“IN THE LATE nineties, people were realizing that fishing is actually a problem for the oceans,” says Daniel, whose face lights up as soon as we broach the subject of global fisheries. “To figure out if this activity is in the process of wiping itself out, you have to go beyond the Bay of Whatchamacallit or the Gulf of Whatever. When astrophysicists can’t see something well enough, they build a bigger telescope. So that’s what I did, build a bigger machine, the biggest one I could imagine—the world since 1950.” With Ecopath and FishBase at his disposal, Daniel now had all the tools he needed to study fisheries on a planetary scale over a period of several decades.
But he also needed lots of data to feed those tools, which ran on information laboriously gleaned from the scientific literature, and his resources in Vancouver were limited. Daniel applied for funding from the Canadian government several times without much success: “I stopped asking them the day I received a response that said my application was excellent, but they still couldn’t give me any funding.” Initially, therefore, he had to rely on his students at UBC and his colleagues at ICLARM.
After studying the problem of trophic levels during the development of Ecopath and then again for his first article in Nature with Villy Christensen, Daniel realized that he could calculate the mean trophic level of all the fish caught in a particular zone over a certain period of time. For example, if a fishery mostly caught tuna, swordfish, and other superpredators, the mean trophic level would be higher than if it mainly targeted small vegetarian fish like anchoveta. As an exercise, he asked his master’s student Johanne Dalsgaard to run such a calculation for the catches of all the fisheries in the northeastern Atlantic from 1950 to 1994. Johanne based her work on the FAO’s fisheries statistics, which track catches according to species group, and the trophic levels of each of these groups, calculated using a series of Ecopath models. She found that the mean trophic level declined over time, “indicating that European fisheries catches are increasingly composed of fishes from the lower part of marine food webs.”1
The results didn’t come as a big surprise to Daniel, who knew that despite the best efforts of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, the northeastern Atlantic was still overfished, causing larger species to decline and forcing fisheries to fall back on smaller fish. These smaller targets initially multiply because the fisheries have eliminated their natural predators, but their stocks are soon overexploited in turn.
Daniel had nearly forgotten about this analysis when, several weeks later, he found himself back at the Singapura restaurant in Manila with Villy Christensen and Rainer Froese. “I was having (low-trophic-level) Sambal squids with rice. What happened is that I suddenly realized that the plot by Johanne Dalsgaard could be easily expanded to cover the whole world.”2 Villy and Rainer were up for the challenge, and the team got to work with the help of Francisco Torres, who assigned a trophic level to each of the 1,200 species cited by the FAO, a task he politely characterized as “tedious.” A few turns of the data mill later, they had their verdict: the trophic level of organisms fished in both salt and fresh water had declined since 1950 all over the world.
The paper where they presented their analysis “literally wrote itself,” according to Daniel. He sent it to Science, the ultra-selective American journal. Their four-page contribution received a positive evaluation and appeared in 1998 with the title “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs.”3 Pauly and his colleagues emphasize that, despite this general trend, they also detected important regional variations, the drop in mean trophic level over time being stronger in the northern hemisphere where the fisheries are more highly “developed.” They go on to underline the fact that “present exploitation patterns are unsustainable” and bring their article to a close with the following recommendation: “in the next decades fisheries management will have to emphasize the rebuilding of fish populations . . . within large ‘no-take’ marine protected areas.”4
The article appeared in Science with the headline: “What is the future for fisheries worldwide? Bleak, according to an analysis by Pauly et al.” An editorial accompanied the paper relaying the reactions of fisheries specialists, one of whom called it “a wake-up call.” The text ends with a short remark from Daniel, one of those zingers for which journalists would come to love him: “If things go unchecked, we might end up with a marine junkyard dominated by plankton.” Daniel, who already had a solid reputation in his field, became a celebrity thanks to that article, which is still the one he is best known for today.
I discovered the article at the library of the oceanographic institute in Kiel in February of 1998. “This guy is good,” I thought to myself. “He’s used open-source data from the FAO to do analyses that are simple yet revolutionary, and he’s shown the world that everything marine ecologists have feared to be true for a long time is really happening.” 5 His conclusions reminded me of a book I had read recently in which—already, in 1984—Timothy Parsons and his colleagues had announced that “no form of marine pollution is in any way comparable to the ecological impact which occurs with the removal of circa seventy million metric tons per year of predatory fish from the ocean ecosystem.”6 These words impressed me so much that I copied them down and pinned them to my dorm room wall.
