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Book Review
| The Sea Knows No Boundaries: A Century of Marine Science Under ICES. By Helen M. Rozwadowski. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea in association with University of Washington Press, 2002. ix + 410 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $50.00.
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| In this litigious age, institutional history poses risks for untenured scholars. Take the recent case of Andrea Hamilton, who wrote her dissertation on Baltimore's Bryn Mawr School. After she signed a publication contract, the school's trustees threatened legal action. A two-year stalemate ensued. The trustees finally relented in response to a letter signed by 140 historians, who warned that the school's action undermined academic freedom. Despite the happy ending, the episode suggests that undertaking a work of institutional history is the intellectual equivalent of skydiving with a dodgy parachute. |
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Helen Rozwadowski is therefore to be commended for taking on the challenge of chronicling the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, an intergovernmental organization which has provided research and advice on North Atlantic marine resources since 1902. Although the institution under investigation sponsored the book, The Sea Knows No Boundaries: A Century of Marine Science Under ICES, Rozwadowski seems to have taken great care to maintain an independent voice. In addition to excavating the ICES archives, she conducted over eighty oral history interviews in order to elucidate the "development of marine science under ICES" (p. 5). The result is a solid work of scholarship which perhaps does have, in her words, "the potential to promote the virtually nonexistent field of marine environmental history" (p. 5). |
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The opening chapters place ICES in the contexts of internationalism and science-based resource management in the early twentieth century, and lay out the council's longstanding focus on fisheries hydrography and biology. Indeed, for several decades, ICES leaders defined "exploration of the sea" primarily in terms of helping fishermen catch more fish. To this end, ICES scientists played a crucial role in standardizing hydrographic equipment and methods and promoting data exchange. They also sought to apply their knowledge by advising governments on the regulation and enhancement of fish stocks. |
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Rozwadowski does a good job mapping the evolution of the ICES agenda beyond fisheries maximization. For example, she shows how public opinion and other forces stimulated council leaders of the 1970s to address marine pollution, a move that facilitated the incorporation of interdisciplinary environmental sciences into ICES. The author skillfully highlights tensions within ICES, especially regarding the demand for ecosystem-oriented approaches, the shift from single- to multi-species assessment, the primacy of advisory versus scientific work, and the relationship between the physics and biology of the sea. |
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Unfortunately, the text is far too detailed to attract non-specialists. Should it reach a second printing, the publisher must add diagrams and tables of ICES's organizational structure for each chronological period, since it is hard to keep track of the many working groups, study groups, and committees that carried out the council's goals. The reader also needs a glossary to navigate the fleet of acronyms. Nevertheless, The Sea Knows No Boundaries will no doubt join such books as Margaret Deacon's Scientists and the Sea, 1650–1900: A Study of Marine Science (Ashgate, 1997), Eric Mills's Biological Oceanography: An Early History, 1870–1960 (Cornell, 1989), and Tim Smith's Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855–1955 (Cambridge, 1994) as a key reference for historians of marine science, oceanography, and fisheries. |
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Reviewed by Christine Keiner, assistant professor of science, technology, and society at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is writing a history of Chesapeake Bay oyster conservation politics. |
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