Download The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental

The Promise of Ocean History for
Environmental History
Helen M. Rozwadowski
Paul Sutter closes his essay on the state of the field of environmental history by calling
attention to the relatively short time during which humans have transformed the planet—
a point that certainly applies to the ocean. Anthropogenically induced global climate
change is affecting ocean temperature and acidity. Overfishing has not only decimated
marine populations but has emptied entire levels of the marine food web. Bottom trawling
has scarred virtually all the commercially reachable seafloor. Attention to marine environmental issues has lagged behind similar attention to land by a century or more; only since
the 1990s has the ocean’s environmental status gripped the attention of mainstream media
and ordinary people.1
Although the ocean seems remote, marine environmental activists and ocean boosters
rightly note the many ways that all people are tightly connected to it. The seas provide
food, energy, communication, and transportation of the goods and raw materials that fuel
the global economy. Threats to oceans and the uses made of ocean space and ocean resources have prompted the formation of international legal regimes and agreements. The
majority of the world’s population lives along coasts—and the proportion of coastal dwellers is on the increase—therefore even more people will be involved in the challenges associated with sea-level rise and the increasing frequency and intensity of storms.2
Such interactions between people and ocean are grist for historical scholarship. Sutter
acknowledges environmental history’s terrestrial bias and notes the small but growing body
of literature that recognizes the ocean’s place in history. This notice has happened at an
auspicious time, because environmental history’s embrace of hybridity opens a space for
the sea and other environments like it. Like land, the ocean is a natural environment that
is—perhaps to a greater degree even than terra firma—knowable through cultural lenses.
Technology necessarily mediates understanding of the vast depths of the ocean and even
Helen M. Rozwadowski is an associate professor of history and maritime studies at the University of Connecticut,
Avery Point.
Readers may contact Rozwadowski at [email protected].
1
On calls for ocean ethics and activism in response to ocean-related environmental issues and events, see Carl
Safina, “Launching a Sea Ethic,” Wild Earth, 12 (Winter 2002–2003), 2–5; and David Helvarg, Blue Frontier:
Saving America’s Living Seas (New York, 2001).
2
On official international responses to threats to oceans and the uses made of ocean space and ocean resources,
see Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, Eng., 2001); Virginia M. Walsh, Global
Institutions and Social Knowledge: Generating Research at the Scripps Institution and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna
Commission, 1900s–1990s (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); and Don Hinrichsen, Coastal Waters of the World: Trends,
Threats, and Strategies (Washington, 1998).
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat069
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
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The Journal of American History
June 2013
The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History
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of its surface. Imagination—whether existing knowledge systems, preconceived notions, or
desires—influences ideas about and uses of the ocean. Hybridity invites recognition that
humans have left imprints in places that seem remote from civilization—indeed, places
that challenge human survival.
Adding such environments to the compendium of subjects appropriate to environmental
history represents a dramatic expansion of the geographic territory available to historians.
Ocean history also promises to extend areas of inquiry outlined by Sutter and to contribute to burgeoning fields such as deep history, big history, spatial history, envirotech, energy
history, and disaster history.
Although Sutter’s treatment of agroenvironmental history did not explicitly include
fishing, it might well do so, as fish are a major global protein source. Even so, fish are the
only remaining wild-caught source of food for large numbers of people, thereby putting
fishing in a somewhat different historical category. One commonality of land and sea is the
profound length of time that humans have been using resources from both and the correspondingly long time during which human activities have left their mark. Like history, prehistory may reflect a terrestrial bias, reinforced by the fact that seacoasts, which early
humans might have inhabited during the last glaciation, are now inundated and thus
unavailable for traditional archaeological investigation. Historical attention has focused on
industrial-era fishing, while innovative, interdisciplinary partnerships between scientists
and historians have yielded results demonstrating human impact on marine resources
reaching back hundreds, even thousands, of years. Such studies suggest that the ocean, like
Brian Donahue’s New England, is a place where “there was no land before history.”3
Yet ocean history must not be limited to fisheries history. Even a brief consideration of
the range of activities enumerated above should make clear the relevance of ocean history
to Sutter’s study of the environmental-management state. The history and legacy of who
controls ocean space and ocean resources promises to add profoundly international and
spatial dimensions to existing histories that focus on nation-states. Many, if not most,
ocean resources prompt bilateral or multilateral negotiations over control and use. Increasingly, private corporations—and oil companies in particular—are joining nation-states as
key players in the process.4
The growth of the offshore oil-drilling industry has turned large swaths of ocean space
into places more closely resembling land than ever before, especially with the installation
of permanent and semipermanent structures. The burgeoning wind-energy movement
promises to extend this trajectory. There have been efforts, as well, to create working and
living spaces on and in the ocean, such as the Cold War–era Texas Towers radar facilities,
plans for floating airports and cities, or submersible underwater habitats such as the series
3
Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History, 100 (June 2013), 94–119; Torbin C. Rick and Jon M. Erlandson, eds., Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems: A Global Perspective (Berkeley, 2008). Fisheries histories that demonstrate the focus on industrial fisheries
include Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, Eng., 1986); Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis
(Seattle, 1999); Christine Keiner, The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since
1880 (Athens, Ga., 2010); and Carmel Finley, All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of
Fisheries Management (Chicago, 2011). Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and Land in Colonial Concord
(New Haven, 2004), 24.
