Moving Trout, Moved by Trout: A New Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Environmental Change

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Background 

Once located in only a few patches of the world, today rainbow trout and brown trout are among the most widely distributed – and most widely desired – freshwater fish. This one-day conference engages with the puzzles that these creatures present: Why and how have particular people come to love trout so much? And why and how have these fish come to be spread to more than 100 countries on six continents? Trout exemplify a key environmental transformation: In a period of widespread species extinctions and declines, how do some organisms come to spread and flourish? Braiding together historical and ethnographic insights with cutting-edge data from river ecology and fisheries genetics, this conference presents how the entanglement of social and ecological processes matters to how we understand and address current and future dilemmas around living with trout, which cannot easily be removed once they have been introduced. In the midst of mounting crises, trout show us how ecologies are transformed by often-overlooked forces that are at once banal and earth-shattering, such as sport angling and small-scale fish breeding. 

Trout also highlight one of the most important features of the “global” environmental problems of our times: that they are highly heterodox and cannot be understood via generalizations. Instead, they require that we consider the comparisons and connections of studying trout in various places at the same time. This event, the final public event of the 4-year Norwegian Research Council FRIPRO research project “Global Trout” showcases the empirical and analytical insights from the project’s novel approach of combining large-scale, transnational trout histories with grounded, site-specific research in England, Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand, and Japan.

Conference Program