormous, and often unexpected, role in the outcome of war. War can also leave lasting and often irreversible scars on soil, leaving it churned, riddled with battle debris and bodies, polluted with heavy metals, toxic dioxins, oil and radioactivity. In many cases, it is left unusable. War can also indirectly affect the soil, for example through the need in Britain, during the Second World War, to cultivate gardens and city parkland for food. And the current growing demand for food, coupled with environmental pressures related to climate change, will place increasing pressure on soil, potentially leading to future wars. This chapter will look at how war is affected by and how it affects soil.

Fritz Haber was not blinded by his own achievements. Even in 1921, just when his own work was becoming widely recognised, he could state: “It may be that this solution is not the final one. Nitrogen bacteria teach us that Nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilises methods which we do not as yet know how to imitate.” The realisation that this was the case prompted a lot of speculation, but scientific advances in biological fixation still awaited a strategic breakthrough. In addition, chemistry, and especially inorganic chemistry, went into decline. The academic world seemed to believe that the chemistry of simple species such as dinitrogen was completed. There was no single clarion call, comparable to that of Crookes in 1898, for the regeneration of research into nitrogen fixation, but the pressure for it built up in a variety of unexpected ways. Perhaps the seminal influence on the field arose in the 1960s. The stimulus can be seen in the changes that occurred after World War II. In 1945, when much of the world was on its knees, having sustained grave losses of material and people, the impetus was to restart and rebuild. By about 1960, there was the appreciation in some areas that technology could not be applied to the environment indefinitely, nor could standards of living continue to rise without some unpleasant consequences. Western governments were not keen to hear such ideas. The British government, for example, produced a policy document called “Food from our own Resources,” the aim of which was to guide the United Kingdom towards self-sufficiency in food, avoiding the possibility of the country being starved as a result of a siege of the sea lanes by a potential enemy. The difficulties of maintaining food supplies from the Empire in the face of a sea blockade were a principal reason why food had been severely rationed in Britain during World War II. A consequence of this policy was that farmers were encouraged to produce as much food as they could, by whatever methods seemed most appropriate, and the era of intensive agriculture really got into its stride.

Now that we have discussed how assemblages of marine soft sediments are structured, we need to consider functional aspects. There are a few main interrelationships that need to be discussed here— inter- and intraspecific competition, feeding and predator–prey interactions, the production of biomass, and the production and delivery of recruiting stages. Other functional aspects, such as the effects of pathogens and parasites and the benefits of association (mutualism, parasitism, symbiosis, etc.) are of less importance in the present discussion. By function we mean the rate processes (i.e. those involving time) that either affect (extrinsic processes) or are inside (intrinsic processes and responses) the organisms that live in sediments. Hence these include primary and secondary production and processes that are mitigated by the organisms that live in sediments, such as nutrient and contaminant fluxes into and out of the sediment. We begin with the historical development of the field since such aspects are often overlooked in these days of electronic searches for references. Functional studies of ecosystems really began with Lindeman´s classic paper (1942) on trophic dynamics. Rather than regarding food merely as particulate matter, Lindeman expressed it in terms of the energy it contained, thereby enabling comparisons to be made between different systems. For example, 1 g of the bivalve Ensis is not equivalent in food value to 1 g of the planktonic copepod Calanus, so the two animals cannot be compared in terms of weight, but they can be compared in terms of the energy units that each gram dry weight contains. The energy unit originally used was the calorie, but this has now been superseded by the joule (J), 1 calorie being equivalent to 4.2 joules. Ensis contains 14 654 J g-1 dry wt and Calanus 30 982 J g-1 dry wt. The basic trophic system is well understood and can be summarized as we showed earlier in Fig. I.8 which gives the links between various trophic levels and the role of competition, organic matter transport, and resource partitioning. In systems fuelled by photosynthesis (so excluding the chemosynthetic deep-sea vent systems), the primary source of energy for any community is sunlight, which is fixed and stored in plant material, which thus constitutes the first trophic level in the ecosystem.

An increasing number of the 92 naturally occurring elements on Earth are now known to be essential to humans and other vertebrate species. In addition to the ten main constituents (H, N, O, Na, Mg, P, S, Cl, K, Ca), twelve elements present in trace quantities are generally accepted to have necessary functions in the human body. These essential trace elements are Mn, Cr, Fe, Co, Cu, Zn, Se, Mo, F, bromine (Br), Si, and I. Most of these elements are present in human serum at levels orders of magnitude lower than their mean concentrations in the Earth’s crust (e.g., Mn and Cr are less than 10-6 of average rock composition), except for I and Se, which occur in similar concentrations in human serum and in rocks. This indicates that the pathways of these two elements to humans are basically different from those of other essential trace elements. There is now substantial evidence to suggest that the marine environment is an important source of I and Se to humans and other terrestrial species through biogeochemical cycling involving atmospheric transport. The dissolved matter in ocean water is enriched relative to the earth’s crust in a few elements (e.g., Na, Mg, S, Cl, Br) but depleted in most others. Some elements, such as I and Se, are strongly enriched in marine organisms relative to their concentrations in sea water. Fish and other marine food may constitute an important source of these elements to humans. It has become increasingly evident, however, that atmospheric transport of substances from marine to terrestrial systems may constitute an alternative pathway of some essential elements to humans and livestock.

When we drive by a modern farm, we still expect to see green plants sprouting from the earth, bearing the promise of food or cooking oil or a cotton shirt. Pulling up one of those plants, we are still prepared to find dirt clinging to its roots. Even in this age of high-tech euphoria, agriculture remains essentially a matter of plants growing in the soil. But another element besides soil has always been a part of the farmer’s life-water. Farming is not only growing crops on a piece of land, it is also growing crops in water. I don’t mean a hydroponics lab. I mean that the farmer and his plants inescapably are participants in the natural cycle of water on this planet. Water is a more volatile, uncertain element than soil in the agricultural equation. Soil naturally stays there on the farm, unless poor management intervenes, whereas water is by nature forever on the move, falling from the clouds, soaking down to roots, running off in streams to the sea. We must farm rivers and the flow of water as well as fields and pastures if we are to continue to thrive. But it has never been easy to extract a living from something so mobile and elusive, so relentless and yet so vulnerable as water. If there is to be a long-term, sustainable agriculture in the United States or elsewhere, farmers must think and act in accord with the flow of water over, under, through, and beyond their farms. Preserving the fertility of the soil resource is critical to sustaining it, of course, but not more so than maintaining the quality of water. In many ways, the two ideals are one. And their failure is one, as when rain erodes the topsoil and creeks and rivers suffer. But there are differences between those two resources, differences we must understand and respect. Unlike soil, water cannot be “built.” It can be lost to the farmer, or it can be diverted, polluted, misused, or over-appropriated, but it can never be deepened or enhanced as soil can be.

The exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Japan has a very wide area due to a lot of islands in the Japanese Archipelago. Recently, the development of power generation facilities, food production facilities, and the natural resources in the Japanese EEZ are planned. As the worldwide supply and demand of mineral resources are being tight, the technology for effective exploitation and the use of mineral resources in the EEZ will become a key for sustainable development in the Japanese industry. Prior to development of marine mineral resources, it is necessary to evaluate its environmental impact on t