Welcome to Fathoming the Ocean, a blog and website dedicated to fostering and promoting ocean history. I’m Helen Rozwadowski, a historian who has dedicated a career to exploring our human relationship with the ocean – all of it, including its great depths as well as its surface and coasts.
Because of the importance of the ocean today – in terms of climate, health, economy, food supply, recreation, coastal habitation, and many other areas – the time has come to historicize our human relationship with the ocean. That relationship spans evolutionary time and includes the ocean’s depths as well as its surface. Adding to the oldest uses of the sea, for food and transportation, novel uses developed at various points over time: trade, warfare, communication, science, submarine warfare, seafloor mining, and recreation. Still, traditional activities such as shipping, piracy, smuggling, fishing, and whaling continue unabated. Most of the world’s population today lives in coastal zones clustered in megacities. The ocean’s volume provides 99% of the earth’s living space and the sea provided the conditions for life itself. Even those who live inland rely on products that use marine resources and commodities transported across oceans and depend utterly on the ocean’s role in maintaining our planetary climate. While the sea’s bounty and unpredictability have influenced human history at every turn, people have also left indelible traces, even in the vast and apparently trackless world ocean.
A grassroots effort to articulate principles of ocean literacy, which culminated in the recent adoption of international standards by UNESCO, focuses on science and science education to the near-exclusion of the humanities. The sixth of seven principles of ocean literacy acknowledges that “the oceans and humans are inextricably interconnected” (http://oceanliteracy.wp2.coexploration.org/), yet the ocean literacy initiative emphasizes presentist and acultural messages about how much humans rely on the ocean and how damaging our activities have been. While more and better science education is certainly critical to addressing ocean environmental issues, attention to history and culture are equally important. Appreciation of the length and character of human interactions with the ocean illuminates the complexity of ocean issues; on the other hand, understanding the power of cultural representations to create and reflect change might offer some hope for the future.
Until we recognize the ocean’s past, and our inextricable relationship to it, its presence in our lives and world today remains unmoored. It is difficult to reconcile the urgency of environmental crisis with a place viewed as outside of time. In reality, while coastal peoples have always lived with the bounty and tragedy of the ocean, our interdependence with it has intensified since the age of discovery of the 15th and 16th centuries. Now is the time to read, write, and tell ocean history.