The paper in Science was picked up by dozens of news outlets around the world but didn’t make much of a splash in Daniel’s native France. Still, he could hardly suppress his pride when the New York Times, which he read religiously, published a long article on his work in the Science section.7 The Times journalist changed his name to David Pauly, but aside from that, Daniel found the piece to be “accurate, informative, and well written.” In particular, the article explains that, according to Daniel, marine food webs will be “collapsing in on themselves” within thirty or forty years if nothing is done. The term “collapse,” referring to both social and ecological contexts, appeared in that article years before the publication of Jared Diamond’s book bearing that title.* To illustrate his point, Daniel tells the old story of the Newfoundland cod, pointing out that after that fishery was closed, the bottom scrapers known as trawlers shifted their attention to the cod’s prey, shrimp. Once this new resource has been plundered, will fishers go after the shrimps’ prey? Hard to do, since they mostly eat detritus—“It’s mud,” quips Daniel, concluding, “That’s when you hit the wall beyond which the fishery has no more commercial value.” 8
In the media storm following the Science article, Daniel understood that “there are professionals with communication skills that most scientists lack.” That was when he began answering calls from journalists: “I learned to communicate with them, so they could translate my findings into something that could be read and appreciated by wider audiences.” One of his interlocutors from that period was Nancy Baron. An energetic Canadian journalist specializing in environmental topics, she interviewed him for a local Vancouver paper, the Georgia Straight, and later wrote one of the best portraits of Pauly: “Fisheries ministers, for the most part, do not read peer-reviewed journals, and so if scientists are to share their wisdom with the wider world, they have to come out of their ivory tower. . . Pauly is often the front man, venturing out on the tightrope across the abyss of the unknown. . . He is a storyteller. . . a master of metaphor.”9 Baron goes on to cite a series of Paulyesque remarks, including: “The [fishing] industry has acted like a terrible tenant who trashes their rental.” And: “As a society, we don’t have to do everything we can do. We don’t allow people to drive over the speed limit to get somewhere faster, we don’t allow machine guns to hunt deer, and we do not allow destruction of our marine resources.” Nancy Baron sums up the impact of the article that Pauly and his colleagues published in Science: “While this paper is considered a classic amongst marine ecologists and fisheries scientists, what is more remarkable is that the concept has become widely cited by journalists and policymakers. The reason is that Pauly summed up years of work and mountains of data into a simple graphic that is now used far and wide, and a few oft-repeated catch phrases. ‘Fishing down marine food webs’ has become part of the vernacular in some circles.”
But where is this magnificent graphic that Nancy is talking about? Don’t look for it in the 1998 article—it only appeared later, as a drawing showing a cross-section of the ocean and its inhabitants from the surface to the sea floor. On the left, you can see this community as it should be, with superpredators like big sharks and tuna at the top; then, just below them, the smaller fish that they feed on; then the plankton; and finally, seaweed, starfish, and other creatures who dwell on the sea floor. As your eyes move to the right, you can see the community dwindle from the top down as a result of fishing—the sharks go first, then the medium-sized fish, and on the far right, we can see an overfished ecosystem with only a few small fish and plankton left. A diagonal arrow drawn from the top left toward the bottom right highlights the phenomenon of fishing down marine food webs. Several versions of this graphic can be found on the internet—an indication of its success—though they don’t all give credit to the original creator.
Her name is Rachel Atanacio, but in Manila, everyone calls her Aque. I made her acquaintance at FishBase headquarters during my visit to the Philippines, and she blushed as I went on about how happy I was to meet the creator of such a famous illustration. Aque is a self-taught painter who has been drawing for as long as she can remember, with a marked preference for watercolors, landscapes, and portraits (her take on John Lennon is particularly impressive). Feeling she wasn’t “made for an office job working nine to five,” she started out as a volunteer drawing for different Buddhist reviews, which left her plenty of time to pursue her second passion, the violin. At a friend’s suggestion, though, she joined ICLARM in 1988, then moved to FishBase, where she still works today. She is the one who drew, pixel by pixel, each species of fish that appeared in the first version of that famous ichthyological encyclopedia. Illustrating fishing down marine food webs was her first time working with Daniel. “I’m an artist, not a scientist,” she tells me. “He had to explain to me exactly what he wanted, but I suggested adding the diagonal arrow that highlights the general decline.” Aque used illustrated books about fish classification as references to make her drawings of the different fish species, then she taught herself how to use a graphic design program to copy the drawings and place them in the illustration. Daniel was more than satisfied with the result, and Aque has gone on to illustrate quite a few of his books and papers.
