'seeding the water as the earth': THE EPICENTER AND PERIPHERIES OF A WESTERN AQUACULTURAL REVOLUTION

Environmental History, Jul 2006 by Kinsey, Darin

Only two years after the construction of the Huningue site, a new scientific community was formed in France, La Société imperiale zoologique d'acclimitation. The Société's mission was to promote and study the importation, acclimatization, and domestication of exotic animal and plant species that eventually could become acclimated to France and transformed into popular food sources. The Société's founding members included Isadore Geoffery Saint-Hilaire, Milne-Edwards, Quatrefages, and a large group of prominent naturalists and aristocratic supporters. Saint-Hilaire believed acclimatization to be the first step in a three-stage process that would lead ultimately to the complete submission of species to human domestication. At Boulogne, just outside of Paris, they constructed the centerpiece of their movement, the Jardin d'Acclimitation, which served as a laboratory for collective investigation. The Jardin, with its imperial sanction, represented nothing less than an ecological extension of the mission civilisatrice, and activities at Huningue became closely associated with the Société's goals.28

In addition to its scholarly work, the Société engaged in more popular spectacles. New species of animals and plants usually arrived (and often were eaten) amidst great public fanfare reminiscent of the pageantry of exotic animals in Imperial Rome. In one instance, a Parisian newspaper noted how the Société had distributed "little microscopic fish" (probably goldfish reared at Huningue or in the aquarium house at the Jardin) into the fountains and water basins in the Tuileries. Such acts brought artificial fecundation and fish acclimatization efforts into the popular imagination in ways that their academic journal could never have achieved. The introduction of exotic fish species consequently became the cornerstone of the Huningue piscifactory's operations and clearly dominated the inquiry of its director, the man put in charge of investigating and advancing French aquaculture science as a whole-Victor Coste.29

Coste was a physician with specialized training in embryology, a member of the Société, and imperial physician to Empress Eugénie. Eugénie was not just an imperial consort, but an important counselor, thus giving Coste a ready line of communication to the emperor with whom he established a strong, amicable, and lifelong relationship. Coste commenced his new responsibilities with a fisheries survey of the French and Italian coastline. Along the way, he visited the small Italian town of Commachio, on the Adriatic between Ravenna and the mouth of the Po River, where he investigated the use of aquaculture practices that were said to date from antiquity. He noted: "The documents that I have gathered in my voyage of exploration will be the proof that human industry, guided by experience of centuries and the new discoveries of science, will organize along all the waterways machinery of exploitation, where the fruits of this inexhaustible domain, held, ripened and multiplied with care, will be harvested with as much profit and less labor than those of the earth."30 He gave these ideas deeper meaning in 1853 in his Instructions pratiques sur la pisciculture. The text was intended to instruct ordinary people in the advantages and uses of a modern science of aquaculture and was quickly translated into English. This work was in every way a French aquatic-oriented predecessor to other kinds of modern environmental improvement writings such as those of Julius Sterling Morton who popularized the modern techniques of farming and forestry. If less well known today than Morton, Coste's work had an equally global impact.31