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

In the era of climate change, how can we imagine better futures? AN ECOTOPIAN LEXICON is a collaborative volume of short, engaging essays that offer ecologically productive terms—drawn from other languages, science fiction, and subcultures of resistance—to envision what could be. The book connects thirty authors and fourteen artists from a range of backgrounds and locations, and three of them are here in discussion today: anthropologist and herbalist Charis Boke, visual artist Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, and Sam Solnick of the University of Liverpool. This conversation was recorded in August 2020.

For more information, visit ecotopianlexicon.com.

Works and writers referenced in this episode in order of appearance:
David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants
Carolyn Fornoff
The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt
bell hooks
Evelyn Reilly
Karen Barad
Donna Haraway
Climate Changed by Philippe Squarzoni

Thanks to the conversants:
Charis Boke, charisboke.com
Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, michelleksfung.com
Sam Solnick, @LitSciHub on Twitter

Hope and Art when the World is Falling Apart.

University of Minnesota Press

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