Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna

When talking about climate change, what do an oceanographer and a literary scholar have in common? How might these distant disciplines begin to speak to each other? TIMESCALES: THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES is a volume that includes frictive chit-chats from scholars from far-flung disciplines and explores what they have to teach each other about the timescales of environmental change. Bethany Wiggin is one of three co-editors of this volume, along with Carolyn Fornoff and Patricia Kim. Wiggin is director of the first established academic program in environmental humanities at a major research university: the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. She is joined here by oceanographer Frankie Pavia, law student Jason Bell, and geophysicist Jane Dmochowski. This conversation was recorded in November 2020.

More information: z.umn.edu/timescales.

MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES:

-Ep. 17: Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment. With Patricia Eunji Kim, Kate Farquhar, and Marcia Ferguson: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-17

-Ep. 14: Time and the interplay between human history and planetary history. With Carolyn Fornoff, Jen Telesca, Wai Chee Dimock, and Charles Tung: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-14

Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change.

University of Minnesota Press

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