Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative 9781138315228, 9781138315273, 9780429456466

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BLUE ECOCRITICISM AND THE OCEANIC IMPERATIVE

This book initiates a conversation about blue ecocriticism: critical, ethical, cultural, and political positions that emerge from oceanic or aquatic frames of mind rather than traditional land-​based approaches. Ecocriticism has rapidly become not only a disciplinary legitimate critical form but also one of the most dynamic, active criticisms to emerge in recent times. However, even in its institutional success, ecocriticism has exemplified an “ocean deficit.” That is, ecocriticism has thus far primarily been a land-​based criticism stranded on a liquid planet. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative contributes to efforts to overcome ecocriticism’s “ocean deficit.” The chapters explore a vast archive of oceanic literature, visual art, television and film, games, theory, and criticism. By examining the relationships between these representations of ocean and cultural imaginaries, Blue Ecocriticism works to unmoor ecocriticism from its land-​based anchors. This book aims to simultaneously advance blue ecocriticism as an intellectual pursuit within the environmental humanities and to advocate for ocean conservation as derivative of that pursuit. Sidney I. Dobrin is a Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Florida.

“Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative calls for ecocriticism to take to the sea, offering an indispensable guide to navigating between the many disciplinary and methodological currents arising in the blue humanities. The scope of the book, alone, is impressive—Dobrin assembles a vast archive of oceanic literature, visual art, television and film, games, theory and criticism, making this an invaluable resource and potent provocation for the environmental humanities, animal studies, and the emerging blue humanities.” —​Dr. Stacy Alaimo, Professor of English, Environmental Studies Core Faculty Member, University of Oregon, USA “As Ishmael might’ve said, it is the easiest thing in the world for a book to look as if it had a great secret in it. ‘Blue Ecocriticism’ actually does: its expansive, sophisticated and entertaining account of Ocean as a dominant, threatened material-​semiotic actor on Earth offers a digestible remedy for ecocritics’ ‘ocean deficit disorder.’ Be it eco-​cosmopolitanism, oceanography or Object Oriented Ontology, Dobrin knows the ropes.” —​Greg Garrard, Professor of Environmental Humanities, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, Canada “With the publication of Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative Sid Dobrin takes the stage of humanistic scholarship on the marine environment with a highly engaging introduction to the changing conditions and conceptions of the human relationship to the world’s oceans. Dobrin’s impassioned and insightful work ups the ante for current ecocritical scholarship by calling for (and demonstrating) an oceanic commitment that is both intellectual and personal as well as local, global, and ongoing. By going all in with his oceanic scholarship, Dobrin demonstrates why the rest of us should, too.” —​Daniel Brayton, Julian W. Abernethy Chair of Literature, Director, Environmental Studies Program, Middlebury College, USA

Routledge Environmental Humanities Series editors: Scott Slovic (University of Idaho, USA), Joni Adamson (Arizona State University, USA) and Yuki Masami (Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan)

Editorial Board Jennifer Newell, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, USA Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia International Advisory Board Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-​Director, Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig-​Maximilians-​Universität, Germany Mary Evelyn Tucker,Yale University, USA Kirsten Wehner, University of London, UK The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture. The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicenter of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-​focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences. We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change. For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​ Routledge-​Environmental-​Humanities/​book-​series/​REH

BLUE ECOCRITICISM AND THE OCEANIC IMPERATIVE

Sidney I. Dobrin

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Sidney I. Dobrin The right of Sidney I. Dobrin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Dobrin, Sidney I., 1967– author. Title: Blue ecocriticism and the oceanic imperative / Sidney I. Dobrin. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge environmental humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020046300 (print) | LCCN 2020046301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138315228 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138315273 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429456466 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Ocean and civilization. Classification: LCC PN98.E36 D63 2021 (print) | LCC PN98.E36 (ebook) |DDC 809/.9336–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046300 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046301 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​31522-​8  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​31527-​3  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​45646-​6  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

When we ask my mother where she was born, she always responds that she was hatched in the ocean and that she crawled out through the surf on to the beach in New Smyrna. When my brothers and I were young, she stood with us on the beach facing the ocean and introduced us, “This is the ocean. Respect her, and she will treat you well. Disrespect her and you will face rage like you cannot imagine.” This one is for my mom, who gave us the ocean.

CONTENTS

List of figures  Preface 

x xi

1 Unearthing ecocriticism 

1

2 Scaling the ocean 

88

3 Object ocean 

137

4 Seeing ocean 

175

5 Protein economies 

201

6 Blue frontiers 

227

Index 

230

FIGURES

2.1 Henry Holiday, “The Bellman’s Map” or “The Ocean Chart,” from ­chapter 2 of Lewis Carrol’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” 1876  2.2 Mahendra Singh, “Blank Map of the Bellman” 2010, n.p.  2.3 Frontispiece by William Strang for 1903 publication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient mariner  2.4 Nick Hayes Rime of the Modern Mariner. n.p.  2.5 Stabius-​Durer World Map circa 1513 ce  2.6 Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders  2.7 The Blue Marble taken by either Harrison Schmitt or Ron Evans aboard the Apollo 17 mission on December 7, 1972  2.8 Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the bluish-​white speck almost halfway up the brown band on the right  2.9 The Blue Dot image with text added to playfully indicate location  3.1 Single-​Use Plastic bag discovered at the bottom of Mariana’s Trench. JAMSTEC E-​library of Deep-​sea Images  5.1 “America’s Fishing Fleet . . . Assets to victory.” Henry Koerner, 1943  5.2 “Fish is a Fighting Food . . . We Need More.” Henry Koerner, 1943 

97 99 100 101 103 105 106 107 108 138 212 213

PREFACE

This is an introduction. That is, this is a preface, but this book is an introduction. It is not an origin, not the beginning of a conversation. It submerges into an already present ocean of ideas, research, theory, methodology, and experiences. Nor is it, by any means, exhaustive. It is a small drop in an oceanic bucket. It appears mid-​ current and mid-​water. Imagine swimming in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, your body but a speck on the more than 41,100,000 square miles of surface, a mere crumb floating above the more than 12,000 feet of depth below you, unable to see or even imagine the water around you in its entirety. This book is relatively the same: a small (perhaps insignificant) whit in a vast search. In the Introduction to her magnificent book Exposed: Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Stacy Alaimo confesses that she had not set out to write Exposed, but that “it was something that happened to me while I was trying to get to the sea” (13–​14). Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative—​like much of everything I do—​happened because I can never be free of the sea. Ocean is not an object, a body, a place, a concept, or a way of being I try to get to but is something from which I can never detach—​nor would I want to. I wrote much of this book at the same time I wrote Fishing, Gone? Saving the Ocean through Sportfishing (Texas A&M University Press, 2019), feeling a need to expand some of my thinking about ocean conservation to my ecocritical and ecocompositional background. Alaimo’s work had been influential in my thinking long before I  took up these projects, but Exposed, with its ocean activism and awareness of overfishing and dozens of other oceanic concerns—​including a cover that alludes to my former home Tampa, Florida—​triggers for me critical questions about ocean and representations of ocean in cultural imaginaries, particularly ecocriticism and ecocomposition’s address of such matters. With the exception of the two years I  spent as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas1 after completing my PhD at the University of South Florida,

xii Preface

I have lived my life at the edge of ocean in communities that are soaked by the narratives and images of ocean.1 Art, emblems on t-​shirts, company logos, bumper stickers, billboards, television commercials, music, manhole covers, local stories, and so on all depict ocean and oceanic iconography. Ocean saturates the places of my life. As a kid, I devoured books about ocean. I can’t tell you how many times I read and reread Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-​Tiki (a book I boasted as my “all-​time favorite” for much of my childhood), Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea, Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea, William Beebe’s Half Mile Down, Melville’s Moby Dick and Typee, Jacques Cousteau’s Silent World, and so many others. In recollection, it is significant, too, that when I was 13 Cousteau moved his base of operations to Norfolk and that the Calypso was docked only a few miles from my childhood home. Stories of sailors and pirates enraptured me. I read multiple versions of Sinbad the Sailor, always wondering why he was called Sinbad the Sailor when clearly he was just Sinbad the Passenger, never really doing any of the sailing himself. Moreover, I was curious about how the Sinbad stories leaked into other media, like the 1936 short Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor, which was nominated for an Academy Award. I  loved these kinds of crossover narratives. Sure, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was great, but Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, well that got me all bound up in the many, many versions of Treasure Island I could read and watch. Or the Laurel and Hardy sailor films: Why Girls Love Sailors, Sailors Beware, and Saps at Sea. Or the 1942 Abbott and Costello spoof of popular South Sea Island movies Pardon My Sarong. In addition, of course, reruns of Gilligan’s Island, Flipper (the original two films Flipper and Flipper’s New Adventure and the 1964 TV series, not the remakes in 1995 and 1996), Sea Hunt, and so on. If the narrative took place at sea or on an island, it had my attention. In fact, one of the overwhelming aspects of writing this book has been the sheer volume of ocean-​related books, films, television shows, songs, paintings, sculptures, tattoos, graphic novels, video games, and other texts that saturate my experiences in knowing ocean and in the formation of ocean in cultural imaginaries about which I wish I could simply wax nostalgic. Remember the first time you watched Endless Summer? Cultural imaginaries, and social imaginaries a la Charles Taylor, however, require that such texts be engaged dynamically in order to better understand the relationship between texts and culture. Such engagements demand attention, as well, to the function of texts in cultural memories as more than nostalgic recollections but as core components of cultural imaginary formation. As Isabelle McNeill explains, “this is a form of memory that is not confined to the body of an individual but is instead mediated through cultural artifacts and imaginative investment” (57). Such memory, then, accumulates and circulates as embodied memory and as augmented memory. The very texts that co-​constitute cultural imaginaries function in material forms of augmented memory; the books, films, art, music, and so on function as forms of augmented memory that contribute to our cultural imaginary and cultural memory of ocean. The t-​shirts, tote bags, art, posters, bumper stickers, books of pirate stories, literary texts, tattoos, and so on all

Preface  xiii

function as cultural memory apparatus and archive while simultaneously serving as economic device, products for sale rendering cultural imaginaries inseparable from economy. A Finding Nemo plush toy is at once a result of capitalist economics, an artifact that preserves and contributes to cultural imaginaries, a memory augmentation that curates, circulates, and perpetuates cultural memory of the Disney film and the function of that film within cultural memory and cultural imaginary. Such artifacts are not manifestations of memory but are themselves memories, semiotic mnemonics to connect text and imaginary. It is not that texts evoke memory or preserve memory; they are memory and augmentations of embodied memory. For me, such textual encounters intertwine with a life encumbered (or, more accurately enhanced) by ocean. When I  was five or six, my parents, in need of tenure-​track jobs in the same city, relocated us from Florida to Norfolk, Virginia. As a teenager, my friends and I navigated the rivers around our homes that fed the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean in small powerboats and sailboats. By car it was impossible to drive anywhere without crossing several bridges across rivers and bays, and most of my friends and I either had or craved four-​wheel drive vehicles for driving on the beach to remote surf and fishing spots. My family’s history of boat making and fishing placed ocean as a central figure in our lives alongside a professional history as book-​focused academics. Our home sat only a foot above sea level less than three miles from the main gate to the world’s largest naval base. The entire region flaunted its military and maritime histories, exemplified in its collective moniker Tidewater (an appellation evoked by the manufacturer of one of my current boats, as well). Throughout high school and college, I worked at a marina at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, internalizing the narratives of boaters, boat builders, commercial and industrial fishers, recreational anglers, commercial captains, learning maritime folklore and technologies. For my brothers and me, teenage social life revolved around surf culture and beach culture, beach parties (which to us were just “parties”), boats, and fishing. Deck shoes, board shorts, and t-​shirts from 17th Street Surf Shop or Wave Riding Vehicles (WRV) were mandatory teenage apparel (admittedly, they are also still my mainstay). When we were bored in the summer, we would go crabbing along the bulkhead a block from our house. Teenage weekend nights were spent along the Virginia Beach strip listening to surf bands with names like “Locals Only.” The Outer Banks of North Carolina were a mere two hours south of our home, and we spent so much time there we still think of it as part of our home, even though we have not been there in years since my parents and one of my brothers and I returned Florida permanently more than twenty years ago. My academic life balanced with secondary careers as boat captain, scuba instructor, and writer for fishing magazines. My primary advocacy work tied to my role as chair of the American Sportfishing Association’s Advocacy Committee. Mine is, as I have said, a life of ocean. In what follows, I  attempt to parse out how this life has interacted with the methodologies and agendas of ecocriticism and ecocomposition to the end of drawing attention to the remarkable lack of attention paid to ocean in ecocriticism

newgenprepdf

xiv Preface

and ecocomposition.With a few exceptions—​the work of Alaimo, Melody Jue, Dan Brayton, and Serenella Iovino along with a few other exemplary exceptions—​these areas of study have, for the most part, remanded critical work about ocean and oceanic texts to a convenient background position. My hope in this work is to expose some of that ecocritical deficit to invigorate work in blue ecocriticism, particularly given the nearly endless archive of texts that represent ocean. This, then, is a whit and an introduction (and a preface) to the possibility for such work.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed:  Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2016. Barton, Charles. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Universal Pictures. 1948. Beebe, William. Half Mile Down. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1934. Benson, Leon. Flipper’s New Adventure. Metro-​Goldwyn-​Mayer.  1964. Brown, Bruce. Endless Summer. Cinema V. 1966. Clark, James B. Flipper. Metro-​Goldwyn-​Mayer.  1963. Cousteau, Captain J. Y. The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure Unfolding Wonders Never Before Seen by Man. New York: Pocket Books. 1953. Cowden, Jack, and Ricou Browning. Flipper. MGM Television. 1964–​1967. Dobrin, Sid. Fishing, Gone? Saving the Ocean through Sportfishing. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press. 2019. Douglas, Gordon. Saps at Sea. United Artists. 1940. Fleischer, Dave, and Willard Bowsky. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor. Paramount Pictures. 1936. Flipper. Samuel Goldwyn Television. 1995–​2000. Foster, Norman. Charlie Chan at Treasure Island. 20th Century Fox. 1939. Guiol, Fred. Why Girls Love Sailors. Pathé Exchange. 1927. Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and The Sea. New York: Scribner. 1995. Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-​Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. New York: Rand McNally. 1951. Kenton, Erle C. Pardon My Sarong. Universal Pictures. 1942. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: McMillan Collector’s Library. 2016. —​—​—​. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. New York: Penguin Classics. 1996. McNeill, Isabelle. “Virtual Museums and Memory Objects.” Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era. Edinburgh University Press. 2010. 51–​86. Roach, Hal. Sailors Beware. Pathé Exchange. 1927. Shapiro, Alan. Flipper. Universal Pictures. 1996. Scwartz, Sherwood. Gilligan’s Island. CBS Productions. 1964–​1967. Stanton, Anderw. Finding Nemo. Walt Disney Pictures. 2003. Tors, Ivan. Sea Hunt. Ziv Television Programs. 1958–​1961. Verne, Jules. 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea. New York: Wordsworth Editions. 1998.

Note 1 Even Kansas, though, is haunted by the ghosts of the Cretaceous Western Interior Sea still. The memories of the ancient sea manifest in the teeth of Megalodon and other oceanic fossils found along river banks and in the rich soils of the tilled fields of America’s wheat belt.

1 UNEARTHING ECOCRITICISM

The ocean can be a strange place, an alien place, a wild place. Historically, we cast the ocean as the wildest nature, the untamable, the unpredictable.1 But, in the same breath, we cast the ocean as a place of salvation. Contemporary environmental conversations and some oceanographic discussions describe the ocean as the place from where human salvation will likely emerge in the wake of environmental destruction; others point out that life on Earth is dependent upon the health of the ocean. The ocean is strange and promising all in one breath. As Stefan Helmreich puts it in Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, “We witness a resurgence of an apocalyptic notion that the oceans will not wash away our sins but rather drown us in them” (14). The ocean. Singular.The “bodies” of saltwater that cover the planet are connected, or, more accurately, are a singular aquatic body divided only by human cartography and discourse for the sake of conveniences like navigational communication, the ability to identify location, political claims to sovereign rights, and the identification of ecological distinctions. However, such convenience invades our thought, our cultural imaginaries, and our cultural memories, contributing to centuries of understanding the oceans as independent bodies confined with separate, though connected containers or basins. Instead, we must now think not of the world’s oceans, but of the world’s ocean—​singular—​or what Dan Brayton, author of the remarkable book Shakespeare’s Ocean, points out is standard discourse in the marine sciences: “the global ocean.” Or what J. H. Parry, the eminent maritime historian described in his seminal book The Discovery of the Sea as “the one sea”: “All the seas of the world are one” (xi). Or, as E. G. R. Taylor explains in his revered 1956 work The Haven-​Finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook: “the ancient Greeks correctly declared that the ocean was one, and washed the lands on all sides. And they argued this conclusion from the tides, which they found to rise and fall with the same rhythm in the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean and the

2  Unearthing ecocriticism

Atlantic” (21). Likewise, the comfortable notion that Earth cradles the oceans in solid basins not only reinforces the perception of the oceans’ geographic division, but also contributes to Earth’s exceptionalism as oceans and seas are presumed as individual entities nestled within terrestrial embrace. However, ocean finds (and makes) fissures, cracks, and crevices, seeping and saturating, never contained, always circulating, flowing, spilling outside of imagined basins. Even familiar notions of average depth and deepest point dissolve (or become moot) when we cede presumption of ocean floor as solid surface and accept that ocean permeates deeper and further than familiar sentiments of fixity acknowledge. Unique in its oneness, the ocean is alone on this planet, and as far as we know at this moment, alone in the universe, despite speculation of water flow on Europa, Enceladus, Mars, and other astral bodies. Such speculations find value culturally in their hints toward possibilities of life beyond Earth. That is, the value of finding oceans elsewhere is bound to a cultural value of finding “life” more so than finding “ocean,” and always a part of a narrative of affirming or dispelling universal human singularity. As Michael Carroll puts it in the introduction to his coedited work Alien Seas: Oceans in Space, During its first 3 years of operation, NASA’s planet-​hunting Kepler spacecraft tracked down somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 planet candidates that appear to be in the “hospitable zone” around their planet stars. In other words, these planets, or moons circling planets in the case of giant planets, have the capacity to support liquid waters on their surfaces. (1) He contends, “seas in many forms await our studies within our home planetary system. There are oceans of water beyond the earth” (1). Finding oceans, we might assess, is important in so much as what it might indicate about not-​ocean. Ocean’s value is always relative and connected, bound to human exceptionalism. Earth’s ocean is the rarest of jewels; there is no other of its kind. As such, its value is immeasurable, or, more to the point, we ascribe one particular kind of value to ocean in homage of its rarity, a value often confounded by attribution of other cultural and economic values. Its rarity superseded in value by anthropomorphic economies and politics. The world’s ocean is complicated with the turmoil of possession. The possessive world’s indicates ocean to be owned by the world; the world understood not to mean a global ecology, but the possession of the human inhabitants of the planet and their political cartographies. The deeply seated cultural understanding of possession and its extension across ocean perplexes our ability to think of ocean in ways other than territorially and reveals our desire to import land-​based logic of ownership on the fluid space of ocean. For example, the indiscriminate application of terra nullius, a principle of international law regarding possession of “unoccupied” territories, to ocean spaces. As I  will show, such thinking restricts our ability to think of ocean outside of anthropomorphic land-​based logics. Oceanic thinking, in

Unearthing ecocriticism  3

this way, is bound by land-​based ideologies and values. Consider, for example, the frequently repeated value attribution for ocean—​often reduced to coastal values expressed as oceanic values; that is, ocean-​adjacent values—​as residing in the more than 200 million jobs globally attributed to ocean-​based employment in fisheries, travel, tourism, shipping, energy production, and the likes. Similarly, oceanic value materializes from acknowledgment that ocean provides “between 13.8% and 16.5% of the animal protein intake of the human population” (WHO) providing protein for approximately 4.3 billion people worldwide (I take up these oceanic protein economies in detail in Chapter 5).These values, however, now run headlong into the result of centuries of human-​enacted degradation of ocean environments, eroding, as Manipadma Jena so tellingly puts it, “the ocean’s ability to sustain the benefits it can provide for present and future generations” (Jena), revealing the understanding of ocean as resource to provide for human need and ocean degradation as needing attention only in the potential consequence for human economics and politics. Inseparable from such economic valuing, then, territorial dispute and possession stand as a central component of how we understand ocean and economic value. We have records of international territorial disputes over ocean access and fisheries rights dating back to at least the early 1200s. Such cultural entrenchments will be difficult to overcome. Enter ecocriticism. Ecocriticism was forged of the Earth. It emerged in an atmosphere of terrestrial thinking, often identified as a “land ethic,” a mindset frequently attributed to Aldo Leopold and the notion of “Thinking Like a Mountain.” As Greg Garrard puts it while explaining the political nature of ecocriticism, “Ecocritics generally tie their cultural analyses explicitly to a ‘green’ moral and political agenda” (3). Garrard intends “green” as a generic term to encapsulate the diversity of environmentalist political positions.The term “green” is employed frequently and familiarly in this way. In doing so, though, Garrard’s statement exposes a cultural embrace of the terrestrial as the driving environmental ideology, the metaphor and icon “green” adopted as the symbol of environmental politics: for example, the green movement. Adapted, too, “green” often serves as symbolic of a left-​leaning politic tied to environmentalist politics (green parties and such), manifest in the satirical Make America Green Again (MAGA). Timothy Morton, too, conveys a similar land-​leaning exceptionalism in The Ecological Thought when discussing a perception of location being local:  “In the West, we think of ecology as earthbound” (27). Yes, Morton’s claim echoes Heidegger’s understanding of “dwelling” and is intended to convey a sense of limited planetary association, but his language “earthbound” conveys an implicit land-​based prejudice. Consider, too, Melody Jue’s profound recognition in her essay “Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and ‘Oceanic’ ”—​interestingly published in Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Planets:  Ecology and Science Fiction, despite its focus on blue not green—​that “the ocean, for us, is commonly conceptualized as a cartesian volume that can be gridded and measured, with a surface only at the top” (“Churning,” 226). “This dominant metaphorical sense of ‘depth’ as the below and ‘surface’ on top,” Jue contends, “is based on the normal position of a

4  Unearthing ecocriticism

human observer” (“Churning,” 226). Jue then works to reveal the “pervasiveness of our land-​based perspectives of surface and depth and how it colors the terrestrial metaphors we live by” (“Churning,” 226). Likewise, in her powerful book Allegories of the Anthropocene, Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey works to shift “the conversation from land-​based imaginaries, discourses that root the human in soil and earth/​Earth, toward the oceanic” (135). As Lawrence Buell, notes, too, “Ecology as green also perpetuates the implication of binary nature—​cultural separation (simplistic for both sides of the human-​nonhuman divide) and understates the potential for self-​ intoxicated fetishization of greenery as such” (x). Such land-​based epistemologies, though, are not unique to ecocriticism, but derivative of significant, long-​term land-​based thinking across cultures and histories. Much of the entrenchment of land-​based thinking might be attributed to modernist ideologies of capital that construct oceanic space as akin to land–​space and ascribe capitalist notions of ownership and commerce to those spaces. As Philip E. Steinberg explains in The Social Construction of the Ocean, each period of capitalism, besides having a particular spatiality on land, has had a complimentary—​if not contrapuntal—​spatiality at sea with specific interest groups during each period promoting specific constructions of ocean-​space. As is the case with land-​space, the contradictions and changes within each period’s construction have been intertwined with contradistinctions and changes in that period’s political-​economic structures. (5–​6) Reductively, we might dismiss claims about land-​based thinking simply because humans inhabit the solid land portions of the planet and, thus, can only think from land-​based perspectives, venturing into/​onto oceanic space in limited, mediated ways.Yet such out of hand dismissal devalues the effects of applying land-​based epistemologies to oceanic environments not only in terms of human–​ocean relations, but also in terms of histories of oceanic representation and interaction. Thus, one primary objective of blue ecocriticism is to irritate ecocriticism’s engagement with representations of ocean from predominantly land-​based methodologies and epistemologies.

Landmarks Ecocriticism emerged in college literature programs just over a quarter century ago. I will not recount its history in detail, as others, such as Garrard, Michael P. Cohen, Timothy Clark, Ursula Heise, Cheryl Glotfelty, Glen Love, David Mazel, and Michael Branch and Scott Slovic, have so thoroughly accounted for its history. To oversimplify, though, ecocriticism adopted the mission of examining literature from an environmental standpoint, as Mazel has so wonderfully defined it, ecocriticism is “the study of literature as if the environment mattered” (1). He explains, too, that “no matter how it is defined, ecocriticism seems less a singular approach or

Unearthing ecocriticism  5

method than a constellation of approaches, having little more in common than a shared concern with the environment” (2). Yet, there are some telling commonalities that Mazel does not address. Others’ definitions expose one such commonality. As Glotfelty has so famously (among ecocritics) put it, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-​conscious perspective, Marxist criticism brings awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-​centered approach to literary studies. (xviii) Glotfelty wrote this in the Introduction to the The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology: “Landmarks.” The metaphors run deep and telling in ecocritical thought, reflective of a more encompassing western, cultural ideology that values the solidity of land.The metaphor derived from understanding landmark as a noticeable landscape feature, something that could be seen from a great distance. A landmark is not a watermark, not an oceanmark.2 Though the term initially referred to natural landscape features, it would eventually also come to include constructed objects that mark locations of human historical importance. Initially, landmark referred to visible natural or human-​made fixtures on land that could assist in navigation from the ocean. For example, the great Colossus of Rhodes identified harbor to Mediterranean sailors, Table Mountain in South Africa serves as navigational aid for sailors navigating around the southern end of Africa, and countless lighthouses around the world serve as navigational markers. Early oceanic travelers did not veer out of sight of land, relying on the ability to see landmarks for navigation. As such, landmarks require embodied experience, dependent upon visual experiences and the visual experiences of others, contributing to a cultural memory of landmark to guide navigation. Landmarks need to be seen. Metaphorically, we might say that ecocriticism has operated similarly, remaining within sight of the fixity of land, rarely venturing offshore out of sight of the confidence in landmark. Navigating ecocritical terrain has relied (as navigating any field does) on its landmarks to guide its constituents. More speculatively, though, we might say that ecocriticism unfolded as humanists began to ask, “what can we do?” in the midst of growing environmental crises. Framed within this question, ecocritical work has grown to be more than a traditional literary criticism, a kind of analytical approach; it has evolved as a critical activist position responding directly to the question “what can we do?” emphasizing the importance of action, of doing. On the one hand, ecocriticism might be more aptly understood as critical theory, not necessarily as the term applies to the Frankfurt School, per se, but as an intellectual pursuit that puts environmental salvation on par with critical theory’s liberatory objectives and strives, as Max Horkheimer puts it, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (244). Ecocritic Richard Kerridge, for example, explains that ecocriticism

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“seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (“Small,” 5). A “crisis” that Garrad identifies as “monolithic” as taken up in these early definitions (4). That monolithic approach, demonstrated in ecocritical infancy, maintained a predominantly land-​ based approach. Glotfelty, for example, despite identifying that ecocriticism “expands the notion of ‘the world’ to include the entire ecosphere,” describes ecocriticism as having “one foot in literature and the other on land” (xix). On the other hand, however, ecocriticism clearly unfolded in ways antithetical to critical theory’s connections with post-​structuralist and postmodernist theories that emphasize linguistic construction and react against modernist constructions of concepts such as culture and identity. Yet, in its resistance to these theoretical interventions, ecocriticism, as Serpil Opperman astutely puts it, “has diversified without making any recourse to the problems posed by the representations of the outside world in the text” (154). Opperman turns to Heise to show that ecocriticism coheres “more by virtue of a common political project than on the basis of shared theoretical and methodological assumptions” (“Hitchhiker’s,” 506). For Opperman, the lack of any shared methodological and theoretical conventions results in disciplinary heterogeneity: “Indeed ecocriticism’s heterogeneity has become its identifying epithet” (154). As such, ecocriticism remains nascent. Blue ecocriticism surfaces as tributary to ecocriticism’s continued nebulous surge. Timothy Clark explains that ecocriticism’s academic and literary objectives have always been tempered by an understanding that ecocritical work sheds light on the cultural representations of the human–​nature interaction in order to provide awareness. Such awareness, ecocritics have inferred, stands to transform attitude and practice.That is, ecocriticism’s unwritten objective is to promote ecological literacy in order to enact change through awareness. The intent of such exposure resides in a conviction that ecocriticism has the potential to affect the cultural imaginary and, thereby, cultural practice. This assumption has necessarily been questioned. As Clark puts it, ecocriticism may need to confront an intractable question. What if the kind of transformed imagination celebrated in that sort of cultural programme, this awareness of interconnection, could not be assumed to be an effective agent of change—​in other words, how far does a change in knowledge and imagination entail a change in environmentally destructive modes of life? (emphasis in original, 18) For Clark, the fundamental imperative to change cultural imagination, to alter world view, remains central to the ecocritical project; yet, he is also right to question the assumptions about such an imperative, to explain that the assumption that awareness and understanding lead to action is itself a function of ecocriticism’s own cultural imaginary.3 Clark questions whether or not change “can be very significantly advanced through interpretation of cultural artefacts” (19). He explains, as well, that “to exaggerate the importance of the kind of imaginary is, in itself, to run the risk

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of consolidating a kind of diversionary side-​show, blind to its relative insignificance” (21). For Clark, then, critique of ecocriticism’s own limits becomes essential to the relevance of ecocriticism. He hopes that “a stronger ecocriticism may emerge from one more directly engaged with its own current limits” (19). While Blue Ecocriticism may not necessarily be a “stronger” ecocriticism, part of this project’s objective is to tease out ecocritical limits. Ecocriticism has diffused across the literary and humanities terrain since Glotfelty’s early discussions, becoming a more familiar and accepted institutional presence, finding kinship among other disciplines within the environmental humanities: philosophy, religion studies, anthropology, gender studies, indigenous studies, and the likes. Ecocriticism has emerged from the wild; ecocritics are no longer, as Glotfelty puts it, “lone voices howling in the wilderness” (xvii). Ecocritical voices are no longer solitary, nor do they emanate from the wilderness. Ecocriticism has been domesticated and institutionalized, much of the wild bred out, caged in academic menageries. Ecocriticism now bears the trappings of institutional approval—​ or appropriation, depending upon your point of view—​ including professional associations (the Association for Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) with branches across the globe, for example), academic journals (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Resilience, Green Letters, The Journal of Ecocriticism, etc.), conferences (the ASLE Conference), listserves, blogs, degrees, programs, even departments.4 However, this domestication has not rendered ecocriticism ineffectual; rather, such domestication and institutionalization has empowered academic work in ecocriticism, providing research resources, publication venues, valued academic credentialing, community, locations for communication and collaboration, and encouragement to pursue ecocritical work as legitimate, important work. Contemporary ecocriticism has also cast a wider net than the earliest literary–​ land relationship inquires, now adapting to a more expansive, interdisciplinary terrain well beyond the literary to an institutional positioning of environmental humanities, not limited to the literary alone. As Garrard clarifies, ecocriticism now explores the “relationship of the human and the non-​human, throughout human cultural history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself ” (5). He distinguishes, then, ecocriticism into two primary categories: literary and cultural (5). That evolution is manifest in this book by way of many influential ecocritics, Gotfelty foundational among them, yes, but certainly, Clark, Garrard, Ursula Heise, Stacy Alaimo, Melody Jue, Serenella Iovino, Serpil Oppermann, and others who push the boundaries of what constitutes ecocriticism and the possibilities for what ecocriticism can provide. A good deal of the exigency for this book derives from Brayton’s venture that “Ecocritical scholarship strives to represent the human impact on the biophysical environment, yet even the most encompassing efforts to expand the parameters of ecocriticism have neglected the central significance of the ocean and marine life in the Shakespeare corpus” (4). Brayton’s claim should be attributed not only to ecocritical approaches to Shakespeare, but to all texts and artifacts under the diverse rubric of ecocritical thought. In a rudimentary way, then, what I am calling “Blue

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Ecocriticism” is intended to call attention to this neglect and emphasize the need to expand the ecocritical lens to more attentive inclusions of matters oceanic, given both the tremendous corpus of literary and textual representations of ocean that contribute to cultural imaginaries and the vital role of ocean in global ecologies and environmental crises. That is, blue ecocriticism is at once an attempt to emphasize the significantly overlooked importance of ocean in ecocritical work and to call to question the critical function of doing so. Simultaneously, blue ecocriticism strives to consider the ramifications of those representations of ocean upon and within cultural imaginaries and to provide what might be thought of as an oceanic fluency.5 Brayton’s project excavates “the idea of a strange kinship between humanity and the ocean,” one that works to “destabilize the terrestrial grounding of such a relationship” (5). Brayton takes up such destabilization in order to expose the historical ignoring of the role of the ocean in all aspects of human history. To be clear, Brayton—​and by extension this project—​does not claim that matters of ocean are entirely absent from ecocritical accounts or from address of human history in total, only that they have been minimal in consideration despite the incredible importance of ocean in all of human history. Brayton, modifying Richard Louv’s concept of “Nature-​Deficit Disorder,” contends that “literature scholars suffer from a collective case of ‘ocean deficit disorder’ ” (6–​7). Like Brayton’s work, Blue Ecocriticism contributes to efforts to overcome this “disorder,” a term particularly suited for such work when invoked not as a medical metaphor suggesting affliction, but as a term indicating a position away from order, a metaphor to point toward a reversing or tangential force other than that which is ordered. Such order, manifest often in academic taxonomies and disciplinary demarcations, traps the fluidity of ocean in the linearity of terrestrial thinking. To expand, then, the rudimentary objectives of blue ecocriticism, this project seizes the opportunity to consider the role of institutionalized order by way of discipline in how we might achieve a more encompassing consideration of ocean not merely in literary studies, but as saturated throughout all disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, blue ecocriticism considers the historical positioning and construction of ocean in Western thought and ecocritical approaches. Part of the exigency for this project, as well, grows from the growing academic institutionalization of inquiry into matters deemed ecological, environmental, and sustainable, particularly as those inquiries have emerged within ecocriticism, specifically, and the humanities, more generally.That is to say, part of the objective of blue ecocriticism encourages institutional critique, including focus upon environmental literacy and environmental humanities as they have appeared in the last decade. Part of such critique requires situating ecocriticism not merely as a literary criticism or a set of methodologies through which to read the literary (and, perhaps, thereby to read human culture as represented in the literary archive), but as inextricably bound to an advocacy imperative that positions ecocriticism as a critical theory enacted to the end of not just critiquing ecological problems in conjunction with cultural and social problems, but participating in the active work to overcome those problems. To do so, blue ecocriticism works to unearth ecocriticism so as to free

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it from its moorings. I employ these metaphors flagrantly here to underscore the need to examine oceanic metaphors as a manner of examining the positioning of ocean in language and literature and to suggest, as well, a possible relationship between ecocriticism writ large and blue ecocriticism, a distinction that seems to imply blue ecocriticism as subset of ecocriticism. However, I hope to establish blue ecocriticism as saturated by the ecocritical imperative and diffused among it. Blue ecocriticism synthesizes solutions that include ecocompositional, ecofeminist, social judicial, natural historical, environmental justice, environmental philosophy, and indigenous perspectives to such possible objectives. Despite Clark’s spot-​on critique of ecocriticism’s cultural imaginary aspirations, Blue Ecocriticism promotes oceanic awareness in two ways:  first, Blue Ecocriticism works disciplinarily to make ecocriticism aware of its own oceanic deficiencies and the implications of those deficiencies for the discipline, as well as the potentials for overcoming them. Second, it works to promote a more global awareness of matters oceanic, specifically with cultural imaginaries in mind. However, in doing so, there comes, too, a recognition, that the very size and complexity of oceanic matters renders such awareness impossible in total—​both disciplinarily and culturally—​and acknowledges that blue ecocriticism requires more than analytical expression. It requires advocacy and action. This is book, then, is as much about ocean as it is about human interaction with ocean or ecocriticism. “Ocean deficiency,” in this context, should be understood as disciplinary critique. It is not a claim regarding a more global textual history. There is no shortage or deficiency of narratives and texts that contribute to oceanic cultural imaginaries. Oceanic representations appear throughout global oral, literate, and digital histories. Ocean deficit does not imply that there has been a shortage of texts written about the ocean; the literature of the ocean (often indicated as the “literature of the sea”) has been more than prolific across varieties of texts and cultures. The deficit speaks only of the ecocritical attention to these texts. To clarify, though, I should note, too, that even in the vastness of oceanic literature (broadly defined) most texts are not really about ocean but are about human interactions with ocean. This is telling in several ways. Throughout this book (about ocean and about texts about ocean), I turn to numerous examples of texts that encounter ocean, but these are a mere drop in the bucket of the numbers of oceanic texts available for ecocritical consideration. Similarly, Blue Ecocriticism turns to Ursula Heise’s identification that Rather than focusing on the recuperation of a sense of place, environmentalism needs to foster an understanding of how a wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the world, and how human impact affects and changes this connectedness. (21) Stacy Alaimo offers a similar consideration in pointing to the importance of what she calls the “double reckoning with the local and the global, the immediate and the highly mediated” (Exposed, 3). Taking up Heise’s and Alaimo’s conundrum

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between the value of global and local views of ecological systems, Blue Ecocriticism considers the ways in which ocean is represented both as global system in cultural imaginaries and as local environment, noting particularly that unlike many representations of the local, representations of local ocean are often limited by technological access. Thus, Blue Ecocriticism takes up consideration of ocean as object and place and simultaneously not object or place, given Heise’s recognition that “place continues to function as one of the most important categories through which American environmentalists articulate what it means to be ecologically aware and ethically responsible today” (29). To that end, Blue Ecocriticism takes to heart Heise’s mission in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet “to trace some of the narrative and metaphorical templates in the rhetorical as well as visual realms that have shaped perceptions of global ecology in Western societies over the last forty years” (63). Part of my objective in Blue Ecocriticism is not merely to unearth ecocriticism but, borrowing from Stefan Helmreich’s concept in Alien Ocean:  Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, to abduct it. Helmreich’s metaphor is apt for consideration in oceanic thinking, not only because he forwards it in a book about ocean but because of its disruptive possibility. Abduction hints at piracy, a metaphor now commonly used to describe theft of media and intellectual property, a metaphor born of maritime law. Violence saturates both abduction and piracy; colonialism and racism haunt piracy. My use of the terms here is not meant to dismiss or erase those histories, but to acknowledge the inescapable specter of a violent history in the critical adaptation of the terms, and, in some ways, to consider how literary histories have romanticized such violence through glorified tales of piracy, including acts of abduction and colonial aggressions. Note, for example that novelists Harold Robbins, Frederick Marryat, and Walter Scott each published books titled The Pirate (Scott in 1822, Marryat in 1836, and Robbins in 1974). Even contemporary media adaptations of pirate stories like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise (2003–​2017) or Microsoft’s Xbox game Sea of Thieves (2018) cannot shed the intertwined specters of colonialism and racism. Or consider the Gasparilla Pirate Festival held each January in Tampa, Florida, since 1904 based upon the story of the fictional pirate José Gaspar.The tradition of the festival is so large—​and such an economic boon to the city—​that the weekend festival has mutated into “Gasparilla Season,” which lasts from mid-​January to mid-​March. The pirate mythos is so prevalent in Tampa that the city’s professional football team bears the name the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which had employed an icon of a pirate (Bruce) and now uses a pirate flag as its primary icon.6 Primarily, though, I adopt Helmreich’s use of abduction as a metaphor to suggest a need to unhitch ecocriticism from its terrestrial moorings, an act of intellectual violence or disruption. According to Helmreich, abduction is paramount to how we demonstrate the complexity of life. Rudimentarily, Helmreich’s use of abduction should not be read as a literal kidnapping, but more attuned to the less familiar definition of abduction derived from studies in anatomy and zoology that define abduction as drawing a part of a given body away from its midline or median. That is, to abduct is to wrench away from

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the center, to find a different path, to navigate out of the channel. By way of Charles Sanders Pierce’s notion that abduction can provide a logical trajectory, Helmrich’s proposes that abduction can provide a general prediction without any positive assurance that it will succeed either in the special case or usually, its justification being that it is the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally, and that induction from past experience gives us strong encouragement to hope that it will be successful in the future. (Alien, 172) But Helmreich’s abduction is scarred by the more familiar understanding of abduction as taking without consent, what he calls the “unexpected capture against one’s will” by an alien life form (Alien, 173). By bringing these two definitions of abduction into dialogue within the context of his anthropological observations of marine microbiologists, Helmreich contends that “our work might be seen as one style of alien abduction, a venture in which humans, as strangers to the sea, employ a mixture of logic and last-​ditch hope to make sense of something unfamiliar” (Alien, 194). This abduction, unmooring, and unearthing of ecocriticism is a move to pilot ecocriticism off course by a few degrees, to shanghai its navigational directions. To that end, Blue Ecocriticism asks the dual questions how do we represent ocean and how do we know ocean, or more succinctly, how do ocean representations teach us to know ocean? Leslie Marmon Silko, in her resplendent novella Oceanstory, asks of such knowing: I began to think about the ocean constantly. I felt destined to come to this ocean although I was born far inland and knew nothing about the ocean. Who knows the ocean best? Is it the oceanographer or the marine biologist, the one who studies and performs experiments on ocean water? Is it the fisherman, the one who feeds himself from the ocean? Is it the one who sleeps next to the ocean every night as his ancestors have done for thousands of years? Is it the one who swims in the Ocean? Is it the one the ocean takes, does that person know the ocean best? (Silko) Knowing ocean, as Silko alludes, requires many avenues of perception. Steve Mentz, too, identifies the significant hurdle in knowing ocean: “the basic challenge the ocean always poses: to know an ungraspable thing” (Bottom, ix).Thus, my methodologies here to unearth and abduct ecocriticism might be described as eclectic, but such a description invokes an inelegance of patchwork and the befuddled history of eclecticism. Rather, I have come to think of blue ecocriticism as submerged within interspersed and fluid methodologies, an approach I have come to think of as submersive epistemology, a neologism that compounds submersible and subversive to

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suggest not merely fluidity and depth but also the corrosive potentials of thinking. Corrosive, here, should be understood as processes by which the foundational land-​ based solidity of ecocritical objectives are dissolved not to destroy them but to allow for reformation and to encourage the emergence of new ocean-​inclusive ecocriticisms. Fluidity and fluid thinking become central within a submersive epistemology in order to promote dynamic interdisciplinary mixing. This is not, however, a kind of mixing that intends to make homogenous diverse approaches, but an attempt to strive toward a compounded fluidity that may not necessarily adhere to traditional disciplinary demarcations, instead striving for a transdisciplinary view. Specifically, Blue Ecocriticism is influenced by Kristin Arola’s explanation in her coauthored with Donnie Johnson Sackey et al. Rhetoric Review article that melding methodological approaches derived from posthumanism, new materialism, and object-​oriented ontologies—​to which I  add a few others—​is viable because of the interconnections between these approaches. She explains by way of Vivienne Bozalek and Michalinos Zemblylas that these kinds of diverse, yet interconnected methodologies interact through “relational ontologies; a critique of dualism; and engagements with matter and the non-​human” (386). Similarly, my methodologies are influenced by Macarena Gómez-​Barris’ decolonial submerged perspectives. Gómez-​Barris explains that her methods in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives propose a “submerged viewpoint, about ways to see what lies within the ecologies all around us, and about how to perceive those things that are not usually available to the naked eye” (xiv). She develops a methodology that addresses “the importance of epistemological autonomy and embodied knowledge as necessary to pushing away from a paradigm of mere resistance into the more layered terrain of potential” (xv). For Gómez-​Barris, this methodology deploys a “mode of porous and undisciplined analysis” tied to what she calls the “extractive zone,” a term she uses to refer to “the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of ‘high biodiversity’ in order to reduce life to capitalist resource conversion” (xvi). Submersive epistemologies, then, approach submersion as immersion not in a homogenous singular entity, but in a nascent compound in perpetual flux, the constitution of which shifts, mixes, and moves fluidly as components of the representational ocean fluctuate through time and scale. To this end, blue ecocritical methodologies adopt, in part, Morton’s concept of ambient poetics, “a materialist way of reading texts with a view to how they encode the literal space of their inscription—​if there is such a thing—​the spaces between the words, the margins of the page, the physical and social environment of the reader” (Ecology, 3). That is, Morton argues for the importance of the materiality of the locations from which writers write.7 Interestingly, to make his argument about ambient poetics, Morton begins with an oceanic tease: As I write this, I am sitting on the seashore.The gentle sound of waves lapping against my deck chair coincides with the sound of my fingers typing away at the laptop. Overhead the cry of gulls pierces the twilit sky, conjuring a sense of distance. The smoke trail of an ocean liner disappears over the far horizon.

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The surrounding air is moist and smells of seaweed. The crackle of pebbles on the shore as the waves roll in reminds me of England, summer holidays on stony beaches. No—​that was pure fiction; just a tease. (Ecology, 29)8 Three further introductory deceptions follow this one, as Morton works to show that acknowledging the place from which one writes affects how the writer writes. Morton calls this kind of environmental acknowledgment ecomimesis, an authentication of the author’s writing location that transmits to the reader a specific historical and environmental situatedness. That is, Morton argues for acknowledgment of the surrounding environmental frame of a text. He binds this depiction with what he calls ambient poetics. Morton’s ambient poetics emphasizes the need to consider multiple forms of artistic texts in order to understand the very spaces in which those texts appear and represent. Morton’s ambient poetics, then, takes up a twofold objective to account for the role of multiple textual artifacts is environmental criticism and to “make strange the idea of environment” (Ecology, 34). Making strange, like abduction, functions as a method of disrupting familiar views and assumptions. For Morton, making strange requires examination of many textual forms, particularly emerging media forms which reflect: “the significance of multimedia in general, and synesthesia in particular, in inspiring the notion of an ambient poetics. New kinds of art and aesthetics have provoked literary criticism, art history, and musicology to acknowledge the role of the environmental” (Ecology, 34). For Morton, “Historicizing this form of poetics permits the politicization of environmental art and its ‘ecomimesis,’ or authenticating evocation of the author’s environment, such that the experience of its phenomena becomes present for and shared with the audience” (Ecology, 32). This politization, for Morton, is essential, as he explains in The Ecological Thought, because there can be no neutral position from which to articulate ecological positions. Using noir film analogously in developing his concept of “dark ecology,” Morton explains, “The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it” (Ecological, 16–​17). To oversimplify, what Morton is getting at across multiple projects is that highly diverse (and I would add migratory) populations of textual forms and representations participate in complex textual ecologies that construct (or, more accurately, can be read as) ambient conditions from which writers compose.Those ambient conditions participate in systems of reinscription that are always political and material. I hope to show, too, that such conditions are also always already confined by scale and time. Morton’s ecomimesis may serve to authenticate specific historical and environmental situatedness, but it can do so only as historical recount. That is, given the scale of representation within textual ecologies the question “what can we do?” can only be answered ecocritically by examining what “have we done?”—​in both senses of the question. Critique, that is, is always a look back. This is specifically

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why Morton’s ambient poetics becomes crucial in recognizing the need to examine representations across multiple, interconnected texts. Throughout Blue Ecocriticism, I  turn to a variety of texts in order to both identify both ecocriticism’s ocean deficit and to examine the textual ecologies that contribute to ocean formation in cultural imaginaries. Like Morton and Alaimo, I  turn to a variety of literary, visual, artistic, and digital texts, recognizing that when it comes to ocean representation, any example I employ is a choice of convenience within a frame of ambient poetics. I do so, too, because, as Steve Mentz has put it, “we need a poetic history of the oceans” because contemporary culture has “frayed our connections to the sea” (Bottom, ix). I contend that such a history surfaces from an ocean of texts, and that if Mentz is at all right about the eroded cultural connection to the sea, reinvigorating (or invigorating, as the case seems to be) ecocritical attention to the role of representations of ocean in cultural imaginaries is more than necessary. To do so, requires, as well, consistent recognition not only of the anthropocentric notions of those representational histories, but the ingrained humanist and Enlightenment epistemologies that muddy their formations. The very notion of “the human” as either a singular agent acting within local and global systems or as a more collective notion of “human” writ large simultaneously obscures the ability to conceive of ecological systems sans human while making evident the importance of that inability. Such acknowledgment demands that ecocritical work—​in particular blue ecocritical work—​acknowledge that any efforts to demonstrate posthumanist thinking risks obfuscating the role of human politics in all aspects of global ecologies. Blue ecocriticism, then, negotiates a fluid space between and among the human and posthuman. If we are to embrace the very notion of the Anthropocene, then we acknowledge that no part of Earth’s ecosystems remains untouched by human influence and that no human action that leads to such influence is removed from politics and ideology. Exemplary of this, in Chapter 3, I examine the discovery of a single-​use plastic bag at the bottom of Mariana’s Trench. Yet, in saying that no part of the Earth remains untouched by human influence, we must also acknowledge that most of the human population remains unaware of those transformations and effects. This is particularly true of ocean. As Steve Mentz explains, The typical reader today has lost much of the specialized information, language, and first-​hand experience of the sea that were common in Western culture. Except as a space for recreation, the sea seems less present to early 21st-​century English and American readers than it did to our ancestors. (“Toward,” 998) Mentz and others have noted that technological advancements in transportation have reduced ocean to a thing to pass over. We travel overseas, over seas. Trade and shipping technologies are black boxed as Western culture becomes less aware of what is required to transport goods across ocean. Likewise, for much of Western populations, ocean has been recast as location for recreation, a place to visit. As

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Mentz puts it, “By turning the sea from a vision of chaos into a playground, the modern world has lost part of its cultural history” (“Toward,” 998). Cultural history is inseparable from cultural memory and cultural imaginaries and is often assumed as homogenous. Blue ecocriticism works against the convenience of homogenous cultural memory and history to recognized the diverse cultural memories and histories that contribute to cultural imaginaries, including, as I will show shortly, Indigenous and diasporic cultural memories and histories that often counter the assumed cultural history of a place. Part of the blue ecocritical agenda, then, stems from a need to disrupt assumed cultural histories, particularly by way of better understanding representations of ocean in cultural imaginaries, looking to which narratives and metaphors curtail the most damage and which contribute to the cause of damage. Nothing, then, in what follows is comprehensive. It is all a drop in the bucket, a wayfarer’s glimpse of things connected and in need of exploration.

