Just over ten years ago, David Graeber, an anthropologist, wrote an article about ‘bullshit jobs’, which he defines as those which are engaged in unproductive work — clerical, administrative, advertising and the like. My favourite candidate for a bullshit job is PR or, as it’s more often called these days, communication. Just about every organisation seems to have someone in a job of this kind, including those to do with fishing, the Atlantic Salmon Trust for example, whose Head of Communications is Jonathon Muir. This is part of how he describes his job
Key to restoring the species [salmon] at scale and pace is by delivering landscape-scale solutions to land managers and policymakers, in addition to harnessing nature-positive finance and philanthropic funding within the corporate sector, using wild salmon as a keystone focus species within efforts to tackle the wider twin crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss.
Heads of communication clearly have a different way of communicating than the rest of us. ‘Landscape-scale solutions’? ‘Nature-positive finance’? Muir must spend much of his time weaving meaningless phrases from a dictionary of corporate gobbledygook. But he’s also written a piece for the Soapbox section in the September issue of Trout & Salmon, a rather Pollyannaish plea for ‘positivity’. Of course the words positive and negative are much bandied about these days, especially by lovers of obtuse language: negative is frequently used to describe someone who holds a different point of view, positive for those who have the same. According to Muir ‘We owe it to future generations of wild salmon lovers . . . to be relentlessly positive . . .’. When you consider that the Atlantic salmon population has crashed in most rivers either side of the Ocean, never mind the rapid disappearance of numerous other animal and plant species worldwide, the sixth mass extinction, it is hard to know what he means. Certainly lapsing into despair will not get us out of the environmental mess of our own making, but frittering away time on fruitless projects, as I believe the Atlantic Salmon Trust is doing, is not cause for optimism. Jonathon Muir seems to personify that foot-dragging.
To give him his due, he does refer to illegal exploitation in the T&S article, which is the first mention I’ve seen from anyone in the AST. The trouble is he is part of the ‘slow pace of action’ and telling us all to cheer up will do nothing to help. Indeed it may even give anglers an excuse to carry on with their own polluting ways — driving high-emission 4 by 4s (does JM own one?), flying around the world for fishing jollies, as encouraged by the magazines Trout & Salmon and Fly Culture among others. Anglers have a nasty habit of laying the blame anywhere but their own doorstep.
In the interests of giving the AST impetus, perhaps I can help Jonny redraft his job description, and that of all the AST employees:
Find out what’s killing the salmon. Take action to prevent it. And be quick about it.
The Secret Angler 