RACHEL CARSON DIED of breast cancer at the age of fifty-six, and her life was not always an easy one. Fascinated by the natural world she discovered on her family’s farm in Pennsylvania, obsessed with poetry and in love with her English teacher, Rachel became her family’s breadwinner at an early age and was forced to abandon the career in ecology to which she had aspired. As a teacher, then an unassuming lab tech, she scraped enough money together to go to graduate school and earned her master’s degree in 1932 from Johns Hopkins. Her thesis had focused on the embryonic development of fish, so she quite logically went to work for the US Bureau of Fisheries, where she was soon recognized for her literary talents. She began editing all the bureau’s reports and writing a weekly radio program and newspaper articles designed to stoke the public’s interest in aquatic life.
Carson was a prolific author—her style precise when explaining scientific information, but steeped in a lyricism that reflected her sense of wonder and her intellectual enthusiasm for the beauties of the natural world. Editors soon discovered her work and in the 1940s and ’50s, she wrote a series on marine environments, including The Sea Around Us,* the book that would make her famous around the world and give her a degree of autonomy. She left her government job to write full-time and began enjoying a mostly platonic—and not entirely secret—relationship with a married woman, Dorothy Freeman. The two sweethearts exchanged nearly nine hundred letters, an archive that provides valuable information about Rachel’s literary activities throughout the 1950s. Obsessive like all great artists and intellectuals, she collected thousands of bibliographic sources and drove her editors insane with constant delays for years at a time. But it all paid off in 1962 when she finally published her most controversial work, a seminal text of the burgeoning environmentalist movement and a project she’d been hatching for a long time: a book called Silent Spring.*
Starting in the 1940s, she had edited the first reports about the impact of DDT on fish—but decision makers at the time didn’t even bat an eye. Twenty years later, though, Carson sallied onto the public stage with a thorough summary of the research on the environmental consequences of DDT and other pesticides. The multinational corporation DuPont and other manufacturers of chemical death attacked her and her book, but Silent Spring was carefully researched and stood up to criticism. Soon, President Kennedy ordered an investigation. Carson also spoke publicly, including on television. She was ultimately vindicated and covered in honors, a shower of glory that would prove all too brief. Even as Rachel Carson wrote about the links between pesticides and cancer, she herself suffered from an “environmental cancer” that she knew would soon end her life. A few heart-wrenching letters to Dorothy later, she died alone on April 14, 1964.
Daniel discovered Silent Spring in German translation in 1968 when he was thinking about becoming an agronomist and working in Africa. The following year, during his first semester at the University of Kiel, a higher-up from BASF, one of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world, came to do a presentation for the students. The Herr Professor called Rachel Carson a hysteric and explained coolly that DDT and other chemical products used in agriculture had never hurt a soul. “According to him, we could have eaten them,” Daniel jokes. “It was such a big lie that—along with the Nazi professors—it pushed me to change my major and study oceanography.” Daniel never forgot Carson’s courage and brilliance, however, and three decades later, she came back into his life at the dawning of one of his greatest endeavors.
VANCOUVER, FALL 1997. For several years now, Daniel had been extricating himself from the more institutional side of fisheries biology and getting closer to environmentalist organizations. This radical transition has allowed Daniel to speak more freely about his work—though some of his colleagues saw it as a betrayal. His display of ideological colors also earned him an invitation to one of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ work groups in Philadelphia. The American NGO, named for its founder, businessman Joseph N. Pew, mainly funds cancer research and the American Red Cross, but had recently shifted its focus to environmental issues. Though Daniel wasn’t yet a big name in his field, Joshua Reichert, head of Pew’s environmental programs, managed to spot him. Reichert gave his panel of experts a single day to answer two questions: “Is it possible to assess the health of the oceans regularly, and, if yes, how?” and “Is it possible to determine which factors are contributing to the condition of the ocean and their consequences for marine life and for humanity?” As Reichert later wrote, “With one exception, the members of the group said that it was not doable without very large investments in monitoring technology, for which there was no recognizable donor other than governments, which would be unlikely to provide the funds needed. The one exception was Daniel Pauly, who, in his indomitable fashion, said that it was possible to undertake this kind of analysis for ocean fisheries.”1
A mischievous grin plays across Daniel’s face as he tells me the story of that memorable meeting. “I didn’t have the same level of credibility as the other researchers they’d invited, and I was the youngest one there. So, I let them speak and I arranged it so I would be the last to give my presentation. I gave a summary of what had been said to show they’d all come to more or less the same conclusion, and then I suggested using the FAO’s fisheries data, which is a huge and freely available source of information, to understand the impact of that economic activity on the world’s marine ecosystems over the decades.” That afternoon, Reichert saw off those highly distinguished scientists with perfect politeness but kept Daniel back for a quick discussion, one-on-one. Their intellectual compatibility was obvious right away. “Josh is all academic,” Daniel tells me, describing a mustachioed man in a three-piece suit. “An anthropologist, studied at Princeton—he can come across as standoffish, but actually, he’s a romantic.” The gray-haired scholar asked Daniel to write a grant for his bold research proposal. “I confess, the dossier I submitted wasn’t very clear,” Daniel admits. “Reichert’s whole team told him not to fund me. The seven American researchers he sent my work to said the same, except for one who thought it was a good idea but wanted funding for his own team to do it.” Reichert had no one to back him up but enough power to follow his instincts and go through with the project. The trust gave Daniel and his team 1.2 million dollars per year on the condition that they begin by analyzing fisheries in the North Atlantic—the area for which the most information was available—and submit an exhaustive research report after two years.