Unmooring literary histories Despite ecocriticism’s ocean deficit, Western literary history (as well as global literatures) is awash with representations of ocean. Seas of ink spilled in oceanic adoration and despair.9 It would be impossible to identify all the bounty of such treasures in the literary sea, and my coverage here of that literary history is inherently limited for the purpose of exemplification. Besides, my objective here is to provide context not to provide literary history. It would be a daunting task to curate a comprehensive archive of oceanic literature. As Johnathan Raban, editor of The Oxford Book of The Sea, puts it, “the sea is an unmanageably great subject” (xvii). “The Sea,” Raban explains, “is one of the most ‘universal’ symbols in literature; it is certainly the most protean” (3). Given its expanse, it is also nearly impossible to solidify taxonomies for various types of oceanic literatures, as Raban implies in the “Note on the Selection” segment that initiates that anthology: “When I started to assemble materials for this collection,” he writes I meant to take my title literally and compile a book of the sea—​not a book of voyages, naval battles, shipboard life, fishing, or any of the other activities that take place in, or on, or at the edge of, the sea. (xvii) For Raban, there are a small number of luminary texts that exemplify writing about the sea, including “Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom,’ Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journal-​entries on breaking waves, Conrad’s description of the Indian Ocean at the beginning of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ ” Hilaire Belloc on the Portland Race in The Cruise of the Nona, Henry Betson on waves in The Outermost House, Rachel Carson on the color of the sea in The Sea about Us,10 and Charles Tomlinson’s anatomy of a great wave in ‘The Atlantic’ ” (xvii). For Raban, these literary texts convey written descriptions of the sea itself, of seawater. Raban is right to make

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such a distinction for the purposes of his anthology, and I concur with his categorization regarding writing about ocean and writing about activities embroiled with ocean, a distinction Raban clarifies between the sea in literature and the literature of the sea.Yet, for the purposes of articulating an entry into blue ecocriticism, I apply the codifications more liberally and consider more inclusively literary, textual, and visual representation of ocean as inherently inseparable in the ambient poetics that form ocean in cultural imaginaries. Thus, blue ecocritical approaches are not limited by Raban’s orthodoxies, despite their value in clarifying curation criteria. Margaret Cohen begins The Novel and the Sea by proclaiming, “At the dawn of Western narrative, Homer’s Odysseus sets sail” (1). Since then, nautical fiction has been a mainstay for English-​language literatures, and historically in such literary representations ocean has served two primary roles. To oversimplify, the first is that of a component of transportation or an environment in which the narrative is set, the kind of narrative Raban identifies as “sea in literature.” In such cases, themes of conflict between characters dominate the narrative and ocean serves as setting. Frequently, in such settings, themes of personal conflict in which characters discover truths about themselves dominate the ocean-​set narratives. Second, ocean is cast as a force against which protagonists often struggle. Ocean, in these narratives, is cast as antagonist. A significant amount of twentieth-​century oceanic literature displays this theme, depicting ocean as wild nature and as a force against which individuals must persevere. Reductively, as our middle-​school English teachers used to tell us, all of these ocean applications in Western literature reveal three primary forms of literary conflict: man versus man, man versus self, and man versus nature. The term man here is telling, as this same Western literary history is almost exclusively a masculine-​ dominated territory. Wrapped in these structures, other literary archetypes emerge, like the archetype of the journey or the archetype of good versus evil. Likewise, much of this literary tradition emphasizes masculine conquest narratives in order to drive romantic, heroic narratives. As such, literary tradition—​ and here I’m thinking also of pre-​novel narratives like the Old English poem The Seafarer (and its numerous translations and interpretations) and thirteenth-​century Norse tales like the Saga of Eric the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders—​establishes a frontier ethos of ocean and the mythos of the intrepid sailor as dominant representations in mainstream literature. As frontier, ocean representations are imbued with a sense of discovery and conquest that whitewash the permeations of colonialism and concomitantly rhetorics of economic and social improvement, a sense that what had not yet been discovered (and claimed) across or in the oceans would be better than or would benefit what was at hand. Inherently, frontier mentality is an anthropomorphic ideology that promotes human exceptionalism, maintains a superiority and separation of human from nonhuman, avails the nonhuman as resource, and places the “natural” world in servitude to the human, particularly as economic stores. Frontier mentality is tributary to capitalism, abetting discovery and conquest as access to material wealth. Likewise, as Mentz has shown, frontier mentality and the implied liberty or lawlessness frequently associated with frontier, “functioned

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in the early modern period as a compelling fantasy, in which ceaseless change and instability of the sea countered human existence on land” (“Toward,” 998). As such, frontier mentality looms large in literary representation of ocean, contributing to influential conceits of human separation from ocean and ocean as the epitome of untamable nature. Such tropes have had significant impact on cultural imaginaries, their relevance particularly important when we acknowledge that for most of the global human population ocean is only ever known—​or more specifically, only ever constructed—​by way of such literary and other textual mediations. At the outset of this chapter, I adopted the strategy of referring to the oceans as a singular ocean to convey a sense of unification of the ecological ocean. However, blue ecocritical approaches must simultaneously accept the multiplicities of oceans written in cultural imaginaries. Raban, perhaps, explains this best:  “the sea in eighteenth-​century literature is one place, the sea in nineteenth-​century literature quite another; as the American sea is importantly different from the British sea” (3). He continues, The sea in literature is not a verifiable object to be described, with varying degrees of success and shades of emphasis, by writers of different periods; it is, rather, the supremely liquid and volatile element, shaping itself newly for every writer and every generation, (3) a sentiment that echoes in Steinberg’s notion of the social construction of the ocean.This is to say that on one hand blue ecocriticism benefits from understanding ocean as a singular entity, on the other there are necessary values in acknowledging distinctions in representations of ocean—​be they cultural, linguistic, material, or textual—​for understanding the relationship between such relationships and cultural imaginaries. The Romantic period, for example, saw a proliferation of seafaring novels, spurred on by Western economic prosperity and shifts in representations of nature to include aesthetics driven by the sublime. Texts from this period, too, contributed to the understanding of ocean as inherently pristine space. Literary scholars frequently cite Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem often identified as foundational in the emerging Romantic period, as addressing the natural splendor of nature and the result of desecrating that majesty. However, the period’s romantic views of nature are muddled, as well, by politics of maritime ownership and harvest and a prevailing attitude that depicted ocean as resource and limitless. As National Geographic Explorer-​in-​Residence Sylvia Earle identifies in her post Deep Water Horizon oil spill book The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One, representations of ocean during the nineteenth century conveyed an ideology of the limitless ocean. She cites a 1883 Thomas Huxley speech regarding disputes over herring harvests (disputes that have been embattled since at least the eleventh century) in which Huxley famously heralds the limitless resources of the ocean:

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The herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all great sea fisheries are inexhaustible: that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the numbers of fish. Any attempts to regulate these fisheries seems consequently . . . to be useless. (qtd in Earl The World is Blue, 53–​54)11 This same understanding of inexhaustibility had been present in representations of ocean in cultural imaginaries and drove unbridled economies of cod, mackerel, herring, and menhaden harvests since as early as the thirteenth century. We might distinguish between commercial and economic representations of the period as compared with literary and artistic representations. Likewise, we might distinguish between representations and understandings of fish as organism within protein economies (see Chapter  5) as distinctly different from representations of ocean qua ocean. Yet, while such distillations might serve purposes of specificity in particular kinds of analysis, seeing them as intertwined in more encompassing cultural understandings of ocean accounts for a more comprehensive consideration of representations of ocean, in this case the Romantic period’s conflictual position of ocean as sublime and majestic and at once inexhaustible resource. Blue ecocritical approaches necessarily consider such inharmonic representations as critical to broader understandings of representation in cultural imaginaries, particularly when considered within a given chronological period. This diploid mindset that enfolds the perception of inexhaustible resource with the splendor of the primeval is reinscribed throughout oceanic representations in Western literature since the early nineteenth century.The heyday of Western oceanic literature might be reductively said to have emerged in the early nineteenth century and exemplified in novels by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Marryat, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and C.  S. Forester, and extending through the twentieth century. Mentz identifies these and other writers at “sea-​ obsessed writers” (Bottom, ix). Part of the reason for this pinnacle period in oceanic literary history might be attributed to the technological shifts that took place in this same period.The move from sail to steam radically altered transportation across the seas and had significant impact on global economies by way of increased trade in terms of speed, range, and quantity. The technological shift to steam also thoroughly altered the ability to harvest ocean. Not only did steam power allow for the development of larger vessels with larger carrying capacities, but steam power also allowed for harvest technologies like trawl systems to grow in capacity. Early trawl technologies, for example, which date back to the 1200s, were limited because sail-​ powered vessels did not have the power to haul heavy equipment efficiently. Steam power increased the mechanical strength of trawl equipment, allowing for larger harvest capacities and larger ranges of deployment. When Cooper began writing sea fiction in the early nineteenth century, the technological transition from sail to steam had only begun. By the time Melville wrote Billy Budd, the age of sail had been relegated to nostalgia, as the opening lines of Melville’s final novel famously

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convey: “In the time before steamships…” (7).This technological shift also initiated a shift in the cultural placement of ocean in cultural imaginary as the ability to cross oceans became more readily available, safer, and more efficient. Such efficiency of transportation began to push ocean from a categorical position of natural barrier wrought with peril and awe to a place akin to a road or other space easily traversed with little attention to the space itself. This shift would distance human awareness of and attention to ocean. The invention of air travel and transoceanic flight would later push ocean even further from human interaction. The sea-​focused literary texts of the nineteenth century contribute significantly to perceptions of ocean as frontier and as sites of exploration in cultural imaginaries, often binding their tropes and rhetorics to land-​based frontier mentality. Consider, for example, the frontier corollaries between Cooper’s nautical novels such as The Pilot (1824), The Water-​Witch:  or the Skimmer of the Seas (1830), The Red Rover (1828), Homeward Bound: or The Chase: A Tale of the Sea (1838), Afloat and Ashore: or The Adventures of Miles Wallingford. A Sea Tale (1844),12 The Crater; or,Vulcan’s Peak: A Tale of the Pacific (1847), Jack Tier:  or the Florida Reefs (aka Captain Spike:  or The Islets of the Gulf) (1848), and The Sea Lions:  The Lost Sealers (1849), and his five Leatherstocking novels written between 1823 and 1841, notably The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1840), which are understood as seminal texts in the American frontier literary canon. Certainly, we see in the Leatherstocking novels language that betrays Cooper’s attention to matters oceanic as he describes terrestrial frontiers. Evident and exemplary of this is the title of The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea, which depicts the Great Lakes as ocean. Cooper writes in the Preface to his 1828 novel The Red Rover, which was published two years following the publication of The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), that he intends his work to be read by the “keen-​eyed critic of the ocean” (2). As Luis Iglesias has proposed, as important as Cooper’s invention of Natty Bumppo is, his invention of the sea novel provides a broader consideration of the emergence of national narrative. Rather than looking west, toward the frontier that has dominated the cultural reading of American literary invention, these novels look east to nautical history in order to re-​conceptualize national narratives within the fluid landscape of the Atlantic. The maritime setting gives Copper license to explore new strategies for presenting American materials, open to a world of languages, customs, and encounters distinct from the epic western expansion with which the Leatherstocking novels are so persistently identified. (1) Notably, too, such transformations demand consideration not only of their effects on the understanding of ocean, but on the very populations that would engage with ocean under these altered understandings. In her eye-​opening article, “Oceanic Corpo-​g raphies, Refugee Bodies and the Making and Unmaking of Waters,” Suvendrini Perera contends that

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the challenges that the gendered and raced transnational subaltern refugee subject poses to the order of “the liberal state” and “the liberal subject” are bound up in complex ways with entrenched understandings of the ocean as elementally distinct from land. (64) This distinction, Perera explains, constituted by the freedom of the sea-​going individualist liberal subject, invariably raced as white and gendered as male, to range across the waves in search of new worlds to conquer, is one that is continually reproduced both in popular culture’s contemporary sea romances, and in in the spatial and legal demarcations of the nation and its limits. (64–​65) Certainly, Cooper’s experiences as a sailor on merchant ships and his service as a midshipman in the US Navy influenced his writing, as evidenced by his nonfiction writings in books like The History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), Old Ironsides (1839), and Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1846), as well as the fact that he dedicates The Pilot and The Red Rover to his friend and fellow midshipman William Branford Shubrick. As such, Cooper’s nautical writings stand as central to the Western nautical fiction canon, and exemplify the genre’s frontier, male-​dominated, conquest themes, just as his American frontier fictional tales have been identified as integral to the formation of a distinct “American Literature.” Cooper’s motifs have stood as foundational to maritime representation to present day, as we see echoes of Cooper in the 2019 Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse set in late-​nineteenth-​century New England in ways not present in the 2016 Chris Crow film The Lighthouse based upon Smalls Island Incident of 1801, which was also partially influential in Eggers’ film. Likewise, Cooper’s maritime fictions—​and again, we see this clearly echoed in the Eggers film as indicative of the lasting influence of Cooper’s writing—​list toward the nautical gothic. Margaret Cohen shows how The Red Rover employs gothic elements integrated with nautical realism to create a particular sense of danger and adventure that makes the dangers of oceanic adventure “palpable, heightening their emotional urgency” (157). This urgency, elicited by way of the gothic, drives Cooper’s protagonists and helps audiences connect with them. As Cohen puts it, “The Gothic asks the reader to sympathize with protagonists negotiating zones of danger that are also zones of mystery” (157). In the same period in which waves of Western nautical fiction surface, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his now famous 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the foundational component of his more comprehensive 1920 book The Frontier in American History in which he contends that American democracy emerged specifically from ideologies of the American frontier. Turner proclaims: “The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West” (3). He argues that

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This new democracy that captured the country and destroyed the ideals of statesmanship came from no theorist’s dreams of the German forest. It came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest. But the triumph of this Western democracy revealed also the fact that it could rally to its aid the laboring classes of the coast, then just beginning to acquire self-​consciousness and organization. (216) Turner explains that “The men of the ‘Western World’ turned their backs upon the Atlantic Ocean, and with a grim energy and self-​reliance began to build up a society free from the dominance of ancient forms” (253). Turner’s hypothesis became paramount to historical understandings of the evolution of American democracy, but it has also been deeply contested, particularly considering Turner’s masculinist representation of Western conquest. Clearly, Iglesias counters Turner’s claims, though Iglesias does not address the role of Turner directly. Both historian Glenda Riley and feminist literary critic Anette Kolodny, though, have criticized not just Turner’s male-​focused presentation of history and frontier but called to question the overall enterprise of American Western frontier representations that erase the presence of women. Kolodny, whose work has been more than influential in ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and ecocomposition responds to Turner in her indispensable book The Land Before Her showing how Turner’s claims erase the role of women in the frontier and “denied a place beside the abiding myth of the American Adam, American women were understandably reluctant to proclaim themselves the rightful New World Eve” (5).13 Yet, examinations of frontier literary representations, both terrestrial and oceanic, reveal that the masculine-​dominated, subjugating frontier ethos still drives oceanic research and exploration and the narratives we form around that work. The Western, English-​ language oceanic literary tradition is often cataloged as nautical fiction, naval fiction, or maritime fiction, categories that intimate connections to military valor, colonial exploration and conquest, and nationalism. Like any literary tradition, sea stories reveal historical, political, economic, and cultural influences of the times and places from which they surface—​such as those regarding the oceans as inexhaustible providers of resources and the intricate volume of maritime and trade laws (and squabbles) that orbit questions regarding access to those imagined inexhaustible stores (and the subsequent disputes that amplify as the myths of inexhaustibility deflate). And while much of this literary tradition has been examined through various critical lenses, ecocriticism has only minimally considered the role of this history of texts in their contribution to our engagements with ocean. Certainly, considerations of canonical texts like Moby Dick have been addressed in terms of whaling industry and the economics of harvest that contribute to ecological and species decimation. Likewise, Shakespeare’s representations of ocean have been taken up by not only Brayton, but by Steve Mentz in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. Yet, most of the genre of maritime fiction has remained devoid of ecocritical attention. Interestingly, unlike terrestrial

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frontier fiction, the nautical or oceanic literary tradition of frontier problematically diverges from terrestrial frontier literature questioning human ability to tame ocean as one might tame, say, The West. Nautical fiction, both Western, English-​language texts, as well as other global texts, convey a sense that ocean is untamable, the wildest of the wild. The Wild West, the literature trumpets, is tamable, but the wild ocean is not. Oceanic literature, that is, breaks with representations of tamable lands, depicting ocean as powerful, dangerous, and sublime, not to mention unmanageable and ungovernable. Note, too, that much of the danger of ocean comes from its interaction with wind, an inseparable interplay between water and air that renders the surface where most human contact occurs. Consider the prevalence of ocean in Lord Byron’s melancholic narrative poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”—​that was published at the same time that Cooper resigned from the Navy and began his career as a writer—​and the often-​cited lines: Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—​roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin—​his control Stops with the shore; Human control, the oceanic narrative tradition establishes, dissolves where land meets sea. This trope has remained central to oceanic narrative. Consider, for example, Steve Mentz’s point that “Shakespeare’s plays write the sea as opaque, inhospitable, and alluring, a dynamic reservoir of estrangement and enchantment” (Bottom, ix). Such depictions have navigated across literary history into contemporary writing. In early narratives, Moses had to part the Red Sea in order for the Hebrews traverse the oceanic obstacle. In China Miéville’s posthumanist weird fantasy Perdido Street Station (the first book in his New Crobuzon trilogy), the ocean is mentioned only as an onerous impediment that Yagharek the exiled Garuda was forced to cross in order to reach New Crobuzon, the setting of the book. Yet, Miéville sets the second book in the trilogy, The Scar, in relation to ocean, offering a posthuman seafaring narrative that calls to question not just the roles of ocean as boundary, but wonderfully insightful critique of piracy, colonialism, slavery, and concepts of equality and ethics from a posthumanist perspective that includes distinctions between those able to live below the surface and those who cannot. Miéville’s introductory descriptions of his fantasy ocean are evocative of Rachel Carson’s oceanic writing, which I address later in this chapter. Reading the two in dialogue reveals a kind of unchanging continuity in how we imagine and represent ocean in the sixty years between their writing, and certainly between Miéville’s work and eighteenth-​century maritime literature, as well. Likewise, Miéville’s novel Kraken is saturated by the specters of Verne and Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Currents of ocean as danger and obstacle run deep in Western literary histories. Tropes of frontier, exploration, and conquest in nautical fiction were particularly suited for texts directed at young male audiences. Consider, for example, the breadth of ocean-​themed novels Scottish writer R. M. Ballantyne published between 1848

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and 1895. Perhaps the most famous of these is The Coral Island (1858) which is touted as being a foundational text in the evolution of young adult literature as it was one of the first young adult books to feature young adult protagonists. The Coral Island is often classified as a “Robinsonade,” a text generated in the wake of the success of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe that employs many of Defoe’s tropes and themes. The Coral Island, which tells the story of three boys who are stranded on an island as the lone survivors of a shipwreck, would influence William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, particularly in its depiction of island and ocean interaction and the role of ocean as barrier and untamed wilderness. Neither The Coral Island nor The Lord of the Flies is about the sea per se, but the power and uncontrollability of ocean is central to the book’s setting and plot, as is the case with many sea stories directed at young male audiences. Cooper’s novels depict ocean as untamable, as well. Particularly telling within this frame, too, is that Cooper’s The Pilot takes up the problematic idea of property law. Control may be beyond the evident scope of human influence over ocean, the literary tradition suggests, but as we now know, anthropocenic influence alters ocean in many ways, subversively controlling, changing, and disturbing. Consequently, and perhaps recursively, oceanic representations, though inextricably imbued with the ambient poetics of such narratives, have begun to account for not only human incursion in and across oceans, but the results of those penetrations. Even the language of incursion or penetration, when considered within the volume of oceanic literature, reveals the sense of ocean as space into which humans venture, not inhabit. Until recently, considerations of oceanic representation have manufactured, as Steinberg explains, “a narrative about the various ways the world-​ocean has been perceived, constructed, and managed under modernity” (1). If control stops at the shore, then, blue ecocriticism might, on one hand, be nothing more than an attempt to control through analysis—​or at least codify—​the uncontrollable. Writing, as well as any other form of representation, strives for the manageable, strives for the ability to collect and arrange. As such, representations of ocean endeavor to make sense of the unmanageable, to tame the untamable. They attempt to lasso liquid. Yet, representations can only be a fleeting glimpse, a moment out of time and scale. Only when we consider a given representation in relation to other representations do the formations within cultural imaginaries emerge. If, then, my example of Cooper’s writings—​or Byron’s or Coleridge’s or any other work of representation—​are to be understood as significant to the literary representation of ocean, they can only achieve such relevance in the swirl of other intertwined representations. We read Cooper, that is, as pertinent to oceanic representation within the effusion of other representations expressed by writers such as, but certainly not limited to, Jules Verne, Daniel Defoe, Alain Rene Le Sage, Walter Scott, Frederick Marryat, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, C. S. Forester, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Wouk, Patrick O’Brian, or any of the other “Sea obsessed” canonical writers we have come to associate with nautical fiction, including William Shakespeare.Yet, to forward such a list is to acknowledge the problematic hegemony of the literary ocean. As a critical

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endeavor, blue ecocriticism necessarily works to consider how Anglophone literary histories have markedly influenced oceanic formation in cultural imaginaries and how such influence (like all Anglophone literary traditions) conceal the influence of other, more diverse representations. Such considerations inherently call to question the situated role of ocean in narratives. Borrowing again from Raban’s distinctions between literatures of the sea and sea in literature, we begin to identify the ways in which Anglophone literary histories exclude, are themselves colonial, and, thus, a controlling mechanism of oceanic perception. Consider, for example the ambient role of ocean in Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Dicken’s Great Expectations (1861), and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), novels that are clearly not literature of the sea but wholly dependent upon the presence of ocean. A  William H.  Gass has explained about food, “It has been wisely noted, in this regard, that we are quite obligated to eat, but there are some perfectly splendid books that never mention the matter” (16). The same can be said of ocean. Consider, too, the metaphoric role of ocean and gothic in Jean Rhys’ Jayne Eyre derivative Wide Sargasso Sea. As Lizabeth Paravisini-​Gebert describes Rhys’ novel—​though Paravisini-​Gebert does not take up the role of ocean per se—​“nowhere has the Gothic mode crossed oceans more powerfully or in more sharp dialogue between the postcolonial and the English Gothic” (252). The brilliance of Rhys’ novel is the recovery of the lost voice of Antoinette Cosway, Bronte’s forsaken Caribbean woman, a castaway of sorts, an islander remanded to Edward Rochester’s brig across the Atlantic. Rhys employs Cosway—​a name that evokes causeway, a kind of breakwater or levee—​as a mechanism for postcolonial critique. Rhys masterpiece triggers, too, questions of how other indigenous or colonized populations might provide variant perspectives on matters oceanic: the Pacific Islanders in Typee or Queequeg in Moby Dick, for example, might offer alternative, critical narratives. I  should note, too, that blue ecocriticism requires not only considerations of diverse representations, but diversity in critique, as well. I  think here, for example of Toni Morrison’s insightful reading of Moby Dick: However intense and dislocating his fever and recovery have been after his encounter with the white whale, however satisfactorily “male” this vengeance is read, the vanity of it is almost adolescent. But if the whale is more than blind, indifferent Nature unsubduable by masculine aggression, if it is as much its adjective as it is its noun, we can consider the possibility that Melville’s “truth” was his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology. (141) My choice here to address Anglophone literatures is, I  hope you will agree, circumscribed and deeply problematic, and I  do so merely as illustrative to the end of developing a more dispersed understanding of blue ecocritical objectives that accounts for expansive understanding of the texts through which

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oceanic representations proliferate. That is, my convenient turn to these canonical Anglophonic texts does not accurately represent my intentions for a much more elastic understanding of how cultural imaginaries educe ocean. I  should just as effortlessly identify the ever-​present role of ocean in books like Denis Johnson’s masterful Fiskadoro. But this is not, by any stretch, a book about ocean’s literary history. Mentz, Raban, Cohen, Bender, and others have initiated those conversations thoroughly, though rarely through ecocritical lenses per se. To that end, too, throughout this book I turn less to the canonical nautical literary tradition in favor of more diverse representations, in genre, agenda, and location, though the familiar, canonical always lurks just below the surface. My objective here, then, is to expose the prevalence of ocean in textual representations in order to provoke conversations about the innumerable other texts that contribute to knowing ocean. In many ways, too, I  do so to consider why it is that ocean is seemingly an intrinsically literary (or more broadly defined, textual) subject, but that ecocriticism remains mostly tethered to the shore in its scope of attention. This question becomes more relevant, too, as technologies of representation become more sophisticated in their methods of portrayal, circulation, and interaction. Synchronously, too, blue ecocriticism maintains an obligation to inquire as to the role of those technologies of representation in global ecologies and media ecologies. It is impossible, for example, to consider the effect of geographic information systems (GIS) on how we know ocean without acknowledging the military influence on the development of GIS technologies, the histories of cartographic politics (and, notably how they are imbued with the ideologies channeled in Anglophonic literatures addressed above and the very notion of empire), the debates surrounding GIS and neogeography in governance, the role of GIS in industrial agriculture, the role of GIS in privacy issues, and a host of other interlocking issues that inform ocean. This is to say, while blue ecocriticism, at times, should train its critical gaze to the sea-​obsessed canonical writers, blue ecocriticism must not be about canonical literature only—​or even “literature” only as the very history of literature is inherently exclusive. Blue ecocriticism requires a more voluminous, heterogeneous trajectory beyond the sea of ink. Blue ecocriticism welcomes the textual flood because while anthropomorphic rhetorics cast floods as destructive, ecologically we know that floods are also revitalizing.

Under the edge of the Sea around Us If ecocritics—​as Greg Garrard and others have—​(reductively) identify the beginning of the modern environmental movement in the West, and, in turn, ecocriticism, as having been born of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring—​specifically the chapter “A Fable for Tomorrow”—​then, equally reductively, blue ecocriticism’s origins might be attributed to Carson’s writings about ocean, particularly her 1951 masterpiece The Sea around Us.14 To make such a claim inherently disrupts the conventional origin story of Western environmental movements and, thus,

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ecocriticism, by preempting that familiar narrative. Likewise, as ecocriticism’s progenitor Scott Slovic has so rightly related, “I still cannot pinpoint the Urtext of ecocriticism” (99). Nor, in my postmodernist (lack of) sensibilities do I  find value in identifying definitive origins. Similarly, then, using a Carson chronology hints of blue ecocriticism’s emergence prior to ecocriticism’s appearance demands some degree of consideration as to why Carson’s thinking about ocean—​ despite the importance and popularity of her oceanic writings—​did not motivate environmentalists, ecocritics, ecocompositionists, environmental philosophers, and so on to the degree that Silent Spring would. And, to follow Slovic’s axiom, we must acknowledge that glimmers of blue ecocriticism appear long before Carson’s writings, forming a substantial body of proto blue ecocritical texts. Yet, Carson’s body of work further makes evident the question of ecocriticism’s oceanic myopia. Keep in mind that The Sea around Us was awarded the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Burroughs Medal for excellence in nature writing (as well as other awards) and remained on the New York Time Best Seller List for eighty-​ six weeks, so its influence outside of ecocriticism is considerable. While Carson received numerous awards for Silent Spring, on the other hand, the book garnered more negative attention (mostly at the hands of the pesticide industry) than did The Sea around us. Likewise, Silent Spring seems anomalous, in some ways, in Carson’s larger attention to oceanic concerns. Note, for example, the success of Carson’s 1941 book Under the Sea Wind: A Naturalist’s Picture of Ocean Life or the impact of her 1955 book The Edge of the Sea. Yet, ecocriticism did not embrace Carson’s oceanic writings as its motivational origin despite Carson’s remarkable influence on our larger cultural awareness of ocean and ocean conservation. In the same way we have labeled Alexander von Humboldt the “Forgotten Father of Environmentalism” (see Wulf), so too can we say that Carson is the forgotten mother of ocean conservation, the maternal attribution reflective of her own claim that the ocean is “the great mother of life.” Perhaps the most significant recognition of Carson’s contribution, though, comes not from ecocritical work, but in the second book of Margaret Atwood’s Madd Addam trilogy The Year of the Flood in which the Gardeners sing praise to the memory of Saint Rachel Carson (372). Carson, by profession, was a marine biologist; her work at Johns Hopkins and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory leading her to a position as an aquatic biologist in the US Bureau of Fisheries prior to her career as a writer. Michael Bryson singles out Carson, along with Loren Eiseley, whom he calls “modern-​day naturalist-​writers” (136) among many other science writers like “Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, Jacques Monod, Jane Goodall, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Louise Young,” and others as two of the most significant popular science writers (135). Importantly, Bryson has pointed to the difficulties Carson faced as a woman working in the sciences at this time (136–​137); note, for example, too, Jonathan Norton Leonard’s complacently misogynistic 1951 New York Times book review of Carson’s The Sea around Us, which concludes,

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“It’s a pity that the book’s publishers did not print on its jacket a photograph of Miss Carson. It would be pleasant to know what a woman looks like who can write about an exacting science with such beauty and precision. (Leonard) Carson’s professional training and experiences contributed to her writing of her “sea trilogy,” which provide lyrical and scientific insights to the whole of the ocean. Carson’s ocean research and writing stand as foundational to the formation of ocean in contemporary Western cultural imaginaries in both their melodic moments of nature writing and her scientifically detailed descriptions as well as her prophetic Maydays regarding ocean degradation. Carson debuted her public writing about ocean in an essay published as “Undersea,” which would become the basis for her first book Under the Sea Wind. It was originally published as part of a 1935 US Bureau of Fisheries brochure called “The World of Water.” The more popularly known version appeared in The Atlantic two years later in 1937. The essay opens with the profound question similar to that which Silko would ask seventy-​five years later in Oceanstory, “who has known the ocean?” and Carson answers, “neither you nor I with our earth-​bound senses” as she explains that humans do not know the oceans as its inhabitants do (322). It is an interesting move to acknowledge nonhuman ways of knowing as central to understanding ocean, particularly since Carson appears to distinguish between terrestrial ways of knowing and aquatic ways of knowing and implies that land-​based methods of observation and experience do not translate wholesale into marine environments. Likewise, Carson connects humans’ limited ability to know ocean to the ability to grasp matters of scale and chrono-​scale perceptions, declaring that “To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-​pervading water” (322). We may even read her phrase “enter vicariously into a universe of all-​pervading water” as indicative of the technology required for human submersion or exploration dependent upon telepresence. The essay conveys themes that became not only foundational to her work in Under the Sea Wind, but that would evolve into the themes that permeate much of her writing, including holistic inquiries into the ecologies of ocean environments ranging from oceanic mega fauna to microscopic organisms, connections between those ecologies and the materiality of the ocean, and expressions of nature as beautiful and vulnerable. Carson, unlike other writers who describe ocean-​oriented organisms as independent entities, works to always depict the ways in which the organisms she describes function in ecological relationships with other organisms and the environments they inhabit. That is, Carson’s writing strives to take up the complexities of ecosystems, not merely individual parts of those systems. Likewise, Carson is alert to shifting material conditions that affect and are affected by those inhabiting organisms. Some new materialist critics like Alaimo have picked up on Carson’s oceanic materialist writings (more about new materialism and ocean in

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Chapter 3), and much of that focus on materiality is evident in Carson’s sea trilogy, beginning with Under the Sea Wind. Carson’s writing in Under the Sea Wind flows like ocean. Reading the book reminds one of continuous shot films in which movement glides from scene to scene with no descriptive disruption; Carson’s imagery moves the reader through the estuarine ecosystems as the reader follows fish to bird to rat to fisherman without a break or cut in the flow. The writing flows and surges in its descriptive objectives. Initially published in 1941, Under the Sea Wind was Carson’s first book, but despite positive public reviews, it did not sell well (Bryson attributes this, in part, to the unfortunate timing of the book’s release in the same moment as the attacks on Pearl Harbor, which consumed the public’s attention (137)). Re-​released a decade following its original publication, in the wake of the success of her second book of marine writing The Sea around Us, Under the Sea Wind became a best-​seller. It is a magnificent work of nature writing that eloquently conveys vivid details we can attribute to Carson’s scientific training as a naturalist and her meticulous methodologies of observations and specimen collections. Under the Sea Wind presents what might be described as narrative vignettes that chronicle scenes of ecological interaction among the organisms of different ocean environments including estuaries, deep ocean places, and rivers that feed bays and seas. The narrative of each chapter emerges from a personified perspective of a nonhuman organism. Notably, several of these scenes integrate the role of human in the ecological interactions, most often as fishermen harvesting in the same waters as the animal characters the narratives follow. Carson carefully places human appearances in these narratives on par with all other organisms; their role cast not as superior organism, but as integral part of the ecological system. Carson’s descriptions of human fisherman, for example, parallel descriptions of herons or other predators fishing. As such, Under the Sea Wind does not promote human exceptionalism in terms of depictions of human as removed from the ecological process; however, human exceptionalism does manifest in the fact that Carson opts to personify the nonhuman protagonists of her narratives. Each vignette describes migration, reproduction, feeding, predation, and death from the perspectives of characters like Silverbar the sanderling, Rynchops the seagull, Scomber the mackerel, and Anguilla the eel. Carson’s use of personification helps drive the narratives and makes accessible her literary labor to convey scientific observations in popularized form. Unlike Under the Sea Wind, The Sea around Us takes a more scientifically objective method rather than a personified narrative approach and conveys Carson’s observations and research in what can be described as popularized science writing. The Sea around Us was initially serialized in 1951 by The New Yorker in three installments identified as a “Profile of the Sea.” The New Yorker had previously published profiles of individuals, but Carson’s series was the first profile the magazine published of a nonhuman.15 The Sea around Us introduces readers not only to the organisms and environments of ocean, but tellingly to the very technologies that allow human access—​particularly research access—​to the inhospitable deeper reaches of the ocean. The Sea around Us, for example, was the first public-​facing

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book to introduce audiences to the connections between the development of sonar technologies during World War II and the use of those technologies in oceanic research. Likewise, The Sea around Us provides descriptions of the use of deep-​water penetrating technologies, like Beebe’s bathysphere and other submarine vehicles, in conducting subsurface research. In 1961, Carson added a new preface to The Sea around Us in which she takes up the relationship between nuclear testing and nuclear waste, warning against practices of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean. The added preface is one of the few moments in Carson’s sea writings that can be understood as a call to advocacy. The Sea around Us and her other works form more of an informational or awareness narrative that seems to imply the type of awareness to advocacy causality that Clark questions. That is, Carson clearly wants readers to be aware of the delicate ecologies of the sea in order to inspire a spirit of protection and stimulate conservationist practice. Bryson describes The Sea around Us as “one of the finest examples of twentieth-​century nonfiction” (137). In 1953, Irwin Allen adapted Carson’s The Sea around Us to documentary film in his movie making debut. Though the film was awarded the 1952 Academy Award for Best Documentary, Carson was so put off by Allen’s adaptation that she never released film rights to any of her other work. Allen’s documentary, which was seen as a commercial success, is composed primarily of stock footage gathered from various research trips and commercial expeditions, as well as substantial footage evidently shot in aquaria, not associated with Carson’s work nor original to the film’s objectives. Likewise,Allen, who would go on to earn the moniker “Master of Disaster” due to his prolific work in making disaster films, focused the film on action sequences, like a romanticized (and overly dramatized) brutal and graphic account of modern whaling. The narrator is repeatedly referring to the whales as “monsters.” The film opens with images of oracular volcanic eruptions and a booming, reverberating narration that recounts the biblical lines regarding the formation of the heavens and the earth and returns to religious contexts in which to situate Carson’s work, rendering Carson’s scientific authority subsumed and devalued by Judeo-​Christian narrative. Allen concludes the film with the speculative premise that melting polar ice caps might lead to massive global floods that would render humans extinct. The final statement of the film, a cliché of fearmongering, delivered in the same booming reverberating narration as the start of the film asks, “Is This The End?” The final frames of the film are of a black screen with the apocalyptic words “The End?” appearing in full-​screen text. Audience reception, however, focused on the film’s “action” footage in scenes that depicted conflict between various sea animals, including a famous black and white scene in which a shark and an octopus battle in what the narrator tells us is an unlikely encounter between these two species. From a technological standpoint, though, it was the documentary’s use of color film that received significant attention. Coincidentally, the same year (1953) that Allen’s adaptation of Carson’s work was released, Robert D. Webb’s film Beneath the 12 Mile Reef was released by 20th Century Fox. Beneath the 12 Mile Reef was only the third film made using the newly developed anamorphic lens technology known as CinemaScope. It was the first

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to use that technology underwater. In 1954, Walt Disney Films released Richard Fleischer’s film adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues beneath the Sea which also pioneered underwater CinemaScope film technologies. Filmed in the waters off Key West, Florida, and Tarpon Springs, Florida, Beneath the 12 Mile Reef depicts Tarpon Springs sponge divers in scenes almost identical to those Allen uses to depict the Tarpon Springs sponge divers in The Sea around Us. Critics noted the film’s CinemaScope underwater footage as the only remarkable aspect of the Beneath the 12 Mile Reef. Like The Sea around Us, critics and movie goers primarily noted the underwater action scenes as the memorable portion of the film, including footage of a giant octopus that attacks the protagonist sponge diver Tony Petrakis (Robert Wagner) in a scene that is eerily evocative of the octopus/​shark battle in The Sea around Us as well as comparable to the divers in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues beneath the Sea film (or, to be honest about it, even many of the underwater scenes that would terrify audiences in Jaws). Two years following the release of 20,000 Leagues beneath the Sea and four years after Allen won the Oscar for best documentary, Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s The Silent World took the Oscar in the same category, marking two underwater wins in a four-​year period. (Notable, too, in 1951 Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-​Tiki earned the Oscar for Best Documentary and Cousteau would win again in 1964 for World Without Sun. No other ocean-​based documentary would win an Oscar until 2009 when the award was given to The Cove.) Based on Cousteau’s 1953 book The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, the documentary was promoted as one of the first films to show the underwater world in full color film—​remember, Allen’s film included some black and white scenes, like the shark and octopus battle. Cousteau’s film also provides images from the deepest point in the ocean filmed at that point in history, from nearly 250 feet below the surface. The technologies employed to provide underwater visual representations in these four films, allowing filmmakers to produce color images of undersea environments, collectively altered the public’s expectations of underwater depictions. Cousteau’s film includes images so strikingly similar to those Allen and Webb use, particularly of sponge divers—​this time in the Mediterranean—​and a brutal whale killing that seeing these films without the specter of the others is almost impossible. That these films were all released within a three-​year period also contributed to their cumulative influence not only in what they determined as relevant or interesting aspects of underwater imagery, but in how those images should be projected, adding to an expectation of what such images should convey. Given the representational similarities between these two documentaries and two fictional films, often to the extent that it becomes impossible to separate the fictional from the nonfictional, we see the role of both technological mediation and visual representation in altering the very fabric of ocean in cultural imaginaries. Unfortunately, Allen’s overly dramatized filmic approaches used in The Sea around Us distracted from the value of Carson’s work. Like The Sea around Us, Carson published early versions of the third book in the sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea, in two installments in The New Yorker in 1955.

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When the book was published, it included several illustrations by Robert Hines, an illustrator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which added a visual dimension to the book’s depictions of marine organisms. Like its predecessors in the trilogy, critics praised The Edge of the Sea for its poetic descriptions and accessible scientific descriptions. Carson began to plan The Edge of the Sea while still working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service before she wrote Under the Sea Wind. Carson had intended the book to serve as a field guide to Atlantic coastal environments, but the book took on a hybrid structure as Carson opted to retain her more literary writing approach rather than adopt more traditional science-​like writing styles common to field guides. The Edge of the Sea examines three distinct Atlantic shoreline environments: the surf zone of New England’s rocky coast, the Mid-​Atlantic’s sandy shores, and the Florida’s Key’s coral coastlines. Carson’s detailed descriptions of these locations are rich with portraits of the abundant animal and plant life found in each region and, often, those descriptions expand into realms of chrono-​ scale representations to consider the evolutionary trajectories necessary for a given organism to appear as it now does. The field guide aspects of the book are informative and meticulous, and the book includes an appendix of organism classifications that furthers the scientific details of many of the species taken up in the book. Like the other two books that make up Carson’s sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea channels detailed scientific information and observations through Carson’s ardent writing, rendering a book of passionate, symphonic nature writing exemplary among the genre. In fact, Bryson has famously described Carson’s sea trilogy as among the most “definitive works of American nature writing and scientific popularization” (144). Countless reviews, in fact, adapt and truncate Bryson’s assessment to identify Under the Sea Wind specifically as one of the “definitive works of American nature writing.” Despite the magnificence, breadth, and rigor of Carson’s oceanic writings, neither environmentalists nor ecocritics have taken up her work as motivational catalyst in the same ways that environmental activists embraced Silent Spring as a monumentally inspiring text. In fact, in her 2018 collection Rachel Carson: Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment, Sandra Steingraber does not include any of Carson’s sea writings. Steingraber, a renowned ecologist whose work focuses on connections between environment and human rights, justifies this editorial decision, claiming that While Carson’s sea books occasionally allude to environmental threats, they call for no particular action. Carson’s theory of social change here, if she had one, seems to rest on helping her readers visualize the oceanic world below the waves, or teeming shorelife—​full of communities of interacting creatures that possessed agency and distinct personalities—​and so inculcate a sense of wonder and humility.Wonder and humility, she believed “do not exist side by side with lust for destruction.” (xxvii)

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Steingraber’s justification, of course, is valid from an editorial position, but it also brings to mind the same kinds of questions that Clark raises regarding the relationship between written work—​literary, critical, or otherwise—​and action and advocacy. Clearly, Carson intended her writing to inspire both awareness and advocacy, but as Steingraber explains, Carson doesn’t provide details or direction for specific action. From a strictly editorial standpoint, I understand Steingraber’s position, yet, it is the larger ecocritical question regarding the connections we may wish to find between Carson’s sea writings as public and popularized science and nature writing and the effect of those texts on cultural imaginaries and environmental advocacy or action. Regardless of any direct or perceived calls to action, Carson’s sea writing offers foundational points of departure for blue ecocritical work. Carson’s insistence upon depictions of organisms as connected in ecological networks, her attention to chrono-​ scale oceanic histories, her depictions of the material qualities of ocean and shore, and her dedication to representations of ocean to the end of making public audiences aware of ocean ecologies inform the beginnings of blue ecocritical work.