“Now that he’s in Canada, Daniel has a lot of artists that can work for him, but if he’s in a hurry, he’ll send me an email and I’ll get him what he needs the same day,” she tells me with a smile. When Daniel makes his nearly annual trip to the Philippines to visit his FishBase colleagues, Aque and Daniel have a little routine: she drags him out of his office in the middle of the afternoon for a pensive walk around the rice paddies. In typical fashion, Daniel kicks off his shoes as soon as possible. “One day I said to him, ‘You have very nice feet, smooth and slim,’” she tells me. “You know,” Daniel answered her, “if I die, I want them to put me in a coffin and just show my feet sticking out, so that everyone can say, ‘he’s got nice feet!’”
His collaboration with Aque helped popularize Daniel’s new concept, which he promoted with his usual sly humor. Nancy Baron remembers Daniel explaining to journalists that “having systematically stripped the oceans of the top predators, we are now eating bait, and we’re headed for jellyfish . . . my children will tell their children, ‘Eat your jellyfish soup.’” 10 Indeed, when fisheries remove the small, plankton-hungry pelagic fish, they are often replaced by jellyfish, which move in permanently because they eat the fishes’ eggs and larvae, preventing their return. Daniel had seen quite a few studies from the North Sea, Namibia, and many other regions confirming the dangerous “rise of slime” in the oceans. This phenomenon leads to well-known problems for tourism and other industries, and is only made worse by climate change. So, Aque made a second version of her famous drawing, adding the jellyfish this time—and Daniel Pauly’s provocative words led to a second torrent of articles in the press about the approaching “attack of the blobs” in marine ecosystems.
The fishing lobby was not amused by all this commotion, but Daniel knew that nothing could stop him from coming after them now. From a simple researcher in an organization linked, for better or for worse, to the fishing industry, he had risen to the mostly untouchable status of tenured professor. The University of British Columbia, under the enlightened direction of Martha Piper, would support him whatever happened. He therefore became increasingly outspoken in his critiques, even forging relationships with environmentalist NGOs. In Vancouver, Daniel was well placed to do just that—environmental activists have been organizing on the West Coast of Canada and the United States since the 1970s. Indeed, Greenpeace was born in Vancouver in 1971, where it launched its first expedition, to protest nuclear testing in Alaska. Among the founders of the association was Paul Watson, who would later launch Sea Shepherd in 1977.
To explain his change of tactics, Daniel pointed out the following: “When you study fishing, you notice that scientists, even those that work for a government, aren’t often listened to. Environmentalist NGOs are the only ones who can take scientists’ conclusions, explain them, and force politicians to take them into account. Those in power make reasonable decisions when they are forced to do so.” When it comes to NGOs, he admits that “with them, it’s another dance, because they want us to become advocates, which I can’t do because I’m a scientist. So, I keep publishing, but I do it so that nonprofits can use my work. I think I’ve managed to do just that because they cite me a lot. It’s a dangerous liaison, but it works. On the other hand, very few scientists act so openly. Most of them are afraid of NGOs.”11
Such fears are often justified. Daniel, who has always been subject to hostile reactions from his colleagues, especially those he has criticized mercilessly in the past, was increasingly the target of scientific and political attacks. “After the article in Science,” Francisco Torres tells me with a nervous laugh, “we got praised here, criticized there, bashed here, appreciated there.” The many letters of protest and a few threats emanating from the northeast coast of the United States aside, the first major attack on Daniel and his ICLARM colleagues’ work came in the form of a response published in Science. Such responses in Science and Nature are a significant feature of scientific publishing, and they appear for one of three reasons, which I will mention in order of importance. First, jealousy: nothing could infuriate other fisheries scientists more than to see Daniel—the unruly problem child—land a revolutionary paper in the best scientific journal on the planet and then benefit from the media attention to become a new alter-globalist icon. “The FAO was mad as hell,” comments Francisco Torres. Second, strategy: by sending a response to Science, the other side often hopes to score a publication in the same journal, “winning” a spot in a prestigious journal with little effort. And finally, integrity: even if they are in the minority (at least, in my opinion), some scientists are honestly interested in academic debate and write to Science because they have detected evident bias in a recently published study.