Daniel was delighted, baptizing the program “Sea Around Us” in honor of Rachel Carson and her sweeping vision of underwater worlds and humans’ impact on the environment. Launched in July 1999, the Sea Around Us began by punching up the UBC Fisheries Centre, “showering money” on five or six researchers close to Daniel, including Villy Christensen, who had recently followed his friend and colleague to UBC. Once they’d recruited an army of students and consultants, the party could begin. “At first, we didn’t have a strong sense of direction,” Daniel admits, “but Josh came to see us and gave us clearer objectives.” The team doubled down, working to produce a vast portrait of the ecology of the North Atlantic over the course of the twentieth century.
For the region in question, the FAO had recorded the quantity of fish caught each year by species, but without any precise information on catch location. The tricky part would be reconstructing that missing data. Reg Watson performed the necessary analyses, using species distribution data from FishBase to create the first catch location maps to cover North Atlantic catches from the 1950s to the 1990s. They show a clear increase in pressure from fisheries in coastal waters over time, as well as gradual expansion into offshore areas and along new coastlines, particularly in West Africa.
Next, a battery of Ecopath models built under Villy Christensen’s supervision made it possible to estimate the biomass of fish present in the environment for the whole North Atlantic over the course of the twentieth century. By calculating the relationship between mass fished and mass present, the researchers showed a troubling increase in fishing pressure over time and, in particular, overfishing in Western European and Scandinavian waters since 1975. They drove their conclusions home by using similar methods to demonstrate that populations of large fish had decreased by 90 percent in the North Atlantic during the twentieth century, and that more than two-thirds of this drop in numbers had happened after 1950.2
Joshua Reichert had ordered a health assessment of the North Atlantic, and Daniel and his colleagues gave it to him. “We had shown that the biomass had collapsed; it was easy to see that the Atlantic wasn’t doing well,” Daniel concludes. This time, everyone at Pew got behind their work, and the Sea Around Us’s funding was renewed year after year. The results of their work on the North Atlantic initially appeared as a series of reports in 2001, then as scientific publications in the years that followed—for example, Villy Christensen et al.’s article on the decline of larger fish, published in March of 2003.
But the Sea Around Us researchers weren’t the only ones working on overfishing. Less than two months later, in May 2003, a Halifax-based duo made waves in the media that would be felt around the world. These new protagonists were Ransom Myers and Boris Worm. Myers, the son of Mississippi cotton farmers, was a well-known figure in the small world of fisheries biology. He was tall, brown-haired, and brown-bearded; some people thought he looked like Thor, the god of thunder,3 but my French colleagues called him “the Ayatollah.” After wandering the Middle East and Africa during the 1970s, he crossed the Atlantic in a 27-foot sailboat to study mathematics in Canada. Hired by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans after his doctorate, he moved to Newfoundland, where he saw the tragic collapse of the cod stocks unfold in real time. As Jeffrey Hutchings, his friend and colleague at the time, would tell it, “You could not work at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Newfoundland in the early 1990s . . . and not be cognizant of the obligation that scientists have to society of communicating their research widely, publicly, and honestly.”4 Myers took a stand, telling the press that neither ravenous seals nor warming waters were responsible for decimating the cod stocks—obviously, overfishing was. The Department of Fisheries reprimanded him severely, but they couldn’t shut Ransom Myers up. He turned his back on the ministry and became a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1997. It was there that, three years later, he received a visit from a young German researcher, yet another graduate of the oceanographic institute in Kiel.