Adrift in the humanities This book is published as part of Routledge’s series on environmental humanities and as part of EarthScan, Routledge’s catalog of “books and journals on climate change, sustainable development and environmental technology for academic, professional and general readers.” It emerges, as well, as the title indicates, from and within ecocriticism, and, as such, streams between disciplinary demarcations. It is at once a critique of ecocriticism’s terrestrially dominated methodologies and epistemologies and a broader interdisciplinary consideration of ocean in humanities and posthumanities inquiry. It stands not at a metaphoric crossroads where ecocriticism and environmental humanities meet simply because ecocriticism is necessarily already subsumed within environmental humanities just as environmental humanities is dependent upon the ecocritical and ecocritical derivatives. In this way, then, Blue Ecocriticism acknowledges the literary history bound to representation of ocean while navigating toward a more encompassing consideration of the kinds of artifacts that now weigh upon ocean within the cultural imaginary. Given both the physical and material characteristics of ocean, and the role ocean plays in global human migration and circulation, aspects of energy humanities inevitably seeps into blue ecocriticism, as well, as do medical humanities, and certainly digital humanities. From within this disciplinary emulsion, blue ecocriticism will necessarily need to address many oceanic issues even beyond what can be contained within the limits of this book’s coverage. Questions concerning representations of and information dissemination regarding climate change; ocean rise; ocean acidification and coral bleaching; fisheries management; plastics and microplastics; chemical pollution; hypoxia; illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (and the role of human trafficking and labor); aquaculture; oil drilling; wind power; hydroelectric;

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coastal engineering; habitat destruction; piracy; and more contribute to the emerging inquiries of blue ecocriticism and the evolution of submersive epistemologies. Like many academic conglomerate disciplines, the environmental humanities can be thought of as an umbrella term that accounts for perspectives from many humanities and humanities-​adjacent fields, including, but not limited to, literary studies, critical theory, philosophy, religion, postcolonial studies, history, sociology, anthropology, nature writing, media studies, rhetoric, and composition (notably, digital rhetorics, environmental rhetorics, and cultural rhetorics), cultural geology, human geography, and many subsets of those disciplines, not to mention, of course, ecocriticism and ecocomposition. Like other umbrella terms, too, environmental humanities resist definitive definition, embracing instead a perpetual nascent state of becoming. Serpil Opperman and Serenella Iovino begin their Introduction to their collection Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene with an epigraph quoted from The Environmental Humanities Newsletter published by the University of Oregon’s Environmental Studies Program in 2014 that establishes a working definition of environmental humanities: “the environmental humanities contextualizes and complements environmental science and policy with a focus on narrative, critical thinking, history, cultural analysis, aesthetics, and ethics” (1). They expand this definition identifying that “Environmental Humanities is interdisciplinary. It brings the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences together in diverse ways to address the current ecological crises from closely knit ethical, cultural, philosophical, political, social, and biological perspectives” (1). They further explain, The fundamental argument, then, fueling the research in the Environmental Humanities is that urgent environmental problems that stretch from the geological to the biological are also essentially social and cultural issues deeply interwoven with economic and political agendas and thus demand solutions on many dimensions. (3) Their objective in opening their anthology with these lines and, in turn, mine in citing their use of the quote from The Environmental Humanities Newsletter, is to emphasize not only the interdisciplinary nature of the environmental humanities, but to distinguish connections to the indispensable relationship between the humanities and the sciences and the irrefutable connections to economics and politics. Likewise, we can read Oppermann and Iovino’s work as contributing to the long-​need dismantling of intellectual and academic silos in favor of truly interdisciplinary approaches to research. Similarly, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer begin the introduction to their anthology Energy Humanities by defining energy humanities as “research that attends to the social, cultural, and political challenges posed by global warming and environmental damage and destruction” (1), a definition that is clearly inseparable from definitions of environmental humanities. However, Szeman and Boyer clarify energy humanities’ focus on “a specific issue in relation to today’s environmental challenges: energy,” as they show that “the use and abuse of energy

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have had significant impact—​perhaps the most significant impact—​on the shape in which we find the planet today” (1). Docking these definitions alongside one another demonstrates the confluence of objectives and distinctions of specificities between these emerging currents within the humanities. In 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the now famous Rede Lecture,“The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution,” in which he argues that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups” (4). Snow defines these groups as the sciences and the humanities (he defines the humanities as literary intellectuals). In 2009, Jerome Kagan introduced the idea of a third culture in the intellectual landscape:  the social sciences.16 These cultural divisions have remained central to the disciplinary demarcations employed in Western education, divisions that tend to promote academic silos, disciplinary territorialism, and intellectual hierarchies, many of which affect larger cultural, political, and economic valuing of and within education. In the past quarter century, that value has manifest culturally as an embrace of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. In response to this cultural tide, the humanities have begun to pay particular attention to four inextricable STEM-​related approaches to humanities research: digital, environmental, medical, and energy. Each of these is articulated as a modifier for the humanities: digital humanities, environmental humanities, medical humanities, and energy humanities. Blue ecocriticism absorbs and is absorbed by each of these affiliate approaches to humanities in a broader humanities-​based suspension.The critical perspectives and methodologies provided by each of these humanities-​based approaches inform (or have the potential to inform) blue ecocritical work and the emergence of submersive epistemologies. In the same moment as these subsets of humanities emerge, the humanities faces what many scholars and critics have equated to an extinction-​level event that academic doomsayers claim may cleave the humanities from higher education altogether. The narrative of the demise of the humanities is populated with examples of failing job markets for graduate students, massively reduced numbers of humanities majors, questions regarding the humanities in General Education curricula, eliminations of foreign language departments, and shrinking resources for humanities research. Notably the humanities receive less than 0.5% of all federally allocated research funds in the United States. Inherent in this popular portrait of the demise of the humanities resides nostalgia for a particularly confined notion of what constitutes scholarly work in “The Humanities.” Such a nostalgia pines for a heyday that privileges a homogenous western (and, generally Anglo male) worldview. Blue ecocriticism resists such nostalgia in its unmooring from canonical literary representations and in its focus on posthumanities and the posthuman, as well as its embrace of feminist, indigenous, and cultural methodologies of inquiry and representations of ocean. To that end, blue ecocriticism espouses the implied dissolving of the humanities as traditionally conceived, particularly in terms of reconfigurations of disciplinary demarcations and intellectual territorialism. To be clear, this is not an argument opposed to humanities methodologies, but an argument in favor of untethering and diffusing them, to turning them back to the

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intellectual primordial ooze and benthic vents from which they evolved. This is to say that the “destruction” of the humanities overshadows a moment of reconstruction, of redefinition, of an emerging humanities and posthumanities.The end of one iteration opens doors to the possibility of new formations; the humanities mutated, evolved. The unmaking of the humanities offers an opportunity for further reconfiguration that emphasizes truly interdisciplinary work, the very kind of work blue ecocriticism forwards. This opportunity positions the digital humanities, environmental humanities, medical humanities, and energy humanities not as pandering to STEM disciplines (ok, maybe a bit of pandering to the STEM zeitgeist), not as a mad scramble to rationalize the value of the humanities within a STEM-​dominated intellectual culture, but as the next phase in intellectual evolution that operates not by way of disciplinary demarcation but by way of hybridization, particularly in terms of methodological progression.What comes next is likely to be a new variant of the humanities—​perhaps one that is unrecognizable as the humanities qua the humanities as we now understand the term—​that drowns traditional disciplinary demarcations in favor of a more inclusive and fluid intellectual agenda. The trajectory of the humanities’ next iteration, with blue ecocriticism in tow, provides a greater possibility of diverse (and divergent) participation, expanding work that welcomes marginalized voices, indigenous methodologies, cultural rhetorics, and alternative literacies. Voices previously minimized stand to drive scholarly work in the humanities writ large and blue ecocriticism more specifically. To account for such inclusivity, blue ecocriticism should address the role of posthuman thinking and the “posthumanities” as central to its consideration of ocean and representations of ocean. The posthumanities decenter the very notion of the human to account for the nonhuman, including attention to the technological, the animal, the material, and the ecological, all central components of blue ecocritical work. The posthuman turn inculcates a turn posthumanities and blue ecocritical work requires that such a turn be understood as consideration of humanities yet-​to-​come: the nascent humanities hinted by turns to digital, medical, energy, and environmental iterations of humanities. Fed by these divergent humanities undercurrents and methodological upwellings, Blue Ecocriticism evolves in the unsettled maelstrom of an epistemological and methodological whirlpool. That said, I want to be clear, too, that blue ecocriticism is by no stretch a unique call within the humanities for more critical attention to matters of ocean. Though profoundly situated in response to ecocriticism’s ocean deficit and within the surge of environmental, digital, medical, and energy humanities, blue ecocriticism also shares its legacy with calls for what has been called a “New Thalassology,” a term derived from the Greek word for the sea, thalassos, and forwarded by Nicholas Hordern and Peregrine Purcell in their book The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, in which they examine the human history of the Mediterranean, or what Kären Wigen has identified as the “ur-​sea” for the new Thalassology (718). Borrowing from Mentz’s claim that this new Thalassology is “rewriting the cultural history of the sea” (Bottom, xi) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores’ point that “the environmental humanities—​with its interdisciplinary, multispecies, feminist,

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and materialist currents—​has generated a lively new body of work concerned with theorizing the ocean” (133), I situate calls for blue ecocriticism among calls by Mentz and others for maritime humanities, blue cultural studies, and literary oceanic studies. For Mentz, a new maritime humanities would “speak to at least three current critical discourses:  globalization, postcolonialism, and environmentalism” (Bottom, xi), yet the ocean-​centered environmental aspect of his trefoil has surfaced only minimally in ecocritical work. In the concluding chapter of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, Mentz reminds us that it is “through language and narrative that our culture has always grappled with living in an unstable, ocean-​drenched environment” (Bottom, 98). He calls for literary studies to shift from traditions of focus on land-​centered narratives and texts to those that describe the sea. “We need sailors and swimmers,” he writes, “to supplement our oversupply of warriors and emperors” (Bottom, 98). These stories, he reminds us, are abundant throughout literary history, despite their notable absence from literary scholarship. In response, he proposes blue cultural studies, “a way of looking at terrestrial literary culture from an offshore perspective, as if we could align ourselves with the watery element” (Bottom, 99). Mentz, in a bibliographic essay that concludes Shakespeare’s Ocean, outlines what he calls a “new maritime humanities.” In “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,” Mentz expands upon his definitions providing a more fully developed enunciation of such studies. Mentz, in this expanded explanation, adds to his trident critical discourses (globalization, postcolonialism, and environmentalism) the necessity of ecocriticism and the histories of science and technology as central to any emerging maritime humanities.As I explain throughout this book, the role of technology is inseparable from any human ability to know ocean. This dependence upon technological mediation manifests, as well, in the indissoluble relationships between the emerging iterations of humanities, particularly that of environmental and digital humanities. Clearly, too, the pairing of environmental humanities and digital humanities influences the very conception of energy humanities. Problematically—​though only slightly—​Mentz moves between three terms he uses synonymously for this oceanic revitalization:  New Thalassology, Blue Cultural Studies, and Maritime Humanities, occasionally, too, identifying “maritime literary criticism,” as well (Toward, 998). These shifts in name indicate degrees of distinction between the disciplinary and methodological approaches. That is, they should not be applied synonymously. For instance, the adjective maritime used to describe maritime literature or maritime humanities conveys a specific notion not of ocean per se, but of matters associated with the sea such as military service, shipping, or navigation. The word maritime conveys oceanic correlation such as living adjacent to the sea or a close relationship to the sea, but not of the sea itself. It is also most frequently used to describe human activity in relation to ocean. The neologism thalassology suggests the study of the sea, blending the Greek roots Thalassos and ology to form a word implying academic inquiry about the sea, implying something different from maritime and describing an action of study as opposed to naming a

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category of artifacts. While I happen to think that clarification of terms is necessary in establishing new areas of study—​or naming ones previously unnamed—​is important, no matter the name given to such studies. The last decade has seen significant academic interest in ocean in the humanities, particularly from within History. Kären Wigen, writing in 2006 in “Introduction: Oceans of History” for a special forum in American Historical Review (AHR), proclaims that “maritime scholarship seems to have burst its bounds; across the discipline, the sea is swinging into view” (717). Wigen explains, “No longer outside time, the sea is being given a history, even as the history of the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea” (717). The AHR forum takes up an approach that asks scholars to look at single bounded bodies of water: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific, distinctions Wigen recognizes as problematic as “the Atlantic is inescapably an imperialist category” (720). Similarly, in 2013, the journal Atlantic Studies published a special focus section on Oceanic Studies, in which editor Hester Blum seems to echo Wigen’s assessment: “whether in Atlantic, Black Atlantic, transnational, or hemispheric studies; or in ecocritical, spatial, planetary, or temporal reorientations, the seas have bounded, washed, transported, and whelmed the terms and objects of such inquiries” (151). Blum proposes that the sea should become central to critical conversations about global movements, relations, and histories. And central not just as a theme or organizing metaphor with which to widen a landlocked critical prospect:  in its geophysical, historical, and imaginative properties, the sea instead provides a new epistemology—​a new dimension—​for thinking about surfaces, depths, and the extra-​terrestrial dimensions of planetary resources and relations. (151) Likewise, in her introduction to a special issue of Ecozon@ focusing on Mediterranean Ecocriticism, Iovino explains that the issue scrutinizes “the Mediterranean both in what it is (or might be) and what it represents (and might represent) for ecocriticism” (2). She explains that ecocritical exploration of the Mediterranean “means translating our values into the language of co-​existence and humility, being ironic, non-​self-​centered, doubtful, open to multiple interpretations; it means consciously deciding to demilitarize and decolonize our identities, in ecological, cultural, and political terms” (12). Blue ecocriticism bubbles up within such an atmosphere. But here’s the problem for ecocriticism:  despite calls for a New Thalassology, Blue Cultural Studies, Maritime Humanities, Maritime Literary Criticism, or whatever else one wishes to dub scholarly focus on matters ocean, ecocriticism, unlike other humanities disciplines, has not headed the call. Blum’s optimistic inclusion of ecocriticism in her litany of disciplines and subdisciplines from which the seas bound is an overestimate. Mentz makes a similar point regarding literary criticism in general: “The contribution of Anglophone literary scholars has thus far lagged somewhat behind other fields in the maritime humanities. Despite abiding interest

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in figures like Melville and Conrad, literary scholars have been slow to announce a ‘maritime paradigm’ or to constitute ‘maritime literature’ as a subgenre” (“Toward,” 999). While Mentz’s Anglophone focus is problematic and limiting in terms what constitutes literature, his claim is accurate in revealing the significant ocean deficit in all literary studies as compared with wider spectrums of environmental humanities. If literary studies—​broadly defined—​has been slow to take up ocean, ecocriticism is among the most lethargic of literary criticisms or environmental humanities subsets to do so. Consider, for example, the last decade of scholarly articles published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the preeminent journal of ecocriticism: as of this writing, since 2010, ISLE has published forty issues that include approximately 388 scholarly articles. Of these, a total of only nineteen articles might be considered related to matters of the ocean (that’s about 4% of the total articles published in the journal over a decade) and many of these appear in the 2104 special issue on global warming. And, truthfully, that’s a liberal estimate. While all these articles are important ecocritical scholarship, only a handful actually addresses matters of ocean. For example, Stacy Alaimo’s 2012 article “States of Suspension:  Trans-​corporeality at Sea” is certainly about the ocean and is foundational to blue ecocriticism. Likewise, Iovino’s wonderful article “Mediterranean Ecocriticism” is certainly oceanic and ecocritical. Yet, as wonderful articles as they are, Cheng Li’s 2014 article “Echoes from the Opposite Shore: Chinese Ecocritical Studies as a Transpacific Dialogue Delayed” is about ecocriticism’s migration to China, not the role the Pacific plays in that movement. Saba Pirzadeh’s 2015 article “Children of Ravaged Worlds: Exploring Environmentalism in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and Cameron Stracher’s The Water Wars” may be about books that include ocean (and even Water Wars only minimally addresses ocean by way of polar ice cap melts), but the ecocritical work here is geared toward understanding ecocriticism in children’s literature. Neither is about matters of ocean. Of the 19 articles I have identified, only about half actually take up matters of ocean. I read this to suggest that around 2% of the scholarship published in ISLE during the decade of the New Thalassology have addressed matters specific to the representation of ocean in literary texts.This is certainly not to fault the authors of the articles noted, as their work advances ecocritical motives honorably and they are certainly not obligated to take up blue ecocritical objectives. I point this out merely to exemplify ecocriticism’s history of pervasive ocean deficit, and by default, its contented berthing on terra firma. Yet, as The Meat Puppets sing: “Though they call it terra firma; It dissolves beneath my feet.” Mentz’s New Thalassology unfolds as a call for early modern literary scholars to “move beyond the now-​established narratives of New Historicist and Atlantic history toward cultural meanings of the oceans themselves” (“Toward,” 999)  by way of four primary factors: globalization, environmentalism, technology studies, and postcolonialism (“Toward,” 1000). His own specific interest falls to “using the oceanic environment to rethink early modern nature poetry . . . and to reconsider paradigms of early modern globalization” (“Toward,” 1000). He is quick to note, too, that “in our current cultural moment of ecologism, environmentalism,

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and ecocriticism, what seems surprising is not a new interest in the sea, but that maritime concerns have taken so long to penetrate literary ecologies” (“Toward,” 1000). While I  concur with Mentz’s diagnostic, it is his loyalty to canonical literary texts that necessarily must be cast off. If, as he claims, “a blue cultural studies must consider the physical environment as a substantial partner in the creation of cultural meaning,” (“Toward,” 1008), then that physical environment, that cultural meaning cannot be limited to maritime canon or even Anglophone literatures more generally. In addition to both the AHR and Atlantic Studies special focus segments, other humanities-​driven journals have paid tribute to ocean in attempts to bring ocean concerns to the fore in various disciplines. In literary studies, for example, PMLA, the premiere journal of the Modern Language Association, dedicated its “Theories and Methodologies” section in one 2010 issue to oceanic studies, publishing ten oceanic studies articles. Like Mentz’s claims about the deficit of ocean in literary studies, Margaret Cohen, in her introduction to the section “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe,” explains that “despite the preeminence of maritime transport in making the modern world, literary scholars across the twentieth century passed over its impact with their gazes fixed on land” (“Terraqueous,” 657). Collectively, the ten articles amount to one of the most substantial calls for attention to ocean in literary studies. Cohen’s introduction calls out literary studies’ failure to engage ocean in any significant way. She writes, This disregard for global ocean travel even where it is a work’s explicit subject matter is so spectacular that it might be called hydrophasia. The syndrome is part of a pervasive twentieth-​century attitude that the photographer and theorist Allan Sekula has called “forgetting the sea.” (“Terraqueous,” 658) Ultimately, Cohen is interested especially in the representation of oceanic travel in novels, a study she extends in her insightful book The Novel and The Sea, a fundamental contribution to maritime literary criticism, but one that floats just outside the currents and tides of ecocriticism. Yet, to parse what counts as ecocritical and not ecocritical is only of minor value in establishing blue ecocriticism as both an ecocritical-​adjacent approach or in relation to the New Thalassology, Blue Cultural Studies, Maritime Humanities, Maritime Literary Criticism, or any other germane body of work that advocates for ocean-​centric research. In fact, I contend that many of the most influential works to take up ocean and inform blue ecocriticism are neither inherently ecocritical nor inherently not ecocritical. They are at once more expansively environmental humanities and then situated among maritime literary analysis, blue cultural studies, maritime humanities. For example, though Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times presents magnificent analysis of many works of art and writing, she couches the project as “a work of cultural studies” (8), in order to expand her analytical range to a more humanities-​broad work. Ultimately,

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such taxonomies are nothing more than convenient ways for academics to situate their work within more encompassing oceanic frames, as the importance of work by Alaimo, Mentz, Blum, Cohen, and so many others who do not position themselves within ecocriticism are, nonetheless, invaluable to the work of environmental humanities and any form of New Thalassology. Ultimately, all these critical approaches work toward an alleviation—​or at least an acknowledgment of—​critical ocean deficit.

Ocean deficit and ecological literacy Ecocriticism maintains a compulsion to promote ecological literacy (aka “ecoliteracy” or “environmental literacy”),17 adhering to the idea that providing analytic information of representation will result in a specific kind of correct, more enlightened cultural mindset. Ecocriticism promotes a kind of literacy, a type of “correct” way in which to read or see the world with an eye toward the ecological. It is, as Clark names it, an assumption that ecocriticism will “form a semi-​ autonomous sphere of effective agency and human self-​understanding,” which, in turn, will influence a more “eco-​cosmopolitan” human identity through which ecologically responsibly behavior and action will emerge (20). Clark is dead-​on in asking whether ecocriticism is delusional in assuming that “cultural representations [have] more centrality and power than in fact it has” (21). Clark sums up this position: “to exaggerate the importance of the imaginary is, in itself, to run the risk of consolidating a kind of diversionary side-​show, blind to its own insignificance” (21). That is to say, too, that Clark brings to question the idea that awareness leads to action; however, even in acknowledging the very idea that there is an avenue to presenting “awareness,” we must consider the politics of that awareness and the role environmental and ecological rhetoric plays in such politics. With this in mind, it becomes necessary to consider ecocriticism’s adherence to a desire to motivate the formation of the cultural imaginary as a form of literacy, a designed political intervention in cultural formation. I want to be clear, however, in making such a claim that I am not arguing against the substance of the ecocritical imperative, nor making an argument oppositional to ecological literacy. This is not an anti-​ecocritical position. It is not an anti-​ecological/​environmental awareness position. It is, rather, an attempt to consider and perhaps disorder the manner in which ecocritics forward awareness and to shed light upon the very ideologies that fuel the assumptions that awareness leads to desired actions. Thus, I use the occasion of addressing blue ecocriticism to consider ecocriticism more broadly as a moment to take up Clark’s call that “any commitment to a new planet-​wide eco-​cosmopolitanism cannot be met by an ecocriticism which, in the past, has often been too intellectually, politically and morally simplifying” (21). Clark’s critique of ecocriticism’s conviction that the interpretation of cultural artifacts will motivate changes to the cultural imaginary and, thereby, incite transformation of human interactions with the natural world—​from individual actions to global behavior—​reveals a political objective of world building. Such

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a project—​despite our fervent commitments to its underpinning ecological and environmental ideologies—​ethically demands perpetual self-​reflective critique in order that we not merely understand the complex implications of the ecocritical project, but always question the role of that project to the ends of further gestation and in defense of counter positions. When Brayton adapts Louv’s concept of nature deficit to propose ocean deficit, the notion of “deficit” implicates a sense of lack, which implies disadvantage or deficiency. As Teresia Teaiwa explains in “What Remains to Be Seen: Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature,” Once were people without writing. This is the dominant narrative of Pacific literature. Such a view rarely takes the lack of a recognizable alphabet or script in most of the inhabited islands of the Pacific at the time of contact with Europeans as a neutral difference. Lack is deficiency.” (730) Nature Deficit designates handicap, a lack of fundamental knowledge and a lack of elemental experience. The imposition of lack in this definition imposes a value structure and a politic to a specific knowledge set. It also imposes an imperative:  you need to know this; not knowing this reveals your lack. In the case of ecocriticism, that knowledge set (amorphous as it might be) often blurs specific ecological literacies with environmental politics and the assumption that literacy paves the way to environmentalist thought, and, in turn, action. Certainly, ecocritics frequently acknowledge the distinction between ecological literacy and environmentalist thought, but more often than not, environmental politics is always already inculcated in the very idea of ecological literacy. Thus, part of the objective here to unearth ecocriticism must be to reconsider the very idea of literacy as a component of ecocriticism and ecocomposition and the manner in which ecocriticism promotes ecological literacy as an inherent aspect of the disciplinary mission and the ways in which approaches to ecological literacy have adapted ensconced politics of literacy. This becomes of particular importance when considering ecological literacies in blue ecocritical contexts given the paired role that transoceanic travel and literacy historically play in cultural migration and colonization. Historically, literacy’s value—​and, in turn, the assumed value of ecological literacy, digital literacy, or any other literacy—​g rows from its opposition to illiteracy, a concept rhetorically imbued with value. The illiterate lacks. Illiterate suggests more than not having the ability to read and write, more than being uneducated; it conveys, as all language does, an ideology of value and individual worth. Describing an individual as being “illiterate” is not merely an identification of lacking a particular skill set—​reading and writing, for example—​it is a statement of imposed difference. The lack of literacy is conveyed as derogatory, and the label used historically to mark particular populations as Other. As David Barton explains, in various moments in history, illiteracy has been characterized as a disease, as a contributor to criminal activity, as an economic burden, and as a factor in unemployment, among

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other negative attributes. Literacy is employed as a measure of “civilization.” Those who are literate are understood to be civilized; those not literate deemed uncivilized. Consider, for example, the distinction made between the ability to read as oppositional to localized knowledge of wilderness expressed in Taika Waititi’s 2016 film Hunt for the Wilderpeople when Ricky (Julian Dennison) realizes and is mortified to learn that his adopted, aging mentor Hec (Sam Neill) cannot read, yet Hec’s local knowledge is able to keep them alive in the New Zealand bush. As the film concludes, we see Hec learning to read, and viewers are handed an excessive moral lesson that literacy signifies improvement of the character/​subject, despite the film’s recurring theme that the two characters exchange and question each other’s literacies—​local and textual. Historically, such demarcations stood/​stand as foundational to colonial enterprise and employed to silence indigenous literacies and homogenize populations. Sylvia Scribner explains it this way: “Historically, literacy has been a potent tool in maintaining the hegemony of elites and dominant classes in certain societies” (11). As Annette Vee explains in Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing, literacy might be better understood in terms of access rather than as a synonym for education (47). Some are granted access, others are not. Vee goes on to show how educational systems are frequently designed to provide that access, but in ways that maintain hegemonic power structures by way of determining what constitutes literacy/​education.That is, what education systems promote as knowledge, as literacy, is always already the reinforcement of a particular ideological worldview. Thus, providing literacy—​a euphemistic way of saying convincing a population that being a particular kind of literate is the more valued position—​even when couched as altruistic, harbors an ideological imperative of homogenization and cultural hegemony. Clearly, this is a reductive overview of the politics of literacy; however, it is critical that we always be alert to the politics and power invoked in notions of environmental or ecological literacy. Literacy, that is, is never free of ideological agenda. Yet, when it comes to ecological literacy, rarely are such agendas unpacked. Ecological literacy advocates (of which I  consider myself one) generally understand and trust in the belief that ecological literacy is a necessary component of long-​term ecological sustainability and a significant contributor to the reversal of ecological crises and, therefore, not only right (morally and intellectually), but a categorical imperative. As Liet-​Kynes, the Imperial Majesty’s Planetologist in Frank Herbert’s 1965 Dune hears his father’s ghostly words resonate such an imperative, “The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences” (438) and that “you must cultivate ecological literacy among the people” (440). Renowned ecological literacy proponent Fritjof Capra, cofounder of the Center for Ecoliteracy and former Chair of the Center’s Board of Directors, defines ecological literacy in this way: “Over billions of years of evolution, the Earth’s ecosystems have evolved certain principles of organization to sustain the web of life. Knowledge of these principles of organization, or principles of ecology, is what we mean by ‘ecological literacy’ ” (“New Facts”). He adds to this definition that human survival is dependent upon ecological literacy:  “In the coming decades, the survival of humanity will

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depend on our ecological literacy—​our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly” (“New Facts”). Capra, then, is adamant: This means that ecoliteracy must become a critical skill for politicians, business leaders, and professionals in all spheres, and should be the most important part of education at all levels—​from primary and secondary schools to colleges, universities, and the continuing education and training of professionals. (“New Facts,” emphasis added) On the surface,18 Capra’s claim seems apparent; many of us agree with at least the basic tenets of his claim. Yet, his claim’s superficiality demands ecocritical engagement. Capra’s claim seems bound up in a rhetoric of scientific authority; yet, as Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, and other critics of science have shown, master scientific narratives are themselves ideological and hegemonic. That claims like Capra’s are forwarded under the assumptive and seemingly exclusive authority of the scientific narrative excludes counter or divergent narratives of ecological engagement.That is, Capra’s ecological literacy appears to emanate from a singular kind of narrative that claims authority over other narratives. Capra’s understanding of ecological literacy, as articulated above, for example, leaves little room for Indigenous perspectives about principles of organization, instead implying acceptance of Western science’s organizational structures, despite the fact that the Center for Ecoliteracy, which he cofounded, professes Indigenous knowledge as a foundation for its work. This is not to imply that Capra’s understanding of ecological literacy is wrong in either its intent or content, only that he presents it as the only way to be correct, leaving no room for alternative literacies. Likewise, that Capra frames ecological literacy as necessary for the survival of humanity exposes anthropocentric emphasis in ecological literacies, imposing a hierarchical value system in the very web of life he lauds. Capra, that is, ultimately appears less interested in ecological sustainability than he does in human sustainability. Similarly, too, binding ecological literacy to formal educational structures and civic and professional occupation further exposes the very notion of literacy as political, as a method for orienting the cultural imaginary in a correct literate way, simultaneously constructing a rhetoric of ecologically illiterate subjects as uneducated and civically irresponsible and, thereby, unformed or incomplete. Over the last twenty years or so, widely accepted notions akin to Capra’s that ecological literacy is necessary has resulted in education systems adding ecological literacy general education requirements, certificate programs, majors, minors, and/​or degree programs, not to mention extracurricular emphasis on “green” initiatives, further validating ecological literacy as necessary for the correctly formed subject, aka the educated subject or the literate subject. Capra is not alone in his promotion of ecological literacy; in fact, I would venture to say that those of you reading this book have significant investment in ecological literacy, as do I in writing it. Outspoken proponents such as David W. Orr and C. A. Bowers profess the educational imperative of ecological literacy. Orr, for

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example, in his foreword to Michael K.  Stone and Zenobia Barlow’s collection Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World, writes, I think H.G. Wells had it right when he said that we are in a race between education and catastrophe. This race will be decided in all of the places, including classrooms, that foster ecological imagination, critical thinking, awareness of connections, independent thought, and good heart. (“Foreword,” x) He continues: environmental education is becoming well-​ established in non-​ profit organizations, public agencies, schools, colleges and universities. The words “environmental education,” however, imply education about the environment, just another course or two, a curricular outbuilding to the big house of formal schooling where the really important things go on. We will have to aim toward a deeper transformation of the substance, process, and scope of education at all levels. The term “ecological literacy” identifies that goal. (“Foreword,” x) Orr, then, echoes his often-​repeated mantra, “all education is environmental education” (“Foreword,” xi).19 Orr has argued in favor of ecological literacy since the early 1990s. He effectively claims that education systems have ignored integrating the role of ecological sustainability in all levels of education and that ecological crises are directly tied to “the process of education and the way we define knowledge” and the “belief that educational institutions are potential leverage points for the transition to sustainability” (Ecological Literacy, 83–​84). For Orr, “the failure to develop ecological literacy is a sin of omission and of commission,” the result of which, he writes, is that we now have “a generation of ecological yahoos” and that as “ecological illiterates they will have roughly the same success as one trying to balance a checkbook without knowing arithmetic” (Ecological Literacy, 85–​86). Or, consider the challenge Wes Jackson proposes to universities across the United States to “ask seriously what it would mean to have as our national goal becoming native to this place, this continent?” (3). As I have said, such arguments about ecological literacy are neither necessarily wrong nor are they poorly argued.To be fair, Orr’s desire for ecological literacy and for education systems to take better account for the role of ecology, environment, and sustainability across all educational disciplines is central to the ecocritical and the environmental humanities missions. Fortunately, too, schools, colleges, and universities have begun to increase curriculum that support such efforts. However, the language Orr employs establishes the ecologically illiterate subject as not merely a subject that lacks, but as an inferior subject. Orr’s language is heavy handed, but it also exposes the ideological nature of the very notion of literacy and the system of exclusion literacy establishes. For Orr, like Capra, locating ecological literacy in

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formal educational structures further enforces such hierarchies. In Capra and Orr’s ecological literacy, educational institutions become the site for delivering literacy, for fixing the ecological yahoos. This suggests that in order for a subject to become ecologically literate, that subject must first have access to the educational system providing that literacy. Schools provide access; formal education offers gateways to power. As such, and as has been the case historically, formal educational systems function as mechanism of exclusion and the marker of literate or illiterate stand as indicative of that access. Like Orr and Capra, C. A. Bowers has long argued for massive restructure of formal educational systems as an avenue to creating more ecologically aware subjects. For Bowers, formal schooling lies at the heart of ecological awareness because “the curriculum performs as important social-​control function” (9). Bowers contends that “the scope of the environmental/​population crisis brings into question the adequacy of Western culture and the assumptions upon which it rests” and those cultural assumptions—​what he terms “cultural literacy”—​are primarily circulated by way of formal education (3).Yet, Bowers breaks—​somewhat—​from Orr’s vision of ecological literacy, writing that the insight Orr’s ecological literacy is intended to provide might not be widely shared, nor survive long in the streets and shopping malls where the students continually encounter messages designed to sustain the current cultural myths. The problem that Orr’s recommendations help illuminate is that we have a wealth of information about the destruction of species and the contamination of the environment, but we have few analogs of how to live in a sustainable relationship with one another (including other supposedly less advanced cultural groups) and with the rest of the biotic community. (180) For Bowers, then, Orr’s ecological literacy represents only a fraction of the needed curricular and literacy reform in higher education toward a more encompassing cultural literacy. Bowers’ use of the term cultural literacy echoes E. D. Hirsch’s controversial core knowledge approach forwarded in the 1987 best-​selling book Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs to Know, a book designed to promote the Reagan administration’s nationalist education agendas and that received significant criticism for its exclusionary notions of both literacy and “American.”20 Yet, Bowers’ notion of cultural literacy emerges alongside Orr and Capra in understanding the power of institutionalized formal education in validating and circulating particular literacies, but similarly ignores the political and ideological criticism Hirsch faced regarding the exclusionary politics of such literacies. For Bowers, Capra, and Orr, use of formal education to promote ecological or cultural literacy is validated by the righteousness they ascribe to those literacies. Again, to be clear, my position here is not to disavow ecological literacy, but to dissolve the underlying assumptions that because ecological literacies promote ecological responsibility, they are somehow devoid of or exempt from the politics of literacy and exclusion.

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For blue ecocriticism, then, the very notion of literacy requires critical consideration, no matter the focus on oceanic literacy, ecological literacy, or even cultural literacy. Literacies, or ways of knowing, should be considered beyond the educational, beyond the institutional, beyond the pedagogical. Embodied and multisensory literacies, for example, play significant roles in better understanding human–​oceanic interaction in terms of health. Indigenous literacies, as well as alternative, divergent, or counter literacies necessarily play a significant role in oceanic literacy, as well. Likewise, ecocritics must account for the histories and politics of transitions from orality to literacy and now digital literacy or electracy in understanding the ways in which oral, literate, and digital knowledge is placed in hierarchical value structures. Thus, in any consideration of ecological literacy or the implications of phrases like nature deficit or ocean deficit, attention must be paid to the encumbered ideologies and cultural representations we ascribe with value over other representations. We must always account for the politics of literacy. As Vee puts is, “If enough people call something literacy, it becomes literacy.” (51, italics in the original). As Edward Stevens puts it in Literacy, Law and Social Order, “Literacy was not a neutral technology. As a tool for individual and social transformation it was always governed by purpose” (8–​9). What critiques like Vee’s and Stevens’ show is that literacy is never apolitical. Garrard clearly shows, too, that ecocriticism always has a “moral and political agenda” (3). Tellingly, too, attention to literacy politics often reveals rigid, linear thinking that is bound to structures akin to those that Clark critiques regarding ecocriticism. Reductively, such linearity is manifest in assumed causal relationships like “awareness leads to action” or “literacy leads to improvement.” These are cartographic, land-​ based logics that suppose/​imposes strictures on what constitutes a literacy, how one attains it, and the possibilities of it uses. Literacy, as I have said, is never absent of ideology and politics that guide or orient the literate within familiar, identifiable knowledge sets. Literacy, as commonly understood, is not fluid. Literacy institutionalizes and homogenizes knowledge routes across and through conquered terrain. Literacy imposes and enforces boundaries. Literacy directs learners as to which way to go; literacy orients but rarely navigates. Literacies maintain trade routes; they are not for wayfaring. Literacies do not necessarily resist fluidity, but they are often immiscible, requiring deliberate agitation to form variant emulsions of literacies. And yet, even in trying to use these liquid words, these aquatic analogies to describe literacy’s linearity as oppositional to fluid epistemologies, the metaphors function only at scale, only at a scale of anthropocentric metaphor. Look more closely into seawater, for example, and we see that solidity permeates fluidity. The material aspects of seawater at microscales reveal particles of salts and chlorides and other fragments of organic and inorganic matter, including human-​ made toxins, petrochemicals, and other particulates. Gasses permeate the liquid too. As such, seawater is only ever liquid at specific macroscales. At smaller scales seawater appears to be a mix of solid particles within water suspensions. Zoom in even closer and particles of salt dissociate at the molecular level, taking on the properties of water. The liquidity of saltwater is revealed as formed by a collective

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of dissociated solid, gas, and liquid that constitute the overall liquid.Thus, to employ metaphors of states of matter reveals the ways in which those metaphors can only ever convey desired meanings at specific scale. Later, I take up scale in greater detail. For now, we see the scale of metaphor as a means for underscoring and disturbing the solidity and potential fluidity of literacies and the complexity of metaphor to the end of developing submersive epistemologies within a blue ecocriticism bound to the disciplinary imperative of ecological literacy. Again, this is not an argument against ecological literacy, but an acknowledgment that from the perspective of blue ecocriticism, ecological literacies should not (always) adhere to the processes of literacies cultivated in land-​based thinking and such adherences are inextricable from the metaphors through which we conceptualize those very literacies. I use the occasion of blue ecocriticism to rethink the very ideas of ecological literacy and, in turn, the very idea of literacy as scholars like Vee has critiqued the politics of literacy. Blue ecocriticism and submersive epistemologies encourage dissolving our adherence to linear, grounded (and entrenched) processes; opportunities arises to flood our thinking about ecological literacies in new, critical ways. Certainly, it could be argued that this consideration of ecological literacy is not unique to blue ecocriticism, but I take the liberty of using the occasion of untying ecocriticism from its mooring to further expand this aspect of ecocritical thinking.

Indigenous knowledge Blue ecocriticism erodes the land-​based logics of ecological literacy. In doing so, it exposes literacy’s systemic exclusion of—​and subsequent erasure of—​Indigenous knowledge-​making systems and methodologies and acknowledges the critical role diverse cultural oceanic knowledge plays in both representations of ocean and human–​ocean interaction. Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe begin their collection What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy by showing that “the term indigenous, and thus the concept of indigenous knowledge has often been associated in the Western context with the primitive, the wild, the natural” evoking condescension and dismissal of “the insight and understanding indigeneity might provide” (3). Indigenous knowledge, as Semali and Kincheloe put it, “reflects the dynamic ways in which the residents of an area have come to understand themselves in relationship to their natural environment and how they organize that folk knowledge of flora and fauna, cultural beliefs, and history to enhance their lives” (3). Indigenous knowledge, they explain, however, “is an ambiguous topic that immediately places analysts on a dangerous terrain” (3). For academic work, they show the dilemma in defining indigenous knowledge and what it means in the contexts of millions of indigenous peoples of the world is central to the postmodern and postcolonial debates on the origins of knowledge and the manner in which it is produced, archived, retrieved, and distributed. (4)

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Such debates are bound, too, in histories of literacies, and the use of literacy practices to inscribe dominant colonial knowledge while simultaneously erasing or overwriting Indigenous knowledge, marking hierarchies of value in divergent literacies. This is particularly evident in shifts that elevated written knowledge making and communication as more valuable than oral traditions, a practice always at work in neocolonial actions. Concurrently, such conversations regarding literacy tend to establish an acceptance of scientific knowledge as inherently universal and politically neutral, whereas Indigenous knowledge retains the devaluing marker of the local and the cultural as secondary (if not tertiary or completely irrelevant) in relation to scientific knowledge. More often than not, Indigenous narratives, methodologies, practices, and epistemologies are dismissed as “superstition” rather than considered for their contributions to human–​environment interactions and knowledge making. Reductively, this hierarchy becomes evident in the cultural imaginary’s construction of science versus story. As Madhu Suri Prakash shows, this perception of its so-​called cultural or gender “neutrality”—​of being neutered from culture or gender, among other non-​ universalizables—​ is emphasized and affirmed by its propagators, fans, faithful followers to distinguish (S)cience (sometimes written with a big “S” to underscore its rank and distinction qua modern systems of knowledge) from beliefs, theories and practices that constitute the knowledge systems of indigenous or traditional peoples. (157–​158) More recent shifts from written literacies to digital literacies may exacerbate such values but may also provide new methods not just for archiving, curating, and circulating Indigenous knowledge but for composing new Indigenous methodologies and knowledge. Likewise, Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, in some of the most rigorous and eye-​opening examinations of ocean and Indigenous islanders, directly explains that “the ocean has been vital to Indigenous genealogies and practices” (142). To oversimplify, we can think of Indigenous knowledges as kinds of local knowledges that are perpetuated through and permeate cultural histories. Such knowledges interweave significant degrees of localized technological and ecological ways of knowing yet is often dismissed as primitive or devoid of scientific (read:  colonial) authentication despite long histories of application and accuracy. Likewise, the very act of identifying Indigenous knowledge as “a kind of local knowledge” conveniently homogenizes and ostracizes a diverse and divergent array of ways of knowing under a dismissive and monolithic reductionism. Over the last decade, academic efforts have emerged to account for and to empower Indigenous knowledge and methodologies as critical contributions to the very idea of knowledge making in academic, cultural, professional, and civic contexts. Such efforts surface cautiously, however, as there are evident concerns regarding entrenched institutional power such as that of Western education and research systems to appropriate Indigenous methodologies in ways that disconnect them from their

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Indigenous origins. Such a decoupling risks erasing the subjectivity and agency of the Indigenous peoples from whom such knowledge and methodologies are taken, what we might think of as epistemic colonialism. As Iris D. Ruiz and Raúl Sánchez show, colonial practices of epistemic abduction “amount to a de facto project of epistemic neocolonization, if we understand ‘colonization’ to include not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture and the defining of knowledge (of which language is a crucial part)” (xiii). Note, too, that the history of “taking land” predominates narratives about colonialism despite the historical global practices of taking water that as often as the taking of land disrupted, displaced, and decimated Indigenous populations. Rarely does that narrative address taking ocean, despite colonial and neocolonial appropriations of oceanic access and resources throughout human history. We see this manifest in conflicts between state-​run fisheries management and Indigenous harvest rights, as exemplified by, say, arguments regarding salmon harvest along Alaska’s Kenia peninsula, arguments that are visible in the official dialogue and the day-​to-​day cultural interactions and prejudices among Non-​Indigenous residents, Indigenous peoples, and tourists. Ecocriticism frequently annexes Indigenous knowledge as avenue to addressing ecological crises and cultural representations of ecological crises and human–​ environment interactions, often within a shadow of a romantically mythologized relationship between Indigenous lifestyles imagined as inherently sustainable and local environments. As Garrard explains, “the assumption of indigenous environmental virtue is a foundational belief for deep ecologists and many ecocritics” (129). Ecocriticism, despite good intentions and a rhetoric of openness regarding Indigenous knowledge, inherently contributes to an academic neocolonial abduction of Indigenous knowledge. Much like Clark’s question regarding the causal relationship between awareness and action by way of ecological literary criticism, though, questions regarding the long-​term effect of integrating Indigenous knowledge, methodology, and practice in ecocritical thinking mostly remains unexamined, particularly in terms of effect not only upon Indigenous and academic knowledge but upon the larger cultural imaginary. Garrard, by way of Shepard Krech III, shows that media images during the 1970s capitalized on the mythologized narrative of Indigenous peoples’ harmonious relationship with nature—​ particularly Native Americans—​to create an image of the “ecological Indian” (130), an image Garrard calls potent, but one that does not necessarily “accurately represent the environmental record of historical Native Americans” (133). The narrative—​one imposed in colonial fashion upon Indigenous ways of being—​reduces Indigenous knowledge to primitive, natural ways of knowing, discounting the rich understanding of complex local systems Indigenous knowledge stands to provide, often, as noted before, as superstition. Semali and Kincheloe contend, too, that Indigenous knowledge has the potential to “counter Western science’s destruction of the earth. Indigenous knowledge can facilitate this ambitious twenty-​first century project because of its tendency to focus on relationships of human beings to both one another and to their ecosystems” (16). Questions of assimilation, erasure, and neocolonialization, however, cannot be ignored.

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Given the significant role ocean has played historically in colonial enterprises and the very recent willingness of academic discourses to consider Indigenous knowledge, blue ecocritical work should necessarily account for Indigenous knowledge systems and should be infused throughout blue ecocritical efforts. For blue ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledge is particularly critical if—​ as noted earlier regarding Arola’s concepts of melding methodological approaches—​it is to promote an epistemology that conveys connection not “between” varying methods in a linear sense of connectivity, but as a fluid, kinetic way of knowing that diffuses, mixes, and remixes multiple ways of knowing. This approach might be thought of, as Alaimo puts it, as “dwelling in the dissolve” (Exposed, 2). The risk of suggesting this, however, in this academic venue is the potential that academic contexts will either subsume Indigenous knowledges and render them and the subjects that produced them impotent in academic discourse or fetishize them, devaluing their contribution. Like saltwater, Western literacies and academic discourse (and other master narratives) are corrosive. Yet, the biggest danger is that Indigenous knowledge systems are not acknowledged in any way and overwritten by the institutional power of academic knowledge making, erasing their histories, stories, archives, methodologies, and epistemologies. This is always the risk of exposure, as ecocritics are aware. On the one hand, exposure hopes to convey recognition and awareness. On the other, exposure is always a risk of vulnerability. As Kovach puts it, the “bringing cultural knowledges into Western research spaces” risks “misinterpretations, appropriations, and dismissals that often accompany Indigenous ways of knowing within the academy” (12). Importantly, too, blue ecocriticism’s engagement with Indigenous knowledge must also avoid, as Donaldo Macedo has put it, “falling prey, on the one hand, to a blind romanticism with indigenous knowledge and, on the other hand, to a poisonous paternalism characterized by a form of ‘charitable racism,’ ” a term he borrows from Albert Memmi (xi). By way of Macedo, then, blue ecocriticism recognizes that a global comprehension of indigenous knowledge cannot be achieved through the reduction binarism of Western versus indigenous knowledge.The essence of indigenous knowledge is found in the experience of the colonized which is never restricted to Third World and other “Tribal” contexts. (xi) I attempt throughout this project, then, to account for Indigenous perspectives when I  can, confessing my own lack of literacy and my limitations in ability to do so. I acknowledge that my access to such perspectives is confined to published accounts and that, as such, those accounts are always already colonized by way of academic literacies and publication practices that evolved from European academic and literary traditions—​the same traditions that lie at the bottom of contemporary literacy practices. In this way, I  am guilty of participation in such neocolonization by adapting Indigenous narratives and knowledge making to this

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project. I acknowledge my own accountability to this end and my own absence of knowledge, my own Socratic ignorance. However, my methods in this project strive to work fluidly among many knowledge systems, acknowledging Indigenous ways of knowing while, as Alaimo puts it, “this does not mean I advocate phenomenological encounters or entirely local epistemologies” (Exposed, 3) as the only avenue to engaging the cultural imaginary ocean. To this end, by referring to Indigenous knowledge, I do not intend to create homology, but to imply vast difference. For example, I have repeatedly identified blue ecocriticism’s untying from land-​based ideologies and methodologies.Yet, to do so risks devaluing Indigenous knowledges and positions such as that taken up by N. Scott Momaday in “The Man Made of Words,” in which he emphasizes the need for a land ethic and ties that need to the importance of storytelling and orality in the history of his people. Thus, my call to move away from land-​based thinking toward aqueous epistemologies is not intended to devalue land-​based epistemologies for to do so risks further silencing of non-​ocean-​located Indigenous ways of knowing. Likewise, I am not able ethically to convey Indigenous knowledge making as my own; to do so would be a blatant act of academic neocolonialism. Any discussion I  forward of indigenous knowledge can only ever be an appropriation. I hope that such acknowledgment drives an ethic of recognition rather than adapting a homologizing approach that reduces Indigenous and tribal difference to a singular representation. Nor can it stand as absolution. This book takes up blue ecocriticism primarily from a North American and Western perspective, though some conversations—​such as those pertaining to the role of oceanic travel and colonialism—​will necessarily look to non-​Western and to Indigenous views, as well. In many ways, my perspectives are trapped by my own histories and stories. It is, I  admit, a book wrought with what Anne Ryen has identified as “methodological discrimination” (220). I acknowledge the critical importance of Indigenous ways of knowing in addressing cultural representations of ocean. Similarly, from a methodological perspective, I wholeheartedly agree with Kovach’s insight that “Indigenous methodologies disrupt methodological homogeneity in research” (12). Kovach is right to point to the history of attempts to integrate Western methodologies into Indigenous methodologies and the “need for methodologies that are inherently and wholly Indigenous” (13). I acknowledge my inability to provide those in this project, but I do not approach this project blind to them. Any consideration of representations of ocean in the cultural imaginary must necessarily recognize that the effects of such representations impact all peoples and all cultures, not just select groups that employ political and economic power to privilege the production, circulation, and consumption of specific narratives and representations. Similarly, blue ecocriticism cannot overlook the widespread ramifications of material consequences of those representations and our engagement with ocean in relation to all human inhabitants of the planet—​as well as the anthropomorphic primacy of the human in saying so. To that end, borrowing from Garrard, blue ecocriticism, particularly when focused on literary histories of oceanic representation, accounts for the fact that

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“neither novel nor lyric poetry were part of traditional Native cultures, meaning that writers have had to graft oral traditions on to them” (136). Such grafting can be read as indicative of Ruiz and Sánchez’s notion of neocolonialism and of participation in abductive assimilative practices while simultaneously (and perhaps contradictorily) adapting the historically powerful acts of writing and education to disseminate Indigenous ways of knowing. As such, and as noted earlier, any inclusion of Indigenous knowledge in blue ecocriticism in always already encumbered in histories of colonization and literacy. Many Indigenous methodologies grow from a strong commitment to community. As such, Indigenous insight often makes evident relationships between the human and the nonhuman members of that community. That is to say, Indigenous methodologies might, on the one hand, be oversimplified as emphasizing aspects of human community, but more to the point, Indigenous methodologies often delineate a community’s environment and the non-​ human inhabitants of that environment as inextricable parts of the community. In this way, then, Indigenous narratives and methodologies contribute to our understanding of community not as inhabitants of a place, but as part of that place in the same way that the place is indistinguishable from that community. Similarly, as Kovach relates in Indigenous Methodologies:  Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts, “Many non-​Indigenous young people are attracted to Indigenous approaches as well because, I believe, it has to do with a generation seeking ways to understand the world without harming it” (11). There is a growing interest among ecologists and other scientists in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), what Henry P. Huntington defines as “the system of experiential knowledge gained by continual observation and transmitted among members of a community” (“Observations,” 237). Huntington explains that “as a system of knowledge, TEK is more than an accumulation of facts and conjecture. It is a way of organizing one’s understanding of the natural world, and as such it includes spiritual aspects of the proper relationship between humans and their environment” (“Traditional,” 64). Huntington, an independent researcher whose O Arctic Ocean conservation research contributes to the work of the organization Ocean Conservancy, specializes in environmental policy and indigenous/​traditional knowledge, particularly as it pertains to climate change, conservation, and natural resources management. A proponent of TEK, Huntington explains that The idea of respecting and including Indigenous knowledge in environmental research and management is a laudable step in a positive direction. But good intentions are not sufficient. It is tempting, when engaging with a different system of knowledge or different type of expertise, to pick those facts and views that accord nicely with what we already believe. Accepting Indigenous observations as reliable contributions to the scientific knowledge base is engagement only at the superficial level. And even here, we may dismiss observations that do not accord with our understanding. (“Dimensions”)

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Much of Huntington’s research seeks ways to combine Indigenous and scientific knowledge to provide more comprehensive understanding of local ecosystems. He has developed several methodologies for learning Indigenous ways of knowing and accounting for them in concert with scientific research. He emphasizes mutual respect between ways of knowing, particularly when addressing what appear to be incongruent or incompatible knowledges. Though I do not take up Huntington’s research in depth in this project, it is specifically his work with understanding concepts of wilderness (see “Traditional”) and his extensive research about marine mammal harvest and TEK that contributes to knowledge making within blue ecocriticism. While Huntington’s attention to TEK focuses mostly on policy development and ecological observation, blue ecocriticism’s attention to textual representations of ocean demands not only attention to Indigenous methodologies and ways of knowing, but to the representations of Indigenous perspectives across all Indigenous populations and across diverse textual formats. If writing stands as emblematic of colonial literacy practices, then blue ecocriticism must not limit its consideration of oceanic representations to that which is understood as “literary” nor to the written word.To this end, blue ecocriticism is particularly influenced by expressions of ways of knowing such as those in Karin Amimoto Ingersoll’s majestic work Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Ingersoll introduces a Hawaiian way of knowing that is not grounded in land-​based place, but in ocean as the center of place-​based knowing. Her seascape epistemology emerges from Indigenous Hawaiian embodied and sensorial ways of knowing ocean. “When I enter the ocean,” she begins her powerful book, “my indigenous identity emerges” (1). She explains, “I become aware of my pelagic origin as I  soak in the same salty waters as Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian] centuries before me” (1). Ingersol’s ocean-​based epistemology articulates the potential power that he‘e nalu [surfing] and other ocean-​based knowledges, such as ho‘okele (navigation) and lawai‘a (fishing), offer to cultural awareness and affirmation within the reality of a colonial history and of neocolonial systems that continue to subject Hawaiian knowledge and identities. (3) She explains: Ocean-​based knowledges help to mobilize Hawaiian bodies through a specific time and space in ke kai [in the sea] that anchors Kānaka [plural of kanaka, native] in existence as ever-​shifting and negotiating beings within the Western institutions of statehood, capitalism, and ecologically challenging development. Her work “aims to bring the physical movements of he‘e nalu, ho‘okele, and lawai‘a back into an ontological perspective that speaks to an ethical experience of

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movement through the world and life” (3). For Ingersoll, he‘e nalu, ho‘okele, and lawai‘a are foundational to oceanic literacy because “all involve a knowledge situated in a specific place and space, which is oceanic” (5). As such, Ingersoll’s seascape epistemology informs submersive epistemology not as an appropriation, but as acknowledgment of the power of Indigenous ways of knowing ocean, as empowering Indigenous voices, and as deconstruction of hegemonic Western oceanic narratives. Ingersoll’s seascape epistemology is of interest to me as haole (nonnative) who has spent time navigating and fishing Hawaiian waters. I have written elsewhere of the incongruencies of my own fishing-​driven ways of knowing ocean and those that I learn from Kanaka Maoli and Hapa. (Hapa is used casually now among Hawaiians to refer to anyone whose ancestry is part Native Hawaiian, but not “full blood.”The history of the word, however, is bound in racial politics and was, at one time, used as derogatory for Caucasians. Austin Aslan’s young adult novels in the Islands at the End of the World series provide wonderful insight into the word’s use.) And while my formulations of blue ecocriticism have been influenced by these differences in ways of knowing, my encounters with Hawaiian ways of knowing can only ever be peripheral, tourist, and appropriative.Yet, Ingersoll’s work is critical to blue ecocriticism, particularly in terms of her emphasis upon embodied and sensorial experiences as ways of knowing, in terms of her reinvigorated notions of knowing place and space, and in terms of her initiatives to think beyond land-​based ways of knowing. Predating Ingersoll by two decades,Will Kyselka, in An Ocean in Mind, also turns to Hawaiian ways of knowing in order to understand not just ocean, but the very processes by which humans come to know. Kyselka explains that he is interested in “the process, curious about what it’s like to get an ocean of information in mind, transform it into knowledge, and then trust mind and senses to find the way to distant lands” (ix). Kyselka is specifically interested in ho‘okele, in how Indigenous island populations learned to navigate the Pacific without any instrumentation and to find other lands. Kyselka calls this Indigenous navigational methodology “wayfinding.” Wayfinding, particularly when placed in conversation with Tim Ingold’s notion of wayfaring, suggests a less-​than-​linear way of knowing, a method driven less by destination than by the experience of flow and movement and the cultural history of that understanding. Kyselka’s work unfolds in connections between ocean, sky, and land, depicting not only connections between various geographic forms—​the ability, for example to know where one is on the ocean based on the ability to see stars and moon—​but the cultural narratives that have retained and passed down such knowledges. Ingersoll’s seascape epistemology empowers resistance against the literate urge to map, against colonial pressures, including political, military, and tourist, as well as the literacies that are inseparable from those. In an era when politics and neocolonialism are indissoluble contributors to environmental devastation, climate change, and sea rise, Indigenous knowledge becomes even more relevant to Indigenous populations facing environmental catastrophe that are at once global and local. Consider, for example, the ways in which sea rise along West Africa is decimating communities

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in Togo, Ghana, and Mauritania. Island communities along the 4,000-​mile stretch of sub-​Saharan West coast of Africa from Mauritania to Cameroon face the greatest impact of sea-​level rise. Whereas predictions for sea-​level rise globally predict rises of two to two and a half feet by the end of the century, some of the islands along this stretch of coast experience rise of a hundred feet per year (Fagotto). Representations of ocean in this region rarely reach Western audiences, US audiences in particular, remaining part of the ocean unseen (more about this in Chapter 3), yet they are critically important to ocean-​knowing. Matilde Gattoni’s photo essay “The Waves will take Us Away,” for example, provides astonishing images of ocean rise in West African coastal communities. Similar situations unfold in small communities around the world. Jordi Pizarro’s photo essay “Waiting to Vanish” depicts, for example, the effect of sea rise on villagers in the Bay of Bengal. Likewise, in July 2020, the South African–​based film and animation collective Lucan released a trailer for a new animation series called Isaura. Set in Mozambique and written for children, Isaura is an environmentalist-​themed series designed to teach children about environmentalist issues relevant to the east coast of Africa. It focuses on ocean conservation and climate change from both political and social perspectives. The protagonist Isaura, a young girl from a small fishing village in Mozambique, empowers other children to become advocates for their villages and their home environments. These visual representations of an ocean crisis bring to bear the inseparability of Indigenous, local knowledges from the global ocean. This same inseparability saturates the writings of Epeli Hauʻofa, a Tongan and Fijian anthropologist whose work questions the impact of globalization on Indigenous Pacific populations. Hau‘ofa contends that “development”—​ what Geoffrey White identifies as “the central trope defining relations between the indigenous Pacific and global capitalism” (xiii)—​becomes a colonial method for creating poverty; he explains that within a literacy of development “suddenly our world changed; we were poor” (qtd in White, xiii). “Underdeveloped,” Hau‘ofa explains, became tied to Indigenous. In his renowned essay “The Ocean in Us,” Hau‘ofa writes of a kind of consciousness shared among many peoples of Oceania that is linked to the Pacific Ocean itself: Our diverse loyalties are much too strong for a regional identity ever to erase them. Besides, our diversity is necessary for the struggle against the homogenizing forces of the global juggernaut. It is even more necessary for those of us who must focus on strengthening their ancestral cultures in their struggles against seemingly overwhelming forces in order to regain their lost sovereignty. The regional identity that I  am concerned with is something additional to the other identities we already have, or will develop in the future, something that should serve to enrich our other selves. (42) Hau‘ofa’s regional identity grows from efforts to decolonialize island territories in the South Pacific.

