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Anniversary Forum

The Other Seven Tenths

Lance Van Sittert

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. 4
      Through its project teams, annual meetings, and training programs, HMAP thus provides a unique opportunity for environmental historians to engage in interdisciplinary praxis with scientists in a collaborative environment of mutual learning. For a field which prides itself on its activist, interdisciplinary, and transnational traditions, environmental historians have been slow to respond and, while broadening their inquiry to encompass all the continents, have almost entirely ignored the other seven tenths of the planet's surface that are sea. The tawdry response to the HMAP program, now already half gone, may also owe something to the way it conceives the relationship between the disciplines: "At the root of establishing ... collaboration between humanists and scientists is dealing with the fundamental issue of events in time. Clearly in the natural world there are things that repeat themselves—that is why we have models. Yet in order to understand the complex interactions between humans and nature we need to understand the contexts within which events unfold. Thus statistics, interpreted for context, blended with modeled nature, can help us understand the history of the interactions between humans and marine ecosystems. It is the interface of context with strong repeatable relationships that we are after."9 5
      HMAP's primary focus on quantification and building a historical database has tended to restrict "context" to the verification of historical time series and rendered the humanists the data serfs of "scientist" model lords. Indeed, there is something quaintly Victorian about HMAP's Rankean search for reliable facts to be pressed into the service of positivist science, which flies in the face of much of the developments in the past few decades in historical inquiry, not least the historicization of both science and nature as context-dependent cultural constructs.10 The unquestioning acceptance of the "large marine ecosystems" and "models" that HMAP so diligently documents and serves is its Achilles heel.11 To make only the most obvious point: The current crisis in the world's oceans has unfolded at a massively accelerated rate in the twentieth century during the disciplinary lifetime of modern marine science and actively facilitated by its abstracted notions of nature as model.12 It is thus hard to see how adding more data to shift model baselines is going to solve a problem which modelling was deeply complicit in creating. That the limits of a naive empiricism have begun to dawn on HMAP itself is reflected in the recent recognition that much about "oceans past" will remain forever "unknowable."13 6
      That is not to suggest that the humanists within HMAP have been entirely silent about the unexamined cultural assumptions of the project, but that their critique has tended to be marginalized by the thrall of marine science.14 What is urgently required are more mainstream environmental histories of the sea in the critical interdisciplinary tradition pioneered by Arthur McEvoy twenty years ago and most recently revived by Jay Taylor.15 The HMAP program offers a rich array of intellectual talent and data with which to pursue such inquiry, but environmental historians might also usefully broaden their traditional notion of "interdisciplinary" away from a narrow obsession with science to encompass other social-science disciplines where the project of historicizing the ocean is already well advanced.16 If Donald Worster called sixteen years ago for environmental historians to get mud on their shoes, now is the time for them to get their feet wet.17 7


Lance van Sittert is a senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town and former project leader on the HMAP Southwest Africa Shelf project.



Notes

1. See, for example, Louis W. Botsford, et al., "The Management of Fisheries and Marine Ecosystems," Science 277 (25 July 1997): 509-15; Daniel Pauly, et al., "Fishing Down Marine Food Webs," Science 279 (6 February 1998): 860-63; and Jeremy B. C. Jackson, et al., "Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems," Science 293 (27 July 2001): 629-38.

2. Daniel Pauly, "Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries," TREE 10 (October 1995): 430.

3. Jeremy B. C. Jackson, "Reefs since Columbus," Coral Reefs 16 (Supplement, 1997): S23.

4. Jackson, et al., "Historical Overfishing," 629.

5. Jeremy B. C. Jackson and Enric Sala, "Unnatural Oceans," Scientia Marina 65 (Supplement 2, 2001): 281.

6. The HMAP "institutional bases" are the Centre for Maritime and Regional Studies, University of Southern Denmark (www.cmrs.dk); Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull (www.hull.ac.uk/history/MHSC/mhschome.html); and Departments of Natural Resources and History, University of New Hampshire (www.unh.edu/ur-nr.html and www.unh.edu/ur-hist.html). See http://www.hmapcoml.org/. For a fuller statement of the HMAP vision and research agenda, see Poul Holm, "History of Marine Animal Populations: A Global Research Program of the Census of Marine Life" Oceanologica Acta 25 (2003): 207-11.

7. The twelve HMAP projects focus on the North Sea and Baltic, White, and Barent seas, Caribbean Sea, north Pacific, northwest Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black Sea, southwest African Shelf, southeast Asia, southwest Pacific, southeast Australian Shelf, and world whaling. See Paul Holm, Tim D. Smith, and David J. Starkey, eds., The Exploited Seas: New Directions for Marine Environmental History (St. Johns, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2001); and http://www.hmapcoml.org/Default.asp?ID=3 for details and research outputs.

8. See http://www.hmapcoml.org/Default.asp?ID=37 or http://www.hull.ac.uk/history/MHSC/hmapUH.htm.

9. See http://www.hmapcoml.org/.

10. On ecology, see, for example, Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). On nature, see William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 69-90.

11. For a non-specialist introduction to the large marine ecosystem concept, see Lewis M. Alexander, "Large Marine Ecosystems: A New Focus for Marine Resources Management," Marine Policy 17 (1993): 186-98.

12. See John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 237-51.

13. See conference announcement "Oceans Past: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the History of Marine Animal Populations," HMAP Conference, 24-27 October 2005, Hotel Comwell, Kolding, Denmark at http://www.hmapcoml.org/Default.asp?ID=194.

14. For a recent example, see conference program and abstracts "Environmental History and the Oceans," Carlsberg Academy, Copenhagen, 2-5 June 2004 at http://www.hmapcoml.org/Default.asp?ID=215.

15. See Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Joseph E. Taylor, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

16. See, for example, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004).

17. Donald Worster, "Appendix: Doing Environmental History," in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster and Alfred W. Crosby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 289.

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