“By far the most interesting critique of ‘Fishing Down Marine Food Webs,’” Daniel notes, “was by a group of FAO staff who suggested that the FAO catch statistics used for our contribution were not detailed and reliable enough to support the inferences drawn from them. (I don’t dare to think what they would have written, had we written such a thing about the FAO statistics!)”12 The FAO scientists’ commentary begins with praise for Pauly and his colleagues, saying they “are to be congratulated for giving this important issue high profile.” However, they go on to insist that the FAO does not agree “that a general decline in mean trophic level of marine landings is likely to have occurred in many regions.” The authors express several objections that they say seriously limit the study’s validity. Daniel, Rainer, and Villy responded point by point, and the two letters appeared side by side in Science in 1998.13
What follows is a brief summary of their game of academic ping-pong. First objection: the trophic level of fish caught is unknown for 70 percent of saltwater species and 40 percent of freshwater ones. Additionally, it can change according to the age of the fish and the season. Response: even if the FAO’s dataset is far from perfect, it was in the zones for which the most detailed information was available that our analysis showed the sharpest decrease in mean trophic level. Second objection: FAO statistics cover the volume of the catch, not the biomass of the fish of different trophic levels present in marine ecosystems. Response: this isn’t a problem because fisheries are now so global, exploiting stocks in every corner of Earth’s waters, that the relationship between volume fished and volume present is a robust one. Third objection: when it comes to freshwater fisheries, the FAO statistics don’t differentiate between the volumes of wild-caught fish and those produced in aquaculture, despite the fact that this activity is growing quickly and has an increasingly large impact on mean trophic levels. Response: we reanalyzed the data without the freshwater fisheries, and our conclusions are the same. Fourth objection: the eutrophication of coastal waters—that is, their enrichment by dissolved nutrients from agricultural runoff—boosts plankton production and causes a population explosion among organisms with low trophic levels which has nothing to do with fishing. Response: the fishing-down effect still appears when species with low trophic levels, likely to become more abundant in coastal waters, are omitted from the computation of mean trophic levels.
Though his counterarguments were solid, Daniel did not take the scientists’ criticism lightly. On the contrary, it steered his research for years to come as he worked to find additional evidence of planetwide overfishing: “As it turned out, each of Caddy et al.’s points reinforced our original conclusions. In effect, they became ‘judo arguments’ (Asimov 1977), whose detailed examination strengthened the case that we were ‘fishing down the food web.’”14
Pauly and his colleagues end their defense on a conciliatory note, emphasizing the FAO’s efforts to document, and try to halt, “the excessive global fishing capacity that has depleted major fisheries” as well as “the vast effort that went into generating and maintaining the global FAO database of landings.” Pauly’s team seemed to have won this round fair and square: in the decade that followed, the concept of fishing down marine food webs only gained more traction, its validity confirmed by twenty-eight studies performed off the coasts of five continents and on a global scale. Recognition also came from an unexpected source. In 2004, the Convention on Biological Diversity, meeting in Kuala Lumpur, identified a number of biodiversity indicators that would allow them to track progress toward significantly reducing biodiversity loss by 2020. Among the eight indicators to be implemented immediately was a “marine trophic index” very much inspired by Pauly’s team’s work. “Of course, we were very proud of the fact that our findings had ultimately led to an important new policy initiative.” 15
But scientific debates are never really over, and, in 2010, the one on fishing down marine food webs burst back onto the scene. Trevor Branch of the University of Washington in Seattle and eight other scientists published an article dryly titled “The Trophic Fingerprint of Marine Fisheries” in Nature—a very precise attack designed to shatter Daniel’s conclusions on the topic.16 Using a combination of mathematical models and what its authors call “global assessments of mean trophic level” based on catch volumes and estimates of the size of fish stocks, they reach the conclusion that the trophic level of catches does not reflect structural changes in marine ecosystems. The authors recommend abandoning this particular indicator, but their ideas for how to replace it are somewhat vague. For them, the priority should be “measuring and reporting changes in marine biodiversity by tracking trends in abundance relative to reference points for conservation and sustainable use.” They suggest developing new methods to that end that could be used by “countries with few resources for science and assessment.” They could have added, “And good luck with that!”