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Attention to Indigenous ways of knowing is critical. For ecocriticism in general, and blue ecocriticism more specifically, attention to representations of Indigenous knowledge must not be overlooked. However, such recognition also reveals the need to navigate between the Indigenous, the local, the regional, and the global while accounting for the dislocation of the Indigenous from location. That is, isolating a specific Indigenous knowledge or methodology risks removing its place-​ based context. Blue ecocritical work necessarily must account for the risks of, to use Heise’s term, “deterritorialization, understood as the weakening of the ties between culture and place” (21). Perhaps, then, for the purposes of blue ecocriticism, Heise’s notion of an “ethic of proximity” becomes of particular importance. Heise turns to Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics in which he provides this example of ethics of proximity: moral responsibility prompts us to care that our children are fed, clad, and shod; it cannot offer us much practical advice, however, when faced with numbing images of a depleted, desiccated and overheated planet which our children, and the children of our children, will inherit and have to inhabit in the direct or oblique result of our collective unconcern. (217–​218) What Bauman, and in turn Heise, addresses is the question of proximity, the focus on the local. But in addressing the Indigenous, the question of an ethics of proximity complicates not only the position of the local in the global but the bonds between the local and the evolution of Indigenous ways of knowing. Dislocating Indigenous ways of knowing from the Indigenous places in which those ways of knowing emerge risks devaluing the very idea of indigeneity. For blue ecocriticism, the question of proximity and dislocation in terms of Indigenous knowledge becomes of particular interest since both concepts emerge from land-​based logics, from the idea of connectivity to a place, most often understood as a place of habitation. Blue ecocriticism dislocates the spatial understanding of such thinking simply in the recognition of ocean as a fluid place in which location is always shifting, flowing. Ultimately, the question of the Indigenous unfolds as a question of locality, particularly in the contexts of decolonial efforts and histories of colonial economic and cultural power tied to globalization. However, for blue ecocriticism, as the question of Indigenous ways of knowing ocean are indispensable, they are also bound to questions of representation and scale. They are also tied by ocean to co-​constitutive narratives of diasporic cultures. Like Indigenous perspectives, blue ecocriticism requires, as well, attention to the diasporic ocean, to the narratives of those human populations displaced from their Indigenous locations and what those representations convey about ocean itself. If we are to consider the role of displacing Indigenous knowledge from the places of their indigeneity, then representations from diasporic cultures stand to provide significant opportunities for blue ecocritical consideration, as well.To oversimplify,

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we might say that the very idea of diaspora is bound to ocean, though not exclusively. For example, prior to transatlantic human migrations, Jews were known as wanderers without a homeland, but their wanderings primarily retained land-​ based displacement. Yet, since post transoceanic travel expanded such population movement, Jews have become a global diaspora. Likewise, to engage representations of the human–​ocean interactions, other diasporic populations’ ways of knowing ocean are of critical importance. Consider, for example the emergence of the Greek diaspora, which carried Indigenous Greek ways of knowing the Mediterranean to other oceans of the world, such as to the migration of many Greeks to Tarpon Springs, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico, where the Greek culture has melded with local environments as represented in the films I mentioned earlier: Beneath the 12 Mile Reef, The Sea around Us, and even 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea. Ian Chambers takes up the Greek diaspora, and the larger Mediterranean diaspora, in Mediterranean Crossings, proposing what he calls the ocean’s “liquid materiality” (5) as a method for engaging the postcolonial Mediterranean. Diasporic narratives are, thus, indispensable to the work of blue ecocriticism. Consider, as well, the role of ocean in the narratives of the era of transatlantic slave trade, what Paul Gilroy names The Black Atlantic. While much of the work in African diasporas has focused on the Atlantic diasporas, black Indian Ocean diasporas also formed as a result of slave trade and black Mediterranean diasporas also formed as result of African exploration and conquest. Consider, too, the Irish diaspora following the Irish famine. Or, the southern Chinese and Indian diasporas perpetuated by the “coolie trade” of the early nineteenth century. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey explains, “The use of aquatic metaphors, a maritime grammar of the ‘peoples of the sea,’ helps us to recognize the importance of the ocean in the transnational imaginary and in diaspora theory in general” (30).Yet, DeLoughrey is clear that while ocean is crucial to understanding diaspora, such understanding also traps ocean in histories of oceanic territorializing. Much of the work in diasporic cultures tied to literary criticism can be attributed to work emerging from cultural studies.Yet, as important as this work is, little work has been forwarded to consider the ecological and ecocritical ramifications of diasporic–​oceanic intersections. Like the role of cultural rhetorics in understanding Indigenous ways of knowing, cultural rhetorics play a significant role in addressing diasporic oceans, as well.

A sense of oceanic place Indigenous knowledges are frequently characterized as being specifically local, connected to place and to sense of place. Similarly, diasporic knowledges are tied to place, though places of (often forced) migration or exile, places from which a population is absent (i.e., the “homeland”). Both Indigenous and diasporic ways of knowing share a fundamental connection between knowing and place. Place-​ based thinking influences a significant portion of work in ecocriticism and, certainly, in ecocomposition. The very idea of a “sense of place” plays significantly

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into the ecocritical imperative. Note, for example, Heise’s influential work Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global or the dozens of other books and articles that employ the phrase “sense of place”—​or even our off-​handed use of the term as a way of explaining unexplainable connections we have with places. Nedra Reynolds defines the idea of “sense of place” as where “textual, material, or imaginary, are constructed and reproduced not simply by boundaries but also by practices, structures of feeling, and sedimented features of habitus” (2). Yet, a sense of place becomes problematic in marine environments. The very distinctions between place and space identify that individual places are always emerging within the same, overlapping spaces. Natural, cultural, and ideological constructions of place fluctuate in never-​ending cycles of place. Any “sense of place” can only be established in fleeting glimpses pinned to specific historical moments and specific habitations. Yet, in such distinctions, oceanic environments impose another complexity in that the space of ocean eschews the rigidity and continuity of terrestrial space. Certainly, chronological scale reveals instability and constant change of land-​based environments, but the very scale of such spatial transformation in marine environments occurs at accelerated rates as compared with terrestrial change due, in part, to varying scales of fluid movement in current and energy dispersion as compared with solid earth, rendering the very ways in which space and place can be imagined not merely different, but differently complex. Thus, senses of ocean places require different methods of understanding and expression. Likewise, because human interaction with ocean places occur by way of distinctly different forms of technological and cultural mediations than do terrestrial interactions, blue ecocritical approaches to sense of place inevitably surface in ways that cannot always adhere to land-​based thinking, despite being bound to familiar terrestrial logics imposed and guided by the limits of language and metaphor. Humans inhabit ocean differently than land and thus develop a sense of its placeness differently. Though ocean permeates many ways of living, we inhabit ocean adjacently. We live on its edge. Even vessel-​based inhabitation occurs on the surface, on the top edge. Deep water habitation currently can only be achieved as tourist, as traveler, and only for limited amounts of time and only with specialized technology.21 If ocean is a place, it is a place we visit, a place from which we must return. As Stacy Alaimo so tellingly (and unintentionally) puts it, “having returned from a week on the Gulf of Mexico, where sea life was sparse…” (111). Ocean is a place from which we return, from which we desire to return. Not returning from the sea is understood to imply death, and such failures of return saturate literary and visual representations depicting ocean as human graveyard, fueling cultural thalassophobia.22 Thus, unlike most terrestrial places, ocean places form in the cultural imaginary as tangential, as bound and connected to the terrestrial: the coastal community, the floating solid construction of vessel, even the rigidly fabricated submersible. If sense of place is understood to foster a sense of belonging, a connection between human and location, then senses of place attributed to ocean exist on the border. As such, cultural imaginaries formulate ocean in relation to the terrestrial. Consider again, for example, Ingersoll’s examples of he‘e nalu (surfing), ho‘okele

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(navigation), and lawai‘a (fishing), all of which describe human activities that retain two primary characteristics: entry into and return from ocean and some degree of technology and technological knowledge. To be clear, do not read this reductive assessment as devaluing the role of Ingersoll’s seascape epistemology, of Indigenous (or any) immersive experiences in ocean, of embodied knowledge, or of the significance of the senses of place that grow from these experiences and ways of knowing. Rather, consider the depth of encumbrance of terrestrial thinking in the very concept of sense of place as attuned to oceanic places. Let me offer an example. In considering concepts of a sense of place in relation to the ways in which we identify oceanic places, the majority of our methods for naming, describing, or even imagining those places are anchored not just to land-​based logics and languages, they are also tethered to land-​based reference points. That is, attributing placeness to ocean is always already framed in the cultural imaginary by way of places not-​ ocean:  Ingersoll’s ocean is defined by its proximity to and relationship with the Hawaiian Islands; Hauʻofa’s ocean is known through its relationship with South Pacific islands and populations. The name The Grand Banks does not refer to the ocean of the North Atlantic, but to the underwater plateaus of the continental shelf. Mariana’s Trench is not ocean, but a formation of rock. Silfra is not ocean, but a fissure between the two tectonic plates of the European and North American continents. Even the very identifications of Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, Caribbean, and so on are not references to oceans or seas, but to the locations of those oceans in relation to the primacy of land-​based references. Likewise, even celestial navigation relies on the ability to see the horizon to fix a position. As DeLoughrey explains, the fluidity of the sea poses a challenge to the ability to render it into embodied and fixed place, so authors and artists necessarily employ certain localizing figures such as the boat (or ship), the shore (or beach), and the body, human or otherwise. (135) For a moment, though, let go of those situated ways of knowing the place of ocean and engage in a thought experiment—​or for those of you who, like me, have had this experience enough times to understand this sense of place, recall a memory with me—​imagine being on a boat on the ocean, far enough offshore that you cannot see land.23 The boat floats at the surface with the ocean floor a thousand feet below. Imagine, then, leaving the boat wearing scuba gear—​a technology that in early iterations referred to the “the scuba tanks” as an “aqua lung,” a technological apparatus that augments the capacity of the human biological lung so as to permit human respiration in an environment that is inhospitable to the human respiratory system. Imagine, then, diving to a depth of about 60 feet.24 The water is turbid; light has dissipated significantly, red and orange now filtered from the visible spectrum, though you can still see in all directions, but only because your mask encases your eyes in air, the media for which the human eye is adapted, bringing the above-​ocean

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surface media capacity with you. Using your buoyancy compensator device, a technological augmentation that prevents your body from sinking or floating too rapidly in the aqueous media, you establish neutral buoyancy, a condition of neither floating nor sinking.You drift in the water and your sensory perceptions alter. Being neutrally buoyant resists the pull of gravity; you do not sink. It also thwarts buoyancy; you do not float to the surface. 60 feet down is approximately the equivalent of a five-​story building, if you need the terrestrial reference, or the distance from the goal line to the 20-​yard line on an American football field. Not too far down, but here, the additional two atmospheres of pressure on your body affect your position in the water, affect your embodied sensation of depth, the pressure felt immediately in your ears and sinuses. The limited light alters your visual perception. Only the bubbles as you exhale through your regulator provide any sense of up or down. Bubbles always go up toward the surface due to the material conditions of gravity and the structural density of gas and water. It is easy to become so disoriented in this mid-​water place that inattentive divers may swim deeper, or in any other direction, thinking they are moving toward the surface. The deeper you go, the less light, the less ability to rely of the visual to establish location.There is no reference point with which to establish your bearings.You float in space. The disconnectedness—​though still bound to the technological necessities and cultural imaginaries—​of this moment in ocean space reveals, too, that the aquatic atmosphere is never stagnant. Particulates—​those seen and those too small to be seen by the human eye—​move in constant flow. Water moves perpetually. Thus, if we shed our terrestrial epistemology that allows us to find fixity in concepts of place, we begin to see that the place in which we float in ocean is not the same place as the place we entered the water. That water is gone. That place is gone. It has moved in current and flow, the very molecules in which we float dissipated and replaced by others.The place is no place at all. In Cratylus, Plato gives us Heraclitus’ words: “You could not step twice into the same river” (402A) to teach that the river, the water changes. The place of ocean requires a vastly different kind of knowing. Our terrestrial mind set tells us to think of our position in this ocean as not in this ocean but somewhere between the solidity of the ocean floor and the familiarity of the ocean surface. Note, too, that in order to see in this environment, you need technology; you need a mask to seal air around your eyes because the physiology of your eyes, unlike a fish’s, requires the medium of air to see clearly. Certainly, you may remove your mask and peer through the water, but your vision will be less than optimal as our eyes are not constructed for the water medium. And water distorts vision, magnifying and throwing askew our abilities of perception. Similarly, we must acknowledge the evident fact that humans cannot enter into submerged ocean environments without technological support because our bodies do not accommodate breathing underwater or increasing pressure of depth, thus our embodied experiences and knowing are always already incumbered with fear and risk, as well as limits of time afforded by either technologies like scuba or the physical ability to hold one’s breath. Likewise, even with technological augmentation, for many

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humans—​including me to a problematic degree—​the perpetual motion of aquatic environments can cause motion sickness that, like altitude sickness, requires both behavioral and pharmaceutical intervention. Even in our physical disorientation, in our visual impairment, in our inability to inhabit this place as we might a terrestrial place, what becomes evident is that the oceanic sense of place is necessarily not bound to the same theoretical presuppositions (human-​ist) we attach to the ambiguous yet powerful concept of “sense of place.” Recreational scuba diving is a massive industry that earns about $3.5 billion annually, with about $1 billion of that coming from the United States. Industry estimates reveal that there are approximately 2.7 to 3.5  million scuba divers in the United States and about 6 million recreational scuba divers worldwide. These numbers are significant from four perspectives: first, with millions of divers experiencing ocean through first-​hand experiences made available by scuba technologies, ocean interactions and perceptions have begun to expand beneath the surface, giving many people the opportunity to see the subsurface environment, contributing to how ocean forms in cultural imaginaries. Second, given the ubiquity of and ease of use of imaging devices like underwater cameras and the role of video sharing through social media, self-​made media now contributes tremendously to the representation of ocean in cultural imaginaries. Third, the size of the industry reminds us of the role of capitalist intrusion into ocean environments and that much of the scuba-​driven contribution to representations of ocean are bound to the scuba industry and orbiting industries like the camera industry and the computer industry. Fourth, tangentially all aspects of these industries are complicit in their destructive effects upon ocean not only in providing access to ocean environments, but in the manufacture of the technological apparatus associated with each interconnected industry: the use of petrochemicals in the manufacture of scuba hoses, masks, fins, and so on, as well as the use of mined conflict minerals in electronic devices like dive computers, underwater cameras, and other submersible gear.25 I assume that for many the thought of experience the disorienting place of open ocean as I have just described it evokes anxiety, fear, dread, perhaps nausea. Acknowledging that this example might reveal engrained thalassophobias, blue ecocriticism requires attention to the ways in which representations of ocean contribute to the convergence of fear and sense of oceanic place in cultural imaginaries. Many of these fears, too, emanate from local, cultural knowledge, and may are supported by historical and narrative evidence that demands attention. For example, the horrific practices of transatlantic slave trade have contributed to cultural representations of ocean as deadly. For example, in my essay “An American Beach,” I address the practice of slave traders dumping their “cargo” into the Atlantic off of the coast of the southern United States rather than face criminal charges as per the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves as well as the hundred years following the abolition of slavery in the United States when African Americans were denied access to beaches and ocean in Florida. These kinds of cultural and historical narratives and the accompanying embodied experiences of ocean place reify the need to reconceptualize our linear sense of place within oceanic spaces.

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I will not revisit the distinction between space and place here, as I have done so in detail elsewhere,26 as have thinkers like Michel de Certeau,Yi-​Fu Tuan, George Perec, Edward S. Casey, Marc Augé, and many others. However, Tuan contributes an important aspect of understanding sense of place in his book Landscapes of Fear when he examines the relationships between fear and place within many cultural histories. For blue ecocriticism, the role of fear of ocean in cultural imaginaries is central to understanding how the very idea of sense of place is formed in aquatic environments, particularly in terms of the sublime. Note, too, that Tuan’s title again emphasizes the primacy of land-​based thinking, though the cover art of the most recent edition of the book displays an image of the sixteenth-​century woodcut print “Whale Eating Men,” which is taken from the 1550 edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia Universalis. The image—​which has been colorized in an artistic rendition for the cover—​depicts a human being devoured by a sea monster that the title of the woodcut identifies as a whale despite looking like a fanged monster. The image conveys ocean as a place of fear. Oceanic fear, then, saturates cultural imaginaries, even when ocean is positioned as welcoming and clam. If fear is a primary characteristic of ocean’s sense of place in many cultural imaginaries, then the very idea of what we mean by the generic invocation of “sense of place”—​ that of connection to and kinship with a place—​dissolves in ocean places and requires significant reconstitution if we are to theorize a sense of ocean. This does not mean, as I  have pointed out regarding ocean deficit across ecocritical work, that any ecocritical address of sense of place necessarily must account for an adjacent or divergent sense of ocean. Yet, an emerging blue ecocriticism would be limited by adhering to and attributing an idea of sense of place that was formulated as a land-​based way of knowing to ocean space and place and superimposed onto ocean or applied as default without considering the ramifications of such transference. So much of the sense of place we attribute to ocean is not really a sense of ocean. Historically our senses of ocean places have been conveyed by way of shorelines, islands, reefs, beaches, trenches, shoals, lighthouses, ships and shipwrecks, tidal pools, and so on more so than ocean independent of land (not that ocean can be conceived independent of the contrast with land or outside of anthropocentric thinking). Interestingly, Heise’s critique in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet omits any discussion of ocean in either the local sense of place or the global sense of planet. On the one hand, pointing this out might be an unfair or even trite criticism as the objective of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet is not ocean driven, and rigorous work like Heise’s inherently cannot take into account all aspects of a particular subject.27 In the same way, Blue Ecocriticism does not account for speculative futures for urban ecologies, as Heise’s work does in “Imagining Future Cities in an Age of Ecological Change,” and therefore stands vulnerable to the same kind of incongruent criticism for such lack—​despite the clear connections between blue ecocriticism and urban ecologies, imagined or enacted. However, it needs to be pointed out that the absence of ocean in Heise’s vision of a sense of planet is indicative of ecocriticism’s historical land-​ based thinking and oceanic invisibility. That

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is, our sense of ecocriticism’s place—​institutional, ideological, educational—​is firmly planted on land, and Heise’s argument about sense of place and planet maintains those traditions of disciplinary footholds, as does just about all other ecocritical work. Do not hear this as accusation, as calling out Heise—​or any other ecocritic who has not addressed ocean—​as blue ecocriticism could not surface without the vastly important work she and others have provided that allows for our thinking to move beyond our ecocriticism firma. Likewise, Heise’s inspiring questions regarding conjunctions ecocriticism and theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism when situated with her critique of North American environmentalism’s emphasis on the ethics of the local invigorates the very kinds of questions blue ecocriticism needs to address in terms of representations of ocean as simultaneously understood as local and global and as inextricably bound to globalization, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and Heise’s concept of “eco-​ cosmopolitanism.” That is, like Raban’s distinction between the sea in literature and the literature of the sea, ocean is always already inextricable from work like Heise’s because—​again like the ambient role of ocean in Bronte’s Jane Eyre—​ ocean is an ambient condition of globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Blue ecocriticism affords ecocriticism the opportunity to explore the ways in which that positioning of ocean as ambient devalues—​or possibly erases—​the significance of ocean in such thinking. Concurrently, such consideration further demands that we ask, given the generally understood importance of ocean in current environmental crises ranging from ocean-​specific crises like hypoxia and sea rise to more encompassing global issues like climate change, why ecocriticism, for the most part, has been satisfied with relegating ocean to the periphery, to ambient condition.

Climate change and sea rise In November 2018, the voting body attending the annual National Council of Teachers of English’s (NCTE) Annual Business Meeting for the Board of Directors and Other Members of the Council voted to approve the “Resolution on Literacy Teaching on Climate Change.” Three months later, on February 22, 2019, the NCTE Executive Committee formally approved the resolution, following a vote by the NCTE membership in January. The background for the resolution explains: Climate change is not simply a scientific or technological issue, but one with enormous ethical, social, political, and cultural dimensions. Understanding climate change challenges the imagination; addressing climate change demands all the tools of language and communication, including the ability to tell compelling stories about the people and conflicts at the heart of this global discussion. Addressing climate change demands the involvement of English-​language arts teachers: “We believe that a purely science-​oriented approach to climate change can miss the social, historical, ethical, and human realities that are

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critical to the problem” (Beach et al., 2017, p. 7). Students need to explore images, texts, ideas, perspectives, and issues; need to empathize with victims of climate change; need to imagine consequences and possibilities, and take action individually, locally, and nationally.They need our guidance in learning how to read and communicate about these vital and troubling issues. (NCTE) Following this brief background, the resolution encourages teachers and teacher educators to resist the politicization of climate science by evaluating curricular texts for scientific credibility; lead students to engage thoughtfully with texts focusing on social and political debates surrounding climate change; and work with teachers in other fields to implement interdisciplinary instruction on climate change and sustainability. (NCTE) Yet, nowhere does the NCTE statement engage its own politic, assuming instead the privilege of curricula and instruction as the singular mechanism for degrees of ecological literacies pertaining to climate change. NCTE’s qualifying explanation is exemplary of the flaws in embracing familiar approaches to literacy. While certainly devised conscientiously and in service of the humanities-​driven inquiry I mentioned earlier “what can we do” (not to mention intentionally ambiguous and open-​ended as most position statements tend to be), the contextualization and rhetoric that decries “they need our guidance” exposes the linearity of land-​based thinking in understanding what constitutes the politics of literacy. I worry, too, that situating the claim in terms of “they” and “our” also contributes to a one-​directional form of literacy that reeks of what Paulo Freire identified as a banking method of education and that works away from dialogic approaches. The they/​our or us/​them literacy model is precisely the model of literacy that I noted early as silencing and devaluing Indigenous, diasporic, or divergent literacies. And, given “our” track record in ocean conservation, I’m not so sure “we” are the best source for such instruction—​and, yes, I do understand and support the spirit behind NCTE’s articulation. As ocean is inseparable from climate change, from acidification, and from sea-​ level rise, so too is blue ecocriticism bound to any critical work conducted in relation to climate change and sea rise. As DeLoughrey puts it, “our most visible sign of planetary change is sea-​level rise, catalyzing a new oceanic imaginary and human relationship to the largest space on Earth” (134). Oceans drive climate, and we cannot address climate change without deep considerations of ocean.Yet, this book is not a book about climate change or sea rise per se. But, it does propose the need for attention to climate change and sea rise in cultural imaginary as indispensable in considering ocean. Sea rise, as DeLoughrey explains in her powerful book Allegories

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of the Anthropocene, catalyzes “a new oceanic imaginary and human relationship to the largest space on earth” (134). In September 2019, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate” that shows how global warming—​in conjunction with other destructive effects of the Anthropocene—​is interconnected with ocean. The report conveys information regarding the massive declines in fish stocks; the destruction of coral reefs by way of multiple causes including changes in ocean temperature, pollution, and other chemical intrusions; and the effects of sea-​level rise that stand to displace hundreds of millions of people. Yet, the report also maintains a sense of optimism, an eye toward the ways in which the ocean might also hold answers to global climate problems, again perpetuating the reductive generalizations that ocean may be our demise or savior. The IPCC report, when taken into consideration within the massive context of other research addressing the role of ocean in climate change, is certainly important to understanding ocean in relation to climate change and sea-​level rise, but that relationship is also manifest in a significant body of textual representation that influences how ocean forms in cultural imaginaries. Sea rise and flooded or drowned cities have been central to cultural histories for a while. The myths of Atlantis stand as a central example, as well as biblical and other cultural narratives about an ancient great flood. More contemporary textual representations have continued and expanded these representations, particularly with the emergence of climate fiction—​or “cli fi”—​and significantly within young adult literatures and within natural disaster films. Carson alerted us to sea rise in the Edge of the Sea, attributing sea rise to natural processes, not yet informed of the human contributions to sea rise. Carson points to the Western Interior Seaway (also known as the Cretaceous Seaway) and the perpetual geographic changes to Earth’s surface as indicative of the likelihood of sea rise. Yet, for Carson, the distinction between the presence of ancient seas and the impact of contemporary sea rise is that of human impact. In this comparative consideration, then, the very notion that sea rise is inherently considered a “disaster” stems strictly from its likely displacement or destruction of coastal human populations. Consider my previous examples of the Western African coast. Or, consider, the current situation in the Republic of Kiribati, an island nation of more than 110,000 that inhabits thirty-​two atolls and one coral island (Banaba) in the central Pacific Ocean. More than half of the population resides on Tarawa atoll. None of the islands in the Kiribati nation rise more than about six feet above sea level. In 2013 the World Bank distributed a report identifying that Pacific island nations are at the greatest risk of sea rise pointing specifically to the Kiribati settlement of Bikenibeu as likely being underwater by 2050. Similar effects are already being seen southeast of Kiribati in the island nation of Tuvalu, which at its highest elevation rests only 15 feet above sea level. Some estimates identify Tuvalu will be uninhabitable within the next hundred years. The Tuvaluvian government has been developing strategies to deter ocean incursion, including a last resort scenario of evacuation. The Republic of the Marshall Islands

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and other nations in Micronesia face similarly devastating outcomes if current sea-​ rise predictions come to fruition. While these real-​world scenarios require significant attention, for blue ecocriticism, we must be willing to address connections between these material, real scenarios and the ways in which we situate them in cultural imaginaries—​or, more to the point the ways in which our traditions and histories of cultural imaginaries provide parameters through which we are able to address or come to terms with such scenarios. If Carson’s work implores us to understand sea rise and climate change as the result of natural processes and we now see more clearly the influences and acceleration human activity enact upon such processes, then the role of representation of such processes and effects are necessarily implicated in the anthropocentric influence.Thus, it is impossible to speak of blue ecocriticism without simultaneously speaking of climate change and the intertwined crises of rising ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, oceanic habitat loss, sea-​level rise, sea ice melt, increased disease, and so on. Yet, in order to do so, we must also ask as to whether such “crises” are understood as crises only within the context of human lives and the primacy of the human. Land underwater is no longer human habitable land, yet its value is altered and maintained in ecological systems. It is impossible, too, as I have begun to show, to speak of ecocriticism—​blue or otherwise—​without implicating a sense of activism or awareness, no matter the accuracy of Clark’s criticism. Scientific evidence confirms the reality of climate change, the role of the human in accelerating such changes, if not the role of the human in initiating climate change. Blue ecocriticism does not engage debates as to the validity of this evidence or the reality of climate change. Rather, it acknowledges the reality of the current situation and works from the position of this reality. Similarly, blue ecocriticism accepts the data and evidence that confirms the exponential rate of species extinction, looking specifically to multiple human-​induced causes for devastating population losses across the world’s ocean. Taken up in Chapter  5, Protein Economy, blue ecocriticism looks to biological populations of ocean and the ramifications of such losses. The conditions of climate change and sea rise, however, stand as fundamental across the blue ecocriticism project that permeates the discussions found herein. If Carson gives us a nonfictional introduction to sea rise, then her influence is seen, as well across the textual history of flooded cities tropes. Consider, for example J. G. Ballard’s 1962 The Drowned World in which the planet is rapidly being swallowed by rising seas and substantial global warming. The Drowned World is often identified as one of the originators of climate fiction. In Ballard’s drowned world, as the human-​made world is retaken by the natural world, including mutated and hybrid forms of plants and animals, it slowly devolves (or evolves depending on how you frame it) to a prehistoric condition. Yet, in Ballard’s The Drowned World the global warming and insurmountable climate change are not anthropocentric in origin; they are the result of solar flares, of natural, uncontrollable events. The Drowned World questions the very primacy we give to the primacy of the anthropocentric. But Ballard was not blind to the role of anthropocentric influence on global climates. His 1964 novel The Burning World, which was expanded and remarketed as

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The Drought in 1965, turns to the question of human influence on climate change. In The Drought, Ballard supposes the result of massive amounts of industrial and radioactive waste dumped into the ocean compounding over time creating a skin across the ocean made of polymers that obstructs evaporation leading to a global breakdown in the water cycle, ending precipitation. As the Earth is baked in a human-​caused drought, water becomes a rare commodity, and global populations begin to migrate to the oceans in search of water. In his short story “The Deep Ends,” though, Ballard reverses the problem as the oceans of the story have dried up, forcing humans to leave earth for colonies on Mars. In this story, the protagonists discover a single dogfish struggling in a remnant puddle of the ocean. The death of the small shark signifies the total collapse of the earth. In these works, Ballard enters into the history of global flood narratives transitioning the trope into the climate fiction genre. There are many other works that take up sea rise. Notable among these Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140 in which New York City has been twice been flooded by climate change induced sea rise, changing the city into a disintegrating canal-​dominated urban environment nicked named “SuperVenice.” The young adult (YA) market has also turned its attention to the postapocalyptic flood theme. Paolo Bacigalupi’s postapocalyptic trilogy Ship Breakers, The Drowned Cities, and Tool of War are set in the flooded US Gulf states and takes up questions of labor, petroculture, and the posthuman in a post sea rise world. Considered some of the most influential YA postapocalyptic climate fiction, Bacigalupi’s trilogy continues asking questions of climate change he established in his adult-​directed books like The Water Knife and the biopunk The Windup Girl for which he won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and to which I  will turn in Chapter  5 regarding his concept of protein economy. Brenda Peterson’s The Aquantis Series, which includes The Drowning World28 and Tattoo Master, is set in a future of rising seas, floating cities, and Flood Lands. The Downing World introduces readers to the dynamic relationship between the mermaid Marina and Skyeworld inhabitant and Cuban refuge Lukas. Like the expanding numbers of books that address sea rise and climate change, films have turned to the themes, as well, particularly in the natural disaster genre. It is curious, then, why ecocritical work has taken up so little to address the role of ocean in these kinds of texts in consideration of how ocean is represented and the effect on cultural imaginaries. Early in Ecocriticism on the Edge, Clark explains that it may be that ecocriticism has found it hard to deal with climate change as a sustained and direct object of analysis because the issue is one that refuses to stay put, dispersing as soon as you look at it into multiple questions, disciplines and topics, most of them at once outside the sphere of literary studies, others outside the humanities altogether, and many of them (for instance the size of one’s family) only counting as “environmental” at all through variously hypothetical contextual and scale effects. (10)

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If the project of ecocriticism itself is born in part from a need to ask “what can I /​ we do” as teachers and scholars in the humanities, then the ambition of ecocritics is a need to respond to environmental/​ecological degradation, often represented—​ accurately—​as crisis. Conveniently overlooking the role of ocean in that umbrella conception of crises significantly restricts not only the ecocritical lens, but then limits the effectiveness ecocritical work might contribute to understanding and, perhaps, altering the groundswell and tide of such crises.

Why blue? The New Jersey–​ based company Pantone, which provides color management systems, named “Classic Blue” the Color of the Year for 2020. Pantone began naming the Color of the Year twenty years prior, and in 2000 proclaimed Cerulean the inaugural Color of the Year. Blue color variants have earned the honor five other times—​Aqua Sky (2003), Blue Turquoise (2005), Blue Iris (2008),Turquoise (2010), and Serenity (2016)—​making blue Color of the Year 35% of the time, beating out red as the most frequently awarded color. Apparently, blue is an important part of the aesthetic of the early twenty-​first century, or it is at least an important part of the management of color in the early twenty-​first century. As William Ernest Henley and John Stephen Farmer have explained: Few words enter more largely into the comprehension of slang, and colloquialisms bordering on slang, than does the word BLUE. Expressive alike of the utmost contempt, as of all that men hold dearest and love best, its manifold combinations, in ever varying shades of meaning, greet the philologist at every turn. A very Proteus, it defies all attempts to trace the why and wherefore of many of the turns of expression of which it forms part. (qtd in Gass, 7) I had intended to call this book Oceanic Ecocriticism, but the editorial team at Routledge suggested the title change, indicating that Blue Ecocriticism would be more appealing to audiences (read cynically:  would sell more copies). Oceanic Ecocriticism, I  had assumed, would distinguish my focus on ocean from a more encompassing attention to water writ large. This project focuses on ocean while acknowledging the importance of water studies as an emerging discipline; yet, methodologically this is not a water studies project per se. Work in water studies tends to focus on social, political, and economic factors of water resources locally and globally. While such considerations necessarily inform blue ecocriticism and blue ecocriticism stands to provide insight to water studies, this project does not take up water studies specifically. That is, rather than addressing specific matters of physiochemical properties, ecosystemic interactions, pollution strategies, local and global management policies and laws, health sciences, and other concentrations taken up by water studies, this project remains focused on the role of ocean in cultural imaginaries as attended to by way of ecocriticism and ecocomposition.Yet, it

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carries the label of Blue Ecocriticism in emphasis of blue as a predominant metaphor for ocean in many representations. Despite this editorial renaming, the metaphor blue floods this project for many reasons, intimacy primary among them. Blue is a convenient and familiar metaphor to refer to ocean, inked by writers, artists, and filmmakers into cultural imaginaries in the titles and contents of texts and media. Like most metaphors, though, blue is simultaneously reductive, clichéd, deeply problematic, and bathetic. Much of the problem in how ocean has been adapted into critical work has been its use as metaphor, and certainly, throughout this book I use oceanic, maritime, and marine terminology metaphorically. Yet, blue ecocriticism is not really about using ocean as metaphor; it is, as I  have said, about developing a submersive epistemology, about, as Blum puts it, developing “a methodological model for nonlinear and nonplanar thought” (151) and it is about unmooring ecocriticism from its land-​ based foundations. Earlier in this chapter, I noted Slovic’s discussion of the origins of ecocriticism. Slovic offers these remarks in an essay titled “Seasick among the Waves of Ecocriticism: An Inquiry into Alternative Historiographic Metaphors,” which appears in Oppermann and Iovino’s Environmental Humanities:  Voices from the Anthropocene. Slovic’s essay is a consideration of the ways in which ecocritics have described the history of ecocriticism as unfolding in “waves” much in the same ways that feminist thinking is accounted for as first-​wave, second-​wave, and so on. It appropriates aquatic metaphor as a method, a way of talking about things as though they were liquid and with the assumption that thinking of them as liquid will somehow make understanding them clearer. Using ocean in such metaphoric ways is commonplace. As Jue explains, ocean is often reduced to metaphor “where the ocean serves as a convenient conceptual figure or metaphor” (Proteus, 247). Similarly, to impose the metaphor blue is to imply that the metaphor describes and makes more evident the characteristics of that which it modifies without attributing or understanding the object of modification as actually having those characteristics. That is, blue ecocriticism may suggest an ecocriticism situated within characteristics of blue—​including the acknowledgment that blue operates metaphorically as nominalization, reducing that which is described as blue as containing or being defined in similarity to other things blue. Metaphor and color are always culturally localized. Blue in the United States is not the blue of China or Lagos or Australia or Brazil, or anywhere else. Thus, to identify ocean as blue is to situate ocean in specific cultural imaginaries, and, perhaps, is to colonize ocean as blue. Yet, blue’s depth and complexity encourage fluid exchange between representations and imaginaries. Part of understanding blue ecocriticism requires understanding the human relationship to blue. William Edward Gladstone’s 1858 book Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age famously shows that Homer describes the ocean with language such as oinops (“wine-​ looking”) and “wine-​dark,” but never as blue. Critics have accused Gladstone of suggesting a colorblindness among the Ancient Greeks, a criticism Gladstone adamantly denied, explaining that his claims address the linguistic identification of color, not visual disability. Gladstone’s assessment of Homeric color has been central to

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recent conversations about blue, often inspiring claims that the Greeks did not see blue rather than comprehending Gladstone’s linguistic claims. Blue, it seems, was the last color for which humans developed descriptive language, thus calling to question how we have seen blue or if we have seen blue. For blue ecocriticism, then, blue is both a color and an encompassing metaphor that is situated culturally, historically, and locally, and, as such, is always already political, ideological, and ethical. The blue of blue ecocriticism stands as more dynamic than a simple metaphor for ocean within the pairing of blue and ecocriticism/​ecocomposition. Blue pours out as an intellectual transition in human environmental consciousness. Blue ecocriticism is named intentionally as such to imply not merely oceanic ecocriticism, but a more significant and more vital relationship between seeing the blue of ocean and ecocriticism. To this end, submersive epistemologies theorizes what it means to imagine not merely a blue ecocriticism, but a blue critical, ethical, cultural, and political mindset—​“Think Blue,” San Diego’s storm water pollution prevention campaign decries. Similarly, “Vote Blue” campaigns now take up the distinction between blue and red as emblematic of Democratic and Republican political and voting trends, though the use of blue in such contexts is not tied to ocean or water. Because of the inevitable association between blue and the visual, blue ecocriticism instigates considerations of the role of the visual as central to how ocean is represented. Intentionally, too, blue ecocriticism adopts blue as a modifier not only as a metaphor for ocean, but also as a term intended as tangential to the familiar use of “green” as emblematic of environmental thinking. Blue ecocriticism initiates a blue revolution within ecocriticism and ecocomposition. Medievalist Michel Pastoureau, in Blue:  The History of a Color, and novelist William H.  Gass, in On Being Blue:  A Philosophical Inquiry, provide some of the most comprehensive considerations of blue. For Pastoureau, “color is a social phenomenon” (10). He explains, “we see the colors transmitted to us by the past as time has altered them and not as they were originally. Moreover, we see them under light conditions that are entirely different from those known by past societies” (8). To understand color, he writes, one must “grapple with a host of factors all at once: physics, chemistry, materials, and techniques of production, as well as iconography, ideology, and the symbolic meanings that colors convey’ (8). Turning to analyses of manuscripts, paintings, textiles, stained glass, and other artifacts, Pastoureau shows the transition of blue from a color rarely employed in art (what he dubs “the silence of the blue” (32)) to its international ubiquitous use and varied meaning in what has become “the West’s favorite color” (179). Blue, Pastoureau says, “has become a magical word, a word that seduces, pacifies, and invites revery”—​and, he emphasizes, a word that sells: Many products, companies, sites, and artistic creations that have only a faint rapport with this color (or no rapport at all) are today referred to as “blue.” The music of this name is often sweet, pleasant liquid; its semantic field evokes the sky, the sea, repose, love, travel, vacations, the infinite. (180)

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Apropos of this project, too, Pastoureau seemingly validates the Routledge editor’s rationale, explaining that the complexities of blue are “present in a great many book titles, and their presence alone confers a particular charm that no other color term could offer” (180). Gass’ analysis of blue is more philosophical than is Pastoureau’s historical chronicle and speculates that “blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of wraith” (11). Gass begins his account of blue with a ramshackle page-​long sentence that is an inventory of things that can be blue. His inquiry is linguistic in focus, a teasing out of metaphor. His analysis might be considered literary in method, but its presentation is more fluid than criticism tends to be, his language evoking the flow of blue water. As Michael Gorra writes in the Introduction to the 2014 edition of On Being Blue, Gass’ writing about blue rarely pursues a single line of thought, and they offer not a progression of ideas so much as an experience, all feints and nuance, and with the argument itself vanishing with the supportive accretions of his prose. But then that play of mid itself the argument, and where the theorist believes that language can cripple, the novelist knows that it may set you free. (xiii) For Gass, blue is at once a word, a concept, and a way of thinking. Despite its application as a modifier in Blue Ecocriticism intended to convey the oceanic, the aquatic, ocean is not blue; or, more accurately, ocean is not only blue and not always blue. In various times and places ocean can be any color of the spectrum. Ocean’s color dependent upon light, depth, angle of view, bottom composition, particulates, and so on. Ocean can be at times any shade of red, orange, amber, green, violet, blue, and black. As Alaimo explains, “seawater absorbs and scatters light. The ocean acts like a vast liquid prism that subtracts rather than diffracts different frequencies of light at different depths” (“Violet-​Black,” 235–​236). So, even when blue, ocean is many hues of blue; it is never a constant. As Jue notes, “the experience of blueness above water or below is not a stable thing” (Wild, xi). Even when looking upon the cobalt of offshore waters, the color is never stable, shifting in the flow and reflection of ocean’s perpetual motion. Blue shifts in time and space through delicate visual mutations. Eddies and whorls of water and light push and pull the hues of blue in a single sight, rendering blue mercurial, transitional. Blue swirls in the spectrum between green and violet, visible in wavelengths appearing to human eyes roughly between 450 and 495 nanometers. Blue is visible by way of the effects of Rayleigh scattering and Tyndall scattering, the elastic scattering and collision of minute particles that tend to reflect blue light. In its mixing with green and violet, more than 260 variations of blue have been identified and classified with hexadecimal coding. Digital displays of color expand the metaphor of blue and the access to variant degrees of blueness. If blue describes ocean, ocean often reciprocates in defining blue: Marine Blue (#01386a), Ocean

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Blue (#009dc4), Water Blue (#0e87cc), Wave (#a5ced5), Atlantic Wave (#3d797c), Blue Lagoon (#00626f), Deep Sea Blue (#002366), and Deepest Sea (#444d56). As often as it is blue, ocean is also green, sea green—​a color identified in the hexadecimal color scheme as #2e8b57 and dependent upon blue as it is composed of 18% red, 54.5% yellow, and 34.1% blue. Shallower, inshore waters may be emerald or as James Joyce famously puts it,“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea” (3). Sea green waters occur most often in ocean waters that contain high levels of phytoplankton, which include chlorophyll, a green pigment that absorbs red and blue light and reflects green light. Thus, the green of the sea might be better described as the green of the organisms that inhabit the sea, not the ocean water itself. In fact, in most instances, the colors we attribute to ocean are the colors of the objects diffused throughout the water or the composition of the materials below or above the water like the sand or grass of the sea floor. Even though in many representations the sea is green, the green appropriated as the metaphor of land-​based environmentalism is not sea green. Blue stands adjacent to green, and in gradient degrees inseparable from and at time indistinguishable from green, blue is always haunted by green. Pastoureau shows that green and black are always counterparts to blue and that historically blue is frequently paired with white and yellow, and “above all red, blue’s opposite partner, and rival in all the Western color systems throughout the ages” (11). As green dissipates, blue sinks to black in the absence of light. At times ocean can be gray or pale; Chinese science fiction writer Chen Qiufan writes “The sea. Pale like the skin of a corpse, the sea stretched out until it touched the laden gray sky” (137). Or, recall that when The Kid arrives in San Diego toward the end of Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy describes The Kid’s first sight of the Pacific: “out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea” (316). As much as it is blue or green, ocean is black, or as Alaimo describes it, as a violet-​black: “A violet-​black ecology hovers in the bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, and hadal zones, the three regions of the deep seas, one thousand meters down and much deeper, where sunlight cannot descend” (“Violet-​Black,” 233). Like all colors, blue is described in hues, tints, shades, and tones. The metaphor of tone revealing a synesthesia that expands blue beyond the visual to a more encompassing sensory experience. Rudy Rucker describes the oceanic synesthesia in Book 3 of his cyberpunk book The Ware Tetralogy: “Get fully lifted on synesthesia because the ocean is indeed realizing its ability to actualize the way you are going to move” (393).29 Bright colors may be described as “loud,” but blue is more often than not “cool,” the sensory interactions of color expressed in visual, audio, and tactile metaphors.The blue of ocean and blue ecocriticism are sensorially embodied, or as Eileen A. Joy proposes, “a transcorporeal blue (and blues) ecology that would bind humans, nonhumans, and stormy weather together” (213). Joy proposes that depression—​euphemistically expressed as “feeling blue”—​is a “form of deeply empathetic enmeshment with a world that suffers its own sea changes and that can never be seen as separate from the so-​called individuals who supposedly populate (‘people’) it” (213). Blue, that is, is at once visual and more than visual. In

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his early accounts of his exploratory descendancy to depths previously unreached by humans, William Beebe struggles with the experience of blue: we were the first living men to look out at the strange illumination: and it was stranger than any imagination could have conceived. It was an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I  have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing way. (109) He continues: I brought all my logic to bear, I  put out of mind the excitement of our position in water space and tried to think sanely of comparative color, and I failed utterly. I flashed on the searchlight, which seemed the yellowest thing I have ever seen, and let it soak into my eyes, yet the moment it was switched off, it was like the long vanquished sunlight—​it was as though it never had been—​and the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings. (109) If blue passes from the eye into our very being, then, we must acknowledge, as well, that blue is composed by the very beings that inhabit ocean and reflects characteristics of those organisms in their oceanic ecologies. Being and blue, we must understand, encompass more than the human; blue is always already posthuman and can be read as conveying other than human information about ocean. In February 2019, Stephanie Dutkiewicz et  al. published research that identifies the effect of climate change on ocean color. Dutkiewicz et  al. show that while researchers monitor shifts in chlorophyll as indicative of alterations in marine phytoplankton because phytoplankton are the foundation of marine food chains and global carbon cycles, satellite sensors—​remote sensing reflectance—​cannot monitor chlorophyll directly nor is chlorophyll the only contributor to ocean color formations. Such monitoring is crucial, the research shows, as “Satellite ocean colour measurements over the last two decades have allowed the scientific community an unprecedented dataset to study phytoplankton on a global scale and at regular, frequent intervals” (578). These data sets “have been used to explore trends in ocean surface [chlorophyll] as well as primary production, suggesting complex, but as yet limited, patterns of long-​term change” (578). Dutkiewicz et al. show can be measured and predicted by way of monitoring color shifts of the ocean. It is likely, the researchers show, that by the year 2100 ocean’s color will change, will be different from the color we now see ocean to be. Such color shifts, they predict, will reflect the massive changes affected upon ocean through climate change. As Sarah Gibbens summarizes Dutkiewicz et al.’s findings, “warming oceans could be permanently altering the mosaics of blues and greens seen from space” (“Climate”). Ultimately—​and significantly simplified—​what Dutkiewicz et al.’s research reveals is that if climate change

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trends continue as they are, by the year 2100, the blues and greens of at least half of ocean’s waters will be decidedly bluer and greener. As such, the measure of blue makes evident the fluctuation of ocean blue as constantly inconsistent. Dutkiewicz et al.’s research also contributes to our understanding that reading ocean, knowing ocean—​whether scientifically, personally, culturally, textually, or any other way—​ requires growing technological mediation. Blue may represent ocean, but it also represents components or characteristics of ocean. Blue is also the hue of petroleum on ocean’s surface and, as such, conjures the technological, the blue screen light, the blue screen of death, the blue tooth, blue in tooth and claw. In her work to “unsettle our basic assumptions regarding nature as a ‘place’ separate from the human realm and to posit it instead as natural-​cultural processes continually occurring all around, through, and in us,” materialist ecocritic Heather I. Sullivan posits that “nature is unbounded by material ecocriticism and reconfigured in an inclusive, natural-​cultural sense of energy and light, that is, of optical colors emerging from the solar input of into the biosphere” (80). For blue ecocriticism, then, the material and cultural role of blue emerges at once as a central metaphor for oceanic ecocritical work and as indicative of the fluid, ungraspable epistemologies through which blue flows. As Goethe sermonizes, “A blue surface seems to return from us . . . but as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it” (311). Likewise, we might think of the blue of blue ecocriticism as drawing on the metaphor of “blue shift” that describes the movement of the shorter wavelengths of light moving toward the observer. Blue ecocriticism, that is, moves toward our observations.