Boris Worm is from the Black Forest, and he does indeed project something of the woodsman-intellectual, like a young Aldo Leopold.* When I first heard about him in the late 1990s, all the girls at the institute couldn’t stop talking about his curly blond hair and his adventures in the Yukon and on Vancouver Island, where he spent his summers observing the orcas. Our professors had also fallen under the spell of this obviously gifted student, who was a hard worker and detail oriented. University legends abound when it comes to Boris Worm: one of them concerns his time at the Roscoff marine research station in Bretagne, where his whole class went to study marine organisms on the rocky French coast. Boris had taken an interest in the feeding habits of sea snails and, unsatisfied with the information in his textbooks, took to sitting on the ocean floor in his diving equipment for hours at a time, patiently waiting for the tiny creatures to give up their secrets.
Boris was not a fisheries biologist, however. “When I was a student, I always thought that subject was so boring,” he tells me. “It just seemed like accounting to me.” Indeed, he still loves the intertidal, that part of the coast where the tides go in and out and where he likes to test complex hypotheses about interactions between different species. But after his doctorate in Kiel, he began looking for a job and met Ransom Myers. “We hit it off and he took me to a big fisheries conference in Florida,” recounts Boris, who admits that he was “very impressed by the sophisticated statistics in certain analyses.” He moved to Halifax and the Worm-Myers duo soon began using those “sophisticated statistics” to study interactions between species in the parts of the North Atlantic where cod were fished.5 They were able to demonstrate that once all the cod had been caught, shrimp became abundant because there were no more cod to eat them. The fisheries that had targeted cod therefore quickly shifted to shrimp, neatly demonstrating the concept of fishing down marine food webs articulated by Daniel Pauly.
Then, along with four other researchers at Dalhousie University, they used data from the American longline fishing fleet, which tracks accidental catches of sharks in the Gulf of Mexico. By studying the number of sharks captured year after year, they were able to show that their numbers had declined by 75 percent in fifteen years. The resulting paper made headlines in Science,6 but Boris and Ransom were just getting started. In fact, Ransom had spent the preceding decade gathering information on the abundance of large fish (cod, tuna, swordfish, et cetera) for four coastal regions and all of the temperate, subtropical, and tropical zones in three oceans. This data was mainly mined from the records of Japanese long-liners, which track the precise number of fish captured by species per year, per region, as a function of the number of hooks put into the water on longlines that can reach up to 62 miles in length. This allowed Ransom and Boris to reconstruct how the biomass of groups of exploited species had changed over time by using the number of individuals captured per one hundred hooks as an indicator.
“Long-lining has expanded globally. . . like a hole burning through paper,” Daniel quipped, coining a phrase that would be picked up by media outlets the world over.* Indeed, the maps that Boris pulled up on his computer screen for the television cameras demonstrate that although in the early 1950s the Japanese fleet kept to the Pacific, where they made substantial catches north of Australia, by the end of the decade, they had moved out into the warm waters of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, carrying out huge raids in the waters off Brazil and West Africa. By the 1960s, their conquest of the waters inhabited by tuna and similar fish was complete—and catch rates in the Pacific were already falling. This trend was confirmed in the 1980s when catch rates fell worldwide. Ransom and Boris end on a laconic note: “Industrialized fisheries typically reduced community biomass by 80% within 15 years of exploitation.” “We estimate,” they add, “that large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10% of pre-industrial levels.”
