Abstract
Marine environmental history is an exciting new field of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship, engaging historians, fisheries scientists, oceanographers, archaeologists, and more. Perspectives on Oceans Past, edited by Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology in Germany, and Bo Poulsen, at Denmark’s Aalborg University, is an effort to take stock of the methods and theories that are coming to the fore in the process. The methods range widely, encompassing the archival tools of the trained historian, the models and theory of ecology, archaeological records in sand and stone, the oral histories of people still alive who create and participate in that history, and the ethnographic records of the local knowledge and practices of people who live by and with the sea.
Gender issues are typically relegated to the end of volumes, and this book is no exception, but the last chapter, an ethnographic perspective on gender, is a good place to start this review, which will then proceed from back to front.
Co-editor Schwerdtner Máñez and cultural anthropologist Annet Pauwelussen review the extensive literature on women in fisheries and provide an in-depth case study of women in Indonesia engaged in giant clam collection and trade. The near invisibility of their practice is partly due to the gleaning nature of clam collection and to its illegality. But the authors go further to argue that the narrow understanding of ‘fishing’ and tendency to focus on public domains (including fishing docks), rather than the private ones dominated by women, have led to neglect of the roles of women. They also argue that a focus on gendered roles can lead to better understanding of how fisheries are indeed organized and practiced.
Next from the end is a historical study of changing perceptions and practices toward sea turtles and manatees in the Atlantic Ocean, focusing on Brazil and the Cape Verde islands. Cristina Brito and Nina Vieira of Portugal use a variety of scholarly methods to show the shaky but discernible shift from exploitation for consumption and trade to conservation of sea turtles and manatees as well as the social and cultural reinvention of large marine fauna such as whales and manatees.
A chapter on the use of oral histories to inform natural resource management is authored by an Australian team of biologists engaged in coral reef studies: Ruth Thurstan, Sarah Buckley and John Pandolfi. Oral history is a method for obtaining local and traditional knowledge on past and contemporary events and experiences. The important issue they address is the utility of oral histories (and other kinds of qualitative information) for reconstructing the past conditions and changes, where little other data, especially quantitative data exist. One example is a nineteenth-century Royal Commission of Enquiry in the UK, which relied on interviewees as witnesses to the fish and fisheries of the sea. It remains a major source of baseline and historical information, comparable I believe to a similar study done in the United States in the later nineteenth century (George Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, 7 volumes, Washington, U.S. Printing Office, 1884–1887). The two pioneers in the use of interviews to develop knowledge that can inform marine science and management are Edward Ames and Andrea Sàenz-Arroyo, and they both get much deserved coverage in the chapter. Ames’s interviews with retired fishers in the US Gulf of Maine documented the decline and extinction of inshore spawning areas heretofore not known, and Sàenz-Arroyo interviewed three generations of fishers to discern shifting environmental baselines in the marine environment of the Gulf of California. Today there is a great deal of work on indigenous knowledge of changes in the Arctic as well. The authors are careful to discuss guidelines for effective, reliable, and ethical research with informants. They also point to a shift toward using the method to obtain the more quantitative information that can be more readily used in resource management.
Joseph Christensen, a historian, contributed a chapter on illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, a matter of great and grave international concern. He traces the recent construction of the problem as ‘IUU’ but locates its roots in twentieth changes in marine capture fisheries, as well as in huge shifts in property rights. One was adoption of the broad mare liberum or free right, enshrined in early seventeenth-century arguments for colonialist powers, and the more recent is the UN Law of the Sea movement toward broader national territories. Both have played significant roles in diminishing and challenging small-scale coastal fisheries and their systems of using and managing common resources. Livelihoods threatened, many small-scale fishers have turned to illegal fishing practices, a process he discerns in the Indo-Pacific region. At the international level, the case of Patagonian toothfish is one of three case studies that cogently illustrate the circumstances around IUU fishing and efforts to restrain it. Christensen points to the paradox that IUU fishing arises when there is good surveillance and monitoring of fisheries. He also takes an important paragraph to argue for the importance of historians’ approach to the interpretation of evidence as providing useful checks to science, challenging the veracity and verification of the data used.