Casting off Blue ecocriticism takes as its objectives the tasks of overcoming ecocriticism’s ocean deficit disorder and understanding the implications of claiming such as an ecocritical deficit, including understanding the historical underpinnings of that disorder, extending an ocean-​centric critical view, and disrupting the traditional land-​centered approach of ecocriticism. Blue ecocriticism, then, takes a specifically oceanic-​centered approach in order to call attention to ecocriticism’s land-​based logics and methods. In doing so, I want to be clear that while the work in this book takes up a predominantly, if not exclusively, Western view of blue ecocriticism, blue ecocriticism is at once a global and local approach. The Western focus of this book is perhaps a fault of the limit of my sight, but it is also a call to extend the blue ecocritical gaze to cross-​cultural perspectives, particularly within frames of Indigenous and diasporic ways of knowing ocean. Similarly, as ocean’s vastness imposes particular limits on our current abilities to engage with it, so too is engagement in blue ecocriticism limited—​by technological limits imposed, for example, by codex thinking and linear, terrestrial logics.Thus, Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative makes no claims of comprehensive coverage, but merely of inaugural discussion, of vitalization. Such inaugural discussion must lead to further consideration

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of ecocritical imperatives within the context of current oceanic environmental crises. As Alaimo puts it, The early twenty-​first century has ushered in a new era of deep-​sea exploration, marine science, industrial fishing, mining, drilling, and consequently, ecological devastation. Feminists, environmentalists and new materialists of all sorts must follow these ventures in order to witness not only the dazzling newly discovered creatures of the abyssal zone, but also the outdated yet obdurate narratives projected into the depths. (281) It is through such consideration of the narratives and other representations that fuel cultural imaginaries approach to ocean that must surface within the ecocritical project no matter the difficulties that have kept ecocriticism from taking up ocean in more substantial ways. Clark identifies that ecocriticism finds difficulties in locating strategies to address climate change primarily because there is no one “object to confront, or delimit, let alone ‘fix’ or to ‘tackle.’ There is no ‘it,’ only a kind of dissolution into innumerable issues” (10). While I do not mean to suggest that climate change and ocean are homologous, they are connected and our thinking about each are similar. Thus, the same critique Clark offers of ecocriticism’s ability to address climate change might be said of ecocriticism’s engagement with the global ocean. Ecocriticism’s oceanic deficit might be inevitable because of the inability to pin down what we even mean by ocean. Clark explains regarding climate change: It may be that ecocriticism has found it hard to deal with climate change as a sustained and direct object of analysis because the issue is one that refuses to stay put, dispersing as soon as you look at it into multiple questions, disciplines and topics, most of them at once outside the sphere of literary studies, other outside the humanities altogether, and many of them (for instance, the size of one’s family) only counting as “environmental” at all through variously hypothetical contextual and scale effects. (10) In light of Clark’s point, I acknowledge that this book is incomplete, can never be complete. It can never be truly comprehensive for the simple fact that ocean cannot be pinned down in any codifiable way that allows it to be addressed as a concrete entity. It does not abide by such logics either in material form or formations of cultural imaginaries. The scale of the object of study is too vast, too immense not only in size but in complexity. This book is bound (as all books are bound) not only by magnitude, but by the ability to represent such measure in comprehensible ways. It is circumscribed, certainly, by both the technologies of exploration and the technologies of expression. The confines of the codex lineage restrain the ability to express other than in linear, literate means. Trapped by metaphor and history,

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by institution and culture, by ideology and literacy, ocean requires disentanglement from terrestrial ecocritical approaches. There is, that is to say, much missing from this work that will help elucidate the human–​ocean dynamic and extend ecocritical work. Implied throughout this project is the relation of the human to the global ocean. Such an implication demands consideration of the complexity of the social, cultural, political, institutional histories and ideologies of that which we name human. That is, this inquiry appeals to a scrutiny of, as Clark puts it, “the newly recognized agent of humanity as a geological force” (15). However, that demand can only be met in this project to a minimal degree. I concur with Clark’s assessment that “The Anthropocene brings to an unavoidable point of stress the question of the nature of Nature and of the human” (16), and emphasize for the sake of this project that the same may be specifically said of ocean as a subset artifact under the Anthropecenic umbrella. I adapt and take seriously, then, Clark’s call that our interactions with the global ocean be conceived at a “higher, unprecedented level of self-​reflection” (16). To say so, though, demands, as well, that we—​humanity writ large and ecocritics, specifically—​recognize that “awareness” actually does very little. If ecocritics are to acknowledge and embrace the very idea that our disciplinary, institutional endeavors are born—​in part—​from a need to answer the question, “what can I do?” then self-​ reflection can only be a starting point, awareness only an introduction. This is not to say that ecocritical work is not a form of advocacy, of action, or of doing, only that it can only ever be phase one. For Clark, this requires a shift, one in which “politics, culture and art should now aid a sort of species-​consciousness, so that the worst effects of environmental degradation can be countered by the redemptive force of an increased and shared self-​recognition” (17). Clark hopes that the inherent dangers presented by anthropocenic degradation will motivate such a shift. For Clark, the potential for this kind of shift manifests in ecocriticism and that ecocriticism itself materializes from this emergent imperative. As Clark puts it, The work of the environmental critics then becomes to consider and appreciate the work in literature, criticism, and the arts that helps articulate this shift toward a new kind of eco-​cosmopolitanism capable of uniting people across the world without erasing important cultural and political differences. (17) While I whole heartedly agree with Clark’s call, I believe that the appearance of environmental humanities and the New Thalassology in the institutional framework, coupled with the extensive range of texts and media which effect the very cultures Clark wishes to reach through humanities artifacts (literature, criticism, and art), demands a broader ecocritical domain that better accounts for ocean in its inquiry. Blue Ecocriticism acknowledges Clark’s paramount “intractable” question:

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What if the kind of transformed imagination celebrated in this sort of cultural programme, this awareness of interconnection, could not be assumed to be an effective agent of change—​in other words, how far does a change in knowledge and imagination entail a change in environmentally destructive modes of life? (emphasis in original, 18) To that end, this project acknowledges the significant possibility that awareness might not lead to action or to recognizable changes in behavior, but hedges against such possibilities in the hope that blue ecocriticism might expand the ecocritical imperative to better comprehend the connection between representations of ocean, cultural imaginaries, and ocean itself. To this end, Blue Ecocriticism casts off from terra firma into terra fluidum, acknowledging that it can only do so ensconced in the limits of cultural, technological, and physiological apparatus. In its wayfarer’s approach, Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative appears as pedesis or Brownian movement through several critical considerations of representations of ocean. Chapter  2 considers the concept of scale as it pertains to representations of ocean. Chapter 3, by way of Morton’s hyperobject and Alaimo and Jue’s new materialist approaches, considers how identifying ocean as object impacts how ocean is represented in cultural imaginaries. Chapter 4 turns to visual rhetorical approaches to consider the primacy of the visual in oceanic representation when so much of ocean remains unseen. Chapter 5 looks to the role of protein economies in how ocean is understood. Together, these chapters form an introduction to blue ecocriticism with the hope of encouraging more substantial ecocritical examinations of oceanic texts.

Notes 1 The term nature, I recognize is problematic. I agree with Stacy Alaimo’s point that “since the concept of ‘nature’ has long been enlisted to support racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, and essentialism, it remains a rather volatile term” that must be approached cautiously (Exposed, 11). 2 A watermark is a mark, symbol, or pattern imposed upon a print or digital documents to varying degrees of visibility. It suggests the inscription of fluid upon the material of documentation, upon paper. The metaphor transferred—​as many metaphors and logics are—​from print ideologies to the digital. 3 By extension, we might level the same critique against all literary criticism, noting the implications of criticism and critical theory as vehicles for awareness for purposes of various social changes:  (reductively) feminist critique promoting awareness of representations of women to the end of social change; Marxist criticism forwarding critique of capital in the cultural imaginary toward objectives of economic change; postcolonial criticism forwarding critique of colonial representation to the end of enacting social and cultural change; and so on. In turn, then, Clark’s question of awareness enacting change becomes relevant to the entire enterprise of literary criticism, whether driven by critical theory or not. 4 Tellingly, too, as more and more US institutions of higher learning adopt analytic systems of evaluation—​see Academic Analytics, for example—​to assess value of individual scholar’s

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research “success,” lists of “high impact” publications in ecocriticism are now available alongside other traditional areas of study in literature and the humanities. Ecocriticism’s emergence from the wild, that is, now falls under institutional surveillance akin to other recognized disciplines. Whether we accept this as recognition of ecocriticism’s coming of age and validation or as institutional appropriation and control is a question deserving of significant institutional critique, as well. 5 Fluency is etymologically derivative of flue, a term of aquatic bearings, meaning at once to flow, a kind of fishing net, the fluke of an anchor, and the fluke of a harpoon’s point. 6 Go Bucs! 7 See my article “Writing Takes Place” for more about the locations of writing. 8 Interestingly, Morton’s description of using a laptop while sitting in a chair that is being lapped by ocean waves demands the materialist recognition that salt air is incredibly corrosive and can wreak havoc on a laptop’s circuitry. 9 I plagiarize the metaphoric phrase “sea of ink” from early in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea not only as homage to the beauty of Verne’s expression, but as a moment of digressive tributary to note the materiality of ink in its transformation from liquid to solid in the act of writing. Ink is also used in tattooing, a body modification artform with close ties to nautical histories and literatures as well as to traditions of indigenous people, particularly Polynesian peoples. The word tattoo is adapted from the Polynesian word tatau. In addition to human connections between ink and ocean, cephalopod mollusks (with the exception of two species of deep-​sea octopi) and some gastropods produce ink as a defense mechanism. Cephalopod ink was dubbed “ink” because humans collected and used the substance as ink for writing. One kind of cephalopod, a cuttlefish, carries the Greek moniker sepia; the reddish-​brown color named from the cuttlefish. 10 I assume that Raban’s identification of Carson’s The Sea around Us as The Sea about Us is a typographical flaw in the 2001 edition of The Oxford Book of the Sea. 11 For more about these fisheries harvest matters, see my book Fishing, Gone? Saving the Ocean through Sportfishing. 12 Cooper published two other novels in 1844, as well: Miles Wallingford: Sequel to Afloat and Ashore which was published as Lucy Hardinge: A Second Series of Afloat and Ashore in England. 13 In the interview “Taking Back the Language” that Christopher J. Keller and I conducted with Anette Kolodny and published in our book Writing Environments, Kolodny points specifically to the role of personal journals written by women that contribute to understanding frontier mentalities that were not accounted for in more visible texts that fueled understanding frontier. 14 Aldo Leopold’s 1949 A Sand County Almanac, particularly the essay “A Land Ethic,” is also frequently identified as the origin marker for western environmentalist thinking. I acknowledge its role in the origin of contemporary environmentalism, ecocriticism, and ecocomposition, noting specifically that it, too, promotes land-​based thinking. 15 Though I do not take up Silent Spring here in any detail, it should be noted that Silent Spring, like The Sea around Us was first published as a three-​part series in The New Yorker in 1962. 16 Note, too, that in 1995 John Brockman, President of the Edge Foundation and founder of The Reality Club proposed a third culture, as well, in response to Snow’s two cultures. Brockman’s third culture, though, identifies a space between the sciences and the humanities in which scientists make use of writing and humanistic artifacts to convey scientific knowledge to the general public. Those who support this idea of a third culture

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refute, too, the idea of a fourth culture which by way of internet and other digital media perpetuates uncritical popular cultural knowledge, including religious and political positions “dumbed down” for mass consumption. This third culture is not the third culture of my inquiry. 17 In order to maintain distinction between the ecological and the environmental, I  employ “ecological literacy” or “ecoliteracy” to indicate literacies pertaining to the understanding of ecological systems. I take “environmental literacy” to encumber environmentalist politics. However, many who use these terms fold the two understandings together when using either or both. This synthesis tends to be less problematic than it might appear, as ecological and environmental literacies are irrevocably bound. David W. Orr, for example, frequently employs “environmental literacies,” but his use clearly suggests a more encompassing ecoliteracy. Likewise, he is clear in distinguishing the two in his Foreword to the Stone and Barlow Ecological Literacy collection. 18 The metaphor “on the surface” is aquatic in origin, suggesting that which can easily be seen, that which is evident, not the “deeper,” hidden or obscured things. “Deeper,” in this context, juxtaposed with “being on the surface” to suggest more substantial, encompassing view, not merely the superficial.The notion of depth suggesting greater or more consequential. Similarly, related idioms such as “dive right in” convey the idea that a situation might require more than the superficial. Such metaphors and idioms permeate the English language revealing glimpses of oceanic influence on our ability to describe the world. Throughout this book, I  intentionally employ many similar metaphors without unpacking them in discursive notes and do so specifically to incorporate a sense of oceanic flow in my writing. 19 Orr first issued this claim in Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World p. 90. 20 To be fair, Bowers does distance himself from Hirsch’s politics to a degree, claiming he actually coined the term “cultural literacy” more than a decade prior to Hirsch’s use of the term. Nonetheless, Bowers’ acknowledgement of the power of formal education as a means for building particular literacies is what is crucial here. 21 In 2014 Bruce Cantrell and Jessica Fain, faculty from Roane State Community College, spent 73 days, 2 hours, and 34 minutes living and working in Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, FL.Their stay—​at the time of this writing—​is recorded as the longest underwater habitation by humans. The previous record had been set by Richard Presley in 1992 who resided in Jules’ Undersea Lodge for 69 days and 19 minutes. During their stay, Cantrell and Fain taught the first online college credit biology course offered from beneath the surface. Jules’ Undersea Lodge sits about thirty feet below the surface of the lagoon at Key Largo and features research and education labs. 22 Since I was a teenager, I have kept on my wall a framed map of North Carolina’s Outer Banks marked with hundreds of shipwrecks; the map titled simply “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” a nickname given to the region because of its perilous waters and the more than 5,000 shipwrecks accounted for in the waters around Hatteras, North Carolina since 1526 when local authorities began keeping tally. Much of our literary and cultural histories depict ocean as graveyard, as inhospitable. 23 It is generally understood that because of the curvature of the Earth, one loses sight of land about three miles offshore. However, those who spend any amount of time in offshore waters tend to hold that one can see twelve miles to the horizon, or more to the point, can see other vessels as far away as twelve miles across the water. This kind of “local knowledge” has been so influential in our ways of knowing ocean since humans began navigating and using navigational and cartographic tools that it is the foundational

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knowledge that helped establish the boundary of international waters as twelve miles from the shore of any nation, despite the “scientific” explanation of sight being limited to three miles. 24 In recreational diving, depth limits are set at 130 feet. Certified technical and professional divers set depth limits at about 200 feet, though these are understood as deep dives and require specialized gear and gas mixes for breathing at depth as oxygen becomes toxic at depth. As a trained dive instructor and technical diver, the deepest dive I have ever made is to about 160 feet. My brother, who, in addition to being Dean at Virginia Wesleyan University, is the dive instructor and trainer for the Virginia Beach and Chesapeake Police Departments. His deepest dive has been to about 130 feet, though the technical rescue and recovery diving he does requires significantly more technical training that one needs for simply diving deeper. 25 I should note, too, that part of the capitalist aspect of the scuba industry is direct competition with other ocean-​based industries for right to access. For example, debates in 2018 surrounding the closures of parts of Biscayne Bay, Florida, revolved around who would be granted access and who would not. At the fore, the scuba industry demanded retaining access rights claiming scuba as a less intrusive, less damaging recreational interaction with marine environments than recreational fishing. The recreational fishing industry (recreational saltwater fishing is a $27 billion per year industry in the US), on the other hand, demonstrated the destructive effects of scuba on coral reefs. That the debate fell to questions of which industry exacerbates less damage in order to maintain high-​dollar revenues is quite telling. 26 See Postcomposition, particularly ­chapter 2 “The Space of Writing.” 27 Admittedly, though, Heise’s ocean-​absent sense of planet might thirst for such critique. 28 An excerpt from Peterson’s The Drowning World can be found in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment’s 2014 Global Warming Special Issue (Volume 21, Issue 1, Winter 2014, pp. 101–​108). 29 Part of book four of the Ware Tetralogy takes place underwater in the South Pacific Ocean, and Rucker provides a scene of an encounter between a sperm whale and a giant squid that can be read as a tribute to Verne.

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—​—​—​. The Kraken. New York: Del-​Rey Books. 2011. Momaday, N. Scott. “The Man Made of Words.” Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1983. 414–​416. Morrison,Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-​American Presence in American Literature.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. October 7, 1988. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature:  Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2007. —​—​—​. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). “Resolution on Literacy Teaching on Climate Change.” NCTE Position Statements. March 1, 2019. www2.ncte.org/​ statement/​resolution-​literacy-​teaching-​climate-​change/​ Opperman, Serpil. “Ecocriticism’s Theoretical Discontents.” Mosaic. 44, no. 2 (June 2011). 153–​169. Opperman, Serpil and Serenella Iovino, Eds. Environmental Humanities:  Voices from the Anthropocene. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Orr, David W. Ecological Literacy:  Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. —​—​—​. “Foreword.” Ecological Literacy:  Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World. Eds. Michael K. Stone and Zenobia Barlow. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. 2005. ix–​xi. Paravisini-​ Gebert, Lizabeth. “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic:  the Caribbean.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold Hogle. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. 2002. 229–​258. Parry, J. H. The Discovery of the Sea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Pastoureau, Michel. Blue: The History of a Color. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2001. Perera, Suvendrini. “Oceanic Corpo-​ Graphies, Refugee Bodies and The Making and Unmaking of Waters.” Feminist Review. 103 (2013): 58–​79. Peterson, Brenda S. “The Drowning World.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 21, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 101–​108. —​—​—​. The Drowning World. Seattle, WA: Delphinus Publishing. 2012. —​—​—​. Tattoo Master. Seattle, WA: Delphinus Publishing. 2014. Pirzadeh, Saba. “Children of Ravaged Worlds:  Exploring Environmentalism in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and Cameron Stracher’s The Water Wars.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 203–​221. Pizarro, Jordi. “Waiting to Vanish.”Washington DC: Foreign Policy. 2 February 2016. https://​ foreignpolicy.com/ ​ 2 016/ ​ 0 2/ ​ 0 2/ ​ waiting- ​ t o- ​ vanish-​ c limate-change-​ e nvironmentwarming/​ Plato. Plato: Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias (Loeb Classical Library No. 167). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1926. Prakash, Madhu Suri. “Indigenous Knowledge Systems:  Ecological Literacy through Initiation into People’s Science” What is Indigenous Knowledge:  Voices from the Academy. Eds. Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe. New York: Falmer Press, 1999. 157–​178. Qiufan, Chen. Waster Tide. Trans. Ken Liu. New York: TOR. 2019. Raban, Jonathan, ed. The Oxford Book of The Sea. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. 2001 (originally published 1992). Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing:  Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. 2007.

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Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W. W. Norton. 2016. Riley, Glenda.“Frederick Jackson Turner Overlooked the Ladies.” Journal of the Early Republic. 13, no. 2 (1993): 216–​30. Robbins, Harold. The Pirate. New York: Pocket Books. 1974. Robinson, Kim Stanley. New York 2140. New York: Orbit Books. 2017. Rucker, Rudy. The Ware Tetralogy. Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books. 2010. Ruiz, Iris D. and Raúl Sánchez, eds. Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. Ryen, Anne.“Colonial methodology? Methodological Challenges to Cross-​Cultural Projects Collecting data by Structured Interviews.” Research and Inequality. Eds. Carole Truman, Donna M. Mertens, and Beth Humphries. London: UCL Press. 2000. 220–​233. Sackey, Donnie Johnson, Casey Boyle, Mai Nou Xiong, Gabriela Raquel Ríos, Kristin L. Arola, Scot Barnett. “Perspectives on Cultural and Posthumanist Rhetorics.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 38, no. 4, 2019, pp. 375–​401. Scott, Walter. The Pirate. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Company. 1822. Scribner, Sylvia. “Literacy in Three Metaphors.” American Journal of Education 93 No. 1 (1984): 6–​21. Semali, Ladislaus M. and Joe L. Kincheloe. What is Indigenous Knowledge:  Voices from the Academy. New York: Falmer Press, 1999. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Oceanstory. Odyssey Editions. 2011. Slovic, Scott. “Seasick among the Waves of Ecocriticism:  An Inquiry into Alternative Historiographic Metaphors.” Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. Eds. Serpil Opperman and Serenella Iovino. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 99–​111. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures. London:  Cambridge University Press. 1959. (Reprint 2001). Spielberg, Steven. Jaws. Universal Pictures. 1975. Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Steingraber, Sandra. Silent Spring and Other Writings on the Environment. Ed. Rachel Carson. New York: Library of America. 2018. Stevens, Edward. Literacy, Law and Social Order. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988. Stracher, Cameron. The Water Wars. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Fire. 2011. Sullivan, Heather I. “The Ecology of Colors:  Goethe’s Materialist Optics and Ecological Posthumanism.” Material Ecocriticism. Eds. Serenella Iovin and Serpil Opperman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 2014. 80–​94. Szeman, Imre and Dominic Boyer. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2017. Taylor, E. G. R. The Haven-​Finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook. New York: American Elsevier. 1956 (reprint 1971). Teaiwa, Teresia. “What Remains to Be Seen:  Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature.” PMLA. 125, no. 3 (2010): 730–​736. Tuan,Yi-​Fu. Landscapes of Fear. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1980. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New  York:  Henry Holt and Company, 1920. Vee, Anette. Coding Literacy:  How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Verbinski, Gore. Pirates of the Caribbean. Walt Disney Pictures. 2003. Verne, Jules. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 1998.

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Waititi, Taika. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Piki Films. 2016. Webb, Robert D. Beneath the 12 Mile Reef. 20th Century Fox. 1953. White, Geoffrey. “Foreword.” Epeli Hau’ofa.We are the Ocean. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 2008. Wigen, Kären. “Introduction:  Oceans of History.” American Historical Review. 111, no. 3 (2006): 717–​721. World Health Organization (WHO). “Availability and Consumption of Fish.” www.who. int/​nutrition/​topics/​3_​foodconsumption/​en/​index5.html n.d. Wulf, Andrea. “The Forgotten Father of Environmentalism.” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic. com/​science/​archive/​2015/​12/​the-​forgotten-​father-​of-​environmentalism/​421434/​ 23 December 2015. X-​Box Game Studios. Sea of Thieves. X-​box. 2018.

2 SCALING THE OCEAN

It is commonly accepted that humans have seen about 5% of the ocean, rendering the remaining 95% unknown and yet-​to-​be-​discovered. Speculation, then, questions whether the yet-​to-​be-​discovered might be simply more of the same as the known 5% or whether it holds discoveries currently beyond imagination. The rhetorical effect of this oft-​repeated statistic provides us with a sense of unknowing and a sense of possibility. It invokes the sublime. It drives a desire to explore and discover what might be hidden in that remaining 95%, reclaiming the frontier narrative of eighteenth-​century literature and recasting it as cutting-​edge appeals for research, the same explorations Alaimo refers to as “new era of deep-​sea exploration” and marine science, and the same narratives that obfuscate the environmental destruction that accompany this new, high-​tech exploration. Such exploratory desire encumbers a condition of imperative, dictating that observing the 95% is an inherent necessity. Desire-​to-​know mutated into an anthro-​hubristic presumed compulsory need to know. While such desire remains guarded behind a rhetoric of scientific curiosity, it must also be understood irrevocably as bearing characteristics of colonialism and ecocolonialism. That is, the need to know the remaining 95% echoes aspirations of conquest—​material, political, intellectual, cultural, and philosophical. Likewise, the rhetoric of the 95% mirrors binary popularizations similar to those rendered about technology as either savior or demise, a kind of techno-​fetishism that posits technology will save us from ourselves, providing something better than what came before. Such thinking manifests in the very ideas of digital literacy and upgrade paths. Such thinking, when applied to ecological literacies and ocean, in particular, supposes that the yet-​to-​be-​discovered ocean might reveal opportunities for global salvation or destruction. “As goes the ocean, so goes life” (Mitchell, 22). No matter these popularized deliberations, acknowledgment of the 5:95% ratio reveals, too, the question of oceanic scale, particularly as it pertains to cultural imaginary. That is, the ratio suggests that ocean is so big that even the mighty,

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all-​seeing human has not been able to grasp it in its entirety. That the relational 5% is bound to the concept of “seeing” exposes, too, the importance of the visual in our understanding of ocean, as well as our valuing of the technological and data-​ driven mediations that allow ocean to be seen. Part of our understanding of scale is bound up in a faith in seeing as definitive evidence (seeing is believing; pics or it didn’t happen) and the reliance upon and necessity of technological and data mediation to provide that view. Unfortunately, encumbered in the ocean deficit of both ecocriticism and literary studies more broadly is a confined understanding of scale and ocean. As Cohen explains, “One of the most discussed revisions offered by the maritime perspective is an addition of new geographic and spatial scales. As regards modernity, literary studies across the twentieth century preferred scales that came from territory and terrestrial existence” (“Terraqueous,” 658). Blue ecocriticism, then, necessarily, rethinks the role of scale in considering the impact of textual representations of ocean upon the cultural imaginary. As such, blue ecocriticism necessarily encounters questions of contemporary digital representation as both part of the literary/​textual continuum of representation and as divergent from such traditions and the role of scale in those depictions.1 Drawing from Zach Horton’s claim that “we have failed to develop an adequate level of scale literacy” (6) (while acknowledging my earlier claims regarding literacies), this chapter considers the role of scale in representations of ocean and how scale contributes to oceanic literacy. For Horton, scalar thinking in ecology requires that we think of a kind of “thick” ecology that “spans all scales of our milieu and is self-​reflexively fed back into the material-​technological-​semiotic process of milieu-​ building itself ” (6). “To build a milieu,” Horton explains, “is to select a set of signifying ecological details and arrange them into a life world. Our technological assemblages, cultural narratives, and the ontological assertiveness of the world itself are all compositional elements of our milieus” (6). Horton’s notion of milieu, for the purposes of this examination, might be thought of as an encompassing atmosphere from which the cultural imaginary emerges. Both are never identifiable in total, but elements of their composition—​like Horton’s technological assemblages and cultural narratives—​may make evident fundamental aspects of their complex structures. Historically, textual representations,2 more often than not, present ocean as a kind of generic fluid, its properties depicted without the detail of physical properties such as variations in chemical properties, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics, and so on. In particular, such representations are restricted in imagining—​if not unable to imagine—​ocean in scale, ranging from the microbial, the genetic, and the atomic to the global. As such, we tend to reduce ocean to being big. Ocean, it seems, is oceanic. Ocean is, again, sublime. Representations of ocean tend to maintain a consistent position of scale, rendering the ability to imagine ocean only to a singular depth of understanding. Blue ecocriticism requires significant consideration of scale. Microscopic and microbial views are as relevant as GIS global views. As a matter of clarity, considerations of oceanic scale require attention to distinctions between representations of ocean and representations of water—​in the

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case of marine environments, seawater specifically (see Jue, for example). This project, as I noted earlier, focuses on ocean while acknowledging the importance of water studies as an emerging discipline. However, in saying so, blue ecocriticism does not divest of the importance of water studies’ attention to the politics and economics bound up in scalar representations but works to demonstrate the ways in which scalar thinking often obfuscates the political, cultural, and indigenous perspective of oceanic view. Clark’s examination of ecocriticism in the Anthropocene relies significantly upon considerations of scale. As he puts it, “the environmental ethics emerging from the Anthropocene entails thinking on scales of space and time often considerably greater than usual” (29). Certainly, scale has become a critical aspect of recent ecocritical conversations, and Clark’s binding scale to ethics invokes opportunity to reimagine environmental ethics not only in light of anthropocenic thinking, but specifically within posthumanist thought, as well. That is to say, to address scale from within anthropocenic ecocriticism conjoins posthuman ethics with scalar thinking. Similarly, as Stacy Alaimo has so rightly identified, “attention to the relation between epistemology and ethics remains vital” (Exposed, 8). For Clark, scalar thinking stands to invigorate what is yet to come in ecocritical thought, yet, like much of the ecocritical turn, he identifies that scalar thinking stands to “support the ecocritical agenda of including a green cultural shift” (29). Though I  assume Clark to employ “green” here to represent an all-​encompassing environmental position, my objective here is to promote a blue cultural shift alongside green thinking, but to also show how green thinking—​or land-​based logics and traditions—​also restrict scalar representations of and thinking about ocean. Thus, the green cultural shift imposes land-​based ideologies, logics, methods, and politics upon ocean; blue ecocriticism works to show how such an imposition constricts how the cultural imaginary constructs ocean. Cultural imaginaries tend to represent ocean and outer space (aka deep space) as analogous in size. Our descriptors echo that assumption: ocean and outer space are vast, boundless, enormous, huge, immense, limitless, colossal, tremendous. Perhaps conceptually bigger than we can grasp or tend to in total. Sublime. Things that are big are oceanic. Similarly, deep ocean, like deep space, requires significant technological apparatus for humans to enter and observe. With this in mind, this chapter attends to histories of scalar thinking and the magnitude of applying scalar methods to representations of ocean and oceanic space.

A scaled view of scale Clark, by way of scalar thought forwarded by scholars such as Timothy Morton, Mitchell Thomashow, and Simon A.  Levin, contends that we gravitate toward environmental and ecological thinking through limited perceptions of scale. For Clark, these limits of perception produce a constrained view that inhibits one’s range of perception, and in turn, the scope of possible thought. Clark sees this limit as perpetuating an unbalanced perspective, what he terms a “derangement of scale”

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(125). Simply put, Clark’s derangement of scale suggests that our ability to see microscale actions limit our ability to perceive of macroscale effects.Two significant problems arise from this derangement: a sense that our individual actions are trivial in larger scales and larger scaled problems are so overwhelming that as individuals we are unable to see our contributions has having any effect. For Thomashow, “by virtue of juxtaposing scale and perspective you learn how to explore the spatial and temporal dimensions of environmental change and thereby cultivate the ability to perceive the biosphere” (5). Thomashow emphasizes the role of time in scalar thinking. He writes, consider some of the scalar perspectives you might encounter in thinking about the biodiversity crisis. First, to place the issue in a biospheric context, you have to expand your sense of time so that you think in terms of the history of life on Earth (four billion years or so). (12) “Perceiving global environmental change,” he explains, “requires the ability to scan broad horizons of place and time” and “require the skilled juxtaposition of scale” (78). Thomashow derives this concept of “juxtaposition of scale” from Timothy Allen and Thomas Hoekstra’s position that an ecological epistemology would understand “the juxtaposition of scale as a means of interpreting complex patterns” (97). In Toward a Unified Ecology, Allen and Hoekstra contend that all ecological processes are necessarily multiscaled and that “the observer always has a scale of perception and a level of analysis that deals with the system as a complex observable” (19). They explain that at any scalar view, the observer inherently adopts a “criteria for observation” (19) that are deployed across scaled observation as needed. Criteria for observation, they note, are determined by “whatever it is that makes something important enough to be recognized in an observation or set of observations” (19). The complexity of ecological process, though, both Allen and Hoekstra and Thomashow contend, require scalar observation to account for at least three tiers—​ or hierarchies in Allen and Thomashow’s terminology—​of observation: the tier in question; the level below which reveals, in part, the structures of the tier in question; and the level above which makes evident the context and significance of the tier in question (Thomashow, 97; Allen and Hoekstra, 19–​21). Insightfully, Allen and Hoekstra declare that “nothing is scaled until it is realized” (20). However, even this tiered vision of scale suggests an allegiance to a kind of literacy, a linearity. Clark also adapts Levin’s notions of limits of scale as “only a low-​dimensional slice through a high-​dimensional cake” (1945). Levin describes the restricted scalar view: “In some cases, the scales of observation may be chosen deliberately to elucidate key features of the natural system; more often, the scales are imposed on us by our perceptual capabilities or by technological or logistical constraints” (1945). For ecocriticism, I would add to this discursive or linguistic constraints, as well, what Levine alludes to as “the scale of description” (1945), particularly given his claim that “the realized environmental variability will be a consequence of the scales of

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experience” (1945) and for the human, such experiences are mediated discursively. Levine, I should note, clarifies, too, that “there is no natural level of description” (1947). For Levin, as he expressed in his 1989 Robert H. MacArthur Award Lecture, “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology,” scale is “the fundamental conceptual problem in ecology, if not in all science” (1944). The same might be said of ecocriticism and ecocomposition, if we take Clark’s (and Morton’s, as I will show) claims to heart. For Levin, the role of theoretical ecology is to relate “processes that occur on different scales of space, time, and organizational complexity” (1944). This, Levin contends, is “the essence of science” (1944). He is clear that “global and regional changes in biological diversity, in the distribution of greenhouse gases and pollutants, and in climate all have origins in and consequences for fine-​scale phenomena,” and that “we must learn how to interface the disparate scales of interest of scientists studying these problems at different levels” (1944). Levin’s objectives are scientific, and, as I  have noted regarding environmental and energy humanities, while the ecocritical imperative emerges from within the humanities, it is imbricated with scientific knowledge systems. In fact, the very term ecocriticism binds the Greek philosophical method of κριτική (kritikē) (meaning “evaluation” or “analysis”) with the Greek οἶκος (oikos) (meaning “house” or “environment”) and implicates by way of ecology the Greek λογία (meaning “study of ”), yoking the humanities and science together. Levin’s objectives are strictly scientific; yet, he provides some foundational guidance for scalar thinking that become necessary in developing approaches of scale for ecocritical work. Chief among these is Levin’s recognition that any scalar inquiry might emphasize a particular “scale of interest” and that fundamentally there can be “no single ‘correct’ scale on which to describe populations or ecosystems” (1944). Levine distinguishes, too, between scales of interest and scales of observation, as well as scales of experience—​which, of course, are measured as human experiences. The point here for ecocriticism, particularly as scale has emerged as a key facet of current ecocritical work, is that representations from any point within a given scale must be understood as a viable perception, and simultaneously recognized as only one perspective along that scale—​the “scale of interest” in that study. One scale of interest’s impact across the rest of the scale is not irrelevant, though it may not be made evident within the account of that scale of interest. Similarly, the degree of intensity of interaction and/​or the effect of one scale of interest is likely to vary across a given scale and likely to be inconsistent across other scales. Thus, and though Levin’s address of scale does not take it up, the very idea of scale of interest implicates the role of complexity in scalar thinking. In turn, then, any consideration of blue ecocriticism—​or any ecocriticism—​is always already only representative of a given scale of interest in a given context. Repetition of that scale of interest or the lack of representation of other scales of interest in that given context, then, perpetuate a sense of authenticity of that scale of interest as the relevant or singular (and thus independently accurate) view of that context. Pairing Levin’s scalar approach with Allen and Hoekstra’s three tiers of observation

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and their claim that only that which is realized can be observed in scale allows us to begin to develop a scalar method that acknowledges the situatedness of scale. As such, any scalar representation certainly is vulnerable to contradiction by counter positions within scales of interest, but more importantly always already an acknowledgment of the importance of other similarly tiered observations and criteria in order to more fully express the complexity of the observed scaled representation. The difficulty, as Allen and Hoekstra, Thomashow, and Levin have expressed it, is that despite this recognition, too frequently representations of a given scale of interest fail to account for multitiered observations and/​or other criteria along the same scale of interest. Thus, scaled representations tend to be interpreted as isolated from the complexity of the system in which they participate and, in turn, as a normalized view of that scale of interest. Problematically, too, we can easily identify that anthropocentric scales of interest tend to cast scales of interest as external to the body of the observer, failing to consider, for example, of ecological systems internal to the body of the observer. That is, scales of interest are less often embodied scales. From Levin, then, Clark derives a crucial aspect of scale relevant to the ecocritical project:  “one scale forms a kind of norm for us, the usually taken-​for-​g ranted scale of our day-​to-​day existence and perception” (29). He continues: “We understand distance, height, and breadth in terms of the given dimensionality of our embodied existence. A particular human scale is inherent to the intelligibility of the Earth around us” (30). This is why we have yet to be able to comprehend and represent ocean beyond the vast. Clark’s diagnosis concerning scale and the human, though, carries deeper implications regarding the imposed limits of our human-​ ness on our engagement with the world. The human scale constraint—​or Levin’s scale of interest—​inherently shields our ability to think in ways other than from human perspective, or at least encourages us to acknowledge those limits. Even if we wanted to think like a mountain, we couldn’t. Ecocriticism, itself exemplary of this bounded human perspective, has yet to fully embrace questions of the posthuman in the reshaping of ecocritical thought—​ecocritical ethics, in particular. Historically, such human scale has been employed to justify constructions of what “human” might even mean, often to the abhorrent end of constructing Indigenous populations as non-​human and the erasure of Indigenous scales of interest. Allen and Hoekstra, too, recognize in their account of scale and hierarchy that the most important general point about understanding scale is the “recognition of the role of the observer in the system. Ignoring human subjectivity will not make it go away” (59). Clark, Levin, and Allen and Hoekstra are right to identify that such human-​centric scale is unavoidable, but we must also concede the implications of what that unavoidability renders ethically. As Clark puts it, understanding the Anthropocene, “entails the realization of how deeply this scale may be misleading, underlying how (worryingly) our ‘normal’ scales of space and time must be understood as contingent projections of a biology which may be relatively inexorable” (30). Clark calls it the “inevitable question of scale” and the “demand to think of human life at much broader scales of space and time, something which alters significantly the way that many once familiar issues appear” (13). Like Clark, Morton, in

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Dark Ecology, connects understanding the Anthropocene with understanding scale, showing how individuals are less likely to connect their commonplace choices—​ like using an automobile—​with other individuals’ choices to do the same resulting in larger-​scaled impacts. According to Morton, such individual actions are “statistically meaningless” from the perspective of a microscale, but their cumulative effects have environmental impact at macroscales. This is Clark’s derangement of scale. As a precursor to Clark’s ecocritical consideration of the Anthropocene and scale, Morton’s work across three books—​The Ecological Thought, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World and Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence—​forwards the now familiar idea of the hyperobject:  things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. Morton first proposed the idea of the hyperobject in a March 18, 2010, post to his blog “The Temporary Condition,” explaining that We have indeed created things that we can hardly understand, let alone control, let alone make sensible political decisions about. Sometimes it’s good to have new words for these things, to remind you of how mind-​blowing they are. So I’m going to introduce a new term: hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are phenomena such as radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience. In this sense, hyperobjects are like those tubes of toothpaste that say they contain 10% extra: there’s more to hyperobjects than ordinary objects. (“Common Sense”) This introduction of the term hyperobjects in his blog would serve as foundation for Morton’s more fully extrapolated definition initiated that same year in his book The Ecological Thought, a book Morton considers a precursor to his previous work in Ecology without Nature. In the final pages of The Ecological Thought, Morton proposes the idea of the hyperobject as things that last longer than we do. His concept was initially tied specifically to materiality, to the ability to fathom3 thoughts that things like “humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium will far outlast current social and biological forms” (130). “Hyperobjects,” he explains, “outlast us all” (130). Like Thomashow, Morton’s earliest definitions of hyperobjects emphasize the role of time in scalar thinking. Hyperobjects, Morton initially explained, are objects that have life spans that significantly exceed human life spans, which force us to think in difficult chrono-​scalar representation beyond the evident scale of interest. Hyperobjects, evolve beyond object-​ness, as well, as their parts often extend the time scale, implicating, for example, not just the hundreds of thousands of years a Styrofoam cup might exist, as Morton shows, but also the chemical components of that cup as it decays, extending its chemical influence and diffuse impact into its environment and ecological systems long after the cup-​object has itself mutated and

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decayed. For Morton’s initial descriptions of hyperobjects, the object may appear “more real than reality itself ” (130). Morton transmogrifies the notion of hyperobject in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World to the now familiar definition from his Ecological Thought definition, “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans,” (1) into a definition that now includes things like black holes, the Florida Everglades, or the solar system. In this updated definition, “Hyperobjects, then, are ‘hyper,’ in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not” (1). Hyperobjects, Morton explains, “involve profoundly different temporalities than human-​scale ones we are used to” (1). However, he continues, “hyperobjects occupy a high-​dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for a stretch of time” (1). Again, the ability to “see” the hyperobject is central to the human ability to grasp at the scale of a hyperobject. This linkage allows Morton to attribute hyperobjects as detectable “in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects” (1).4 In this way, then, we might deem ocean a hyperobject, and in many ways it is. However, ocean simultaneously is not hyperobject. Morton’s hyperobjects, he explains,“are not just collections, systems, or assemblages of other objects. They are objects in their own right” (2). Clearly, ocean is both hyperobject and not hyperobject in Morton’s structure. The role of the aesthetic in the oceanic cultural imaginary is central to our understanding of ocean as hyperobject, certainly, as is the assemblage of biological, material, physical, chemical, and cultural components of what constitutes ocean.The “object” of Morton’s hyperobject derives from object-​oriented ontology (OOO), and in Chapter 3, I will take up the idea of ocean as object and hyperobject, particularly in terms of new materialist approaches to the formation of ocean. For now, Morton’s hyperobject provides a somewhat useful—​if not popular—​avenue into our understanding of scale, as he shows how hyperobjects exceed the ability to grasp the vast scale of a hyperobjects time and size. However, Morton’s hyperobjects are also conceptually problematic in that he dilutes the relevance of the hyperobject toward the end of Hyperobjects by claiming, “in a strange way, every object is a hyperobject” (Hyperobjects, 201), a claim that echoes, for me, the relevance of Syndrome’s aphorism in The Incredibles:  “when everyone is super, no one will be.” Morton may have intended this claim to universalize the importance of the hyperobject in an attempt to make ubiquitous the notion of hyperobject and to emphasize his claim that “hyperobjects profoundly change how we think about any object” (201). Alternatively, perhaps the intention is to solidify the very idea of hyperobject as the uber-​hyperobject. Unfortunately, though, the rhetorical maneuver is more aptly read as dismissive shrug. Similarly, Morton’s gesture toward the indiscriminate application of hyperobject to “everything” reveals a problematic holism within his extended theory of the hyperobject that is itself contradictory to the very role of scale he professes as necessary in understanding hyperobjectivity. That is, if everything is a hyperobject at all scales of perception including chrono-​scalar relativity, then Morton’s scalar derangement is less a matter of derangement than it is of homogenizing erasure and might be considered a form of scalar nominalism.

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Though a less pressing critique of his claims, Morton’s work also exemplifies significant ocean deficit as he does not take up ocean as hyperobject, despite hyperobjectivity being particularly well-​suited for considering the oceanic, unless we simply assume ocean as hyperobject under Morton’s “everything” rubric.5 This is not a critical statement, as it is not my intention to chastise individual scholars for not emphasizing ocean in their work no matter their objectives, but rather, as explained in the previous chapter, to emphasize a larger, disciplinary ocean deficit across ecocriticism and ecocomposition.

Visual nominalism French novelist and filmmaker George Perec’s 1974 meditation Species of Spaces and Other Pieces presents a scalar vision of the world that is often taken up by those working with spatial theories. Interestingly, Perec initiates his consideration of space and scale with a reproduction of pre-​Raphaelite painter and designer Henry Holiday’s illustration of “The Bellman’s Map” also known as “The Ocean Chart” that appears in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits).6 Carroll’s poem recounts the adventure of a crew of ten (nine men whose names each begin with the letter B and a Beaver) searching for the illusive Snark, a rare and dangerous animal the crew believes resides on an island across the sea (the same island, Carroll has suggested elsewhere, on which the Jabberwock of his poem “Jabberwocky” was slain). To get to the island, the crew must cross the ocean, guided by a map that the Bellman purchased for the voyage. The image (see Figure 2.1) appears between lines 096 and 097 amidst the discussion of the map. It is simply a blank sheet of paper: The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies—​       Such a carriage, such ease and such grace! Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,       The moment one looked in his face! He had bought a large map representing the sea,       Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be       A map they could all understand. “What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,7       Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?” So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply       “They are merely conventional signs! “Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!       But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank: (So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—​       A perfect and absolute blank!”

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FIGURE 2.1  Henry

Holiday, “The Bellman’s Map” or “The Ocean Chart,” from ­chapter 2 of Lewis Carrol’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” 1876 Permissions: Public Domain

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out       That the Captain they trusted so well Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,       And that was to tingle his bell. (10–​12)

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We might read The Bellman’s Map in a number of different ways, but from a blue ecocritical perspective, we might consider the image to suggest the unseen, or the inability to see the ocean in totality, the inability to account for it as a stationary, mappable space. Ocean, according to the map, is empty, undefined. Such representation of ocean is not, however, unfamiliar. In The Social Construction of the Ocean, Philip Steinberg explains that historically maps frequently depicted the “blankness” of the ocean (107). Or, perhaps, ocean is not mappable space or is space yet-​to-​ be-​written. Note, for example, in the lower left portion of the image, the Scale of Miles suggests that the map depicts a large area, yet the map shows no characteristics of this area. Similarly, the map suggests surface, not depth; or, given its ambiguity, depth not surface. Nor does it provide any referent to determine where in Carroll’s imagined ocean the map is situated. The scale is illusive, and no reference point hints to the spatial characteristics of the mapped area.The scale of interest obscured. It is a space that cannot be seen or represented. It is, as the crew commends, “A perfect and absolute blank” (104). Of course, we cannot discount that the map is nonsense, part of a nonsense text. This notion of The Bellman’s Map as depicting the unseen is echoed in Mahendra Singh’s 2010 graphic novel version of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Yet, Singh does not present the map as blank, but depicts the crew as unable to see the map, their heads hooded and eyes covered (see Figure 2.2).The map itself offers no cartographical illustration, containing only the words “vous êtes ici toujours” literally meaning, “you are always here” or “you are here, always” depending on your grammatical choice.The idiomatic version of this would be rendered in the familiar English map key “you are here.” Singh’s “you are always here” is also evocative of Buckaroo Banzai’s catch phrase, “no matter where you go, there you are.” Singh has clearly depicted the Snark hunters with Rene Magritte’s 1928 twin surrealist paintings “The Lovers I” and “The Lovers II” in mind. The intertextual reference to Magritte leads us to read “you are here” on the blank map in the same playfully critical vein as Magritte’s Treachery of Images “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” which famously challenges our understanding of the relationship between words and images. Singh’s version of The Bellman’s Map also hints at allusion to semantics scholar Alfred Korzybski’s famous decree “the map is not the territory.” Singh’s hatching style, too, is deeply evocative of William Strang’s 1903 frontispiece for an edition of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (see Figure 2.3), an image echoed, as well, in Nick Hayes’ beautiful retelling in The Rime of the Modern Mariner (see Figure 2.4). For Singh, the crew must navigate to the island blind to their own position within the blank oceanic chart. The map, as well as its position on the ocean, is hidden from their view. For Perec to preface his consideration of space and spatiality with the image of The Bellman’s Map without any discussion of the map—​a kind of visual epigraph—​ suggests a rebuke of familiar cartographic representations of space and scale. The blank page of the map conveys Perec’s notion of unwritten space, a theme that underscores Perec’s meditations throughout Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Perec provides a scaled understanding of the spaces he occupies, moving us from the

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FIGURE 2.2  Mahendra

Singh, “Blank Map of the Bellman” 2010, n.p.

small-​scale representations of a sheet of paper on his bed, to the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment building, the street, the neighborhood, the town, the countryside, the country, the continent, the world, and eventually into space. His account is a foray into a textual zoom, a linguistic representation of scalar movement and perspective. Perec designs scaled movement outward to provide a relational view of human spatial occupation. Perec’s backing off through representations of ever-​ expanding spatial demarcations provides a view of relative size. His descriptions of space and of the world require—​at some level of understanding—​the role of the miniscule as compromising the expansive. Without the recognition of the page, for example, the world and space, as Perec shows them, would be unformed. The inverse holds, too, as the page becomes unidentifiable, absent of its position in the scaled representation at the outer ranges of Perec’s expanding perspective. Thus, the

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FIGURE 2.3  Frontispiece

by William Strang for 1903 publication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient mariner Permissions: Public Domain

inclusion of The Bellman’s Map suggests Perec’s attention to the representation of scale as inherently always a representation of perspective, of, as Levin would put it, the scale of interest. Perec’s move from the microview to the macroview is by no means unique to his work, as others have presented similar scaled perspectives. Notably Adrienne Rich describes employing a similar playful strategy as a child when writing letters to a friend providing her address as Adrienne Rich 14 Edgevale Road Baltimore, Maryland The United States of America

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FIGURE 2.4  Nick

Hayes Rime of the Modern Mariner. n.p.

