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THE MAKING OF A SUSTAINABILITY DISCOURSE

I open the app Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide: A guide to choosing your seafood

wisely. This is Australia’s only independent national guide to sustainable seafood and a tool

for those who ‘love our oceans but also love their seafood’ and are concerned about what

they eat from the sea and how it got to their plate (AMCS 2016, para. 4). I glance at the

legend. A simple traffic light system tells me ‘green’ is better, ‘orange’ means eat less, and

‘red’ indicates avoid altogether. I type in tuna. There are only two orange and five red listed.

No green. I click on the icon for wild caught yellowfin. The page opens and a black and white

illustration of a tuna appears at the top, along with a map of its habitat in Australian waters

and information on its sustainability status. Orange! Indicating that I should eat less due to

pressures on this tuna species from overfishing and longliner bycatch of species like turtle

and shark.

Sustainability travels. As a goal, a series of practices, objects, devices, and a set of

statements, it circulates widely. Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide is one example of a

device, which has circulated online since 2014 (AMCS 2014). The guide gained traction by

featuring on numerous sustainability blogs – Sustainable Living Guide (Redman-Brown n.d.),

Body and Soul (Pendlebury 2009), Greenly (Haynes 2009), and Good Fish Bad Fish

(Edwards & Bicknell n.d.). Sustainability is also produced through institutional networks. For

instance, the guide was a joint venture between the Australian Marine Conservation Society

(AMCS) and Greenpeace, which produced its sustainability criteria. Furthermore, knowledge

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