Lance Van Sittert

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Lance Van Sittert | The Other Seven Tenths | Environmental History, 10.1 | The History Cooperative

Anniversary Forum

The Other Seven Tenths

THE DAWN OF the twenty-first century has witnessed mounting alarm not only over humanity's unsustainable use of the marine environment in the present, but also its "over fishing" of large marine vertebrates in the past.¹ The belated recognition of the latter has exacerbated the problem of "shifting baselines" for contemporary modelling of marine ecosystems.² As Jeremy Jackson notes in a seminal article on the Caribbean, "History shows that Caribbean coastal ecosystems were severely degraded long before ecologists began to study them. ... Studying grazing and predation of reefs today is like trying to understand the ecology of the Serengeti by studying the termites and the locusts while ignoring the elephants and the wildebeeste."³	1
Jackson's work among others has catalysed a radical turn to historical ecology in the marine sciences in pursuit of the "ghosts" of modern marine ecosystems with their keystone megafauna reinstated.⁴ As Jackson and Enric Sala explain, "We badly need an historical ecology of sea monsters to determine the pristine abundances and sizes of megafauna before they were fished, and to provide the basic data for modelling their former ecological interactions with other, smaller species and their effect on biological habitats so that we can figure out what we have lost and decide what to do about it if we want to. We still have that chance."⁵	2
The Census of Marine Life (http://www.coml.org/coml.htm), initiated in 2000 as a decade-long international scientific stock-taking of the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the sea, thus includes a historical dimension, the History of Marine Animal Populations or HMAP (http://www.hmapcoml.org/). Headquartered around the north Atlantic rim, HMAP aims to unravel "one of the great unknowns" by expanding "the realm of the known and knowable" about past marine animal populations through fostering close collaboration between scientists and historians to determine (1) changes in stock diversity, distribution, and abundance over the past 2000 years, (2) the factors driving change, (3) the biological and anthropogenic significance of change, and (4) the role of marine resources in the development of human societies.⁶	3
Five years on, the project boasts twelve interdisciplinary research teams working on the history of marine ecosystems around the world, though heavily weighted in favor of the north Atlantic and northwest Pacific.⁷ The centerpiece of these collective labors to date has been the development of an online open-access database currently comprising time series of commercial catches for some seventy-three species of fish and mammal extending to over a quarter of a million records covering the period 1611-2000.⁸ Much more ambitiously though, HMAP also is actively engaged in forging new disciplines of "marine environmental history" and "historical marine ecology" through the training of graduate students in its summer schools and postgraduate programs.	. . .

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