My thinking about seabirds and wild salmon under climate change has been shaped quite a lot by social anthropology—in particular The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing and Reclaiming the Discarded by Kathleen Millar. This 2025 SMMR webinar (video on youtube; slides as PDF) explains some of my current thinking about this. And here is how historian Ali Cathcart and I summarised it as background for a 2023 workshop:
“Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others”, writes environmental anthropologist Anna Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), referring to “precarity” in two senses at once. First, the sense of precarious footing, standing at the brink of a fall (“People lose their jobs…. Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction”); second, the sense of precarious employment, the gig economy, the indeterminate search that has always been at the centre of foraging lifeways, both animal and human, in which one is never sure where the next meal is coming from. These two meanings of “precarity” often coincide but are not the same. Indeed, there is something about the forager’s pattern of widely dispersed resource dependence—vulnerable on many fronts, but with equally many opportunities for a lucky gain—that has often been assumed in both natural and human sciences to be the root of not loss and collapse, but resilience.
In ecology, the pattern of dependence on a diversity of fluctuating or patchy resources is sometimes referred to as “the portfolio effect”, as in the hedging of financial risk in a diversified investment portfolio (Schindler et al., 2015). Structurally, as a metaphor, the investment portfolio is very similar to precarious employment in a gig economy, and both are structurally similar to foraging: they are all united by the pattern of dependence on a fluctuating resource patchwork. However, the two economic metaphors (diversified investments, the gig economy) suggest exactly opposite hypotheses regarding resilience or vulnerability in a changing environment. This raises the question of what exactly we are missing when we tell stories (in words or equations) about the past or future of particular animal and human populations too simplistically. When does filling in our picture of precarious foraging livelihoods (in terms of both the complexity of the resource landscape and the forager’s possibilities for adaptability and response) reveal overlooked resilience, and when does it reveal an overlooked network of vulnerabilities?
Marine systems are a natural habitat for these questions. Marine food chains feature mobile foragers at every level, from millimetre-scale zooplankton feeding on patchy phytoplankton during multigenerational journeys across the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans; to small pelagic fish (sandeels, capelin, herring) feeding on a spectrum of zooplankton that is being steadily reconfigured by climate change; to large, mobile predators (seabirds, wild salmon)—dependent on zooplankton and forage fish stocks spread across many regions, and therefore with difficult migratory decisions to make; to traditional human communities that draw their resources from both land and sea, both formal economies and poaching.
If this analogy strikes a chord, get in touch.