Paper short abstract:

Building on fieldwork in the commercial fishery in Louisiana, USA, this paper discusses illegal fishing as a mode of commoning at the intersection of environmental and economic precarity, shedding light on complicated and contested practices of protecting and managing present and future commons.

Paper long abstract:

This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in the commercial fishery in south-east Louisiana, USA, in the context of intersecting environmental and economic precarity, and addresses the commons as a space for ongoing negotiation, speculation, and contestation, and commoning as a complicated, contested, and at times contradictory practice.

The spectacular eventfulness of social and environmental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2010 BP oil spill, along with the well-documented ongoing land loss crisis in coastal Louisiana, have posited the region within wider discussions of disaster and environmental crisis associated with the Anthropocene (e.g., Adams 2014; Barra 2021; Bond 2013). In this paper I suggest that wider questions of environmental protection and concerns with environmental sustainability and the protection of contemporary and future commons unfold on the ground in intimate relation with the protection of livelihood.

Taking the context of what I suggest to be gradual enclosures of the commercial fishing grounds related to a dual development of a recreational fishing industry, I propose to view instances of illegal fishing and the illegal taking of species as less disruptive than at times represented, but rather as a form of commoning. Illegal fishing as transgressions of state law can in this vein be approached as a measure of solidarity related to industrial protectionism in the context of a globalized fishing industry, but also as claims to modes of environmental knowledge, that are in tension with traditions of scientific expertise associated with the official management of the fishing grounds.