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Opportunities in MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
W. JEFFREY BOLSTER
ABSTRACT
The ocean may be the next frontier for environmental historians. People have depended on the ocean for centuries and quietly reshaped it. Recently the tragic impact of overfishing, habitat destruction, and biological invasions has become apparent. Yet the history of human interactions with marine environments remains largely uninvestigated, in part because of the enduring assumption that the ocean exists (or existed) outside of history. Historians should take seriously the challenge to historicize the ocean. That will include investigating its changing nature and peoples' historically specific assumptions about using and regulating it. Arguing that marine environmental history can complement on-going research in historical marine ecology, this essay invokes recent scientific work while staking out distinct terrain for historians.
| FOR MILLENNIA THE bountiful sea provided a larder, a living, and the possibility of riches for intrepid fishermen. Its scale in time and space, however, even for experienced mariners, appeared all out of proportion to that of familiar worlds ashore; and seafarers and landlubbers alike could not help but regard the sea as inscrutable, threatening, and eternal. Suddenly, in the blink of a twentieth-century eye, the tables were turned: The sea appeared fragile and vulnerable in the face of human arrogance. Overfishing, destruction of marine habitats, and shipborne biological invasions cast the time-honored phrase "men against the sea" in a new light. Following publication in the journal Nature of an essay estimating that large predatory fish had declined worldwide by 90 percent, Newsweek's cover story on July 14, 2003, asked, "Are the oceans dying?"1 That question, unimaginable not long ago, seemed all the more ominous for its lack of historical precedent. |
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The recent crisis in the ocean has been regarded rightfully as an ecological and political problem, but rarely understood in light of history—as if nature and science were somehow realms separate from the study of the past. During the 1990s the Black Sea ecosystem collapsed, literally starved to death by a bloom of invasive jellyfish that indiscrim-inately devoured zoo-plankton, phytoplank-ton, and larval fish, leaving virtually nothing for the rest of the food chain. For creatures in and people around the nearly landlocked Black Sea, the horror un-leashed by the cteno-phore Mnemiopsis leidyi was immediate and vivid; but ships have been carrying invasive marine hitchhikers from one sea to another for centuries, quietly re-shaping the oceans of the world. The Black Sea catastrophe was differ-ent because of its scale and the presence of cameras.2 |
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