The Continent of North America The Western Hemisphere The Earth The Solar System The Universe (8). Both Perec’s scaled transitions and Rich’s scaled address present two critical considerations about scale. First, these examples suggest a need to understand one’s position within the scale, to identify where the subject—​in these cases, the human subject—​is situated in relation to spatial occupation—​again, both Clark’s linkages between scale and perception and Levine’s scale of interest. That is, the cultural imaginary seems to desire a degree of fixity—​a landmark, as it were—​in order not just to attribute a sense of space, but to situate a subject in that sense and that space. Second, such scales stand to identify limits of human positioning. That is, these oversimplified expressions of human location within scales that extend to micro and macro tiers of observation beyond the imaginary give pause to the human subject’s ability to comprehend that positioning in scale and in terms of human relativity in that scale. Scale, then, determines perspective as much as perspective binds the representation of scale. Perspective, thus, can be understood as a kind of

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situated surveillance, what Lev Manovich calls a “logistics of perspective” which he connects to visual representation and the effect of “visual nominalism” (1). Both Perec and Rich provide access to their scale-​view through writing. The Bellman’s Map is the only image in Perec’s text, and it appears as an epigraph rather than an image addressed within the text itself. Yet, as imaging technologies and digital technologies began to provide other engagements with scale, our ability to represent and mediate scale began to grow more complex. Clearly, the advent of photography and digital media provided scalar evidence that altered the cultural imaginary, particularly since the late 1850s when French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-​Félix Tournachon began photographing Paris from the elevated position of a balloon.8 Early aerial photography began to alter concepts of scale by providing broader-​scaled images than had been seen before, but even prior to the advent of photography, imaging technologies merged with cartographic efforts to provide scalar representations. Consider, for example, the collaboration of Albrecht Dürer and Johannes Stabius in developing a system to depict a perspectival representation of the Earth. Dürer, whose work would become foundational in perspective-​based representation and who worked to develop an automated process for rendering perspectival views of objects, worked with Stabius to develop methods for mathematical cartographic simulation and developed a system, as Leon Gurevitch has shown, for “projecting a line-​drawn map of continents onto a spherical object,” that “can be seen as a Renaissance precursor to contemporary computer-​ generated models such as Google Earth” (86) (see Figure  2.5). For Manovich, this “Renaissance perspective” initiated a relationship between image and perspective that has become central to the development of war-​driven technologies such as “radar, infrared imaging, laser sensors, and 3-​D computer graphics” as well as imaging technologies indispensable to nearly every industry and science all of which result in visual nominalism (2), a technology that Manovich defines as “a method for precisely representing three-​dimensional world on a two-​dimensional surface” that would be the precursor to and foundations for the development of automated remote sensory technologies (2–​3). Manovich, by way of William Ivins’ 1939 work On the Rationalization of Sight, is specifically concerned with the effect of such perspectival representations on the cultural imaginary which he addresses by way of the influence of visual culture, “the techniques and technologies of visual representation available to a society at a given moment and the fundamental role they play in shaping every aspect of society” (3). While I return to visual culture and visual representation more extensively in Chapter 4, for now it is important to note the importance of Renaissance perspective and imaging technologies on contemporary scalar thinking specifically because of the act of visual representation affects the ability of the viewer to make connections between the visual representation and the object represented, or thing itself (Kant’s Ding an sich). Thus, as Manovich shows, perspective and the ability to visually convey perspective—​as Dürer’s map might, for example—​establish the relationship between objects and their representations is “the most important principle of perspective” (3), a concept Bruno Latour extends by showing that perspective permits us to not only represent

newgenrtpdf

Permissions: Public Domain

Map circa 1513 CE

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FIGURE 2.5  Stabius-​Durer World

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reality, but to control it. For Latour, who addresses perspective in light of Jean François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse’s cartographic work and travels across the Pacific, contends that perspectival representations are, as Manovich explains, “the most powerful instrument of power” because they allow for the mobilization of and manipulation of resources across time and space (Mapping, 3). For Latour, scaled perspective, then, garners its power not merely through representation, but through the ability to be represented mobile while also “immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable” with other scaled representations (Visualization, 7, italics in original). That is, for Latour no single scaled visualization determines cultural imaginary; instead, multiple, linked visualizations contribute to a larger scaled understanding of the representation. Scaled representations, then, should be understood as powerful influencers on the cultural imaginary, but not independently. The ecology of scaled representation forms a networked view of the represented object in order to obtain such influence. For Latour, Manovich, and Gurevitch, this power of visualizing scaled representation emerged with the Renaissance view and Renaissance-​era cartographic and visualization technologies. As Manovich puts it, By automating perspectival imaging digital computers completed the process begun in the Renaissance.The automation became possible because perspectival drawing has always been a step by step procedure, an algorithm involving a series of steps required to project coordinates of points in 3-​D space onto a plane. Before computers the steps of the algorithm were executed by human draftsmen and artists. The use of a computer allowed to execute them automatically and, therefore, much more efficiently. (Mapping, 10) Scaled representations, thus, are powerful tools in forming the cultural imaginary, certainly, but part of that power also results from interpretations driven by panopticon views and the understanding that scaled representations provide not merely the ability to conceptualize the scaled object in the representation, but to control that object. Scaled representations, whether Dürer and Stabius’ World Map or Google Earth, convey a sense of mastery and control. For ecocriticism, such representations—​image-​based and alphabetic/​linguistic—​have been central to the ability to represent ecological concerns. As such, we might reductively say that ecocriticism’s primary objective has been the critical interpretation of scaled representations across vast territories of the cultural imaginary, initially grounded in literary representations, but more recently a broader range of media representations. As such, considerations of scaled representations ranging from the literary—​such as Andersen’s “Drop of Water”, as I show in a few pages—​to digital representations of scale stand as central to the next iterations of ecocriticism whether blue or otherwise and require significant attention. Famously, ecocritics and others point to William Anders’ December 24, 1968, NASA image AS08-​14-​2383—​popularly known as “Earthrise”—​and the “Blue

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FIGURE 2.6  Earthrise, taken

on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William

Anders Permissions: Public Domain

Marble” photo taken December 7, 1967, by the crew of the Apollo 17 moon mission (either by astronauts Harrison Schmitt or Ron Evans) as iconic moments in which visual imaging dramatically shifted our conception of scale (see Figures 2.6 and 2.7).9 Our ability to see the relative size of Earth in relation to space and the recognition the photos offered of the Earth as a singular entity had not been so clearly depicted before. The photo provided access to a way of seeing the scale of our circumstance. Access to this scaled view altered human perception of the world. Because both images could be read as depicting a holistic view of an ecologically connected system, one simultaneously complex and delicate, both images were adopted by and became iconic to the environmentalist movement emerging at about the same time the pictures were taken. For media guru Marshall McLuhan, the whole earth image represented “perhaps the largest conceivable revolution in information,” creating “a new environment for the planet” (49). Nature, McLuhan argued, would no longer exist as an independent concept, but as ecological content. Local knowledge, he suggests, would become only subsets of global scale. For Stefan Helmreich, these images “became a cold war, proto-​environmentalist icon for a fragile ocean planet” (“Spaceship,” 1211), “a world delivered by the techno-​ eye of a cold war superpower and appropriated into environmentalist iconography” (“Spaceship,” 1214). In one sense, too, these two images—​along with others—​serve as reminder of the importance of both technological advances (i.e., the ability to travel in outer

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FIGURE 2.7 The

Blue Marble taken by either Harrison Schmitt or Ron Evans aboard the Apollo 17 mission on December 7, 1972 Permissions: Public Domain

space)10 and image as central to the relationship between ecological thinking and the larger cultural imaginary about the ecology of the earth. For McLuhan, space-​based media would alter all environmental conceptions. Important, though, we must also acknowledge that the interpreted holism of these images and the environmentalist rhetoric they inspired, as Heise rightly notes, erases political and cultural difference (24). In the same moment that we read these images as conveying a sense of ecological interconnectivity by way of an ecologically holistic visual metaphor, we must also recognize the images’ failure to depict human cultural difference and perspective. As noted in the previous chapter, blue ecocriticism forwards posthumanist ethics that must be driven as much by indigenous and marginalized voices as by technological interventions.Thus, any Whole Earth image is always already political in its representation. Likewise, as Manovich and Latour demonstrate, the power of these scaled representations came not merely from their ability to depict, but from their mobility and interconnectivity in such depictions. The Earthrise and Blue Marble images influence as they do only if they are mobile, only if they can be replicated in multiple locations, and only if viewers are able to conceptualize the linkage between the representation and the object itself.Viewers, too, must be able to extrapolate the possibility of control in relationship to the object of the representation. Such implication of control requires, as well, recognition that power of control and manipulation were in play prior to the ability to forward the representation. The representation only makes evident that such control has always already taken place; the representation exposes the prior control and imposes acknowledgment of that control in all moments after the representation. Scaled representations, then,

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FIGURE 2.8  Seen

from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the bluish-​white speck almost halfway up the brown band on the right Permissions: Public Domain

serve as panopticon and imply varying degrees of surveillance, particularly when the technologies employed to develop those representations are examined in terms of their potential to surveil at other scales, as well.They are also evident connections between controlled representation and literacies. Like the Earthrise photo and the Blue Mable photo, the February 14, 1990, image taken by the Voyager 1 space probe expanded that scaled engagement significantly. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has traveled further from Earth than any other known human-​made object. Commonly known as “Pale Blue Dot,”Voyager 1’s imaging technologies captured and transmitted an image of the Earth taken approximately 6 billion kilometers (about 3.7 billion miles) away from our planet (see Figure 2.8). The picture depicts Earth as a miniscule dot in deep space. It is a dot, perhaps no larger than a single pixel in the photograph, that redefines our understanding of the scale of Earth in relation to its spatial location and that hints at further alterations to our scaling view. Similar to Singh’s playful “you are here,” the Voyager 1 image is frequently reproduced to include the familiar you are here indicator (see Figure 2.9). The Blue Dot photograph was taken at the request of astronomer Carl Sagan, who argued that while the picture was not likely to have

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FIGURE 2.9 The

Blue Dot image with text added to playfully indicate location

any scientific value, it would prove influential in establishing cultural perspective about Earth’s location in the universe. The commonplace name of the photo—​The Pale Blue Dot—​affirms the role of blue in the cultural imaginary. The blue of the image, Sagan explains, “the bluish cast of this dot comes from its thick but transparent atmosphere and its deep oceans of liquid water” (6). For Sagan, this blue element is critical because within this solar system, it is unique. It is, as he and others have explained, the origin of life on this planet. Together, these four photos also provide visual evidence of the predominance of ocean as a central geological feature of the Earth planet.

Mediating zoom Interestingly, forty years in advance of Anders’ Earthrise image, Martin Heidegger foresaw the impact scaled representations of Earth would have. He posits in Being and Time that images taken from space of the Earth would dislocate perceptions and refocus human attention from the local to the global. He feared such disruptions would transform human relationships with the world into technologically dominated relationships (84). Likewise, he recognized the derangement of scale and representation in a whole Earth image, arguing that “This is no longer the earth on which man [sic] lives” implying a disjuncture between the

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object itself and the image (“Only,” 106). Similarly, in 1948, British Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle anticipated that “once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” Certainly, both the Earthrise and Blue Dot images had such an effect to some degree, but as static images, their rhetorical capabilities require viewers to make spatial connections between their individual positions in the world and the scaled representations in which those positions are located. Yet, a la Clark and others, those associations are deranged. That is, the images certainly provided context for scaled dislocation, but they also require associative leaps that can be difficult to conceptualize. Advances in imaging technologies have exacerbated this derangement while simultaneously diversifying the opportunities of scalar thinking. Technological developments continually resize our concepts of scale. Technological developments revise the ways in which we access varying scaled perceptions and, in turn, our ability to conceptualize power and control over those represented objects. In the author’s foreword to the 1957 book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, Kees Boeke explains that we tend to forget how vast are the ranges of existing reality which our eyes cannot directly see, and our attitudes may become narrow and provincial. We need to develop a wider outlook, to see ourselves in our relative position in the great and mysterious universe in which we have been born and live. (4) To encourage this wider outlook, Cosmic View provides a “graphic journey through the universe, to the edge of infinity in one direction and to the nucleus of the atom in another” (inside cover flap). The book, which predates many of the imaging and mapping technologies on which we now rely, consists of forty illustrations that progressively move from an overhead photograph of a young woman sitting on a chair holding a cat through twenty-​five illustrations that “jump” in scale out through space to a view of what telescopes were able to perceive at the time. The book then returns to the image of the girl and the cat and jumps down, through smaller scales until we see an illustration of the nucleus of a sodium atom. Boeke employs a tenfold scale to do so; each illustration moving in or out ten times the size of the previous image’s representation. Boeke’s tenfold scale would become a familiar methodology for representing scalar movement in other representations. Boeke’s book, which is designed for classroom application, might now be read as precursor to what has become known as “zooming.” The word zoom first appeared in our lexicon in the 1850s; its meaning tied to speed, to the act of moving fast and to an auditory notion that moving at speed creates a buzzing sound. Airplanes zoom; automobiles zoom. The enmeshed roles of velocity and the acoustic imply technological intervention; zooming requires technological apparatus. Zoom requires energy expenditure. Zoom is never passive. More recently and tied directly to camera imaging technologies, zoom has come

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to be understood as a photographic, filmic, or digital adjustment to focal length, an ability to adapt visual range. This use of zoom in this way first appeared in the December 1961 issue of Life magazine in the hybrid form of “auto-​zoom” in an advertisement for a Keystone camera that boasted “Keystone’s reflex auto-​zoom, the simplest, surest, most professional home movie camera ever” (114). The act of auto-​zoom would then add the words in and out to zoom to establish zoom to mean an adjustment in focus, a visual shift that alters perspective. To zoom in is to move visually closer; to zoom out is to move visually farther away. Zoom, then, acts as mediation between the visual and the physical act of moving and the representation of scalar positioning. Zooming implies size and space: zoom in for detail; zoom out for a broader view. Zooming in or out maintains zoom’s heredity of speed, as the implication is that the shift in view or visual representation of distance occurs rapidly, an action of the technology, not of the positioning of the device. Part of the value of zoom is the ability to adjust the scale of view quickly. Boeke’s forty illustrations, for example, allow the viewer to move from the subatomic view to a galactic view in a matter of moments. Such scaled movement is physically impossible for the human without significant (and not yet available) technologies, yet other kinds of technologies allow the representation of zoomed scale. Any consideration of scale or zoom, then, necessarily needs to account for human limitations such as human timescales, which play significant role in the construction of environmentalist thought, particularly in terms of approaches to ethics of control, management, and sustainability. Boundary events like the Anthropocene impose a kind of geological time scale to our thinking. Zooming, then, provides artificial velocity in order to transcend the limit of the human. Zoom is simulacra. Zoom is a posthuman technology of mediation. Though the use of zoom to describe adjustments in view as a manner of describing scale is a relatively new usage, one tied to the advent of camera technologies, the methodologies tied to zoom and scale have been employed since at least 1665 when Robert Hook published Micrographilia, a revolutionary text that combined text and images to provide microscopic views. From a strictly literary position, the book is an amazing artifact; its material qualities in printing and plates are astounding for a book of its era. According to Micrographilia scholar Brian J. Ford, the book “revolutionized the art of scientific investigation” (1), particularly given its representations of the microscopic scale in a time when the compound microscope was first developed.11 Unfortunately, only one of Hook’s original drawings remains, the Scheme VIII engraved depiction of ice crystals. Fortunately, many replications through various editions of the book (some as recently as 2019) still provide access to his scalar drawings.12 Hook, who had been appointed Curator of Experiments by the Royal Society (the precursor to Britain’s Academy of Science) in 1662, was responsible for “performing microscopical demonstrations for the members of the Royal Society” (Ford, 3). One of the outcomes of his experiments was the development of the concept of “cells,” which Hook described as a small unit or part of a larger object. He made the discovery while examining a piece of cork under a microscope.

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The discovery, though not recognized at the time, would come to define our understanding of units of life (Ford, 3). Hook’s concept of the cell structure would play a significant role in his depictions microscopic scale. Hook’s scientific accomplishments are monumental, though I will not relate a full history of them here. However, I do want to point out one such discovery that—​in addition to his contributions to scalar thinking—​should be of interest to ecocritics. Hook served as a research assistant to Robert Boyle, the “father of modern chemistry,” and in that capacity developed the first functioning vacuum pump, a design that would later be adapted to construct the first steam engines that powered the Industrial Revolution (see Ford, 2). Given ecocriticism’s long-​held attention to the role of the Industrial Revolution as an oft-​named origin of contemporary environmental crises and the beginning of the Anthropocene, it is interesting to note Hook’s unintended villainous role in that ecocritical origin story, while simultaneously initiating the methods that would drive one of the most prevailing discussions in current ecocriticism: the question of scale.13 Hook performed his microscopic investigations beginning twenty years after the publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Drop of Water,” which seems to anticipate the kinds of methodologies and technologies Hook would employ. Andersen opens his fable with the statement Of course you know what is meant by a magnifying glass—​one of those round spectacle-​glasses that make everything look a hundred times bigger than it is? When anyone takes one of these and holds it to his eye, and looks at a drop of water from the pond yonder, he sees above a thousand wonderful creatures that are otherwise never discerned in the water. But there they are, and it is no delusion. (354) In many translations, however, the words magnifying glass are conveyed as microscope instead:  “Of course you know what is meant by a microscope—​that wonderful little glass which makes everything appear a hundred times larger than it really is.” By way of the magnifying glass (or microscope), an old man named Kribble-​ Krabble observes the microscopic organisms found in a drop of water taken from a puddle. Not being able to see the organisms clearly, he adds a drop of witch’s blood to the water which dyes the organisms pink, making them more visible under the glass. The organisms appear to fight and devour one another in a chaotic scene. Kribble-​Krabble shows a nameless old wizard the spectacle, and the wizard believes he is witnessing the violence and debauchery of a tiny city much like Copenhagen. Anderson’s fable is often read as an allegory about the chaos of urban life or as a commentary on the diverse and sometimes unseen life around us. It might be read, too, as a reflection of changes in observation technologies and the effect new technologies will have on the ability to see things not seen before. In the case of “The Drop of Water,” Anderson provides a glimpse into the effect of technological mediation in scalar thinking akin to Hook’s work.

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Methods akin to Hook’s have dominated many attempts to depict scale. While it would be excessive to summarize all of the writing and imaging that employ zooming as scalar mediation, four films inspired by Boeke’s book stand as exemplary among other such portrayals. I turn to these films because they were all made to reach audiences broader than an academic audience and, as such, contribute to understanding scalar thinking in the larger cultural imaginary. That is, as Ursula Heise and others have readily expounded, when it comes to the science of ecology, the “technical details have often remained inaccessible to the general population” (22). Thus, films composed with a larger public audience in mind serve the larger environmentalist—​and, in turn ecocritical and ecocompositional—​missions more efficiently. Likewise, visual media such as these films emphasize the role of seeing and of the image in scalar thinking, and, as Heise affirms that to the extent that such scientific accounts reached a wide audience, it was through their recourse to asset of popular images and narrative patterns that were either generated by or became associated with the environmentalist movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. (22) Thus, I turn to four films, three from the period Heise addresses, and a fourth more recently produced: the 1968 short film Cosmic Zoom, the 1968 and 1977 versions of the short documentary Powers of Ten, and the 1996 short documentary Cosmic Voyage. Cosmic Zoom, directed and animated by Eva Szasz and produced by the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada,14 relies on animation to convey a sense of scale. Cosmic Zoom begins with an image of a boy rowing a boat along a body of water; a dog sits in the boat with the boy. We can identify the location of the boat as the scene zooms out as the Ottawa River, which flows into the St. Lawrence River and then to the Gulf of St, Lawrence and the North Atlantic. Following the establishing shot of the boy, dog, and boat, the view then zooms out, revealing a larger view of the surrounding. Since the size of the image and the size of the screen remain constant, the zoom reveals a broader image, as the details of the smaller images fade into the larger view. The zoom continues outward revealing the Earth, the moon, and the planets of our solar system and beyond until reaching what the NFB describes as “the farthest conceivable point of the universe.” At that point, at the limit of conception, the zoom reverses and accelerates, speeding back through the cosmos, through the solar system, past the planets, sun, moon, and back to the Earth until the view returns to the boy. When the zoom reverses, the accompanying musical score, performed with a pan flute, increases dramatically in tempo and the zoom itself speeds up so that the return trip to the boy takes 48 seconds whereas the trip out takes three minutes and thirteen seconds. The entire film is 8 minutes long. Once the return zoom reaches the origin of the boy in the boat, the music again slows and the zoom now moves in on the boy’s hand, which holds on to the boat’s

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oar. The zoom tightens revealing a mosquito biting the hand, and the zoom moves into the boy’s blood; the “tiniest particle of existence, an atom of a living human cell,” as the NFB explains. Again, the view reverses back out once the zoom in reaches the cellular level. Similarly, as before, the return trip out is sped up taking 31 seconds as compared to the original 2-​minute and 13-​second zoom in. There are three key points about the Cosmic Zoom film that are notable. First, the film is entirely wordless, rendering the depiction of scale strictly a matter of visual representation. Unlike Boeke’s Cosmic View, which relied upon both written description and images (an Image/​text), Cosmic Zoom conveys its scalar depiction via image and sound.While visually stunning and dramatic, the suggestion that scale is best conveyed visually requires that we consider how visual representations confine how the cultural imaginary conceives of scale. Recall, for example, the opening lines of this chapter indicating how much of ocean has been seen. Second, the accompanying flute creates a sense of velocity that makes evident the role of velocity in zoom, while simultaneously—​and perhaps playfully, given the cartoonish flutter of the flute when sped up—​allowing the viewer to accept the unreality of the velocity. In this film, the sound of zooming is musical, not buzzing, but it nonetheless indicates a chronological scale that would be unachievable in the real-​time physical reality of the human. Finally, the zoom into the cellular establishes a dichotomy between the human and the galactic view. Again, as the NFB describes it, “from the farthest conceivable point of the universe to the tiniest particle of existence.” The representative scale is always already human. From a strictly blue ecocritical position, as well, I should note that it is telling that the film identifies the limit of scale at the human cell, rather than passing through or past the boy into the water, and eventually through the Earth. We never see what is below the surface. This is particularly interesting to me, as well, given that as one of her six short animations produced through the NFB, Szasz animated and directed Jocelyn Rheder’s fable “The Trout that Stole the Rainbow,” a visually stunning an aquatically aware film. To be clear, though, a dive past the boy into the water would have not reduced the scale of observation, but instead recontextualized it from human cellular levels to aquatic cellular levels. Similar to Cosmic Zoom (and probably better known), Charles and Ray Eames’ films the Powers of Ten are based on Boeke’s Cosmic View and rely on zoom representations to depict the universe scaled.15 The first film, A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, depicts an overhead image of a man asleep on a blanket; the narrator (Judith Bronowski) tells us that the man is napping on a golf course in Miami. The screen is divided; the right side shows the napping man and the left side shows four gauges that monitor the zoom movement: an indication of the Powers of Ten as the zoom moves in or out, a distance meter, a clock that measures the depicted travel time and a clock that comparatively shows Earth time, and measure of the percentage of the speed of light represented in the zoom. The film is rendered in black and white. Like Szasz’s film, the zoom out from the image of the man increases outward by the Powers of Ten until reaching a distance of a hundred million light years

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away from the man on the blanket. The zoom then reverses and speeds up, so that whereas the zoom out takes 4:37 representing 10 seconds for each magnitude of change, the return to the man on the blanket takes two seconds for each of the 24 powers of ten traveled outward, so that the return trip takes only 48 seconds. Once returning to the image of the napping man, the zoom then moves in to the man’s hand at the rate of 10 seconds for each magnitude of change, zooming into a view of the nucleus of a carbon atom at a scale of ten to the negative fourteenth power. The film ends there, not returning to the original image. This initial version of the “Powers of Ten” films ran as part of an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. The original film was part of the museum’s original exhibits when it opened in 1976, and it remained in there until the museum’s Life in the Universe gallery closed in 1978. During this time, the Eames revised the film and released Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero in 1977.The revised version was produced for IBM and was made in color. The revised version begins with a film representation of a man and a woman enjoying a picnic on a lakeside in Chicago (as opposed to the original Miami location). Interestingly, lying on the blanket with the picnic foods is a copy of time scholar J. T. Fraser’s 1966 book The Voices of Time.The four gauges do not appear in this version, replaced by a simple textual indication of distance measure on each side of the image. The zoom out then extends to ten to the twenty-​fourth power depicting our galaxy as one among many. The return to the picnic scene is sped up. The zoom in, like the original film and like Szasz’s film, zoom into the man’s hand until reaching the nucleus of a carbon atom at ten to the negative sixteen power, two magnitudes “deeper” than the original film. Like the first version of the film, the revised version ends at this point. The fourth film based on Boeke’s book, the 1996 IMAX film Cosmic Voyage, was directed by Bayley Silleck, produced by Jeffrey Marvin, and narrated by Morgan Freeman. Like the Eames’ first film, Cosmic Voyage was made for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, though it showed worldwide at IMAX theaters. Like the other three films, Cosmic Voyage zooms out and then in across forty-​two orders of magnitude. Like the other films, Silleck’s film begins at the human scale of interest, at a street carnival in Venice, Italy, and zooms out to the edge of the observable universe to a scale of ten to the twenty-​seventh power, farther than the other three films by three degrees of magnitude. Like the other films, the zoom then reverses and speeds up, returning to the scene in Venice in a fraction of the time the zoom out took. Unlike the other three films, however, the zoom in does not focus on the human body; instead, the scene shifts to Delft in the Dutch Republic, birthplace of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek an innovator in microbiology and microscope technologies. Leeuwenhoek often worked with microscopic examinations of drops of pond water, much like Kribble-​Krabble and at about the same time as Andersen wrote his fable. Leeuwenhoek is considered the first to document microscopic examinations of microbes (which he termed dierkens, meaning “tiny animals”), bacteria, red blood cells (as well as capillary blood flow),

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spermatozoa, and details of muscle fibers. Cosmic Voyage, then, focuses on a single drop of water on an aquatic plant, zooming in past microscopic organisms until a magnitude of ten to the negative fifteen power at the level of subatomic quarks. Numerous other books, films, and media projects have taken up the Powers of Ten orders of magnitude approach as a method for depicting scale that exceeds the limit of human scale of interest, including many recent digital experiences, a few of which I address later in this chapter. Many of the more recent digital representations of scale now permit for depictions well beyond the previously mentioned films’ twenty-​fourth power of magnitude, extending out and in beyond 40 degrees of magnitude. What is critical for the discussion within an emerging blue ecocriticism is the acknowledgment that such scalable representations depend upon technological advances that mediate perception beyond the inherent range of biological and embodied limitations. Likewise, scalar representation relies upon visual engagement. As famed Manhattan Project physicist Philip Morrison explains, “of all of our senses it is vision that most informs the mind. We are versatile diurnal primates with a big visual cortex; we use sunlit color in constant examination of the bright world” (115). Instruments of science, he explains, favor vision, but he writes,“they extend it far into new domains of scale” giving us access to images “at scales outside the physical limits of visible light” (115). Yet, he elucidates, “behind every representation stands much more than can be imaged” because “the linked conceptual structures of science are not more central to an overall understanding than the visual models we can prepare” (116). I take up the role of the visual, specifically, in detail in Chapter 4, but the visual remains central to much of what follows, particularly as we examine the role of digital technologies and zoom in devising scalar thinking within blue ecocriticism. The connection between zoom and scale also requires explicit attention to the potential of zoom to erase visibility at varying scales. If, as I noted earlier, we are to accept anthropocentric understandings that humans influence all levels of scale throughout any given ecological system and that such influence is intrinsically encumbered by politics and ideology, then we are ethically bound to identify, too, the risks of extirpating the scaled perspectives of many populations. As Richard Kerridge puts it in his “Foreword” to the Oppermann and Iovino Environmental Humanities collection, From a feminist, postcolonial, or more broadly Environmental Justice perspective, the necessary zooming involves withdrawing to the point from which humanity is visible as a single geomorphic force, and then zooming back in, perhaps further than before, to make necessary distinctions between rich and poor, privileged and oppressed. (xvii)

Digital scale Digital distribution and circulation now stand as the most influential and most far-​reaching mechanism for inculcating representations of ocean—​or anything else,

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for that matter—​in nascent cultural imaginaries and, as some would point out, ecological literacies more comprehensively. As such, then, any blue ecocritical consideration of ocean necessarily demands attention to digital representations (no matter familiar ecocritical positions that technological advances induced current environmental crises) not merely as another textual form to which ecological literary criticism might be applied, but as cynosure to cultural imaginary formations. In the opening chapter of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Heise, pointing to the Blue Planet photo, contends that the transition from the image of the “Blue Planet” to the infinite zooming capabilities of the internet tool Google Earth marks a formal as well as a conceptual shift with important implications for representations of the global across various forms of environmental art and thought. (21) Heise then uses the concept of zooming to describe digital artist John Klima’s pre-​ Google-​Earth-​era installation Earth as software that gathers internet data about topography and weather for the earth and projects them onto a three-​dimensional model of the planet, in such a way that the user can zoom in and out of different regions and see them displayed in terms of six different layers of data about the earth as a whole as well as the specific places the viewer zooms in on. (66) For Heise, the shift to zoomable interactive representations of Earth allows scalar movement between global and localized representation. Google Earth, she contends, is the last metamorphosis of the Blue Planet image into a searchable and zoomable database in the shape of a virtual globe [that] signals and sums up some of the crucial transformations that have taken place in the imagination of the globe since the 1960s. (67) She explains: In its ability to display the whole planet as well as the minute details of particular places in such a way that the user can zoom from one to another and focus on different types of information, Google Earth’s database imaginary may well be the latest and post-​modernist avatar of modernist collage, which has now turned global, digital, dynamic, and interactive. (67)

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As ecocritic Madison Jones has shown, too, “As we increasingly rely on smartphone applications like Google maps and other location-​based technologies for navigation, the rhetoric of scale and zoom are deeply naturalized into our sense of orientation” (81). Unlike the theories of literacy discussed in the previous chapter that identify transitions from orality to literacy to digital literacy or electracy, J. Baird Callicott identifies Google Maps as a significant part of the current transformation of literacy, not to digital literacy or electracy, but to what he terms “Googality”: We are presently in the midst of another revolution in communications and information technology, from literacy to Googality—​I’m sorry, but I cannot think of a better name. If these scholars are right about the transformation of human consciousness effected by the transition from orality to literacy, then another transformation of human consciousness may be forthcoming as we leave the linear world of letters and the privacy and intimacy of the one-​way conversations we have with books, for the simultaneity, interconnectedness, and interactivity of the cyber “cloud.” (151–​152) Google Earth is a computer application that provides an interactive, 3D representation of Earth.16 Google Earth technologies were inspired by the Powers of Ten films (see Killday, 20) and initially constructed by digital game development company Intrinsic Graphics, but because the company did not see any gaming application for it (despite being influenced by flight simulators), Intrinsic Graphics associated company Keyhole developed the technology as Keyhole Earth Viewer. The viewer used technology known as “clipmapping,” a patented graphics innovation developed by Intrinsic for “loading a multi-​resolution stack of images and blending them together to create a seamless mosaic” (Killday, 19). As Bill Killday describes the program, “Clipmapping is a method of clipping a precalculated, optimized sequence of images—​or mipmaps—​to the subset of geometry being rendered in a 3-​D screen scene” (19). He continues to explain that clipmapping “determined how to load the least amount of data possible and still quickly render realistic 3-​D scenes on a screen” in order to provide a much faster visual experience (19–​20).17 The Keyhole Earth Viewer was intended for use by real estate and urban planning industries, but its military uses became evident quickly. In fact, the Keyhole Viewer became a staple for television war reports from CNN, ABC, and CBS in 2003, as reporters were able to use the application to depict bombing raids in Baghdad in real time rather than as recorded animation (see Maney). CNN’s use of Keyhole resulted in the Central Intelligence Agency’s interest in the technology. Google acquired the application in 2004. Using GIS technologies and satellite imagery to overlay detailed images across a digital globe, Google Earth allows users to “explore” the Earth by moving and zooming to different vantage points across the globe. Users, that is, can “fly” anywhere on the globe and zoom in or out for scaled representations. As such, too,

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Google Earth “maps” our understanding of the world, creating a kind of world-​ reading literacy, dictating how the world can be engaged. Reductively, Google Earth fixes the scale of interest at the magnitude of the screen; its scalar and zoom visualizations confined to what can be depicted on screen, whether computer monitor or mobile device. Following Latour, too, it is important to note that not only do scaled representations (like Google Earth) always fix the viewers’ perspective at the level of screen or page, scaled representations also always confine perspective to two-​dimensional space, even when representing three-​dimensional objects like the Earth. With Google Earth, users can navigate the global model through keyboard commands, mouse, touch screen, or entering specific addresses or global positioning coordinate to navigate to that location on the globe. Despite this degree of flexibility, however, Google Earth’s zoom is not infinite as Heise suggests. Google Earth’s navigation inherently retains a specific scale of interest and a specific form of visual interaction that situates users as passive observers in the scaled interaction. Granted, Google Earth does allow users to upload images to more scaled-​ in representations to provide further user-​driven (or crowdsourced), image-​based content. More recent versions of the application also allow for users to contribute data to the Google Earth databases by way of Keyhole Markup Language (KML), a derivative of Extensible Markup Language (XML) that Google Earth developed to allow users to contribute textual (alphabetic) annotations and visual data to the Google Earth datasets. The markup language’s name honors the history of Google Earth’s development. But, in its early iterations, Google Earth only provided scaled representations of the solid parts of Earth. Representations of ocean ended at the surface. Users could not zoom in to ocean, only move across its surface. Oceanic scales of interest did not penetrate ocean itself. On February 2, 2009, though, in the “Official Blog for Google Maps,” Sylvia Earle announced that she had worked with Google Maps to include ocean access through Google Earth. She recounts the evolution of ocean in Google Earth: Three years ago, I  met Google Earth and Maps Director John Hanke at a conference in Spain, and had a chance publicly to say how much I love Google Earth. “My children, my grandchildren think it is great to see their backyard, fly through the Grand Canyon, visit other countries,” I said. “But, John, when are you going to finish it? You should call Google Earth ‘Google Dirt.’ What about the ¾ of the planet that is blue?.” (Deep) Earle goes on to explain that working with “the U.S. Navy, NOAA, NASA, the National Geographic, BBC and numerous ocean institutions and organizations,” she “chaired a Council of Advisors including dozens of scientists, who weighed in on how to bring together information about 97% of the biosphere and make it accessible to the world on Google Earth” (Deep). The collaborative efforts under her guidance led to the inclusion of zoomable ocean representations beginning

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with the release of Google Earth 5.0 in 2009. The addition of Google Ocean to Google Earth—​a demarcation that suggests a distinction between Earth and ocean rather than a connection—​was lauded as a magnificent achievement. On February 3, 2009, for example, digital and media correspondent Urmee Khan, cites both Earle and Arctic explorer and director of Catlin Arctic Survey, Pen Hadow, as praising the addition of Google Ocean. Earle: “I cannot imagine a more effective way to inspire awareness and caring for the blue heart of the planet than the new Ocean in Google Earth.” Hadow: “This is a watershed moment of shared global understanding of our oceans. My passion for the Arctic Ocean is matched only by the urgency of our need to understand how it works within the global Earth system” (Khan). Despite these efforts and praises, however, the scalar representations of ocean in Google Earth (often referred to as Google Ocean, as well) are inherently limited. As Melody Jue rightly points out, the very methodologies used to develop the ocean aspects of Google Earth were derived from established methodologies that had been designed for visualizing land.That is, Google Earth merely extended its scaling and representation approaches to ocean rendering the two environments as homologous. This wholes(c)ale transfer, thus, confines not only scalar representations to previously defined land-​based methods of thinking and engagement, but directly, then, influences the cultural imaginary’s access to ocean representation by way of land-​based thinking. That is, Google Ocean predisposes viewers to see and understand ocean as they view land. While certainly ecologically and inextricably linked, land and ocean are not homologous and requires different methodological approaches to viewing and representation. For Jue, “analyzing the visual rhetoric of Google Ocean asks that we go beyond celebrating its technological sublimity.” Google Ocean, she explains, “facilitates a particular ‘distribution of the sensible,’ ” a term she borrows from Jacques Rancière that described “the system of self-​evident facts of sense of perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions with in it” (Rancière, 12, qtd in Jue, Proteus, 249). For Jue, then, the Google Ocean map is “what the community of viewers has ‘in common,’ positioning each viewer as a satellite able to gaze down onto different parts of the world,” what she deems a “normative point of view” (249).18 This normative view, Jue explains, homogenizes the representation of ocean, “the scale and location in which the application opens—​involves a blank ocean with uniformly blue coloration and land as varying yellow, green, white, and brown” (249). Like other scaled representations—​think here of Earthrise, the Blue Marble, and the Blue Dot representations—​Google Ocean creates a visual nominalization of ocean, rendering its depiction as homogenous, consistent, and singular. Zoom into the Caribbean and the visual representation is the same as zooming into the Arctic. When Google initiated its representations below the surface of ocean, though, it did so with virtually no attention to ocean itself. Rather, the newly added deep dive of Google Earth focused not on ocean, but on the sea floor, the land under the water, providing three-​dimensional representations of bathymetry, that is, of depth in order to represent terrain of the ocean floor primarily. As such, ocean in Google

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Ocean was initially an undefined space between an ambiguous surface and the land below. Granted, some aspects of Google Ocean furnish video representations of some sea life and popular dive sites and surfing sites providing a localized view, but as addendum to the scaled zoom view itself, images appended to but not part of the primary scalar representation. There are also some representations of shipwrecks on the ocean floor. As the official Google Maps blog described the addition of Google Ocean, the new expansions provide “the capability to view the world ocean landscape from beneath the water surface” (“Third Coast,” emphasis added). In 2011, partnering with researchers from Columbia University to synthesize data using global multiresolution topography (GMRT), Google expanded its coverage of the sea floor, providing higher-​resolution depictions of the land under the ocean. Yet, these new depictions retain significant erasure of ocean qua ocean, focusing on the sea floor instead. There are four key criticisms that should be addressed regarding Google Earth’s scaled and zoomable representations of ocean. Jue identifies the first two and an important derivative of those critiques: first, that Google’s representations of ocean do not account for materiality (I address materiality more thoroughly in the next chapter). Diving into ocean in Google Earth, viewers get no sense of seawater, of having transitioned from out-​of-​water representations to in-​water representations. Effects of submersion in saltwater include friction and resistance, buoyancy and gravity, not to mention the visual distortion I  mentioned earlier regarding the physiology of the human eye and its interaction with air or water media. “Diving” through Google’s oceanic scales remains visually synonymous with flying through Google’s above-​g round atmosphere. Likewise, Google Earth’s ocean conveys no sense of current or flow. Anyone who has navigated across or below ocean surface can easily show how current and flow influence movement; getting from point A to point B is not a simple matter of straight lines when those lines are being pushed and pulled by the very media in which one travels just as ocean itself is pushed and pulled by wind, moon, and sun. Correspondingly, ocean water is never still; movement—​such as surge and current—​always operate in conjunction with resistance and friction upon the submerged body or object. Interestingly, other digital representations of ocean have taken up questions of resistance and movement in seawater—​and other water, such as swimming pools, lakes, and rivers. For example, since the release of the 2004 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTASA), Rock Star Games’ infamous Grand Theft Auto video games permit players to swim and dive in aquatic environments. Prior to the release of GTASA, in many video games encounters with water caused immediate death, or in other games water provided extra challenging levels, as is the case in Mario or in Legend of Zelda’s Water Temple. Most often, though, water served as an invisible wall, a device used in video games to confine players within the designed play space, much as ocean had for human movement prior to developing the technologies necessary for transoceanic exploration. The use of ocean as invisible wall is also evident in literature that represents islands. For example, though ocean is only mentioned briefly at the beginning of Aldous Huxley’s final novel Island, its presence is never absent as

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a wall that protects the remote Pacific island of Pala from external politics, ideologies, and populations—​until it can’t. The same is true, as I have noted, in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. In early versions of the GTA games, a player’s avatar would “die” after entering any body of water.19 Invisible walls are built into GTA aquatic environments, but water itself is no longer an inherent wall. In GTASA and subsequent versions of the GTA games, players can enter the digital ocean, swim across the surface, dive below the surface, or use technological apparatus like scuba gear or a limited number of submersible vehicles to move below the surface. In the GTA marine environments, the player’s controls are inverted from terrestrial play (the same hold true for aerial movement as well, such as flying a plane), forcing players to physically adjust their interaction with the game. This minor shift in play acknowledges distinctions between aquatic and land-​based movement. Importantly, players also encounter increased resistance while moving in seawater. Currents tug at a player in the water and pressure increases as players descend. Movement is complicated by seawater resistance and depth. While using a submersible vehicle, players reach depth limits—​known as “crush depth”—​which are clearly invisible walls, but that also convey a sense of oceanic physical resistance. The depiction of such physical resistances contributes to a sense of significant difference for human movement in ocean as opposed to on land, unlike Google Earth’s homologous representation of scaled movement.20 Similarly, in Microsoft Xbox’s 2018 pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves, players are required to pilot sloops and schooners (ships that Caribbean pirates favored because of their shallow draft and speed, allowing them to sail in shallower waters than larger military vessels and to out run larger war ships) across several oceans and, frequently, players must enter the water to swim. The game’s visual depictions of ocean are remarkable; the aesthetic of calm Caribbean waters and rough, storm-​ addled seas is visually stunning. Most significant to Sea of Thieves oceanic representation are the effects of light diffusing across and under the digital waters. Like GTA, water in Sea of Thieves does not function in the same way as other environments in the game. Ships are pushed, currents delay movement, and so on. In addition to movement, Google’s representations do not account for degradation of light at depth or turbidity effects on visual range. Light alters visualization at depth (more about this in Chapter 4), yet Google Earth offers no such representation.Visualization in Google Ocean is the same at three feet below ocean’s surface as it is at 300 feet. The effect of this within the cultural imaginary is both a contribution to the understanding of seeing ocean as akin to seeing a photograph or aquarium and to the overall nominalization of ocean in image and scale. Certainly, Google Earth should not be read as an immersive experience akin to a virtual reality experience, or as a full sensory replication, or as telepresence—​or even actual human submersion via diving technologies whether robust professional and technical experiences or simple recreational experiences—​yet its visualizations fail to represent the visual aspects of subsurface vision beyond simulacra. As such, Google Earth subsurface images maintain the same above surface “air” view, creating the sense that seeing underwater is the same as seeing above. As Jue puts it,“As we zoom

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into Google’s Ocean we meet no resistance, but see and hover as though perfectly clear air” (“Proteus,” 251). Stefan Helmreich echoes this critique: There is an odd sensory feature to Google Ocean’s underwater world. Once beneath the virtual waves, the user sees, just above, a sea surface ceiling of generic ripples and, just below, a rumpled blue seafloor. Particularly odd is the fact that the water is absolutely transparent, with no indices of refraction, no attenuation of light. This is not the dark deep, but a clear fishbowl—​though with no fish; sea life does not swim in this space. It is also difficult to grasp scale here; understanding the size and location of the body one would have to inhabit to access these views is unclear. There is also no change in “medium” with our “travel” below the waves; the user still “flies,” “floats,” indicating something very strange about the place of “gravity” in this model. (“Spaceship,” 1226–​1227) The second of Jue’s critiques reveals Google’s oceanic representations as conveying a sense of an “aquarium aesthetic” viewing that maintains a “terrestrial logic of sedimentation” (“Proteus,” 251).21 Jue shows that Because Google Ocean structures viewing relations in aquarium terms—​a transparent screen/​glass separating observer from observed, framed by a rectangular window—​we can say the sensible is not simply distributed from user to globe, but scaled in such a way as to erase the materiality of seawater: its opacity, viscosity, its chemical and vital properties (“Proteus,” 251) Derived from this criticism, too, Jue rightly notes that Google’s aquarium-​like representations are remiss in representing time in its scaled ocean. In the Google aquarium, which echoes the aquarium views of Carson and Verne, time is not scaled; it is stagnant. Recall that Thomashow’s description of scale includes the ability to scale time. Jue clarifies: “Google Ocean also forecloses the perception of change over time, offering instead a static snapshot of seemingly immortal waters” (“Proteus,” 251). Insightfully, Jue explains, If the ocean’s features do not change over time in our digital representations/​ animations of them, then we risk believing in an idealized form of nature that is invulnerable to the actual environmental changes happening at a variety of temporalities (“Proteus,” 252) Jue points to coral bleaching and ocean acidification as slow processes that are erased by Google’s freeze-​framed representations. Jue turns to Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” which “describes the scale of environmental changes such as glacier melt, sea level rise, and toxic chemical leaching that, because of their slow scale,

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are not easily perceived as violence to people, yet are due to anthropogenic effects interacting with natural processes,” hoping that “a more ecologically and timely instantiation of Google Ocean might find a way to animate the ocean in such a way that scales ‘slow violence’ to human perception” (“Proteus,” 252). In a remarkable comment on the absence of chronological thinking in ocean scale, graphic novelist Paul Chadwick’s eco-​conscientious character Concrete comments in “The Transatlantic Swim” that time in oceanic scale must be marked and accounted for because “such reference points mean a lot, because time becomes as fluid as the liquid desert they inhabit” (64).22 Similar observations of ocean time appear in Matt Kindt and Sharlene Kindt’s deep ocean comics Dept. H Murder Six Miles Deep. Chadwick’s use of the term “liquid desert” is also revealing from a historical perspective when desert and ocean were understood to be uninhabitable, lifeless, and dangerous places. The absence of chrono-​scale representation in Google’s Ocean also obscures the histories of human cultural interaction with ocean. Leslie Marmon Silko’s novella Oceanstory inspirits the recognition of such chrono-​scale and begins with a beautiful account of the ocean’s recession over millions of years leaving great swaths of sand dunes and sand stone behind that over deep time would become home to desert tribes, Indigenous peoples inhabiting remnant oceanic places, geographic memories of ancient oceans, like the Western Interior Seaway addressed earlier. Google’s Ocean is unable to account for such chronologies, fluidities, and habitations. As such, Google Ocean underscores a visual nominalization of ocean that obscures material and chronological characteristics and binds a terrestrial logic (and visual language) to oceanic representations. We might dismiss this lack as the result of technological and mediating limits, but do so would be complicit in nominalization, a position we might understand as a form of microcolonialism, both in terms of human and nonhuman representation. Like Jue, Helmrich provides insightful critiques of Google Ocean. He describes the application as a a mottled mash of icons, indexes, and symbols of the marine and maritime world as well as a simultaneously dystopian and utopian (that is to say, heterotopian) diagram of the sea—​though one that floats in a media ecology that tends to occlude its infrastructural history and conditions of possibility. (“Spaceship,” 1211) In saying so, Helmreich alerts us to a third critique of Google Ocean:  that we cannot read Google Earth’s scalar representations absent of their connections with other representations as contributing to the cultural imaginary. That is, we see Google Ocean not as a singular scaling representation, but as a complex amalgam of scaled images, ideologies, and politics that influence how we are able to see and interpret Google’s ocean.23 As Helmreich puts it, “Insofar as what we see in Google Earth appear to be like photographs, we might think of these items as haunted by all the representational techniques that have to be erased for them to appear this way,”

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what he calls, by way of semiotician Charles S. Pierce, an “expression of qualities” or a “bevy of signs” (“Spaceship,” 1223–​1224). If we accept Helmreich’s position, then, we must also acknowledge that any consideration of representation and mediation in terms of (any) cultural imaginary is always already inseparable from representation of and the effect of representations upon cultural memory. Helmreich describes Google Ocean not as a map or a picture, but as a model (“Spaceship,” 1225). Helmreich’s notion of Google’s scaled representation as dependent upon accrued historical representations of Earth as prerequisite to the ability to seeing scaled ocean in Google Ocean echoes Heidegger’s position that no image can be seen without an inherent reference to all images of the object that precede the viewed image (see “The Age of the World Picture”). Helmreich provides eye-​opening consideration of the technologies and navigational tools Google Ocean employs, as well as a semiotic reading of the indexicality and iconicity of Google Earth and Ocean.Yet, it is his situating Google Ocean among a history of oceanic representations that highlights Google Ocean’s role in the cultural imaginary, and indirectly, the role of Google Ocean in the historical visual nominalization of ocean and by association, cultural memory. For Helmreich, then, Google’s Ocean is “an icon of a hoped for transparency of ecological auditing and governance,” what he calls “a dreamscape” or a conceptual model (1228). For Helmreich, these conceptual models and Google’s deep-​water oceanic representations fall “into the lineage of oceanographic apprehensions of the sea” that he traces from abyssal exploration by nineteenth-​century dredging techniques (1227), thus maintaining the cultural impetus to control ocean. The fourth critique is derivative of the first three addressed here and pertains to the erasure of the local and the subject, a critique of particular relevance to the role of Indigenous knowledge in the oceanic cultural imaginary. Helmreich, Jue, and others have rightly critiqued Google Earth’s god-​view perspective as rendering the local invisible. Even the introduction of Google’s “Street View” cannot offset the scaled representation of the zoomable Earth. The high gaze, elevated not merely from a physical perspective above but an imposed ideological elevation to the value of the high view knowledge, is a condition of centuries of phallogocentric epistemological power. Donna Haraway calls this view the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” that generates an “ideology [of] direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision” (582). Similarly, Alaimo has also shown the danger of such elevated scaled representations, and though she refers to “high theory” or elevated intellectual work versus “low theory” (Exposed, 7), her point is particularly relevant to literal high and low visualized representations: “Elevated perspectives are problematic for both feminist and environmental visions, placing the human knower in a position above and beyond wild entanglements” (Exposed, 7). As noted earlier, scaled representations of Earth and Ocean often obscure the relationship between the individual subject, human and nonhuman, and larger global ecologies; such obfuscations function as tantamount to the erasure of the subject. In this way, Clark’s scalar derangement—​which contends that large scaled representations may

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make it difficult for the individual subject to make connections between small-​scale events (again, to follow Morton, like starting a car) and larger scale effects (like climate change)—​might be recast as more than a kind of scalar colonialism and more accurately a kind of scalar erasure that eliminates the deranged relationship between the local and the global by eradicating the local and the Indigenous from the representation altogether rendering the perception that the individual subject is of little if any relevance in the “bigger picture.” For blue ecocriticism, then, two concerns emerge regarding scaled representation and the erasure of the individual subject: (1) the erasure of Indigenous/​diasporic perspectives and knowledge from the cultural imaginary and (2) the devaluing of individual nonhuman marine organisms in large scale, universalized oceanic representations. I take up this second concern in Chapter 6. For now, I return to my claims in Chapter 1 regarding the role of Indigenous knowledge, culture, and practice in the human–​ocean interaction and the formation of ocean in the cultural imaginary in relationship with scalar thinking. Google Ocean purports to allow users to dive below the surface, but as Jue and Helmreich have shown, such digital dives remain bound to above surface, terrestrial epistemologies and methodologies. Their critiques, too, make evident the inextricable relationships between technology and the ability for human access to subsurface ocean. The ability for human penetration into subsurface space has been a relatively recent achievement, and the ability to image subsurface space—​ deep water environments, in particular—​in any significant detail requires highly sophisticated technologies.Thus, for most of human history, representations of ocean remained above surface. Subsurface representations have been—​and to a degree remain—​speculative. Think, for example, of pre-​bathospheric representations like those of Verne. In this way, then, substantial portions of the cultural imaginary’s understanding of ocean can be reductively described as “fly over” space, as in the idea of “flyover states”: states that we only fly over when moving between airports in the east and west.The term suggests how we know these states, how we see these states.Travelers who fly over them only ever see them from above, from the surface, never learning about the territory itself, the inhabitants, the culture, the ecology. Fly over or surface-​level scale removes the very idea that there is occupied and inhabited space subsurface, rendering, in the case of Google Ocean, oceanic space as invisible, and unmappable, like Holliday’s Bellman’s Map, or un-​seeable like Singh’s. Technologies like Google Earth specifically adapt a sense of fly over, emphasizing that which is seen at the surface with little concern for the physical or biological occupation of subsurface space. From a scalar perspective, the fly-​over mentality restricts access to ocean. This positioning renders ocean as space to be traversed—​ a core characteristic of literary representations of ocean as frontier, barrier, and mechanism for transportation. Each of the zoomable or scaled representations of Earth and ocean addressed previously in this chapter establishes zoomable scale as rendering all that can be observed as tantamount to a flyover observation.That is, to zoom out in Google Earth’s scale eliminates the significant detail and complexity

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of the parts that constitute the whole planet view (as does the Blue Planet and the Blue Dot images, in particular). Clearly, Google Ocean, like its cartographic and photographic predecessors, stands as the contemporary exemplification of scalar representation—​both for Earth and ocean. Its influence upon the cultural imaginary is significant as its extensive use suggests. Google Earth’s product manager Gopal Shah reported that in 2018 “hundreds of millions of people” used Google Earth “to explore.” Of course, this generic use attribution does not account for nonhuman users like automated and bot-​driven systems that drive circulation and rhetorical velocity for Google Earth/​Ocean data, though it does clearly imply a significant influence on how we access scaled representations of Earth. As such, blue ecocritical approaches acknowledge the significance of Google Ocean upon the cultural imaginary, but necessarily also considers how its scalar depictions are bound historically to previously rendered scalar models and methodologies as much as other contemporary and historical images, which we must remind ourselves are always already scaled representations despite their stagnant or frozen in time imaging representation. Google Earth, too, makes evident the inseparability of image from scalar thinking and brings to light the historical relationships and inseparability between imaging and scaling technologies such as cartography, illustration, and photography (and the multitude of subset technologies that influence those higher-​order technologies). That is, Google Earth reminds us that all images are representation of scale. Simultaneously, critique of Google Earth/​Ocean substantiates the imperative not merely to acknowledge but to emphasize the relationships between these technologies and the inescapable politics of their developments and implementations. The convergence of scale, image, and politics of representation are inseparable—​not only for ocean, but in any representation. Thus, despite Clark’s question regarding the relationship between representation, awareness, and action, blue ecocriticism asks how scalar representations of ocean contribute to formation of ocean in the cultural imaginary and as to the functioning relationship between such representations and ocean object actual and the interactions between human subjects and ocean by way of such representations. Concurrently (within the same current), blue ecocriticism recognizes the role such mediated representations play within the politics of ecological literacy, as well. If, then, as Dorinda G. Dallmeyer has put it, “the geographic magnitude of the oceans overwhelms our capacity to believe that our actions there might matter,” blue ecocriticism asks how might we navigate between scalar representations of geographic magnitude and the ecocritical imperatives of advocacy and action within the inseparable and indispensable frameworks of ethics and politics.