What then can biological science offer? Marta Coll of Spain and Heike Lotze of Canada focus on ecological indicators and food-web models as tools for analyzing historical conditions and changes in the marine world. Their work, and that of their colleagues, has elucidated the nature and magnitude of historical depletions and changes in relative abundance, species diversity, occurrence, and other variables for marine fauna and their habitats. Their review is itself a valuable resource. Some of the data come from paleontological and archaeological studies, but stable isotope analysis and other methods are available as well. The authors also explain both quantitative and qualitative feed-web modelling.
An intriguing topic is the study of change in fishing power over time, authored by Georg H. Engelhard of the UK. A narrow topic, it is nonetheless central to understanding human exploitation of the marine environment, linked as it is with fishing pressure. His work and that of others shows the nature, pattern, and scale of fishing power change in the North Sea region. The chapter concludes with methods for quantifying differences and changes in fishing power and cautionary tales.
In his chapter, co-editor Bo Poulsen discusses marine environmental history research as it has developed over the past two decades or so. The use of historical methods to infer the past, discussed in other chapters as well is highlighted by a study of nineteenth-century cod abundance in Canadian waters that suggests a much larger historical baseline than current management uses. This led to further efforts in using historical documents to investigate nineteenth-century fisheries through a research program, History of Marine Animal Populations. Another study was of catch rates in the Dutch herring fishery over several centuries, where historical methods were ‘entangled’ with natural science questions. Among other contributions is the finding that annual catch rates are not simply a function of combinations of fishing power with animal abundance/availability, but rather can reflect how fishermen, and their institutions, coped with and mitigated fluctuations in the fishery. From a less ‘material’ and more ‘cultural’ perspective is the historical examination of the development of modern fisheries science and management, including the dominance of ‘maximum sustainable yield’, despite poor performance. Poulsen offers examples of intriguing methods, including how photography was used in Key West to document changes in sports catches over time, and the challenges of dealing with both traditional archives and digitized databases.
Archaeology provides windows to information of great time depth not recorded in the archives. Of particular value is marine zooarchaeology, the study of marine animal remains in sites of human use and residence, the focus of David Orton’s chapter. Orton gives a complete and sophisticated overview of methods and lines of evidence from archaeological remains used in historical ecology, including stable isotope analysis and ancient DNA.
A very sensitive and difficult question in the social science and history of marine fisheries is the nature of ‘community’, a focus of Poul Holm’s chapter on the ways historical fishing communities have been theorized and represented in the literature. He distinguishes the Scandinavian visions of communities of actors, responding to social and ecological issues, with that of the students of the industrial fisheries of the UK, envisioning the workings of capitalism in degrading labour. By the 1990s, people began working with the notion of communities and the commons, bringing interactions with the natural environment more squarely into the picture. His discussion brings to mind the fact that the rise of management methods like individual transferable quotas and closed areas have led to renewed emphasis on questions about the nature of community, how it relates to individuals, markets, and the state.
The first chapter, following the co-editors’ useful introduction, is about one of the major themes in both the book and marine environment science: shifting baselines. Emily Klein of the USA and Ruth Thurstan of Australia review the issue of shifting baselines, which emerged as scientific and policy issue in the 1990s in marine ecology and ecology writ large. Basically, it means that people and their institutions forget or are ignorant of the distant past; their notion of the past – the baseline against the present is weighed – is rooted in their own experiences, and thus it is likely to shift from generation to generation. This raises the stakes for historical research: what really happened in our grandmother’s time? How many cod were there a century ago? What were the conditions millennia ago? What do we really know about how marine systems change through time if we don’t even know whether and how much they changed?
The Klein-Thurstan chapter identifies a second theme that informs marine science, historical or otherwise: that we are really talking about social-ecological systems – the marine world as imbricated and shaped by human activities, perceptions, institutions, and values. The collection brought together in Perspectives on Oceans Past does a remarkably fine job in explaining how we make sense of this world through time.