When he saw Branch’s paper in Nature, steam came out of Daniel’s ears: “I was shocked, just stunned by their nerve,” he recalls. In fact, Trevor Branch had shown Daniel his preliminary results several months earlier. “Products,” Daniel says, “with trophic levels that rose but then went back down again over time without showing any general trend.” Daniel alerted Branch to the fact that his data did not differentiate between coastal and offshore areas: in fact, because coastal zones were overfished first, the mean trophic level of catches there dropped. Later, though, fisheries shifted to offshore zones that were still rich in fish, causing a brief jump in mean trophic level that only dropped off again over time as resources farther from the coast were depleted in turn. “As far as I was concerned, that conversation was the end of it,” recounts Daniel. But, obviously, that wasn’t the case.
Branch’s surprise attack also relied heavily on data from North American and European fisheries, adding only a few African, Asian, and Australian examples to make the analysis appear more “global.” This approach, centered on the Global North, left Daniel seriously exasperated. “You can fit sixteen Alaskas into the African continent, so the idea that Alaska can serve as an example for stock management is totally absurd—Africa should be the reference point,” insists Daniel. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was Reg Watson. A highly skilled analyst, Reg coauthored Branch’s article despite the fact that he had been a close collaborator of Daniel’s for the last ten years at UBC, where they worked together on the same project—a project from which Reg supplied part of the data for Branch’s analysis. His defection came without warning.
“I almost panicked at first,” Daniel remembers. “Of course, I looked like an idiot—like they’d caught me red-handed. I didn’t know what to say because anything I did say would just be angry words. Hasty replies are like pissing into the wind; they just come back and hit you in the face. To regain the upper hand, we had to do studies showing that their claims were inherently false.” Daniel formed a new team with his postdoctoral student, Kristin Kleisner, and her husband, Hassan Mansour, “a guy who was good with numbers.” Together, they developed a model that took into account the spatial expansion of fisheries over time and the resulting impact on the mean trophic level of the catch. “If it isn’t done that way, it would be like a farmer saying that he had increased his farm’s productivity when in fact he just increased acreage,” Daniel points out.
But that argument wasn’t enough to convince Trevor Branch, who instead proposed a diplomatic solution that smelled of half-hearted consensus building.17 In his mind, there were four working models for how fisheries develop over time: fishing down marine food webs (as described by Pauly and his colleagues), “fishing up marine food webs” (as if fishers went after mussels, then fish, then whales), “fishing through marine food webs” (where all trophic levels are exploited simultaneously), and finally “fishing for profits” (where marine organisms are targeted according to their commercial value, regardless of their trophic level, as is the case with abalone, for example).
FISHING, FISHING, AND more fishing—Daniel obsessed over his work and the verbal and written skirmishes that came with it, so much so that he wasn’t always around to see his kids grow up. “I have regrets,” Daniel admits when I ask him about his children, an even thornier topic than his academic battles.
“I don’t envy you the task of writing about them,” Rainer Froese tells me. “Depending on what comes out of it, Daniel might pin you to the wall.” Message received loud and clear. Obviously, I know my interviews with Angela and Ilya will be among the most sensitive of my entire investigation. I begin prudently with the least tricky of the two interviews and go in search of Angela Pauly. Her parents give me an address in Brussels, and I arrive in that European capital not long after the terrorist attacks of March 22, 2016. “That day,” Daniel tells me, “I was traveling in the middle of nowhere in the Yukon and we didn’t hear from Angela for several hours. Sandra and I were very scared.”