Modifying scales of observation Imaging has certainly been central to our ability to depict scalar representation.Yet, in complex scalar representations like Google Earth/​Ocean, those representations are always already mediated depictions of data. As Clark accurately imparts,

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No-​one has immediate access to the world as a planet: what we have is a complex set of data from various recording stations at various points on the surface or above, and a history of such data or comparable information, all needing to be synthesized, interpreted and debated. (5) Clark’s astute recognition about the role of data makes evident two critical aspects of scalar representations. First, scalar representations are more frequently than not mediated interpretations of data, often not originating as visual data, but as visualization of data—​often referred to as data visualization or “dataviz”—​processes for systematically mapping quantitative data into visual representation for communicative purposes. Second, data relevant to scalar representations are more likely to be acquired from reference points on or above Earth’s surface, from the god’s eye view. Consider, for example, research published in a 2019 article “Ocean-​Scale Interactions from Space” that employs twenty-​five years of satellite observation to show that 80% of the ocean’s total kinetic energy is captured in mesoscale turbulent eddies. Mesoscale, a term primarily used in meteorology, describes a scale larger than microscales of 1 km or less but smaller synoptic or large scales of 1,000 km or more. Mesoscale turbulence, the research shows, occurs in all oceans and “significantly impact the large-​scale ocean circulation, the ocean’s carbon storage, the air-​sea interactions, and therefore the Earth climate as a whole” (Klien, 795). This research and its implications for understanding oceanic movement is achieved by way of satellite data sensors deployed well above ocean’s surface, making possible scaled in observations taken from the god’s eye view.24 The role of data acquisition, curation, and circulation plays a significant role in the formation of scalar representations and our ability to engage oceanic scale and the transmogrification of that data into the narratives and images that permeate the cultural imaginary. In terms of scalar representations, though, we must also account for the fact that any representation of scales of interest, points of perspective, are always already ideological and political. If, as Alaimo shows us, politics and ethics are inseparable (though not always indistinguishable) in the context of environmental epistemologies, actions, and advocacies, then any consideration of scaled representations of ocean are always already depictions of ethical positioning. Concurrently, as work in environmental rhetoric and visual rhetoric have demonstrated, any representation of ocean (or anything else for that matter) is constructed either intentionally or tacitly within a framework of ethics and inherently conveys an ethic. Thus, we must consider the ethics of scalar representations as central to the formation of how we understand ocean since, as Alaimo explains, “the ethical and the political, like many other questions of and in the Anthropocene, become matters of scale-​ shifting” (Exposed, 11). As an example of the role of data in scalar representation and the ethics of scalar representation, recent debates addressing data collected about global fisheries reveal the effect of scaled data and their effect on our understanding of ocean. Given the critical importance of fisheries harvest as a significant element in the

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human–​ocean interaction, the role of data collection in our understanding of ocean harvest contributes significantly to the global cultural imaginary. As indicative of this, in 2018 the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations published “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture: Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.” The report contends that Human societies face the enormous challenge of having to provide food and livelihoods to a population well in excess of 9 billion people by the middle of the twenty-​first century, while addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on the resource base. (vi) The FAO situates its representation of ocean within a familiar paradigm of ocean as repository of human-​required resources. The report connects global fisheries harvest not only with human resource need, but with the global politics of resource control and global nutritional needs (see Chapter 5 “Protein economies” for more about this). The report highlights “the critical importance of fisheries and aquaculture for the food, nutrition and employment of millions of people, many of whom struggle to maintain reasonable livelihoods” (vi).The FAO report defines its agenda as providing “technical insight and factual information on a sector increasingly recognized as crucial for societal success” in order to ensure that in developing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the FAO “tackle the root causes of poverty and hunger while building a fairer society that leaves no one behind” (vii). As such, we see the implication of representations of ocean and nonhuman ocean inhabitants as resource. The report turns to mass data collection to forward this resource-​driven agenda. Cumulatively, the report, whether explicitly or implicitly, contributes to a representation of ocean as resource and conveys an ethic for that resource use. To what end those resources are exploited, though is reduced to a matter of scaled data collection. Within the penumbra of the 2018 FAO Report, a team of fisheries researchers lead by David A.  Kroodsma of Global Fishing Watch—​an international, independent nonprofit organization founded collaboratively between the international ocean conservation organization oceana, the environmental watchdog group SkyTruth, which uses satellite technology to monitor global environmental threats, and Google—​published data in a 2018 issue of Science indicating that in 2016 industrial vessels harvested fish in more than 55% of ocean space—​a spatial extent more than four times greater than global land-​based agriculture (Kroodsma, 904). Using data gathered by dividing the ocean into “an equal-​area grid with 0.5° resolution at the equator” (Kroodsma, 905), the report aggregates data gathered between 2012 and 2016 from 22 billion automatic identification system (AIS) broadcasts—​a digital system for automatically tracking ships by way of transponders—​from more than 70,000 industrial fishing vessels ranging in size from 6 to 146 meters in length. The data composites “fishing effort by fishing hours (the time spent fishing) and by kilowatt-​hours (kWh) (the estimated energy expended)” (Kroodsma, 905). The

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report also accounts for the role of fuel consumption and global fuel economics in determining rates of energy expenditure.The results of this data, the authors report, provide a dynamic view of the global footprint of industrial fishing and convey “spatial and temporal resolution two to three orders of magnitude higher than for previous data sets” (Kroodsma, 904). Likewise, the authors show that “global patterns of fishing have surprisingly low sensitivity to short-​term economic and environmental variation and a strong response to cultural and political events” (Kroodsma, 904). The impact of the claim that more than one half of the world’s ocean is harvested industrially has profound effect not merely on fisheries research, but upon the global cultural imaginary regarding ocean use and use-​value as it demonstrates the globally accepted and economically promoted philosophy of oceanic use to the end of economic and nutritional sustenance. Compared often with harvest mentalities akin to North American Western Expansion harvest practices that decimated bison populations, global industrial fisheries harvest practices have recently become the focus of environmental and conservation efforts, particularly in terms of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) harvest.25 Soon after the publication of Kroodsma et al.’s claim that more than half of the world’s ocean is harvested industrially, Science published a response from another international research team headed by Ricardo O. Amoroso of the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences that questions the Kroodsma team’s use of spatial scale.According to the Amoroso group, Kroodsma et al.’s method of gridding the ocean into cells of 0.5° at the equator inflated the results of the study. Concurrently, the Amoroso group shows that the Kroodsma research counts every cell with any assumed fishing activity of any duration as the occurrence of fishing activity in the entire cell, resulting in a larger scaled representation. Amoroso et al., evaluated the data at gridded scales of 0.5°, 0.1°, and 0.01° at the equator. By scaling into smaller grids, smaller areas of ocean can be identified as harvest areas rather than attributing significantly larger areas as harvested in total based on smaller harvest occurrences. For example, the original study would have considered the entire area of a 3,100 square kilometer grid cell as harvested even if the data collection recorded only a single AIS message in that grid that conveyed that one small vessel fished in a single grid for only a few minutes. The second study, using smaller scaled grid cells, would identify that single occurrence as accounting for a grid cell of 1.23 square kilometers. In this way, Amoroso’s smaller scale representations contrast Kroodsma et al.’s claim that 55% of the ocean is harvest by showing that if measured at 0.1° at the equator only 27% of the ocean is harvested and by zooming in to 0.01° at the equator, only 4% of ocean area is harvested.What Amoroso’s group shows regarding the Kroodsma team’s scalar representations is that the “higher-​resolution analyses reduced their global fishing footprint estimates by a factor of >10” (Amoroso). To this end, as well, the Amoroso research shows that the Kroodsma et al.’s claim that the 55% fishing footprint exceeds the land-​based agriculture footprint by a factor of 4 creates a bias by using varying grid cell criteria. Amoroso et al. show that the estimates of agricultural land use that Kroodsma’s team uses for comparison “are gridded at higher resolution (5′, ~86 km2 versus ~3100 km2) and also account for

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the fraction of farmed or grazed area within each grid cell.” Amoroso’s research reveals that by using comparable high-​resolution scaled investigation the fishing footprint is less—​or can be represented as less—​than the agriculture footprint by a factor of approximately 3.5. Kroodsma et al.’s claims that 55% of the ocean is fished had immediate larger cultural effect. The claim circulated widely across media platforms, notably circulated in reports published by The Washington Post, The Guardian, National Geographic, CNBC, CNN, and dozens of other mainstream news media, as well as widespread circulation by environmental and conservation media sites leading to substantial conversations about oceanic industrial harvesting. The claim that “Half of World’s Oceans now Fished Industrially” (Jowit) echoed Kroodsma’s claims with no acknowledgment of the scale of interest in the study. Conservationists and mass media outlets synthesized the scaled data into a narrative of oceanic degradation, relying on an implied sense of size and scalar inaccessibility conveyed in reductive terms like “half of the world’s ocean” or “more than half ” to suggest massive destructive incursions into and abasement of ocean environments. The scaled representation rendered a powerful rhetoric in the cultural imaginary in support of conservationist and sustainability politics. (Let me be clear, I am neither criticizing conservation efforts to reduce, if not terminate, industrial harvest nor am I contending that industrial harvest does not cause massive environmental destruction; my book Fishing, Gone? conveys clearly my own positions opposed to industrial and commercial harvest.) Once adapted, this scaled data became such an important part of the ocean conservationist narrative, and in turn the cultural imaginary, that when Amoroso et al. responded to Kroodsma’s claims in Science, the wider spread narrative did not revisit the question of scale. In fact, only a few mass media outlets—​notably The Atlantic—​reported the revised scale approach and asked as to the relevance of varying scalar representations (see Yong). Certainly, reporting that industrial ocean harvest takes place in 4% of the ocean conveys a less dramatic since of urgency and environmental abasement and, thus, might be read as serving conservationist rhetorical agendas less effectively. As such, reporting the 55% scaled space reduces the scalar derangement from the appearance of only a 4% active incursion, which is much easier to dismiss as an irrelevant quantity within a space as vast as the global ocean, or at least as vast as the cultural imaginary has come to understand it. Likewise, the fact that the Kroodsma research turns to land-​based agriculture as a comparative in order to delineate the value of the oceanic scale of harvest reifies the practice of applying land-​based thinking to marine environments. Such a reliance forces readers to understand oceanic scale in the same terms as terrestrial scale thus constraining what can be represented about oceanic harvest. By creating the ocean harvest/​agricultural comparative, Kroodsma et al. create a homology that constricts understanding of ocean harvest to occurring at the surface just as agricultural measurements remain tethered to flat, two-​dimensional surface representations. Ocean harvest, on the other hand, extends beyond surface through water columns on to the sea floor, exponentially increasing the impacted area. Certainly, too, we

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must acknowledge that the scaled representations of both agriculture and ocean harvest that Kroodsma and Amoroso present do not take into account any sense of diffuse impacts, specifically in terms of space and time, not to mention any political or economic diffuse impact. Of course, their objectives are not attentive to such impacts, nor should they necessarily be. However, the ecocritical mission drives critical analysis of science-​driven claims like these in order to better consider the larger cultural and political impacts of such work. The Kroodsma/​Amoroso example of scaled representations offers a telling case regarding the ways in which scaled representations can affect the cultural narrative. This effect is garnered by way of employing scale to influence a larger public rhetoric; that is the rhetorical effect of scaled representations influences how we understand the human–​ocean interaction.That rhetoric is constructed to maintain a sense of revelation and of exposure. It is designed as a way of revealing authenticity and accuracy, and, to a degree, truth. Yet, as is the case with all rhetorics—​specifically environmental and conservationist rhetorics, as Killingsworth and Palmer have shown—​in the same moment that this rhetoric works to reveal, to make evident, and thereby influence perception, this scaled representation also erases or obfuscates much about ocean—​and in this case, oceanic populations, as well.

Notes 1 In titling this chapter “Scaling the ocean,” I  intend the obvious delineation that the chapter is to be about scale as a conceptual understanding of observation and measurement as relevant to discussions in ecocriticism, ecocomposition, and ecology. Yet, the term “scaling” might suggest, as well, as the act of climbing or the act of removing scales from a fish. That is, there are opportunities for word play here, as well. 2 Here I intend “textual representations” to refer to all forms of print and digital media, including alphabetic writing and image-​based media. 3 The word fathom, like many of the metaphors used in describing the ability to think “deeply” or to get at meaning “below the surface” is adapted from nautical terminology. It refers to nautical measurements of depth and the act of “sounding” or measuring such depth. A fathom is equivalent to six feet in imperial units and US customary systems of measurement. 4 I should note, too, that embedded in Morton’s hyperobjects is a critique of the role of capitalism in global environmental degradation. As such, hyperobjects suggest a connection with Jean Beaudrillard’s critique of capitalism and the idea of the hyperreal. Beaudrillard’s hyperreal aesthetics, for example, emerges by way of visual technologies that provide “a frisson of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a frisson of simultaneous distancing and magnification, of distortion of scale, of an excessive transparency” (28). While this project does not take up the parallels between hyperobject and the hyperreal, Morton’s and Beaudrillard’s intersections in critique of capitalism and of understanding the interrelationships between technology, aesthetic, and scale stand to be of value in better understanding Anthropocenic scale. 5 I’m obligated to note that despite the near absence of ocean in Morton’s work, the cover of the 2013 University of Minnesota Press paperback version of Hyperobjects features a split-​view image of an iceberg that depicts the iceberg above and below the ocean’s surface. The image might be read as an “econ,” as Sean Morey has defined it, or

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as a visual metaphor (or perhaps visual cliché). Yet, its visual role suggests both something massive (the iceberg and the ocean in which it floats) and something unseen below the surface. 6 I should note that while The Ocean Map is generally attributed to Henry Holiday, there have been some questions as to whether Holiday actually devised and drew the map or if Carroll himself did. The rationale for such consideration grows from the fact that in the original 1876 publication of The Hunting of the Snark the title page indicates that the poem is published “With Nine Illustrations by Henry Holiday,” yet ten illustrations appear in the book including The Ocean Map. Clearly, the other nine illustrations are stylistically consistent with Holiday’s work, thus prompting the question if Carroll rendered the tenth illustration, The Ocean Map, since there is no way in which to compare the blank page with the style of the other images. Some later reproductions of the poem excluded publication of the blank map altogether. 7 In “The Annotated Snark,” Martin Gardner explains that Gerhardus Mercator was a sixteenth-​ century Flemish cartographer and mathematician. According to Gardner, Mercator “devised the method, known as ‘Mercator’s projection, of projecting a spherical map of the earth on a flat rectangle so that the parallels and meridians become straight lines, and the poles become the rectangles top and bottom edges” (29, n. 23). 8 Tournachon’s photographs are no longer available. Thus, the earliest example of an aerial photograph that still exists is James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King’ “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It” (October 13, 1860), which depicts Boston from a height of approximately 2,066 feet. Notable, too, the first aerial motion picture was made in 1909 by the French cinematographic company Société Générale des Cinématographes Eclipse. The silent film was released under the title Wilbur Wright und seine Flugmaschine (Wilbur Wright and his Flying Machine). 9 The Earthrise image has been given significant attention and is an artifact worthy of significant consideration; however, my address here of the image is limited to its role in altering conceptions of scale. In September 2010, my plenary talk “Toward Complex Environmental Visual Literacies” at ASLE UK provided a detailed account of the image. Likewise, Robert Poole’s Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth provides an exceptional account of the photograph. Clark also takes up the Earthrise image in detail (see Clark, 29–​46), as do Heise (Sense, 22–​24), Helmreich (“Spaceship”), Haraway (“Cyborgs”), Cosgrove (“Contested”), Lazier (“Earthrise”), and many others. 10 I should note that Heise rightly points out that many of these technological advances derive from military technological innovations (see Heise, p. 22). 11 Interestingly, given Hook’s emphasis on the image and visual detail, there are no known images of Hook. There are no portraits of him. 12 Ford notes that the sole remaining original drawing is itself a unique example of Hook’s work given that Hook plagiarized the image. “His drawings are clearly taken from those published in 1661 by Thomas Bartholin in his De Nivis usu Medico Observationes Variae” (4). 13 Hook was a rival of Sir Isaac Newton, and the debates between the two—​as well as the accusations of plagiarism between them—​are fascinating aspects of the history of science. 14 Interestingly, Cosmic Zoom and six other animated shorts produced by the NFB were purchased by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). According to NFB blogger Albert Ohayon, “The films were aired in the fall of 1971 as part of a children’s television show entitled Curiosity Shop. The executive producer of the show was none other than animation legend Chuck Jones (creator of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, among other famous cartoon characters)” (“What on Earth?”).

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15 In conjunction with the two Powers of Ten films, the Eameses along with Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison published the book Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe in 1982. 16 The Google Earth application now includes similar scaled navigation for the moon and for Mars, as well as a night-​sky viewing tool. While I do not take these up in this discussion, it is clear that their availability affects the cultural imaginary’s access to these represented spaces, as well, and that the scalar representations used in these variants. 17 For a complete history of the development of Google Earth, see Killday. 18 Jue also rightly shows that this scaled out, zoomable view has been called the “bomb’s eye view” and the “world-​target view” (249). 19 When an avatar “dies” in GTA, the screen identifies that the character has been “wasted,” no matter the cause of the death, thus equating drowning with being shot by an adversary in the game. Keep in mind that the game is intentionally hyper-​violent. 20 Though less relevant to questions of resistance, it is important to note, too, that GTA contributes to the cultural imaginary’s sense of oceanic fear in several ways, most significantly in that water represents instant death in earlier game versions. In more recent versions, fear of ocean is propagated by way of the appearance of sharks (the representation based on the physical appearance of bull sharks) in GTA’s ocean. In some versions of the game, sharks can be aggressive and attack players. However, in the most recent versions of GTA, sharks are less abundant. In the GTA V side mission “Death at Sea,” the Non-​Player Character (NPC) Abagail Mathers explains that sharks rarely appear in the GTA V waters because they are on the verge of extinction. However, getting killed by a shark during game play will unlock the “Out of Your Depth” Achievement/​Trophy, one of thirty-​four achievement trophies found throughout the game. 21 I will return to the idea of the aquarium view in Chapter 4 in thinking about the visual aspects of oceanic representation. 22 For a more detailed ecocritical account of Chadwick’s Concrete books, including an examination of oceanic representations in Concrete, see Dobrin “Follow the Concrete Submersible.” 23 For an exceptional examination of how Google Earth images are inscribed with the politics of imperial and colonial map making, see Jason Farman’s “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography.” 24 In such thinking I am always reminded of the haunting lines in Roger Water’s “Four Minutes” on his story album Radio K.A.O.S. as the song counts down to an impending nuclear strike: “Goodbye little spy in the sky. They say that cameras don’t lie.” 25 For more about fisheries harvest practices and mindsets, see my book Fishing Gone? Saving the Ocean through Sportfishing.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed:  Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2016. Allen, Timothy F.  H. and Thomas W. Hoekstra. Toward a Unified Ecology. 2nd edition. New York: Columbia University Press. 2015. Amoroso, Ricardo O., et  al. “Comment on ‘Tracking the Global Footprint of Fisheries.’ ” Science. 361, no. 6404 (August 24, 2018). . https://​science.sciencemag.org/​content/​361/​ 6404/​eaat6713 Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Drop of Water.” The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories. New York, NY: Anchor Books. 1983. 354–​355.

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Boeke, Kees. Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps. New York: The John Day Company. 1957. Callicott, J. Baird. “Worldview Remediation in the First Century of the New Millennium.” Environmental Humanities:  Voices from the Anthropocene. Eds. Serpil Opperman and Serenella Iovino. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 133–​154. Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits. London: Macmillan and Co. 1876. Carson, Rachel. The Sea around Us. New York: Oxford University Press. 1950. Reprint 1989. Chadwick, Paul. “The Transatlantic Swim.” Paul Chadwick’s Concrete 1: Depths. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2005. 43–​76. Clark. Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge:  The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cohen, Margaret. “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe.” PMLA. 125, no. 3 (2010): 657–​662. Dallmeyer, Dorinda G. “Incorporating Environmental Ethics into Ecosystem-​ based Management.” The Evolution of Ecosystem Based Management: From Theory to Practice. Roger Williams University School of law marine Affairs 6th Marine Law Symposium. October 19–​20, 2006. https://​law.rwu.edu/​academics/​marine-​affairs-​institute/​research-​and-​ outreach/​symposiaconferences/​event-​archives Dobrin, Sidney I.“Follow the Concrete Submersible.” EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels. Ed. Sidney I. Dobrin. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books. 2020. —​—​—​. Fishing, Gone? Saving the Ocean through Sportfishing. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press. 2019. Eames, Charles and Ray Eames, writers and directors. A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. Pyramid Films, 1968. —​—​—​. Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. Pyramid Films, 1977. Earle, Sylvia. “A Deep Dive into the Ocean in Google Earth.” The Official Blog of Google Maps. February 2, 2009. https://​maps.googleblog.com/​2009/​02/​deep-​dive-​into-​ocean-​ in-​google-​earth.html Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture: Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.” 2018. www.fao.org/​3/​ i9540en/​i9540en.pdf Ford, Brian J. “About Micrographia.” Micrographia. Robert Hook. Palo Alto, CA:  Octavo Corporation. 1998. 1–​9. Google Maps. “Google Earth Now Includes US ‘Third Coast.’ ” The Official Blog of Google Maps. https://​maps.googleblog.com/​2009/​04/​google-​earth-​now-​includes-​us-​third.html Gurevitch, Leon. “Google Warming:  Google Earth as Eco-​Machinima Convergence:  The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 20, no. 1 (2014): 85–​107. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women:  The Reinvention of Nature. New  York:  Free Association Books. 1991. Hayes, Nick. The Rime of the Modern Mariner. New York: Viking. 2012. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Martin Macquarrie and Edwin Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. —​—​—​. “The Age of the World Picture.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Perennial. 1977. 115–​154. —​—​—​. “ ‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger.” The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 91–​118. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Helmreich, Stefan. “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures.” Social Research. 78, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 1211–​1242. Hook, Robert. Micrographia. Palo Alto, CA: Octavo Corporation. 1998. Horton, Zach. “The Trans-​Scalar Challenge of Ecology.” ISLE:  Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 26, no. 1 (Winter, 2019): 5–​26. Huxley, Aldous. Island. New York: Harper & Row. 1962. Ivins, William. On the Rationalization of Sight. New York: Da Capo Press. 1975. Jones, Madison. “(Re)placing the Rhetoric of Scale: Ecoliteracy, Networked Writing, and Memorial Mapping.” Mediating Nature: The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy. Eds. Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey. New York: Routledge. 2020. 79–​95. Jowit, Juliette. “Half of World’s Oceans now Fished Industrially, Maps Reveal.” The Guardian. April 18, 2018. Accessed at www.theguardian.com/​environment/​2018/​feb/​22/​half-​ofworlds-​oceans-​now-​fished-​industrially-​maps-​reveal Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media:  Thinking through Seawater. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press. 2020. —​—​—​. “Proteus and the Digital: Scalar Transformations of Seawater’s Materiality in Ocean Animations.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 9, no. 2 (2014): 245–​260. Kerridge, Richard. “Foreword.” Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. Eds. Serpil Oppermann and Srenella Lovino. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2017. xiii-​xvii. Keystone. Advertisement. Life Magazine. December 1961. p. 114. Khan, Urmee.“ ‘Google Ocean’ Launched as Extension of Google Earth to Map the Seabed.” The Telegraph. February 3, 2009. www.telegraph.co.uk/​technology/​google/​4434916/​ Google-​Ocean-​launched-​as-​extension-​of-​Google-​Earth-​to-​map-​the-​seabed.html Killday, Bill. Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality. New York: HarperCollins. 2018. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak:  Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Kindt, Matt, and Sharlene Kindt. Dept.H. Pressure. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2017. —​—​—​. Dept.H. Murder Six Miles Deep: After the Flood. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2017. —​—​—​. Dept.H. Murder Six Miles Deep: Decompressed. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2018. —​—​—​. Dept.H. Murder Six Miles Deep: Lifeboat. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2018. Klein, Patrice, et  al. “Ocean-​ Scale Interactions from Space.” Earth and Space Science. 6 (2019): 795–​817. Kroodsma, David A., “Tracking the Global Footprint of Fisheries.” Science. 359, no. 6378 (2018): 904–​908. Latour, Bruno.“Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. 6 (1986): 1–​40. Lazier, Benjamin. “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture.” The American Historical Review. 116, no. 3 (2011): 602–​630. Leonard, Jonathan Norton. “And his Wonders in the Deep.” The New York Times. July 1, 1951. https://​archive.nytimes.com/​www.nytimes.com/​books/​97/​10/​05/​reviews/​carsonsea.html Levin, Simon A. “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology: The Robert H. Macarthur Award Lecture.” Ecology. 73, no. 6 (1992): 1943–​1967. Maney, Kevin. “Tiny Tech Company Awes Viewers.” USA Today. March 21, 2003. https://​ usatoday30.usatoday.com/​tech/​news/​techinnovations/​2003-​03-​20-​earthviewer_​x.htm Manovich, Lev. “The Mapping of Space: Perspective, Radar, and 3-​D Computer Graphics.” 1993. Accessed from http://​manovich.net/​index.php/​projects/​article-​1993.

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McLuhan, Marshall. “At the Moment of Sputnik the Planet Became a Global Theatre in Which There Are No Spectators but Only Actors.” Journal of Communication. 24, no. 1 (1974):  48–​58. Mitchell, Alanna. Sea Sick:  The Global Ocean in Crisis. Toronto:  McClelland & Stewart. 2009. Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. New York: Del-​Rey Books. 2001. Morrison, Philip. Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True. College Park, MD: American Institute of Physics. 1995. Morrison, Philip, et  al. Powers of Ten:  About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. New York: Scientific American Library. 1982. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology:  For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. —​—​—​. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. —​—​—​. “Hyperobjects and the End of Common Sense.” The Contemporary Condition. http://​ contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/​2010/​03/​hyperobjects-​and-​end-​of-​common-​ sense.html. 18 March 2010. —​—​—​. Hyperobjects:  Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. —​—​—​. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2007. National Film Board. Cosmic Zoom. www.nfb.ca/​film/​cosmic_​zoom/​. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2011. Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. New York: Penguin, 1999. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Toward A Politics of Location.” Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980’s. Eds. Myriam Díaz-​Diocaretz and Iris M. Zavala. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1985. 7–​22. Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot:  A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New  York:  Ballentine Books. 1994. Shah, Gopal. “How We Explored the Whole Wide World with Google Earth in the Past Year.” The Keyword. April 19, 2018. www.blog.google/​products/​earth/​how-​weexplored-​whole-​wide-​world-​google-​earth-​past-​year/​ Silko, Leslie Marmon. Oceanstory. New York, NY: Odyssey Editions. 2011. Singh, Mahendra. The Hunting of the Snark:  An Agony in Eight Fits by Lewis Carroll. New York: Melvillehouse. 2010. Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Szasz, Eva, Director and Animator. Cosmic Zoom. National Film Board of Canada, Producer. 1968. —​—​—​. The Trout that Stole the Rainbow. National Film Board of Canada, Producer. 1968. Thomashow, Mitchell. Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2002. Verne, Jules. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions. 1998. Waters, Roger. “Four Minutes.” Radio K.A.O.S. New York: Columbia Records. 1987. Yong, Ed. “Wait, So How Much of the Ocean Is Actually Fished?” The Atlantic. September 10, 2018. www.theatlantic.com/​science/​archive/​2018/​09/​wait-​so-​how-​much-​of-​the-​ ocean-​is-​fished-​again/​569782/​

3 OBJECT OCEAN

In October 2018, Marine Policy, the leading journal of ocean policy studies, published research by Sanae Chibaa and the Japan Agency for Marine-​Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) that revealed the discovery of a plastic garbage bag 10,975 meters (36,000 feet) deep in Mariana’s Trench in the western Pacific, a demarcation that, as noted earlier, situates the find in relation to a land formation. The discovery came about through research that examined a database of images that had been made public in 2017.The database, which includes photographic and video content, archives images recorded over thirty years during more than 5,010 research dives. Chibaa et al.’s research, published as “Human Footprint in the Abyss: 30 Year Records of Deep-​Sea Plastic Debris,” classified occurrences of plastic, metal, rubber, glass, fishing gear, and “other anthropogenic items” across the global ocean (206), identifying plastic debris as the most prevalent. Of the identified plastics, 89% were categorized as “single use” items like grocery bags and water bottles. Likewise, the research identifies that 17% of the database’s images of plastic indicate interactions with marine life, including entanglement and consumption.Yet, it was the image of the single plastic bag at the deepest point in the ocean that caught the attention of the media, creating an almost instant global econ. Single-​ use plastic bags have earned the moniker “urban tumbleweeds” as discarded bags are now a near-​ubiquitous part of urban landscapes—​urban landscapes evoking a land-​based sense of place and placement. Plastic bags, that is, emerge in cultural imaginaries as land-​based objects, their presence in urban settings accepted as though they now belong there, as though they are of the land, part of the landscape. Their presence in ocean—​particularly unreachable ocean—​is, however, out of place. Single-​use bags were patented worldwide in 1965 by the Swedish company Celloplast and became widely used because of their durability and short-​ sighted claims that they would have less of an impact on global environments than paper bags, which contribute to global deforestation.1 Estimates in 2018 identify

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FIGURE 3.1  Single-​Use

Plastic bag discovered at the bottom of Mariana’s Trench. JAMSTEC E-​library of Deep-​sea Images Permission: see www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/​jedi/​e/​readme.html

that as many as “5 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year, nearly 10 million plastic bags per minute” (United Nations Environment, 10). The production of that many bags requires the use of as much as 12 million barrels of oil. More than 100 billion bags are discarded in the United States each year. Many communities around the world have begun to ban the use of single-​use plastic bags. Yet, it wasn’t until the appearance of Chiba’s research and the accompanying photo of the Mariana’s Trench bag that the impact of plastic pollution began to galvanize in the cultural imaginary around a new narrative about the totality of human impact on even the most inaccessible parts of the planet. Prior to the circulation of the image (see Figure 3.1), it was assumed that the nearly inaccessible reaches of the ocean, particularly the deepest parts, remained untouched by Anthropocenic influence. The image affirmed such assumptions as incorrect. The image of the Mariana’s Trench bag disrupts the familiar assumption regarding the infinite size of ocean. For much of human history, narratives of human–​ocean interactions reinscribed in the cultural imaginary the understanding that ocean is so vast that no matter what humans extract from or deposit into it, Ocean would simply absorb the additions or subtractions with no impact on ocean itself—​or at least no impact that would directly affect human interests. We have only recently begun to see the fallacy of such thinking and the far-​reaching effects of such thinking—​and the slow repeal of such thinking—​on cultural imaginaries. Much like discussions of scale, questions regarding materiality and object-​ oriented ontologies (OOO) have become more prevalent in ecocritical discourse. Zach Horton claims that “the original field of ecology was always object-​and scale-​unstable” (6). As such, Horton contends, that ecology’s “internal challenges to its own methodology and its sometimes tortured call for a disciplinary opening . . .

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frames the humanities not as disciplinary other, but as necessary ally in the challenge of reconceptualizing knowledge as both self-​reflexive and multi-​scalar” (6). Thus, we can easily identify scalar thinking as a methodological or conceptual bridge between ecology and the humanities and a central facet of environmental humanities and ecocritical agendas. Given the importance of scalar approaches to ecology and environmental humanities, then, scale, as the previous chapter demonstrates, is central to blue ecocritical ways of understanding ocean. Yet scale and scalar thinking remain amorphous if dissociated from specified objects and the mediated representations of the objects’ degrees of scale. Thus, object-​oriented ontology and new materialist methodologies become critical facets of blue ecocritical efforts in order to connect scalar thinking to representations of ocean and things oceanic specifically, not just concepts of ocean in the abstract. Despite the deeply problematic aspects of OOO,2 this Heideggerian legacy is valuable to blue ecocritical work in its rejection of human primacy and attention to the role of object ontology as not bound to human interaction. When addressed, then, in consult with posthumanist new materialism, OOO contributes materialist thinking to blue ecocriticism. Likewise, OOO and new materialism objectives encourage the revitalization of the early materialist work of Carson as well as other oceanic thinkers like Robert Michael Ballantyne, who beyond his seafaring novels mentioned earlier also wrote the 1874 treatise The Ocean and Its Wonders. Ballantyne begins his examination of oceanic “wonders” with a consideration of the material make up of seawater. The second chapter of the book, titled with Victorian tediousness “Composition of the Sea—​Its Salts—​Power and Uses of Water—​Advantage and Disadvantage of Salts—​ Anecdote—​Deep-​Sea Soundings—​Brookes Apparatus—​Importance of the Search after Truth—​Illustrations—​Discoveries Resulting from Deep-​Sea Soundings,” asks “what is the sea made of?” (35). He contextualizes his response situated in the logic that to understand the wonders of the sea, one must first understand the composition of the sea. He writes, Fresh water, as most people are aware, is composed of two gases—​oxygen and hydrogen. Sea water is composed of the same gases, with the addition of muriate of soda, magnesia, iron, lime, sulphur, copper, silex, potash, chlorine, iodine, bromine, ammonia, and silver. (35) Though not taken up by Alaimo or Jue, Ballantyne’s turn to seawater’s material configuration anticipates their new materialist and feminist new materialist approaches to seawater. This chapter is intentionally diffuse, or in Morton’s terms viscous, bringing together considerations of ocean as object and new materialist critique in order to examine how we imagine ocean as a thing and how, as thing or object, ocean is portrayed as interacting with other things, including human and nonhuman objects and subjects. Dispersed across and within vast textual spaces, such portrayals not only contribute to and construct ocean in cultural imaginaries, they, too frequently,

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solidify ocean as categorical object. Likewise, as I have begun to show, given the critical role digital distribution plays in contemporary formations of ocean in nascent cultural imaginaries, this chapter continues consideration of digital representation and digital circulation, which is of particular interest given the role that ontological categorization has come to play in information science representations, depictions that reverberate throughout oceanic cultural imaginaries. That is to say, the role of ontology in both OOO thinking and information science participate in a metaphoric oceanic composite.Though of less importance, the role of ontological categorization in information science is also of interest given the role of aquatic and liquid metaphors in articulations of circulation. As Alaimo puts it, “environmental politics in the twenty-​first century not only circulates through digital formats but permeates the material dimensions of everyday life” (Exposed, 9). Likewise, and in complementary consideration, while science and humanities researchers, as well as popular press, have addressed the ecological footprint of digital devices ranging from mineral extraction to e-​waste, the most significant aspects of these inquiries have been framed within human-​centered and land-​based concerns such as mining and toxin leaching in disposal landfills. Other aspects of this research have taken up more social dimensions of the digital explosion, including concerns over forced labor associated with the extraction of what has become known as conflict minerals or conflict resources—​particularly cassiterite (tin), wolframite (tungsten), coltan (tantalum), and gold ore, which are fundamental to the manufacture of industrial and consumer electronics—as well as the bioethical and medical effects of e-​waste disposal. If blue ecocriticism is to consider the role of digital circulation within assemblages of oceanic representation, then ethically it must also consider the material impact of the objects that invigorate digital circulation on and within ocean, particularly in light of necessities of technology in the human–​ocean interaction. Thus, within its consideration of OOO and new materialist critique of our understanding of ocean, blue ecocriticism must enfold inquiry into the ecological consequences of digital circulation upon marine environments. In order to do so, digital circulation and permeation regarding oceanic representation (such as that of Google Ocean) must necessarily be understood as situated in oceanic environments and considered within frameworks of the application of OOO in fluid environments as a method of disrupting the cultural reinscription of ocean as singularly identifiable thing or as media in which things can be extracted from or inserted into positions of occupancy or habitation. I channel this critique from Morton’s claim in Ecology without Nature that Ecological writing keeps insisting that we are “embedded” in nature. Nature is a surrounding medium that sustains our being. Due to the properties of the rhetoric that evokes the idea of a surrounding medium, ecological writing can never properly establish that this is nature and thus provide a compelling and consistent aesthetic basis for the new worldview that is meant to change society. (Ecology,  4–​5)

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Derivative of Morton’s claim, this chapter considers how we have come to represent ocean as both a thing itself and as ambient space in which objects are embedded and extracted. Consider, for example, the representation of the Mariana’s Trench bag as an intrusive object inserted into remote ocean, placed in an environment not an interactive component of that environment. However, in refutation of this reductive bifurcation between embedded objects/​subjects and the “nature” into which they become embedded, this chapter also turns to new materialism and Alaimo’s argument for a trans-​corporeal epistemology and her claim that the tradition of “submersible” research (which she frames in terms of deep ocean exploration) and the ideologies of “embedded” occupation reinscribes traditions of masculine knowledge-​making by disconnecting the intellect from both the bodily experience and the materiality of the body’s immersion in the environment. Alaimo contends that the fantasy of masculine knowledge making is to be free of the body, to be free of the womb-​like submersible embedding. The consideration of oceanic thingness evolves from fluid interplay between new materialist critique and a diluted understanding of OOO, in order to make evident the turbid waters of oceanic epistemologies as absorbed within Western land-​based (and often) masculinist rhetorics of representation (consider, for instance, the Western literary traditions addressed in Chapter 1 that cast ocean as site of conquest). In this way, too, this chapter dissolves metaphors (or, perhaps, just begins to corrode them) that are foundational to such representations and that emerge within OOO conversations that convey object and thing as, at minimum, entities that can be taxonomized as individual and independent for the convenience of identification, or, more literally, accept objects as complete, self-​contained entities that occupy (or inhabit) spaces and interact with other self-​contained entities. On the one hand, as foundational OOO thinkers like Graham Harman express it, OOO works to displace human exceptionalism in relation to nonhuman objects. By association, we discern similar relations with nonhuman animals on par with nonhuman objects, thus exhibiting connections to posthumanism, particularly given OOO’s general anti-​anthropomorphic position. Often, this OOO position manifests as the desire to subvert the privileging of subject over object in order to acknowledge the existence of object as not dependent upon human perception. Such a perspective, however, risks homologizing all subjects into a singular delineation to more conveniently theorize subject qua subject in relation to the metaphysical positioning of subjects and objects writ large. In many ways, this conflation of subject into a universal subject might be understood as a scaled-​ out view of subject that erases individual subjects in a broader scale of interest in favor of a whole-​subject view. On the one hand, such a conflation might conveniently serve theoretical efforts, but like other large-​scale representations, the conflation of subject risks the erasure of individual subjectivities, particularly for populations who have struggled to gain recognition as subject. Similar thinking might be applied to object-​centered thinking, as well. Scaled-​out representations of ocean remove microscale objects from the representation. In cases such as representations of chemical pollutants in ocean, for example, such scaled out

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representations erase the material effects of microscopic-​level interactions of those pollutants and the microbial and microscopic objects that constitute ocean. The scale of interest is adjusted in such a way that what is “seen” in the representation homologizes objects into generalizations like “saltwater” or “pollution.” Similarly, as I have argued elsewhere,3 the reduction of nonhuman subjects into broad categorical subjects—​for example, the ways in which fish populations are categorized in terms of harvest tonnage rather than by individual fish—​ fosters reductive conceptualizations about individuals within the subject group. Such thinking has contributed to ecological disruptions and environmental depletions by identifying large subject and/​or object groups as vast or inexhaustible without taking into consideration the scaled role of the individual subject/​object ecology.Thus, from a posthumanist, blue ecocritical position, OOO provides influential conceptual direction in disrupting anthropocentric-​driven epistemologies, but gambles with the value of individual subjectivity to do so. Likewise, given the claims that Christian Weisser and I  forward in Natural Discourse:  Toward Ecocomposition and Ecocomposition:  Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, I  offer that the fundamental precept of OOO that objects exist separate of human perception and, thus, maintain equivalent ontological capacity as all other objects and subjects functions as a convenient conceptualization for philosophical consideration. In doing so, OOO denies that such pronouncements can only emerge linguistically and metaphorically, trapping the possibilities of how such object-​subject relations can be articulated and understood as always already anthropocentric. The very idea, that is, that there can be object and/​or subject is confounded by discursive access, which is inherently prescribed by politics of literacies. Both OOO and its counterpart speculative realism (OOO evangelist Graham Harman identifies OOO as a “subspecies of Speculative Realism” despite predating it) deflect this criticism emphatically from the outset. Graham Harman, for example, argues that there are two forms of thinking that devalue object-​oriented thinking: undermining and overmining. Overmining, Harman shows, is exemplified in “the various philosophies of social constructionism, for which there is no independent reality outside the system of language, discourse, and power” (45). Harman’s defense of object-​oriented thinking by way of dismissing language, discourse and power—​not to mention politics and ideology—​is deeply problematic. Harman acknowledges that overmining can be a useful technique, but that “usefulness and truth are not the same thing, and that useful intellectual methods are generally those that adopt a powerful exaggeration as their primary tool” (47). He explains that undermining “is too quick to assume that reality is commensurable with our human understanding of reality” (48). In addition to the hubris of declaring one’s own theory as “truth,” Harman’s outright dismissal of discourse and language as the means by which all knowledge of “object” might be known certainly detaches the knowing subject from the object, but in doing so also reduces the notion that knowing has any value at all in the human experience. Admittedly, the relationship between discourse and reality requires extensive navigation, but the dismissal of the role of language and power in any ontological consideration erases the

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importance of ethics too conveniently. Even Harman’s collaborator Levi R. Bryant complicates the issue explaining that ontology ought not be evaluated on ethical grounds (i.e., we shouldn’t let a set of ethical and political commitments determine what is or isn’t ontologically true), it is nonetheless the case that how we think about the world has practical consequences for how we relate to the things of the world. (“The World Is Enough”) It is specifically the consideration of such heterogeneous relations and the role of ethics that make OOO relevant for blue ecocriticism—​relevant and useful, but concurrently resistant to claims of truth. When Weisser and I were writing Natural Discourse and Ecocomposition, we frequently arranged to meet on the water to collaborate on the projects, often combining our writing with scuba diving, spearfishing, and sportfishing. During one such outing, we took a break from a discussion about social constructionism and the role of discourse in forming perceptions about nature and the ramifications of our claim that there is no nature without discourse to make a dive and to spear a few fish. When we returned to the surface, as we swam back to the boat, Weisser pulled his mask down and took his regulator out of his mouth. He said, you know all of that stuff we were discussing before about the social construction of nature? Well, none of it means a damn thing when you feel a tug on your fish stringer and look over to see that a bull shark has hold of your fish and you’re tethered to them. That’s not constructed. That’s real. This moment, for me, exemplifies not merely the philosophical conundrum discourse imposes on human capabilities of accessing “nature,” but the inescapability of “nature’s” concern for discursive theory, OOO, or any other anthropocentric thinking, despite the massive effect of such anthropocentric thinking upon all scales of nature. Clearly, too, at the time, the influence of new materialist thinking had not yet seeped into our thinking about discursive formation, nature, and nonhuman subjects. This is, in part, why new materialist positions elide many of the problematic orthodoxies of OOO and provide more fluid approaches for considerations of ocean representation in cultural imaginaries while invigorating a more enmeshed understanding of the human-​object interaction. For example, while OOO rejects social constructionism’s emphasis on subject and object formation as discursive formation, many new materialists attend to social constructionism’s attention to discursive formations of power and politics in relation to subject and object formation, disrupting traditional subject/​object binaries while acknowledging the role of discourse in the construction of those binaries. In doing so, some new materialist thinkers also provide critique of social constructionism, particularly to identify how social constructionism itself perpetuates notions of the independent subject, a concept central to the very humanist thinking that maintains subject/​object binaries.

