Paper short abstract:

The ocean ecosystem off the coast of Newfoundland is one of the most human impacted areas in the world, threatened by climate change and overfishing. Relying on long-term fieldwork, I will discuss how the slow environmental degradation is experienced, continually reinforced and then forgotten.

Paper long abstract:

Fishery-dependent communities in Newfoundland, Canada are strongly impacted by anthropogenic transformations in the ocean ecosystem and shifting weather patterns caused by climate change. Nevertheless, while the impacts are well perceived and have direct threat to local livelihood, there is little done to stop the environmental change and degradation. Small local disasters - collapse of cod fisheries in 1992, shrimp fisheries in 2015 and currently declining crab fisheries - have left little hope to people in rural Newfoundland. Policy decisions, combined with changing demographics, transformed ecosystem and market conditions have distanced people from their communities and the surrounding environment, creating apathy in the face of inevitable changes. While many still try to recreate the stability the community centered small-scale fisheries once provided, then most understand that the increasing corporate control over coastal fisheries and the flux of youth leaving outports means an end to the life they have known. The neoliberal processes in the fisheries, uncanny environment, and socioeconomic uncertainty leaves little promise for future in rural Newfoundland, leaving people linger in the Anthropocene, disconnected from what they understand as meaningful life.

Relying on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork with fishing communities in rural Newfoundland, this paper will demonstrate if and how fishing people in Newfoundland perceive, experience, and care about climate change when their world has already ended.