Their article7 made the cover of Nature and, according to Boris, “Ransom spent the next few weeks answering so many calls from journalists that he lost his voice.” In France, Le Monde ran the headline “Large fish stocks in danger of disappearing,” calling it a “shocking realization,”8 and the Japanese administration kicked themselves for letting the Canadian team peek at their reports. “Of course, everyone came after us, especially the fisheries management organizations,” Boris sighs. “Daniel was the only one who was a good sport—he even supported us in the press.” The younger scientist steadied his nerves by telling himself, “They’re criticizing my work, not me personally.” Ransom, on the other hand, was more belligerent: “They’re wrong, and I am right!” he declared.9 But he was distressed when he read an article written by his colleague (and supposed friend) Carl Walters titled “Folly and Fantasy in the Analysis of Spatial Catch Rate Data.” 10 “Ransom was so torn up about it that he didn’t even tell me,” Boris recalls. “Carl went a little overboard when it came to the tone.”†
The experience was painful, but Myers and Worm had finally torn a hole in the wall of indifference that couldn’t be ignored: “If fisheries conservation biology and its guiding philosophy thrive, it will be because of the energies of the likes of Ransom,” Daniel wrote several years later.11
THE RESULTS OF the Sea Around Us project, Myers and Worm’s analyses, and the work of several other teams from around the world proved most instructive.
Joshua Reichert, bringing the project full circle, asked Daniel to go beyond his usual reports and scientific publications—if the news was going to reach decision makers, they had to publish a book for the general public, and fast. Nothing excites Daniel more than the idea of diving headfirst into another wordsmithing spree, but he simply didn’t have the time, so he called for backup in the form of Jay Maclean. “Daniel came up to me and said, ‘I want you to write this book, here is the money, I know you’ll be wanting it for your son’s education,’” Jay recalls.
A worthy successor of the illustrious Rachel Carson, Jay got to work gathering his sources, including the essential Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat. Since library catalogs in the Philippines were somewhat limited, Jay spent several weeks in Rome, locked up in the FAO archives. Back at his home in Anilao with its view of the coral reef, he began crafting the simple, precise, and elegantly turned phrases he had become known for. Jay fulfilled his contract, delivering about a hundred pages accompanied by a generous helping of notes. Reichert and the publisher came back with two requests. First, they asked that the book be signed Pauly and Maclean, arguing that it would be easier to sell with the better-known author listed first. Mightily embarrassed, Daniel passed the publisher’s demands on to his old friend. But Jay only shrugged—he was used to being a ghostwriter. The publisher’s second request was that Daniel write the introduction himself, a project he completed during a stay in the French countryside.
In fact, when Daniel’s adoptive father, Louis Pauly (or Loulou, as he was often called), retired from his job in heavy industry in the late 1970s, he couldn’t wait to escape the gray skies and government housing in the Parisian suburb of Maisons-Alfort,* and his wife, Renée, couldn’t agree more. But their children were spread out all over the country, except for Daniel, who had just left for the Philippines. Ever the rationalist, Renée spread a map of France on the kitchen table, and a few barycentric calculations later, she had the answer: La Creuse, a rural region smack in the middle of the hexagon. They found a house within their budget—a two-room cottage with a large garden near the hamlet of La Vallade, about twelve miles northwest of Guéret. Loulou moved in right away, only too happy to start his vegetable garden. Renée joined him a few years later, leaving her department store job far behind her. The home was rustic—at first, there wasn’t even running water or central heating. But the Paulys fixed it up and expanded it over the years with help from their children. “They were exhausted from all those years of work,” one of their neighbors told me. “Loulou didn’t live to be very old. You could tell they hadn’t been very happy in Paris, but here, they were.” Renée and Loulou had never gotten their driver’s licenses, so they crisscrossed the countryside on their mopeds (they each had their own—Renée had never needed a man to tell her where to go), doing their shopping in the nearest village, a few miles away. Monsieur went to buy his cigarettes, Madame to load up on books, which she devoured greedily before narrating their content, in detail, to anyone who was willing to listen.
For the next thirty years, La Vallade became the rallying point for the whole Pauly clan. In order to house everyone in the summertime, they put up tents in the garden and converted the attic into a sleeping loft. The river was right around the corner, a good place to swim, surrounded by greenery and with a sandy beach, just like at the seaside. In the summer of 1981, Daniel, Sandra, Ilya, and baby Angela visited from Manila. A Super 8 home video shows them sitting peacefully among the younger Pauly brothers, who horse around for the camera. “La Creuse helped me make my peace with France,” reminisces Daniel, who enjoyed the beautiful countryside and talked with his mother from morning till night. He returned to La Creuse again and again, not as often as he would have liked, but anytime his mad dashes around the world led him close enough to Paris.