Finding a hotel room proves easier than usual and a strange stillness reigns over the city. I sit on a café terrace, sipping a beer and chatting with a Belgo-Moroccan couple who apparently haven’t lost their sense of humor. “We were going to take a trip abroad,” they tell me, “but then we said, what’s the point when we can get blown up at home!” Angela Pauly, on the other hand, is not one to joke about terrorism. The European powder keg has her worried, but she likes Brussels. An elegant thirtysomething, she lives on the top floor of a historic building and works for an international marketing and communications agency. Her online profile says she’s “ridiculously positive.” Angela answers my questions calmly, with just a hint of humor. Like the rest of the Pauly family, she gets straight to the point: “When I was little, I wouldn’t recognize him when he’d come home from a trip, especially if he’d shaved his beard. My father is an academic; his work defines him. I know it has nothing to do with what he thinks of us, even if I probably felt differently at thirteen . . . My childhood was happy, but there was a lot of pressure to succeed in school. It was subtle, but it was there. I was a good student, but not someone who wanted to work all the time. I was happy with an A; I didn’t need an A+. My parents were frustrated that I didn’t push myself harder.” I am led to understand that this academic elitism didn’t just come from Daniel, whose “life was saved by education,” but also from Sandra, a child of the fight for civil rights whose family was no less than extraordinary. “The Wade sisters are highly intelligent,” Angela says, “and their mother always wanted them to be independent.”
Angela grew up in an upper-class neighborhood in Manila, mostly sheltered from the political turmoil of the Philippines. “There’s a huge difference between my father’s childhood and my childhood, I know that. But even in the Philippines, I knew I was different—people stared at me, they touched my hair. Luckily, I never had any bad experiences and it didn’t affect the rest of my life. I’ve been very lucky; I have a lot of friends.” As a child, Angela had everything that Daniel was denied in La Chaux-de-Fonds and more: loving and enlightened parents who spoke to her in two languages, the apartment with the terrace and the pool, and the comfortable life of a well-to-do expatriate family with horseback-riding lessons and weekends at the beach, school vacations in California and France, and an excellent education at the international school where Sandra worked. “After her baccalaureate in 1999,” Daniel remembers, “Angela was accepted into all the big American universities, and she chose the only one that didn’t offer her a scholarship, where the annual tuition was over thirty thousand dollars.” Angela adds, “I didn’t know it was possible to not go to college—I didn’t think twice about it. And because I didn’t grow up in the United States, at first I didn’t know anything about African American culture.”
Angela went off to Wellesley College, one of the most prestigious women’s colleges in the United States, ranked number four in the country for social sciences. There, Angela became part of what is often called “the most powerful network of women in the world.” But the experience wasn’t all positive: “It’s an amazing school, but I was very unhappy my first year there because of the culture shock. I had an American accent, but I was not American.” Angela worked while she was in school to cover part of her tuition and spent more time at her boyfriend’s place near MIT than she did on the Wellesley campus. After four years in Boston, Angela followed her boyfriend to San Diego, where he joined the Navy. “For a year, I didn’t do much. I got a job selling shoes, I went to the beach. My father was not happy.” One day, she got a call from Daniel: “I didn’t pay for Wellesley so you could work at a shoe store—you’re going to go to graduate school in Vancouver.” Angela did as she was told: “I’m a good daughter. I do what my parents ask me to do.”
Sandra Wade-Pauly, meanwhile, with no reason to stay in the Philippines now that her children had flown the nest, found a job in Vancouver and joined Daniel there. As a result, Angela found herself living with both her parents during the year and a half it took to complete her master’s at UBC. Daniel sighs happily as he describes that “fantastic time” during which he spent a couple of hours each day with his adult daughter. Then she left again, off to launch a career that, like her parents’, would take her across continents, to Washington, DC, Costa Rica, Napa Valley, Madrid, and finally, Brussels. Daniel’s chest swelled with pride when Angela joined Oceana, an American NGO dedicated to ocean conservation, and he frowned with disappointment when she left to work for a multinational corporation. “Gangsters, that’s what I call them,” he says. “Those people who do public relations for dictators!”
“At first,” Angela admits, “I didn’t like the idea of working outside of the nonprofit sector. We do have clients that I’m not very happy about. Morals are flexible—we don’t work for the cigarette companies, but we do work for the Turkish government.” She adds, “I was very anti-corporate, but I’m not anymore. My father is much more dogmatic about it than I am. I’m not going to go to work for Shell or Total, but if I have a car, I’ll put gas in it even if it makes me uncomfortable.”
I bring the conversation back around to Daniel Pauly’s work on overfishing. “I think he’s right,” Angela tells me. “And I’m not just saying that because he’s my father. I’ve worked in that field and I’ve read the literature. He’s right about it, and it’s good that he’s gotten some recognition because it has to be very frustrating for him. Overfishing has to stop, not because fish have feelings, but so that we can feed everybody. I wouldn’t say that my dad is a genius, but it’s crazy how much he knows, how much he’s read, worked. I admire what he does, but, seeing him, I know that it’s not what I want to do. It’s not as important to me.”
When I ask about her relationship with her father now that they live so far apart, she answers quickly: “When we talk on the phone, he asks me about work—that’s his way of letting me know that he worries about me. Incidentally, in 2013, when I left my boyfriend at the time, my dad called me at the office to ask how I was doing. It wasn’t like him, but it was really sweet. Usually, he’s the last person I would talk to about that sort of thing, but he made an effort, he gave me a call.”
When it’s time for Angela to return to work, I walk her back to an official-looking building, which she enters with all the confidence of young upper management, her high heels breezing effortlessly around a corner and out of sight. Before we said goodbye, though, she made one final remark: “You know, even if my father wasn’t around a lot, in the end, the most important thing was that I felt loved. Sounds cheesy, but it’s true.”
AS DANIEL PUTS it, “You’ve met my favorite daughter, and now you’re going to meet my favorite son.” But Ilya lives in Montreal and I won’t see him until almost six months later, on a cold November evening. I’ve already heard a lot about him, in Vancouver and in France, and it became clear that his path had not been as smooth as his sister’s. “Ilya is a fantastic person,” Angela says, summing up the situation, “but his teenage years were a little different.”
I fly in from New York with a bad case of bronchitis and make my way to downtown Montreal, where I wait for Ilya to get off work. I am a little nervous, mostly because I’ve lost my voice and have to do a conference on my research the next day at McGill University. But I also wonder what right I have to dig into the tumultuous youth of Ilya Pauly, who probably has better things to do than chat about his father’s illustrious career. Ilya’s emails were somewhat terse, but he welcomes me politely, cooking dinner while we talk. His girlfriend, Kasia, a social worker of Polish heritage, smiles gently at him and serves me copious amounts of herbal tea. With his almond-shaped eyes and long hair, Ilya reminds me of a Native American. Just a bit taller than his father, he isn’t quite as towering as he looked in the photos. Their building is quiet; jazz plays in the background, and Ilya’s Quebecois accent has a musical quality to it—despite the frog in my throat, this interview turns out to be my most radiophonic.
“Starting in the early nineties, I was aware of my father’s absence. Sometimes, he would be gone for months, and toward the end it got to be stressful. My mother took it badly and so did we. He definitely made a lot of sacrifices when it came to his family. He came back with gifts and stories; he was always good at explaining what he did.” Ilya grew up in the same sheltered environment as his sister but didn’t go to the same school. “I absolutely had to go to the French school, which I thought was terrible. As a ten-year-old, mixed-race kid living in the Philippines, I was supposed to be learning about how the Gauls had invented everything! Daniel probably taught me too much, too young for me to be able to swallow what they taught at school.” When I’d spoken to Daniel about it a few weeks earlier, he’d sighed heavily: “Ilya refused to accept the rules, and I blame myself for encouraging him in the beginning. When he’d say ‘this is what they taught me in school’ and it wasn’t right, I would tell him. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was destroying the teachers’ authority. Those young volunteers who worked at the French school were such idiots—they made negative comments about interracial marriage and presented bilingualism as a handicap. What they really resented was that their students spoke English better than they did.” Things got so out of hand at school and at home that the Paulys sent their then adolescent son to a private school in Singapore. Ilya laughs when he tells me that story: “I climbed over the wall so often at that place that after the first two weeks, they gave me the keys, just so I wouldn’t fall and break my neck. I messed around instead of going to class, like any fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid would do.” Listening to him, I wonder if Daniel had already told his son about his own unruliness at that age, back in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Daniel must have been thinking of his own history, though, because around that time, he offered to help Ilya find his biological mother in Indonesia. “But I already had too many things I needed to figure out in my life,” Ilya tells me. “As far as I’m concerned, my mother has always been Sandra.”