4
Joseph A. Pratt, Tyler Priest, and Christopher J. Castaneda, Offshore Pioneers: Brown & Root and the History of
Offshore Oil and Gas (Houston, 1997); Tyler Priest, The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in
Postwar America (College Station, 2009).
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of Sealabs developed during the 1960s. In addition, activities involving vessels and fishing
gear, certain technologies such as telegraph cables, and most activities that take place at the
sea’s margins deserve the consideration of envirotech scholars and others who attend to the
human-built world.5
Historical focus on efforts to work and live on and in the sea prompts consideration of
the human body. Exploration history almost always includes attention to bodies placed in
trying circumstances. The undersea environment precludes human visits of more than a
few minutes without the use of breathing technology, although ocean enthusiasts in the
1960s anticipated the bioengineering of human bodies to enable oxygen extraction from
seawater. Boosters at that time envisioned combining oceanography, physiology, and engineering to create a new regime for intensive use of ocean resources. Explorers today insist
on the need to involve human bodies in ocean exploration, paralleling the debate about
space. Consideration of extreme environments such as the ocean, space, the polar regions,
the atmosphere, and underground necessarily involve bodies—including their limits, the
extent to which technology can extend those limits, the costs of exploration by humans
instead of robots, and the ethics of putting humans at risk.6
Most know that the oceans cover about three-quarters of the earth’s surface. Fewer recognize that, volumetrically, the sea makes up 99 percent of the earth’s living space. Traditional historical attention to the ocean—through maritime history—focused on activities
such as trade, naval warfare, exploration, or fishing, which took place on the surface. Attention to the entirety of the ocean environment dramatically increases the territory available
for historical inquiry and, in so doing, adds the vertical dimension to the more familiar
horizontal orientation of historians. Oceans are not unique in offering a vertical perspective;
mountains, and also underground environments such as mines, draw historians upward
and downward from the horizontal. Even so, the sheer volume of the ocean environment
invites a vertical perspective more obviously, perhaps, than other environments.7
Although few historians so far have embraced the vertical seriously, ocean history does
seem to be rather naturally oriented toward consideration of categories of space. While
history traditionally addresses a particular geographic location, a specific time period, and
finite groups of historical actors, environments such as oceans seem to require a different
approach. Perhaps histories of gyres, or trade-wind belts, or seamounts, or the deep sea, or
tides might produce insights that histories of specific places such as Long Island Sound or
the Grand Banks cannot.8
5
On efforts to create working and living spaces in and on the ocean, see Helen M. Rozwadowski and David Van
Keuren, eds., The Machine in Neptune’s Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology (Canton, 2004).
6
On bioengineering and the vision of combining oceanography, physiology, and engineering to create a new
regime for use of ocean resources, see “Mouse Breathes Liquid—And Lives: How a Man Might Get Along under
Water without Air,” Life, Aug. 25, 1967, pp. 77–79; Helen M. Rozwadowski, “Ocean’s Depths,” Environmental
History, 15 (July 2010), 520–25; and Helen M. Rozwadowski, “Engineering, Imagination, and Industry: Scripps
Island and Dreams for Ocean Science in the 1960s,” in Machine in Neptune’s Garden, ed. Rozwadowski and Van
Keuren, 325–52.
7
Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge,
Mass., 2008). On a “vertical perspective,” see Michael S. Reidy, “From the Oceans to the Mountains: Spatial Science
in an Age of Empire,” in Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences, ed. Jeremy
Vetter (New Brunswick, 2010), 17–38.
8
On the beach, see Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840,
trans. Jocelyn Phelps (New York, 1995). On the deep sea, see Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The
Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). On tides, see Michael S. Reidy, Tides of History:
Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy (Chicago, 2008).
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However ocean history develops, it is likely to engage with environmental advocacy, if
only because so many current environmental issues are tied to the sea. Merely insisting
that the ocean has a history already provides a start; the long and stubbornly held idea of
the ocean as a timeless place contributed to the long delay in recognizing environmental
crises associated with the ocean. Environmental history of the ocean can contribute in
another way, too. My maritime studies classes fill with students who say they love the
ocean. As my literary colleagues remind me, however, the ocean does not, and cannot,
return that love. Ocean history written in the context of the unfolding field of environmental history holds the promise of recognizing the hybridity of the ocean and, through
that awareness, finding an appropriate balance of nature and culture.