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indiscriminately, they get big fish, small fish, before they lay their eggs. You
block them! You don’t block everything because if you block everything, you will
block a food chain. (M Tammaro 2013, pers. comm. 2 July)

In Tammaro’s statement humans are a part of a system of nature. For example, he also

suggests that if the tuna are no longer fished then the tuna eat all of the anchovies, disturbing

an ecosystem of which humans are a part.

So now we have lots of tuna and few anchovies. If for another five years the tuna
doesn’t get fished there won’t be any anchovies, and as a result the tuna won’t find
any more food. So they shouldn’t put their hands on the balance of nature. (M
Tammaro 2013, pers. comm. 2 July)

Tammaro continues expressing ecology in terms of a relationship between people and nature.

Describing the Neolithic drawings of a man fishing for tuna in a cave near the island of

Levenzo, he says ‘man is part of the balance of nature…for millions of years man was part

of, was integrated in this type of fishing’ (M Tammaro 2013, pers. comm. 2 July).

Like Rivano and Tammaro, Secondo Boghero, restaurateur from Carloforte, considers

sustainability to be a folly unless there are drastic changes to a system that encourages greed

(2013, pers. comm. 19 June). He brings to light and critiques what Robert Vos would call the

dominant capitalist paradigm of growth as well as ‘thin’ versions of sustainability where

economic growth can be balanced with sustainable consumption (2007, p. 336). In the

statement below, Secondo Boghero’s response is more of a hard line ‘thick’ version (Vos

2007, p. 336) of sustainability where economic growth must be slowed and reversed before

we can conceive of sustainability.

Sustainability, you have to approach it from a certain logic to apply
sustainability…sustainability is an economic matter…and a capitalist logic. If we
live in a capitalist world, where your moral and political aim is to make tools to
grow the possibilities of making money, in that case everything is unsustainable.
There’s no logic in all of that, for instance I can say I am pro sustainability, I’m all
for that, but my moral and commercial motive is to make money…What does
sustainability mean? To eliminate money. They’re all a bunch of lies. The Kyoto

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