According to Daniel, “Ilya’s way of refusing to do things went pretty far. . . As soon as he suspected you were trying to teach him something, it was ‘no’—I’m not even sure he realized he was doing it.” In the early nineties, their father-son relationship was a minefield, but there was always one way to call a truce: diving, maybe because Daniel couldn’t scold his son underwater. He didn’t have much to teach him about the sport, either—an accomplished swimmer by ten years old, Ilya was a seasoned free diver by the time he was a teenager, and an instructor at seventeen. “Back then, I could easily dive down twenty meters [sixty-six feet] and stay under for two or three minutes,” he tells me matter-of-factly. After his brief stay in Singapore, Ilya dropped out of school and half-heartedly took some long-distance classes. Mostly, he took part in diving expeditions, exploring out-of-the-way corners of the Philippines. On a personal level, though, he was adrift. “I should have spent more time diving with my son,” affirms Daniel—at the time, though, he mostly studied the Pacific from thirty thousand feet above the waves.
At his parents’ request, Ilya joined Daniel in Canada. The atmosphere in British Columbia came as a shock. “The hardest period of my life,” Ilya admits, “was when I lived in Vancouver. I would go days without speaking to anyone. The people are polite enough, but there’s always distance—it’s an English thing. In the Philippines, though, it’s the exact opposite. You talk to someone for five minutes and he’ll invite you to his house.” The contrast was that much starker because Ilya had just spent six months on a tiny Pacific island, “literally one kilometer by five hundred meters,”* living in a tent and going diving six days a week with a group of twenty other people, “really laid-back guys, funny, like a little family.” Ilya arrived in Vancouver in September and lasted eight months under the city’s semi-constant cloud cover. “I was left to my own devices,” observes Ilya. Daniel remembers it as an “infernal” time. His son was expelled from three of the four institutions where Daniel had enrolled him, and he spent his time wandering the city “in bad company.”
“Any time I managed to have a real conversation with someone, they were from Montreal,” Ilya remembers. So, at the age of twenty, he left his father and moved to Quebec. “I couldn’t stop him,” Daniel sighs.
“I did all kinds of odd jobs in Montreal, anything I could find, including washing dishes,” Ilya laughs. “I went from diver to dishwasher!† At eighteen, nineteen years old, I thought I knew everything there was to know, but when I got to Montreal, I realized that wasn’t the case,” he admits. Ilya discovered a passion for music and studied at a school for sound engineers before becoming an instructor there himself and eventually opening his own studio and working as a DJ.
Today, he mostly makes his living working for an audiovisual equipment company. And twenty years after moving there, Ilya is still in love with Montreal: “Where I live now, I don’t have to tell anyone where I’m from. Francophones can be a pain, but at least they’re up-front with you.” He’s also made peace with his demons—and his father. “All the pressure I was under, it’s something I regret in life, but mostly in his life. He’s also trying to wake people up, so I can forgive him for a lot, for being away so much, just because of that.” Ilya is still sorry to say that his father “doesn’t unplug very often—science defines him and he’s afraid of anything unscientific. He’s not at all esoteric, you could even say he’s anti-spiritual!” Aside from that, Ilya says, Daniel “also doesn’t pay much attention to social norms and he expects to be listened to, which isn’t always appropriate with your family.”
But Ilya also insists that his father has always been his “moral compass”; he squeezes him “like a lemon” when they see each other (usually over the winter holidays in California). “My father also taught me to think about how the world works. For example, he was the first person to talk to me about the war in Syria as a climate war.” Their favorite topics of discussion sound like something straight off a Philosophy 101 syllabus: “Why is progress dead?” They also talk a lot about feminism. “I’m a feminist like my father,” Ilya declares. “Part of him is totally allergic to masculine energy, to anything competitive. He’s so anti-macho that I don’t even think he knows what it is.”
After a final cup of tea, we say our goodbyes and Ilya, who knows that my next trip will be to the Philippines, gives me some advice: “Don’t smoke any joints while you’re there! They’ve just elected a murderer who executes junkies—it’s crazy over there right now.” Coming back around to Daniel and my work on the biography, he observes, “My father spends so much time looking inward, I think that seeing himself reflected in something like this will be good for him.”
* Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
* About 125 acres. (TN)
† Ilya is making a pun: in French, the words for “diver” and “dishwasher” are homographs. (TN)