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Exemplary of this hybrid materiality/​ linguistic constructionist approach, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, in their collection Material Feminisms, work to “bring the material, specifically the materiality of the human body and the natural world, into the forefront of feminist theory and practice” (1).To do so, while they contend that “feminist theory is at an impasse caused by the contemporary linguistic turn in feminist thought” and that “many feminists have turned their attention to social constructionist models,” they also recognize the value in the social constructionist linguistic positions showing how “feminist theory and practice have been significantly enriched” by postmodern, social constructionist, discourse-​focused theories while simultaneously being restricted by those same theories (1–​2). Alaimo and Hekman show that “whereas the epistemology of modernism is grounded in objective access to the real/​natural world, postmodernists argue that the real/​material is entirely constituted by language” (2). Alaimo and Hekman identify this distinction as polarizing and point to an “imperative not to move from one side of the dichotomy to the other, to reverse the privilege of concepts, but to deconstruct the dichotomy itself, to move to an understanding that does not rest on oppositions” (2). In this call for a more integrated theoretical approach, Alaimo and Hekman emphasize the need to disrupt the privilege of the linguistic turn and what they identify as the postmodern “retreat from materiality” with more substantial integration between the linguistic and the material (3). “This retreat from materiality,” they write, “has had serious consequences for feminist theory and practice” (3). Similarly, in the introduction to their collection New Materialisms, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost question why materialism has remained distanced from intellectual inquiry. They contend that akin to the radical changes that critical theory has conferred to our understanding of subjectivity, “it is now time to subject objectivity and material reality to a similar radical reappraisal” (2). They argue that “foregrounding material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are prerequisites for any plausible account of coexistence and its conditions in the twenty-​first century” (2). As such, Coole and Frost’s attention to the interdisciplinarity of new materialism helps elucidate the fact that “the more textual approaches associated with the so-​called cultural turn are increasingly being deemed inadequate for understanding contemporary society, particularly in light of some of its most urgent challenges regarding environmental, demographic, geopolitical, and economic change” (2–​3). As such, Coole and Frost help establish new materialism not as dismissal of social constructionism and/​or the cultural turn, but as an articulation of the inseparability of matter and discourse. For Coole and frost, new materialism provides a necessary challenge to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world, including its normative sense of the human and its beliefs about human agency, but also regarding its material practices, such as the ways we labor on, exploit, and interact with nature. (4)

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New materialist thinking, especially feminist new materialism, aligns blue ecocritical objectives to navigate a fluid theoretical space not between but distributed among discursive formation in ocean representations and the materiality of ocean. Blue ecocriticism’s co-​constitutional approach to discursive and materialist methods is inspired by feminist new materialism—​particularly the work of Alaimo and Jue in their applications of feminist new materialism to matters of ocean and the oceanic. Likewise, blue ecocriticism finds theoretical and methodological inspiration from actor network theory (ANT) as forwarded by Bruno Latour, as well as Michel Callon and John Law, particularly in terms of ANT’s “material-​semiotic” methods that bind objects with concepts or discourses allowing that the relationship between object and discourse are always already co-​constitutive. In many ways, the appeal of ANT over OOO is its focus on intersections between object and discourse over the kinds of essentialist explanations to which OOO often adheres. The fluid nature of ocean requires a less rigid, land-​based consideration of the relationship between discursive constructionism and material object essentialism. The material-​ semiotic theories forwarded by Madaleine Akrich and Latour in what they identify as a “semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies,” Donna Haraway’s concept of “material-​semiotic actors,”4 and N.  Katherine Hayles’ “constrained constructivism” all contribute to this fluid intersection of materialism and discursive constructionism. Likewise, part of new materialism’s appeal emerges in its alignment with posthumanist thinking in order to resist human primacy in situating and representing the human among nonhuman actants and objects. To this end, much of the new materialist work that influences blue ecocriticism situates critique of human primacy within the material-​semiotic or material-​discursive framework. Thus, for blue ecocriticism, the value of OOO comes not in declarations of truth and claims of accurate portrayals of the real, but in conceptual reflection upon the idea of ocean as object—​or in the case of Morton, as at once hyperobject and not hyperobject. Bringing OOO and hyperobjectivity together complicates not only the taxonomical principles of object identification but the role of chronological scales in that identification. I mean this not as response to Harman’s critique of thinking that identifies objects as either being constructed of smaller objects or objects being parts of larger systems, but as consideration that an object at one moment of scaled time is not that object in another. Consider, for example, Morton’s exemplification of the Styrofoam cup as a hyperobject. The objectivity of that cup is not constant in chrono-​scalar investigation. Prior to being Styrofoam, the material components of the what would be turned into Styrofoam retained a different form of object.5 Once made Styrofoam, it became different still with its degree of possible ontologies shifting as human control determined should that object—​or amalgam of objects depending in scale of interest—​become cup or bowl or any of the endless things that can be made of Styrofoam. Such thinking evolves from Lucretius’ first-​century didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which questions the concept of origins (29–​30) and permeates thinking about origins through postmodernity by way of works like Jacques Derrida’s rejection of the concept of origins

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in Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Objects and bodies, that is, exist only at moments within chrono-​scalar perception. They are always already material (and political) processes not fixed entities.The human scale of interest applies use-​value to the object and that value is retained only for a moment in the material scale of the object.The cup, that is, is only a cup for as long as humans use and represent it as cup. A broken or torn cup is no longer a cup; it was cup. It may be a part of a cup or a piece of Styrofoam depending upon the representation. If discarded, its objectivity shifts from cup or was-​cup or Styrofoam to debris, a term of human value representation and demarcation. And, if discarded as debris into ocean as opposed to being discarded on land, not to mention where on land or ocean the object finds itself, the object’s ontologies again shift as the no-​longer-​ cup can become an object on which microbial ocean populations cling becoming a differently valued part of an ecosystem. Or, as it degrades over time, becomes diffused within ocean water, altering the chemical makeup of seawater and possibly becoming carcinogenic to the organisms it encounters, taking on a different ontology bound to its relations now bound to embodied interaction. To indicate such distinctions, we attribute, again, an anthropocentric interpretation of that value as either destructive or useful or adaptable depending upon a variety of scaled representations and interpretations.This blended notion of scale, time, and representation echo Morton’s hyperobjectivity and chrono-​scalar thinking in the distribution of object across time and space and are critical to disrupting land-​based epistemologies as wholesale transferable to ocean materiality. As Melody Jue, whose work is some of the most profound thinking about ocean and the humanities, points out,“In scaling the global ocean down to the size of our computer screen, or scaling seawater up to a point where microbial DNA is tangible, we need to think about the ideological and pedagogical stakes of forgetting the materiality of what we are scaling, and how seawater’s materiality changes with scale” (247). Rudimentarily, then, such inquiry might suggest that a primary blue ecocritical materialist question might ask “what is ocean?” in order to investigate representations of ocean from scales of interest from many perspectives: materially, culturally, politically, economically, ecologically, and so on.That is, the blue ecocritical question unfolds simultaneously as to what the object ocean is and how the object is represented, inquiries originating in material-​semiotic theory. Implicated is such inquiry is always already consideration of the relationship between the human and the ocean, even in posthuman inquiry. As Iovino and Opperman elucidate, Many subfields in the Environmental Humanities—​ ecocriticism, environmental philosophy and history, critical animal studies, queer ecologies, ecofeminisms, environmental sociology, political ecology, ecomaterialisms, and posthumanism, among others—​hold the conviction that the wounds of the natural world are also social wounds and that the planetary ecological crisis is the material and historical consequence of an anthropocentric and dualistic world view. (4)

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Hyperocean Using the accepted foundational principles that life on Earth began in ocean and migrated to terrestrial environments, paleontologists Mark McMenamin and Dianna McMenamin propose a theory to explain the rapid dispersal of plant life across the land during the middle Paleozoic age. Dubbed the hypersea theory, the McMenamin’s contend that by way of increased marine upwellings, what they term “hypermarine” upwellings—​a process in which the cold, nutrient-​r ich waters from deep in the ocean rise to the surface where the water contains fewer nutrients—​ during the middle Paleozoic era, currents in the upper ocean were able to better sustain the microbial life forms that began migrating from ocean to land carrying with them the fundamental components of ocean and life. The McMenamins theorize “the biogeophysical entity we call the Hypersea has made significant alterations to the physical and geochemical landscape” (218). Hypersea, they show, is constituted by eukaryotic organisms6 and their symbionts that populated the land creating a surge species diversity and a hundred-​fold surge in land-​based biomass. “Hypersea,” they explain,“is a biogeophysiological entity composed of a circulatory system evolved by (and for) its biological components.The geophysiological impact of this system profoundly affects the surface of the Earth” (89). The McMenamins adapt the term geophysiology from James Lovelock who coined the term along with Lynn Margulis’ in their well-​known Gaia hypothesis. The McMenamins turn to Lovelock and Margulis’ predecessor Vladimir I.  Verdansky—​the founder of biogeochemistry science—​and his pioneering and now widely accepted conception of the biosphere. Hypersea theory, an enactment of complexity theory (to a degree of intricacy that is difficult to imagine and one deserving of more attention than I offer here), has drastically influenced concepts of whole Earth thinking, providing a much more scientifically rooted narrative and rationalization than the Gaia hypothesis.To be incredibly reductive about it, what hypersea suggests is not just that land-​ based life emerged from the sea, but that that life retains primary components of the sea such that we can theorize the sea as extending across land in a complex system that demonstrates that life has not left the sea, but extends sea across land in an intricate biogeophysiological system. As such, hypersea suggests that the thing itself known as sea is a distributed object that extends well beyond the boundaries of the confined understanding of the sea as identifiable object. Hypersea theory provides the opportunity to rethink the object-​ oriented frameworks representations of ocean often attribute to what is and is not ocean. As such, it provides a more diffuse and scalar approach to seeing ocean within theoretical considerations of Morton’s hyperobject theory that reposition ocean somewhere amidst the hypersea and being and not being a hyperobject. Let’s circle back to Morton’s notion of hyperobject and his early blogpost in which he explains “as well as being about mind-​bending timescales and spatial scales, hyperobjects do something still more disturbing to our conceptual frames of reference. Hyperobjects undermine normative ideas of what an ‘object’ is in the first place” (“Common Sense”). This question of categorical object is important to

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blue ecocriticism in that the very notion of object is more often than not reduced not merely to understanding object to mean a thing that can be seen or touched, that is, an identifiable, codifiable material form, but to a form that is assumed to be to some degree a thing of solidity. Hyperobjectivity and new materialist theories of the material object disrupt these attachments to the condition of the solid and the independent, identifiable object, and ingrain the very idea of object with both chrono-​scalar placement and discursive representation. Objects, that is, may be hyper in both Morton and the McMenamins’ application of the term, dispersed across time and space beyond the traditional confines of what might be deemed object. Perhaps, that is, the very fluidity of ocean renders its objectiveness (or objectification) impossible to identify in ways other than theoretically freezing the moment of perception and analysis in a snapshot glimpse in time and scale, imposing a moment of solidity in order to establish conceptual solidity for the sake of human interpretation. Momentarily no longer fluid, but imagined as solid, ocean is rendered now as object, a thing that can be represented in discourse and image, in text and imagination. As I noted earlier, ocean is both hyperobject and not hyperobject. Accordingly, as per Morton’s definition of hyperobject, ocean exhibits hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness: the oceanic hypocrisy of the impossibility of metalanguage to come to terms with ocean; the oceanic weakness of the disparity between the thing itself ocean and the discursive phenomenon of ocean; the lameness of the ocean’s fragility; and the ocean as object of the cultural imagination. Language, metaphor, and metalanguage are all incapable of accounting for ocean in total—​scaled or not. Language, metaphor, and metalanguage always already contaminated by ocean, and ocean always already contaminated by language, metaphor, and metalanguage. Ocean is, in Morton’s terms and in physical, material makeup, viscous. There is, we can discern from Morton, no away from ocean (see Hyperobjects, 31). Whether theorized as hypersea biogeophysiological system or fluid substance of the cultural imaginary milieu, ocean is not merely a Mortonian viscous entity from which there is no away; it is a thing, an idea that saturates. Morton proclaims, “Viscosity is a feature of the way in which time emanates from objects, rather than being in a continuum in which they float” (Hyperobjects, 33). Ocean exceeds time, operates in and out of the time of hyperobjectivity. Its viscosity clings to and archives the objects of time in its depths. Its salt-​and mineral-​laden waters leave traces of contact, often corrosive. In this way, ocean’s hyperobjectivity is bound to its viscosity, to the very idea that the more you come to know of ocean, to borrow again from Morton,“the more entangled with it you realize you already are” (Morton,Viscous). Yet, Morton binds his notion of viscosity to another characteristic of hyperobjects he dubs the “non-​local,” borrowing the concept of nonlocality from quantum theory. For Morton, because hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space, the local manifestation of the hyperobject can never be an accurate or complete view of the hyperobject. On the one hand, this makes sense within scalar thinking and concepts of scales of interest and localized perspectives. However, there is a danger in understanding hyperobjectivity as nonlocal, which

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can be read as a euphemistic way of saying not local. Certainly, in Morton’s formulation local perspectives cannot reveal the encompassing perspective of hyperobjectivity, yet, adherence to nonlocality risks dissociative perceptions that allow for the erasure of the local, the Indigenous, the viscosity of a localized part. Ocean as hyperobject or as object becomes ontologically dissociative, fragmented within a conceptual framework that denies its own fragments. Not a reductive part of a whole or a whole composed of parts, but a nascent whole made whole by the very localities it enwraps in its viscosity. The nonlocal hyperobject is an object without its inhabitants, without its ecology, reduced to parts and wholes freed from its own viscosity. Certainly, Morton’s hyperobjectivity has given us a substantial theory of OOO within environmental and ecological frameworks.Yet, Morton’s own ocean deficit in his theories of hyperobject seem telling to me, seem, that is, to suggest that ocean is a strange hyperobject, a hyperobject that supplants other hyperobjects in its viscosity, or more accurately in its saturation, and in its refusal to adhere to the idea of nonlocality. Ocean exceeds Morton’s strange stranger to be understood—​or lacking understanding—not merely as strange, but as hyper strange object. If, as Morton suggests, hyperobjects “seem to force something on us, something that affects some core idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is” (15), then ocean seeps into and saturates the cultural imaginary as exponential hyperobject.

New materialist ecocritics Both OOO and new materialism influence contemporary ecocriticism, establishing material ecocriticism as a principal methodological focus. As Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman explain in the introduction to their anthology Material Ecocriticism, the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read; and interpreted as forming narratives, stories. Developing in bodily forms and in discursive formulations, and arising in coevolutionary landscapes of nature and signs, the stories of matter are everywhere.” (1) “All matter, in other words” Iovino and Oppermann contend, “is a ‘storied matter’ ” (1). Material ecocriticism, they show, “aims to open an interpretive horizon for the complex interrelations between discourse and matter” (2) within the material-​ semiotic framework established by Haraway and other new materialists. Material ecocriticism, they show, “examines matter both in text and as a text, trying to shed light on the way bodily natures and discursive forces express their interactions whether in representations or in their concrete reality” (2, italics in original). For Iovino and Oppermann, new materialism (or the material turn) “elicits not only new nonanthropocentric approaches, but also possible ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into dichotomous

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patterns of thinking” (2). Particular to such nondichotomous thinking, Iovino and Oppermann point to materialist thinking that collapse concepts of agency that have traditionally privileged the human as the only subject formation granted agency in order to question not only the agency of other nonhuman organisms but the very notion that agency can only be ascribed to only that which is understood as living. Turning to Jane Bennett’s new materialist thinking in Vibrant Matter:  A Political Ecology of Things, Iovino and Oppermann embrace the new materialist position calling for a “theory of distributive agency” (3, quoting Bennett, 31) or a “confederation of agencies” (4). Iovino and Oppermann’s new materialism echoes that of Coole and Frost, as well, as they contend that new materialism suggests that things (or matter) draw their agentic power from their relation to discourses that in turn structure human relations to materiality. Resisting the emphasis on linguistic constructions of the world, formulated by some trends of postmodern thought, the new materialist paradigm is premised on the integral ways of thinking language and reality, meaning and matter together. (4) Iovino and Oppermann adapt these core tenets of new materialist thinking to ecocriticism in order to show that the “nodes of the ecological crisis . . . are tangles of natures and cultures that can be unraveled only by interpreting them as narratives about the way humans and their agentic partners intersect in the making of the world” (6). Material ecocriticism, they show, “traces the trajectories of natural-​ cultural interactions by reading them as ‘material narratives,’ ” (6). Thus, they define material ecocriticism as “the study of the way material forms . . . intra-​act with each other and with the human dimension, producing configurations of meaning and discourses that we can interpret as stories” (7). What is significant about Iovino and Oppermann’s material ecocriticism is not just its disruption of the primacy of human agency and the call for ecological literary criticism to attend to the material-​semiotic interaction, but its disruption of the orthodoxies that confine our understanding of narrative to which ecocriticism—​ and all literary criticism—​has remained theoretically and disciplinarily loyal. In this way, Iovino and Oppermann show that material ecocriticism can “be understood an approach that entails a critical self-​reflection on our part as humans and on the constitutive engagement of human discursive systems with the material world” (9). Drawing upon Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction, Iovino and Opperman propose a methodology for literary criticism that “Instead of concentrating on texts and seeing how they ‘reflect’ the world’s phenomena—​natural life or a society’s cultural practices—​such an interpretation reads world and text as an agentic entanglement” (9–​10). For ecocriticism, this means “instead of transforming ‘nature’ into an endless series of interpretations, the ‘diffractive’ method allows us to actively participate in a creative process in which material levels and levels of meaning emerge together, contributing to the world’s becoming a web teeming with collective stories” (10). It is specifically the development of such methodologies that invigorate the

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necessities of materialist influence on an emerging blue ecocritical approach. That is, blue ecocriticism takes material ecocriticism’s foundational tenets as critical to its mission. That is not to say that blue ecocriticism is material ecocriticism dressed in blue, but that there can be no blue ecocriticism without material ecocriticism. Certainly, work tied to the new thalassology or blue humanities demands significant attention to materiality, as well. Inspired by material ecocritical methodologies and other similar positions, blue ecocriticism necessarily embraces Iovino and Oppermann’s (as well as others’) call for material ecocriticism to disrupt traditional conceptions of human-​privileged agency. For blue ecocriticism, such disruptions are critical given not only the historical primacy of the human in representation of ocean but the massively absent sense of agency or individuality ascribed to nonhuman organisms and objects that inhabit and constitute the homologous thing known as ocean. On the one hand, the McMenamins’ hypersea theory provides a framework for reimagining ocean as a fluid and distributed agency across boundless bodies and objects, including organisms that migrated from oceanic space to terrestrial space. On the other, material ecocriticism excites blue ecocriticism to disrupt the narratives that have denied agency to nonhuman ocean-​objects and organisms. Consider, for example, the discursive tradition of representing ocean organisms not as individual agents or even simply as individual organisms with or without agency but as collective bodies. Fish are rarely depicted individually; instead, they are schools, shoals, and in terms of harvest, tons. Individual fish are not granted agency beyond the anthropomorphic veil in, say, entertainment narratives like children’s films:  Finding Nemo (2003), Shark Tale (2004), Finding Dory (2016), or, one of my favorites, The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964) in which the agency of the individual fish occurs when the human character Henry Limpet (Don Knotts) falls from a Coney Island pier and transforms into a tilefish and retains his human mind—​and his spectacles, a visual cue to remind viewers both of the human character and that only a transformed fish would have such agency. Even in the narratives of Under the Sea Wind, Rachel Carson’s anthropomorphized individual fish become invisible within the collective of their schools. Representations of fish that deny individual agency are easy to attribute to global histories of commercial harvest and economic and protein value. Yet, agency, whether independent or distributive, for oceanic organisms remains, at best, homogenous or absent, in most cases. From zooplankton and phytoplankton to oceanic megafauna, oceanic organisms are not represented as subjects with agency. Consider, for example, two articles published in popular media: “The Strange and Gruesome Story of the Greenland Shark, the Longest-​Living Vertebrate on Earth,” published in The New Yorker in 2017 and “Consider the Greenland Shark,” published in The London Review of Books in 2020, both of which, though informative reports regarding the shark, reduce the representation of “the Greenland Shark” to not an individual organism but to an entire species and anthropomorphized as dull-​witted, repugnant, and as bycatch. Katherine Rundell, writing in The London Review of Books, situates the use-​value of the shark in terms of human consumption; its flesh is known as hákarl, she explains, and is “considered, by some, a delicacy, and by others

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an abomination” (Rundell). Such patterns of agentic erasure are commonplace among representations of ocean organisms, value attributed to either consumption or aesthetics. The Greenland Shark lacking value in either category is reduced to oceanic oddity, an object of study. Blue ecocriticism extends material ecocriticism’s critique of subjectivity and agency into ocean. Beyond material ecocriticism’s influence on blue ecocriticism’s consideration of agency, material ecocriticism’s critical objective to disrupt the notion of what constitutes text and, simultaneously, to disrupt how texts have traditionally been read as reflections of “the world’s phenomena” in order to read “world and text as an agentic entanglement” (Iovino and Opperman, 9–​10), stands a key component of blue ecocriticism. In the same moments as ecocriticism began to emerge from the intellectual thermal vents into the academic sea, John Fiske provides a model for such reading in his innovative 1989 essay “Reading the Beach,” which begins with the simple claim “Semiotically, the beach can be read as a text” (34). Fiske explains that “by text I mean a signifying construct of potential meanings operating on a number of levels” (34). He clarifies: “Like all texts, the beach has an author—​not, admittedly, a named individual, but a historically determined set of community practices that have produced material objects or signs” (34). These objects, he contends, may have functional dimensions—​meaning human use-​ value—​but they also have signifying dimensions. Beaches, he shows, have readers who interpret the signs to impose meaning onto the beach. That meaning, he contends is also, in part, determined by the socially constructed structure of those texts. Fiske’s attribution of beach as text foresees Haraway’s and new materialism’s material-​semiotic thinking and allows him to offer a reading of the beach that identifies the beach as “an anomalous category between land and sea that is neither one nor the other” (34). Fiske shows that the geographic distinction between land and sea has no meaning until human ideology imposes one. Such ideological imposition, he posits, allows humans to make distinctions between nature and culture in order to be able to make meaning within culture. The beach, he contends, is a place of land/​sea or culture/​nature with land representing the extent of human culture and the sea “becomes nature, untamed, uncivilized, raw” (35). Fiske’s material semiotic approach to reading the beach is at once itself an interesting analysis of the land/​sea dichotomy as well as an important early attempt to bring materialism into critical textual analysis.7 His hybrid approach to reading text teases at new materialist ecocriticism, providing a methodology for reading the human-​made semiotic structure as complex amalgam of ideological and cultural construction of meaning while simultaneously reading natural elements of the text as both nonhuman and as inherently mediated in any readings by anthropomorphic perspective. Fiske’s material-​semiotic approach and its manifestation through his reading of the beach, in conjunction with more comprehensive new materialist ecocriticism, empowers ecocriticism to adjust these methodologies toward focus on texts of ocean representation. However, it would be an oversimplification to say that blue ecocriticism is just new material ecocriticism applied to texts about ocean. Rather,

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new materialist approaches enable blue ecocriticism’s materialist objectives to diffuse across and throughout a fluid critical approach that is at once attentive to the material and the discursive/​semiotic.

Ocean bodies Some of the most important new materialist and materialist ecocriticism to address matters of ocean have been those that take up bodies and embodiment, what Alaimo describes as “the enmeshment of flesh with place” (Exposed, 1). The very idea of “body” is central to new materialism and, as such, emerges as a critical concept within materialist ecocriticism and blue ecocriticism. Body, though, can be a problematic term as it is usually understood to mean pretty much anything that exists. An individual human is a body, as is an individual menhaden or a school of menhaden. The students in my classes are bodies and they are collectively the student body. Schools are bodies, be they educational institutions or populations of fish. Lakes, rivers, ponds, bays, and seas are at once all bodies of water and a single body of water. A microscopic particle of plastic is a body as is Morton’s Styrofoam cup. A  corned beef sandwich is a body made of other bodies disassembled and reassembled and then, when devoured, disassembled, and again reassembled by other bodies. All things that exist are bodies and all bodies exist in perpetual states of assembly, disassembly, and reassembly, all of which require interaction and enmeshment with other bodies. Bodies do not exist independent of other bodies. Likewise, bodies exist only in moments of time. Morton’s Styrofoam cup, as I have suggested, is only a Styrofoam cup at particular moments of chronological scale and only from particular scales of interest. Paul Chadwick’s award-​ winning comic series Concrete offers a magnificent moment depicting this degree of scale and enmeshing.8 “Think Like A Mountain,” the most ambitious of Chadwick’s environmentalist Concrete stories, tells of Concrete’s adventures as he teams up with an EarthFirst! Group as they work to save a forest in Washington. As he is chased by loggers angered by the EarthFirst!ers’ actions, Concrete jumps from a cliff into Puget Sound, and, since his body is composed of dense, rock-​like material, he sinks the sea floor where he sees a large school of spiny dogfish. He thinks, “the predominant shark of Puget Sound. Not man eaters. Not that I’m exactly a man anymore” (56). He is chilled by the sight of hundreds of the sharks, “A gliding swarm of eating machines. God help any fish around here. They’ll sweep this area clean as a clearcut” (56). The analogy is problematic, as Chadwick compares a human-​driven act of harvest with a natural predatory phenomenon, as he finds violence in the shark and innocence in the other fish. Concrete thinks more on the subject, backing away from the initial metaphor: “Well, no. They eat only the middle of the food chain. Providing relief, in fact, for the guys at the bottom. Still, the horror of it” (56). He turns to the writing of “The Great Agnostic” Robert G. Ingersol, asking, “What’s that Ingersol Quote? ‘every drop of every sea is a battle ground. . . . over the precipice of cruelty rolls a perpetual Niagara of blood” (56). For the next several pages, Concrete walks across

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the bottom of Puget Sound meditating upon representations of the sea, conjuring visions of mermaids and relating the reproductive habits of octopi. In a foul mood and contemplating overfishing, he stumbles upon a ghost net, not knowing what it is, he asks, “now what is that?!” (67). The omnipotent narrator provides explication: They call them ghost nets. It’s a drift net that somehow got away. Miles long, its fine nylon strands rendered invisible in the water, still catching fish . . . which attracts sea birds, which become entangled . . . as do sharks . . . and, recently, seals. All to die and rot. (67) The following two-​page spread (pp. 68–​69) provide a remarkable visual of Concrete gazing up into the killing ganglion of the ghost net. He says nothing, thinks nothing, as the narrator’s pen conveys: To Concrete, who knows nothing of this . . . who is in a mood black with thoughts of humankind’s heavy steps on the world . . . and the insult of being repeatedly shot . . . it is like a mysterious vision of corruption. A  rotting zodiac. And as this concept occurs to him, he mentally superimposes it on the ghost net. (68–​69) The superimposition is lost in the monochromatic black and white original, but in the re-​rendered color version published in an anthology of Concrete issues, the zodiacal overlay reveals the horrific rotting corpses of the Gemini twins, the Cancer crab, Leo the lion, Aquarius the water bearer, the goddess Astraea holding the scales of Libra, and Scorpio the scorpion. The bodies are highlighted in the contrasting pinks of flesh against the oceanic blues, greens, and blacks. It is a remarkable image, one that conveys Concrete’s epiphany, one that foreshadows a later image in which Concrete takes a vow of activism with his EarthFirst! friends. It is a depiction of bodies: the superimposed bodies of the zodiac, the bodies of decaying marine life, the bodies of still living marine life that struggles against the net, the net itself a ganglion body enwrapping other bodies, the body of water in which the scene unfolds, Concrete’s body, which provides the point of perspective. Artistically, it is a magnificent image; metaphorically it is a remarkable depiction of materiality, enmeshment, and body.Yet, its depiction is also an erasure of ocean, as the scene retains the logic of the aquarium view, rendering the water unseen, invisible, a blank page comparable to Carrol/​Holiday’s Bellman’s Map. Unseen. Morton, in Hyperobjects, shows how we have little idea as to how our bodies interact with the materiality of the world. Toxins, bacteria, virus, and parasites, for example, interact unseen in and with our bodies. Unseen, though, indicates scale of interest, a point of perception.While the animations of the Powers

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of Ten films allow us to imagine and visualize embodied microbial and cellular ecologies, and microscopic imaging technologies allow us to “see” at microscales,9 we are unable to see much in terms of Alaimo’s enmeshment. Yet, enmeshed we are, materially, ideologically, culturally, and politically.The McMenamins’ Hypersea theory extends this notion of entanglement between body and place, between organism and ocean, beyond the human, showing how material oceanic properties diffuse across diverse organic bodies. The very idea of connection between body and ocean is so prevalent that ocean conservation campaigns frequently rely on the familiar and overly simplified claim that ocean conservation is necessary because the human body’s composition is akin to that of sweater therefore a natural connection between the human and ocean exists. Both Carson and Earle make similar connections, showing similarities between the human body and ocean; Carson shows similarities between seawater and human blood while Earle shows that plankton produce the very air that we breathe. Alaimo cites singer Bjork as explaining “Environmentally concerned scientists hope that such kinship will lead humans to imagine themselves as linked to the planet both personally and evolutionarily” (qtd in Alaimo, “origins,” 188). More critically, Alaimo shows how “a material feminist or new materialist environmentalism, however, would stress that the material exchange between bodies, consumer objects, and substances become the site for ethical-​political engagements and interventions” (Exposed, 9). Alaimo describes these interactions as “material intimacies” that stretch across immense scale (Exposed, 10). In Exposed:  Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (as well as much of her other writing), Alaimo establishes some of the most influential thinking about feminist new materialism and connects much of that work with ocean. In Exposed, she writes, “The exposed subject is always already penetrated by substances and forces that can never be properly accounted for—​ethics and politics must proceed from there” (Exposed, 5). She critiques “transcendence and the splitting of the subject and the object” offering “alternative formulations of new materialist exposure” (Exposed, 7). “The subject, the knower,” Alaimo writes, “is never separate from the world she seeks to know” (Exposed, 7). Drawing from this important claim, and within the shadow of The McMenamins’ Hypersea theory, bodies saturate blue ecocriticism’s engagement with new materialism:  human bodies and nonhuman bodies both organic and nonorganic. Ocean itself as body, bodies of water. As Alaimo points out, the affirmation of wildness needs to be complemented by a new materialist sense of the interacting or intra-​acting material agencies of the objects, substances, and environments produced by or at least altered by humans. Taking such “stuff ” seriously mixes up the domain of ethics (primarily personal) and the domain of politics (primarily public), leaving us with something not unlike the feminist contention that the personal is political. (Exposed, 9)

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In this, we hear echoes, extensions, and metamorphoses of Fiske’s reading of the beach that more comprehensively address the material-​semiotic in terms of the material body and the politics and ethics inextricably bound to that materiality. Blue ecocriticism is always already political. The very act of interpretation and critique it proposes as central to the ecocritical imperative and connectively to the understood anthropocenic immediacy of ocean conservation and sustainability operates simultaneously as biophysical entities and as ideological, political, and ethical constructs. As such, blue ecocriticism is compounded within the politico-​ ethical body as inseparable from the physical body, but also works away from the taxonomically convenient concept that the body—​human or nonhuman—​can or should be distinguishable from other bodies. This is an agitation of the idea that any given body operates in-​placed within an ecology or environment, that its relationship with other bodies affirms its distinction as independent subject/​object and the independence of those other bodies. Instead, blue ecocriticism works toward a more fluid understanding of the diffused relationships of bodies as always already connected and inseparable from the complex networks of other bodies that, at times and varying scales of observation, reveals the inextricability of one body from another to the extent that neither—​or any—​body can be wholly distinguished or separated from another. The anthropomorphic desire to taxonomize bodies as discernible or independent from other bodies is itself a politic of subjectivity, an inscription of power. To accept the body, the individual body, as independent of other bodies or as emplaced and situated within ecologies and networks facilitates the god’s eye view of the world that favors, to one degree, human primacy, while, simultaneously to another degree, imposing restrictions upon which of those bodies can and cannot be granted agency as authentic subjects. This is to say, the very notion of the hyper-​enmeshed body provides the opportunity to disrupt the very anthropocentric ideology and master narrative that assumes the human separation from other bodies. Such thinking, though, is not new. In De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius introduces the idea that bodies are porous (36–​41) and that the relationship between the porous earth and the flow of the sea through and within the earth exemplifies the kind of porous relationship other bodies have, as well (243). To be clear, though, the notion of bodies as porous does not imply that when entities flow through the void of a given body’s porosity that the flow remains distinct from the body, that the effect of the diffusion is merely in its passing. Instead, the porous nature of bodies vivifies interaction and effect between bodies. While it is convenient to imagine such porous interaction as occurring between one body that is porous and another that flows within the voids of its porosity, such interactions are never reducible to such simplifications as each interaction is always already exponentially more complex, involving voids, porosity, saturation, corrosion, residue, and accumulation among bodies. Enmeshed bodies, that is, interact at varying scales to the degree that their engagements might be understood at once scale as occurring between bodies while at other scales may reveal the enmeshment as forming a single or undividable body. Such complexity seems evocative of the ideas of multiplicity and multiples theorized by Gilles Deleuze

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and Alain Badiou as Becky Vartabedian extrapolates. In this way, bodies might be understood as multiplicities of multiplicities and multiples of multiples. Reductively then, we might say that all bodies are porous and enmeshed with other porous and enmeshed bodies, and that the porosity of bodies is at once material and ideological/​political, and, thus, wracked with ethics. Blue ecocriticism asks, then, as to how we navigate corporeality in oceanic environment, as well as the result of human infusion of nonoceanic materials into ocean environments that cyclically permeate oceanic and nonoceanic bodies, for example, in toxic, infectious ways to both human and nonhuman bodies. How, too, do we reconcile the understanding that by way of OOO and new materialism, those very objects we label as toxic or infectious are themselves bodies, some organic and some not, some the result of anthropocenic ascendency. Contemporary ocean conservation regularly focuses on matters of “pollution,” of material objects and bodies identified not as enmeshed with ocean, but as intrusive within ocean: mercury, plastics and microplastics, and biotics like red tide, as examples.Yet, these kinds of questions, while critical to ocean conservation efforts, apply a linear, chrono-​ suspended, terrestrial thinking to our understanding of the ways in which such bodies are enmeshed with other bodies. And, because prevalent representations depict such objects and bodies, ranging from the human to the nonhuman, the organic to the inorganic, as situated within ocean rather than either enmeshed with or as intrinsic part of ocean, often what is erased, too, is the materiality of ocean itself.To this end, Jue asks one of the most prevalent questions of materiality and ocean:  “in what ways is seawater’s specific materiality lost along the way?” (“Proteus,” 247). Blue ecocriticism, then, takes up not only questions akin to Jue’s materialist inquiry, but concurrently asks as to how the representations of such questions and the materiality itself intermingle within cultural imaginaries. Jue’s ecocritical work in “Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and ‘Oceanic,’ ” as I  noted in Chapter  1, exposes the pervasiveness of land-​based perspectives. Jue brings new materialist ecocriticism to bear on science fiction/​speculative fiction to show how “the cognitively estranged environments of SF challenge our terrestrial sense of surface and depth” (“Churning,” 226). In doing so, Jue focuses her critique on the Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Greg Egan’s “Oceanic.” Solaris, Jue shows, how these texts depict scaled perceptions of ocean as enmeshed with an array of bodies in order to “churn up” the “ ‘clean’ model of surface versus depth through science fictional estrangements” (“Churning,” 227). Jue’s essay is an exemplary piece of feminist new materialist ecocriticism that empowers the very kind of blue ecocriticism to turn its attention to matters of ocean. Perhaps, too, what drives blue ecocriticism’s embrace of new materialist thinking about bodies—​and Alaimo’s trans-​corporeality—​is the opportunity to better understand the extent of ocean enmeshment and the anthropocenic ocean. Bringing new materialist engagement with concepts of body into conversation with Bill McKibben’s understanding of “independent nature” allows us to begin to fathom not an independent ocean, but a hyper-​enmeshed ocean. McKibben writes:

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We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-​made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without nature there is nothing but us. (58, italics in original) While I  concur with the McKibben’s condemnation of negative human influence upon natural systems, his notion of independent nature is problematic, particularly if applied to the idea of an independent ocean. McKibben is correct to identify human influence upon weather and nature, but his scale of interest retains bifurcations between human and nature, between bodies. Nature qua nature is always already an entanglement of bodies, never independent, not from human or nonhuman. As such, blue ecocriticism does not propose ocean as independent nature, but as deeply enmeshed and saturated.

Plastic ocean In 2010, the virtual band Gorillaz released its massively popular third studio album Plastic Beach. The album’s title and its theme grew from Gorillaz creator Damon Albarn’s observation of the prevalence of discarded plastics on a beach near his home. The eponymously titled thirteenth track of the album tells the story of a whale watching ships pass by and seeing the plastic debris that moves from the beach into the “dark, dark seas.”The chorus echoes, “It’s a Casio on a plastic beach/​ It’s a Styrofoam deep sea landfill.” While it is not unusual for artists to express ecological concern via music and lyrics (see the next section of this chapter), that Gorillaz turned their attention to the global crisis of plastic pollution seems indicative of the growing awareness of and response to what has come to be known as the global plastic crisis. Clearly the images of the Mariana’s Trench plastic bag contribute to a rapidly expanding textual ecology representing environmentalist concerns regarding the plastic crisis in general and the oceanic plastic crisis more specifically. For new materialists, the plastic crisis has become a primary touchpoint for critique and activism. Overly simplified, the plastic crisis can be understood as the vast production and disposal of plastics to the extent that plastic waste pollution now intrudes upon every part of the planet.The Mariana’s Trench Plastic Bag image exemplifies the degree to which plastic pollution has reached even the most inaccessible parts of the planet. Ranging from microplastics to large scale plastic objects, plastic debris now accounts for the majority of anthropocenic pollution. Recall that Chiba et al.’s research identified the majority of ocean pollution as plastics. Plastic pollution has now been found not only in Mariana’s Trench but in Arctic ice sheets, in drinking water, in food, and even in the air. A 2018 report published in Nature Communications presents research by Ilka Peeken et al. of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, revealed substantial quantities of microplastics in Arctic ice. The researchers identified as many as 12,000 microplastic particles

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per liter of ice. Like the Mariana’s Trench plastic bag image, this research suggests the ubiquity of plastics—​particularly microplastics—​in ocean water. Interestingly, Peeken et al.’s research not only identifies the quantity of microplastics in the ice but also provides patterns of origin of the microplastics. The research team shows that ice flows pushed by Pacific Ocean water in the Canadian Basin contained significant quantities of polyethylene, the most commonly used microplastic polymer in the world, which is used to produce everything from single-​use bags to toys to packing materials to shampoo bottles and even bulletproof vests. The researchers speculate that many of these particles drifted into Arctic ice from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex. Peeken et  al. also identified more local pollution originating from Siberia in the ice including paint chips from ships, nylon from fishing nets, and cellulose acetate, a plastic used in making cigarette filters. In total, the research team identified seventeen kinds of plastic in the Arctic ice. Given the unimaginable reach of plastic pollution across the planet, the elevated damage of plastic to oceanic environments and bodies, and the lack of any viable solution to the plastic crisis beyond curbing plastic use—​which given estimates of future plastic production appears to be impossible—​the plastic crisis falls to the nexus of environmentalist attention and new materialist attention. Given the sublime pervasiveness of plastic pollution, it is impossible to address here even a fraction of the issues and research surrounding plastics or to accurately represent the scope of work new materialist critics have already devoted to plastics. Yet, despite these critical interventions, plastics remain a priority among ocean-​ facing new materialist critics both within ecocriticism and in other related areas of study. Rather that recounting much of that work, I want to again acknowledge Stacy Alaimo’s treatment of plastics in Exposed (see Exposed, 130–​138, 183–​188) and “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea.” Similarly, in his wonderfully wrought essay “Imagining the Eastern Garbage Patch: Ocean Plastics as a Problem of Representation and Scale,” ecocritic Dan Brayton turns his attention to plastics showing that the “growing public visibility of marine plastic debris can delude as well as enlighten, for images and sound bites teach us little or nothing about the extent of the problem” (“Imagining,” 98). “Objects invisible to the eye,” Brayton writes, “can seem to have no history, yet it is increasingly apparent that there is a massive human dimension to the ecological history of the world’s oceans, and that part of this history is written in copolymers” (“Imagining,” 97). It is both in those histories and the representations of those histories in which new materialist attention to plastics and the porous relationship between plastic and nonplastic bodies emerge as a necessary component of blue ecocriticism (as is similar engagements with many other synthetic and biologic “pollutants”). Such critical work will need to further explore the representations of plastic materiality throughout those histories, the effect of those histories and representational narratives upon cultural imaginaries, and the materiality involved in producing and circulating the very texts through which those narratives circulate. That is, it is at once critical to consider histories and narratives but it is also imperative to consider the technologies through which those narratives are transmitted, be they

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technological, biological, organic, or inorganic. The acknowledgment, for example, of the inescapable interaction with plastics necessary for the production of this text, whether in print or digital access, reveals a cultural and technological trap, which ensnares my writing of this text and the distribution of this text in an inescapable plastic quagmire. From the pens, styluses, plastic keyboard, mouse, cameras, microphone, and monitors, I use to the Styrofoam and plastic packing materials in which those devices were delivered to the plastics in the vehicles used to transport the devices from manufacture to distribution and the plastics in the tools used to produce those products. From the plastic-​coated wires through which I access and distribute data to the plastics used in the vast undersea networks of wires and fiber optics that distribute data globally, as Nicole Starosielski documents in her fantastic and eye-​opening book The Undersea Network. From the plastic coatings in book covers to the ink cartridges in the printers that printed this book, the very materiality of engaging blue ecocriticism requires technologies and circulations now inextricable from the plastic crisis. And, of course, as each of these plastic bodies transitions from usable and valuable in the contexts of the writing of this book into rubbish or waste, the plastics become part of the global e-​waste and plastic crises. As such, the economics, politics, and ethics from the moment of extraction of the petroleum needed to produce plastics, the manufacture of the plastics, the distribution of the plastics, the disposal of the plastics, and the degradation of the plastics all play out as inseparable from the cultural imaginary that perpetuates representations of ocean and the materials inculcated in those representations. Ocean representations, that is, are never outside of the materiality of production and circulation. As such, texts like this—​in fact all texts, all scholarship, all media—​are complicit in the plastic crisis. Chen Qiufan’s 2013 near-​future science fiction novel (translated from Chinese to English in 2019) Waste Tide—​a book that synthesizes cyberpunk and ecopunk—​depicts Silicon, an island off the coast of China that serves as the world’s dumping ground for e-​waste, ranging from obsolete computer parts to mobile phones to human prosthetics and sex toys, which are sorted and recycled by lower classes, known as “waste people.” The island is divided by clan rule and strict class distinction. The book is a remarkable commentary about technology, e-​waste, capitalism, and class, as it portrays the ways in which the technologized, capitalist world casts aside and entraps the lowest classes. The island is wrecked with disease and corruption, and ocean is ever present in the lives of the inhabitants, as the title suggests. The book, originally written in Chinese, is particularly telling given the current economic and political tensions between the United States and China and brings to light many issues regarding global e-​waste issues. Engaging the plastic crises, though, is exasperating and often inconceivable, primarily in terms of scope given the astounding global use of and reliance upon plastics in relation to the inability to dispose of plastic debris in any sustainable way. Unsettlingly, too, we are forced to acknowledge that such reliance on plastics is not entirely negative. We must acknowledge that the very technologies of plastics and the conditions of their materiality are at once product and parcel of the most catastrophic aspects of late capitalism, yet their destructive qualities are tempered

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in the cultural imaginary by representations of their usefulness, their economic and technological necessity. As Callum Roberts reminds us, too, writing about pollution more generally, “it is easy to be indignant about the ubiquity of chemical pollution and to rail at the rapacious corporations that peddle these products. But we shouldn’t forget the thousands of lives they save” (148). Roberts, whose writing is some of the most profound and respected work in ocean conservation, details the circulation of plastics throughout oceanic currents in his remarkable, though frequently dispiriting, book The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. Roberts is not alone in such writing. Books like Donovan Hohn’s best-​selling Moby-​Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea & of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists & Fools Including the Author Who Went in Search of Them, and Charles Moore’s Plastic Ocean that brought attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (aka The Pacific Trash Vortex) all work to inform public audiences about the relationships between plastic pollution and global ocean current circulation. Despite the importance of books like these and their interventions into representations of the plastics crisis in relation to ocean, blue ecocritical work requires examination of a significantly broader scope of the ocean/​plastic conundrum. As I write here about ocean and plastics, I do so amid the global COVID-​ 19 pandemic. Each day images circulate across many media platforms of different “scenes” from around the world of the pandemic; these images are intended to convey the dire situation as represented by empty streets, closed businesses, exhausted medical workers, violations of stay-​at-​home orders, and even bags containing the bodies of those who have died. While such images attend to both providing visual information as well as playing upon the pathos of the situations they depict, almost every image circulated relating to the COVID-​19 situation include representations of plastic. In fact, the pandemic drives a global demand for increased production of plastics: surgical tools; respirators and hoses; surgical masks; cleaning supply bottles; cleaning brushes; gloves made of plastics like latex, polyvinyl chloride, or neoprene; syringes; hazmat suits and masks; trash bags; and so on. These images echo Robert’s reminder of the necessity of plastics, but as the demand for these plastic goods increases around the world during this crisis, so too does that demand translate into an increase in global plastic production and disposal. In early May 2020, CNN writer Rob Picheta reported that the demand for plastics during the COVID-​19 crisis results in increased production as well as relaxation or suspension of regulatory restrictions usually imposed on plastics production. He explains that the plastic crisis has taken a back seat to the COVID-​19 crisis and that “all that plastic ends up somewhere” (“Coronavirus”). Conservation organizations like the US-​based NGO Ocean Conservancy anticipate that “somewhere” to often translate into “ocean.” Picheta reports that the global demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) has dramatically increased during the pandemic. On the one hand, the increased manufacture of PPEs is understood as necessity as the COVID-​19 body enmeshes with and infects human bodies, and certainly the protection of human lives from this viral engagement is of critical importance. But we must also acknowledge that the COVID-​19 pandemic exposes a narrative so historically entrenched in

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human primacy that even the most devout posthumanist, new materialist, or OOO enthusiast would have a difficult time ethically arguing against. Inherent in that narrative, blue ecocriticism acknowledges, is an unspoken yet globally accepted narrative that the need for plastics technology for the immediate preservation of human life supersedes the potential for long-​term global health problems associated with plastics pollution. Here, “global health problems” should not be read as strictly a human-​focused term as the inevitable post-​pandemic increase in plastic pollution will affect all life and all bodies to the degree of hyperobjectivity. The narratives of COVID-​19 represent the virus in terms of immediacy; yet, to borrow from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, the pandemic will also likely enact a form of slow violence against ocean by way of increased plastic pollution. Likewise, if we are to establish a strictly anthropocentric scale of interest in examining the likelihood of post-​pandemic plastics pollution, it becomes evident that, as Nixon plainly shows, that it will be the lower socioeconomic populations that most suffer the longer-​scale outcome of the pandemic. Consider the pre-​pandemic situations noted earlier on the islands of Tuvalu and Kiribati, islands rapidly disappearing because of sea rise. Both island nations also face significant environmental and health crises due to plastic pollution, both domestically produced and brought to their shores by ocean current. In 2019, Tuvalu and Kiribati banned many single-​use plastics as their landfills are now assumed to be leaching into adjacent lagoons causing destructive algae blooms. Likewise, researchers in both Tuvalu and Kiribati report plastics in local seafood ranging from microplastics in bivalves to larger plastics ingested by fish. Along with their ban on single-​use plastics, Tuvalu has also begun assessing taxes on imported goods like appliances and automobiles to offset the cost of exporting the waste such objects eventually become. Tellingly, too, on the island of Java, the village Bangun, like many other Indonesian communities, has been operating as a dumping/​recycling post for US waste for many years, but when China banned importing US recycling materials in 2019, the amount of plastics dumped on their island has cause an increased problem. On the one hand, the increased mountains of plastics accelerate the environmental problems associated with plastics, but the Indigenous populations see the increased volume of waste as an economic boon. More than 1,500 families in the Bangun community rely on the dumped waste to make a living, as they pick through the dumped waste to collect recyclable materials that can be sold and reentered into the economic chain. That which has no economic value remains in mountains that define the village’s landscape. It is anticipated that those mountains of waste will soon include significantly more PPE waste. With this in mind, Waste Tide seems less like a science fiction narrative than a commentary on global pollution and class conditions. Unquestionably, the plastics crisis stands at the forefront of oceanic environmental concerns and, thus, as predominant site of potential for blue ecocriticism. Yet, plastics can only be one part of the materialist aspect of blue ecocriticism, as new materialism and OOO have the potential to provide direction for significant ocean and ocean representational investigations.

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Ocean sounds I conclude this chapter about materiality and representation by turning to an often-​overlooked facet of oceanic materialism:  the materiality of sound. As the previous section nodded to Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach, music plays a significant role in the construction of ocean in the cultural imaginary. Certainly, music is an often-​ used media for conveying environmentalist objectives, and musicologists trace connections between environmental activist songs and longer traditions of protest songs. Richard Kahn shows that while songs about the wonders of nature have been prevalent since at least classical antiquity, “the use of popular and other types of protest song to advance the ideas or aims of environmental activism can be traced to the 19th century during the rise of the American Transcendentalist movement” (412). Kahn attributes the first environmental activist song to George Morris and Henry Russell’s 1837 song “Woodman! Spare that Tree!” (412). Kahn points to the transnational ubiquity of environmentalist music, highlighting the work of artists like “Scandinavia’s Bjork, South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Senegal’s Yousou N’Dour, Mexico’s Maná, Brazil’s Paulo Lara, Japan’s Mr. Children, and Australia’s Midnight Oil” (412). Of course, the lists of musicians whose songs convey environmental activist themes can be played out ad infinitum: John Prine, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Pearl Jam, Barenaked Ladies, Don Henley, Sheryl Crow, Jack Johnson, Drake, and so on. Given its antiestablishment politics, too, the various genres of Punk music have been particularly ripe for environmentally themed music. Mainstream Punk bands like Green Day, Bad Religion, Rise Against, Manic Panic, and NOFX produce environmentally targeted music, as do many local Punk bands.10 Beyond the environmentally activist aspects of music, though, representations of ocean in music are also omnipresent. From sea shanties to surf music to beach music, ocean is a frequent subject for songwriters. Like environmental activist music, the list of songs that romanticize ocean is nearly endless and global. Western artists like Irving Berlin, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys, Jimmy Buffett, Zac Brown Band, Jack Johnson, Kenny Chesney, Fidlar,Van Morrison, The Beatles, and so on. I should note, too, that the history of much of this music is tied to politics and ethics of oceanic representation. Sea shanties, for example are often now the repertoire of bar bands, but their history is bound to maritime labor and some genres of shanties are derivative of Caribbean and African slave labor work songs. Described often as a kind of folklore, many sea shanties carry histories of oppression, forced labor, and diasporic narratives. Likewise, Indigenous music, some recorded but much dwelling in oral culture, represents ocean across many Indigenous cultures. Frequently reduced to labels like “world music” or “tribal music” the traditions of Indigenous song participate in Indigenous cultural imaginaries and local literacies in significant and often-​overlooked  ways. Recordings of ocean sounds, as well, are often marketed for meditation and relaxation. The sounds of waves breaking, sea storms, whale song, sea birds, and

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other ocean sounds contribute to the extensive ocean-​inspired archive of music and recordings. In “If a Tree Falls: Mediations into and of Natural Sound,” Joe Marshall Hardin examines both acoustic pollution and the role of representation in “natural” sound recordings like those recorded and marketed for public distribution. Regarding natural soundscape recordings, Hardin shows that “while these soundscape recordings promote an awareness of environmental issues, they also present nature as an ‘out there’ world where humans are merely observers” (75). Hardin’s point, when placed in conversation with Jue’s aquarium aesthetic, further reveals how such soundscape recordings perpetuate culture/​nature binaries and god’s eye views as more encompassing that visual metaphors reveal. All of these kinds of audio texts are ripe for blue ecocritical work from several perspectives, including questions about the very materiality of music production and distribution, particularly in terms of plastic use and e-​waste associated with digital music circulation and even the construction of musical instruments and recording technologies. That plastic ukulele may provide music that contributes to our sense of connectivity with ocean, but it is still plastic. