Page 5 - Marino2005

2.3, September 2005
Nebula

for several years, but I have heard reports from eyewitnesses that one year they took
one tuna, and another year, none.

The old timers were retiring, the new men just wanted a job for three months, or to be
part of something their grandfathers did. Hunters lose interest when the prey is gone. I

felt like the island was losing its life blood.

One year after the book came out I did go back in the spring. The tuna catch had
dwindled over the years. I found Rais Gioacchino Cataldo in a boathouse. He’d

invented what he said was an improvement to the trap. It was an eighth room, which
he named GG, because he’d designed it with former Rais Gioacchino Ernandes. I

wondered why he’d gone to all the trouble of building a new net chamber, when the
tuna were so diminished. I didn’t insist on a logical answer; I understood he was
heartbroken, grasping at straws now, and that he just wanted to leave his mark on

Favignana’s tonnara.

There were no more blue-fin in their trap because of industrial fishing. If mankind can
do a thing, mankind will do it, regardless of the consequences. A steam engine, an
atomic bomb, a trip to the moon, purse seine nets. Another reason is because there are

too many of us, and we are all consumers.

I recently read an article in the New Yorker magazine (May 9, 2005) about global
warming due to man’s actions, and its disastrous effects. Reporter Elizabeth Kolbert

talked to Marty Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, who was as
pessimistic, and realistic, about global warming as I am about over-fishing and its

effects on culture.

He said, "…you know, somebody will visit (earth) in a few hundred million years and

find there were some intelligent beings who lived here for a while, but they just
couldn’t handle the transition from being hunter-gatherers to high technology."

E.M. From what you have said so far I gather that orality, the experience orally
passed from one person to the other, plays an important role in your writing.
Could you expand on that? Do you think it could also be somehow connected

Marino: …An Interview with Theresa Maggio 122