Journalist and author, former pastry chef and commercial fisherman, Mark Kurlansky is perhaps best known as the biographer of a distinctly unlikely character: the cod fish. In his bestseller Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World , Kurlansky follows his piscine subject intercontinentally and through centuries, unlocking facets of European and American history beginning with Viking voyages. The 30 books Kurlansky has authored cover an astonishing breadth of subjects: salt, the Caribbean, baseball, rock & roll, children’s books, and non-violence, in the award-winning Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea . Kurlansky is a guest speaker at The Hindu Lit for Life 2017 . Excerpts from an email interview:
Charles Darwin features prominently in some of your work, and you have attracted at least one letter from a sceptic/ creationist, to whom you wrote that children in particular “must be protected against religious leaders and politicians who tell them what to read.” Do you see a new recoil to anti-Darwinist dogmatism?
Darwin is the key to understanding the natural world and our role in it. You cannot take on any environmental issue without understanding Darwin. People need to read him more. I am currently working on another environmental book for young adults about disappearing insects that will also strongly turn to Darwin. If we are to be an enlightened society, we must read Darwin. Enlightened Americans — there are quite a few — are only now beginning to face up to what a backward and ignorant country the U.S. is. To me, a quick way to see this is that 49 per cent of Americans think evolution is not true. Maybe they think that because they are so unevolved. We have for too long allowed this kind of ignorance to sit and fester.
You once said in an interview that environmentalists aren’t sensitive to the fact that they are “messing around with struggling people and their livelihoods.” Can you elaborate?
There are many examples but I am talking about a lack of understanding of farmers and fishermen. These are people who work with nature and have a tremendous appreciation of it. Environmentalists treat them as though they are the enemies. Most of the time they don’t even talk to them unless they are a rarified example, doing things their way — usually a rich person with an experimental farm that makes no money. Farmers and fishermen work incredibly hard, take no vacations, and have a narrow and fragile profit margin. We ought to be working with them to find better solutions. Look at the anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) movement. They have not come up with a lot of science proving GMOs are harmful. The manufacturers also don’t provide much science to show that it’s not. All the anti-GMO movement is interested in is banning everything. They claim that the farmers don’t want it but do they talk to farmers? I do and they say they want more. In general we should be trying to fix things rather than ban them.
In your book Nonviolence , you write that “Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing.” Which 21st century initiative in your opinion has persevered and perhaps even prevailed?
Don’t know, the century is young. What we have seen so far is a tendency to use social media to build large non-violent movements. I find this hopeful. In earlier times, when organising was more difficult, violence often seemed the more realistic alternative but now people are seeing that large numbers can be mobilised for non-violent resistance. No clear victories I can point to but there probably have been a few and I think there will be many more. One of the problems with non-violence is that it gathers force slowly and requires patience.
Cod, salt, and soon, milk and salmon. How did you come upon these themes?
All very different but I was attracted to them because they were good stories that told us something about where we are today. Cod was the poster child for overfishing back at a time when it was not talked about much in the general public. Salt questions the real value of things we think are valuable; milk represents 10,000 years of arguing about our relationship with food and nature, and salmon is a magnificent and romantic animal taking on almost every environmental mistake on earth.
The sea and creatures of the sea recur as themes in your books. How much of this comes from your time as a commercial fisherman?
This is a chicken-or-egg proposition. I do not come from a sea-going family and was raised a bit inland and yet I have always been drawn to fish, fishing and the sea. To me, there is nothing more thrilling and beautiful on earth than daybreak at sea. That is why I went to sea and why I write about it, but yes, my experiences changed my perspective and greatly influence my writing.