And that is precisely what happened in 2002, shortly after his publisher asked him to write an introduction for Jay’s book. “I was attending a UNESCO workshop in Paris and it was so idiotic that I just left,” Daniel recalls. “I rented a car, and I went to see my mother. I was a little depressed by everything I’d seen in Paris and some other things as well. In La Vallade, I wrote the introduction in a sort of trance, describing an ocean where we’d wiped everything out, where there was nothing left but old beer cans rolling back and forth on the sea floor.”
DANIEL’S TEXT IS poetic, as authoritative and enlightening as one of Rachel Carson’s essays. He begins with the wreck of the Andrea Gail, a 72-foot fishing vessel that left Gloucester, near Boston, in September of 1991 to chase swordfish, only to disappear thirty-eight days later off the coast of Newfoundland beneath 60-foot-high waves and winds over 100 miles per hour. It was the kind of story that was made for the movies, and Hollywood, true to form, glorified the epic battle between man and the “merciless” ocean.* For Daniel, though, the story lay elsewhere: What was a relatively small fishing boat doing at the end of October more than 600 miles off the Canadian coast? Running dangerously low on fuel, the Andrea Gail was in fact hunting down the few remaining swordfish in the North Atlantic—it was overfishing that killed those six sailors. After that dramatic introduction, Jay and Daniel pick up the sad narrative of the pillaging of the North Atlantic, supported by the Sea Around Us’s data on the twentieth century. Having successfully painted a portrait of the current state of affairs, the duo asks the question: “How did we get here?”
“There are no villains, least of all the fishers,” they stress from the outset.12 For them, resource management in the region simply didn’t correspond with ecological reality. The root of the problem is likely conceptual: fisheries biology operates on the myth of infinite ocean resources and manages fish stocks species by species without taking fishing’s ecosystem-wide effects into account. Additionally, even as the profitability of ocean fisheries is diminishing, fishing efforts are being increased thanks to subsidies from national governments, around thirty billion dollars per year worldwide—a mind-boggling sum. In practice, this means that 16 percent of the price of any given seafood item in Europe is covered by subsidies, a figure that climbs as high as 25 percent in Canada. These figures are available thanks to the work of Rashid Sumaila and his very determined team, who wrested them from the official and semi-official documents of different North Atlantic countries.
Indeed, the synthesis published by the Sea Around Us launched Rashid Sumaila’s career. A young Nigerian economist trained in Norway, he moved to Vancouver in the mid-nineties and quickly became a world-class specialist in the socioeconomics of fisheries, eventually landing a professorship at UBC. “I like Rashid a lot,” says Daniel (who is rarely so effusive) when I ask about his young colleague. “And I respect him. I think the feeling is mutual.” Certainly, when I finally meet Rashid in Vancouver, he strikes me as the friendliest and most good-humored member of his department. It is Daniel who tells me about Rashid’s early career: “In Norway, he worked so hard and he was so productive that he had to leave—it’s what’s called ‘tall poppy syndrome.’* It was Tony Pitcher who invited him to Vancouver, and I quickly realized that he had a great work ethic. We had contests to see who could work the longest each day—I lost.”
The master advised his student to look at the big picture, and Rashid did just that, studying the financing and socioeconomic impacts of fishing, not for a specific part of the Norwegian or West African coast, but on a global scale. Perhaps most remarkably, he created the first international databases of ex-vessel seafood prices* and the total cost of fishing activities and their socioeconomic benefits, as well as of fishing subsidies allotted by national governments. “Those projects got him all the way to the World Bank and the World Trade Organization,” Daniel remarks proudly. When Sumaila presented his findings in Brussels, Daniel couldn’t help but smile at the sight of an African explaining to Europeans how to run their fisheries. In particular, Sumaila and his colleagues criticized the government subsidies allotted to fisheries, pointing out that they promote industrial fishing at the expense of more local, environmentally friendly, and socioeconomically sustainable fisheries. Essentially, all of the fisheries management strategies already in place were based on short-term goals without taking the needs of future generations into account.
