Something fishy: Chile's blue revolution, commodity diseases, and the problem of sustainability.

The United Nations describes aquaculture as the fastest-growing method of food production, and some industry boosters have heralded the coming of a sustainable blue revolution. This article interprets the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in southern Chile (1980-2010) by integrating concepts from commodity studies and comparative environmental history. I juxtapose salmon aquaculture to twentieth-century export banana production to reveal the similar dynamics that give rise to "commodity diseases"­events caused by the entanglement of biological, social, and political-economic processes that operate on local, regional, and transoceanic geographical scales. Unsurprisingly, the risks and burdens associated with commodity diseases are borne disproportionately by production workers and residents in localities where commodity disease events occur. Chile's blue revolution suggests that evaluating the sustainability of aquaculture in Latin America cannot be divorced from processes of accumulation.

"Esteeme a little of fish": fish, fishponds, and farming in eighteenth-century New England and the Mid-Atlantic.

Prior to the advent of scientific aquaculture in the mid-nineteenth century, English farming manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries instructed American colonists in the "art of husbandry," imparting advice and passing on the best-known strategies for keeping and rearing fish in enclosed ponds. The development of such ponds in the New England and Mid-Atlantic colonies during the eighteenth century marked the culmination of a long process by which British-American colonists adapted to declines in natural fish populations brought on by over-fishing and disruption of habitat by water-powered mills. The development of private fishponds as an increasingly important component of American mixed husbandry practices in long-settled areas by the end of the eighteenth century illustrates early American farmers' ability to successfully adapt to self-wrought changes in their physical environment.