The economic model being applied to North Atlantic fisheries, among others, was therefore not viable in the long term, and worse, the existing systems of governance were ineffective. “We have not used the regulatory tools and developed the right institutions for managing fisheries effectively for their long-term sustenance,” Jay and Daniel contend in their book. They go on to provide a list of sixteen commissions and forty-three international mechanisms that regulate fishing in the North Atlantic—though with mixed results. The Northern European countries make an honest effort, but Southern Europe is a different matter. The European Commission sets fishing quotas but leaves it up to its member states to make sure that those quotas are respected within their borders. Some countries—such as France, Greece, and Spain—tend to dig in their heels: they would rather pay tens of millions of euros in fines to the EC than make their fishers respect the quotas. Overall, the means allotted to keeping tabs on fishing activities are also largely insufficient, even in countries like the United States and Canada, where the size of areas being exploited is quickly increasing as a result of overfishing. Jay and Daniel conclude that “just as in the case of control of vehicular traffic by police, control by fisheries officers cannot fully replace voluntary compliance by the majority,”13 adding: “All users of marine ecosystems . . . take part in the ocean’s stewardship. . . Status quo is not enough. Restoration of past levels of abundance is required.” 14
For that to happen, Jay and Daniel conclude, we must set aside the current approach, which focuses exclusively on species exploited by fisheries, and work to restore the ecosystems on which those species depend. Thus the idea of ecosystem-based fisheries management was born. During the first few years of the twenty-first century, Daniel’s publications and those of numerous colleagues helped develop this notion, which they define as follows: “The intent of the concept of marine ecosystem management is to place ecosystem integrity or health as the primary consideration in all management decisions that affect the ecosystem. From an economic viewpoint, the ecosystem restoration and management can be seen as an investment in a natural resource.”15 They also suggested a list of five urgent measures designed to mend ecosystems in a North Atlantic damaged by fisheries. They understood that in doing so, they were going beyond their role as simple ecologists and leaning dangerously on “the firewall between science and advocacy.” Because their proposals perfectly summarize the objectives that need to be attained if we are to restore the oceans, I have chosen to quote them at length:
Fishing pressure on North Atlantic fish populations and ecosystems must be drastically reduced, by a factor of three to four in most areas . . . One very effective tool, in this context, is the abolition of subsidies . . . Large marine reserves, amounting to at least 20% of the ocean by the year 2020, must be established, pending the long-term transition toward a regime where specific areas are explicitly open for fishing, while the rest is closed by default.
Eco-labeling and other market-based efforts to move the fishing industry toward sustainable practices must be intensified. An effective regime must be designed and implemented to publicly expose deliberately unsustainable and illegal practices, and their perpetrators.
Access and property rights in fisheries should favor smaller scale, place-based operations, operating passive gear to the extent possible, and the fisheries should be run through co-management arrangements.
When they say “passive gear,” Daniel and Jay are referring to traps and other fishing techniques that are far more selective and less destructive than trawling, a method that can transform rich ocean bottoms into lifeless deserts. They add that they are not defending arti-sanal fisheries for “romantic” reasons, but rather because “local fishers, if given privileged access, will tend to avoid trashing their local stocks, while foreign fishers do not have such motivation.”
The book, signed Daniel Pauly and Jay Maclean, In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean, was released in 2003 by Island Press, an American publisher specializing in environmental literature. At 175 pages, it reads like a detective novel and resonates like an alarm, though the text is also infused with Jay and Daniel’s usual dry humor. “A few more decades of long-lining will resolve the problem, as extinct sharks cannot be finned and discarded,” they quip at one point. Or later: “You cannot go lower than that in terms of fishing down marine food webs: sea cucumbers eat dirt.” I read the book during an expedition to Greenland in the summer of 2004, and I could barely put it down. Back in France, I contacted Daniel for the first time, sending him an email that proved to be the first of many.
* Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).
* Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). The book predicts a silent springtime throughout the country due to the disappearance of birds and insects that will all have been killed off by pesticides.
* See: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949).
* The quote was initially reported by Nancy Baron.
† According to the German expression Boris Worm used in our interview (June 16, 2017): “Carl hat sich im Ton ein bißchen vergriffen.”
* The Parisian suburbs (“la banlieue parisienne”) carry a negative stigma akin to that of the “inner city” in the United States. (TN)
* Wolfgang Petersen, The Perfect Storm, 2000, 130'. The film is based on the book of the same title by Sebastian Junger, published in 1997.
* Tall poppy syndrome describes a situation in which individuals perceived as more successful than their peers are resented or attacked.
* Ex-vessel prices: prices at the landing site, i.e., at first sale. (TN)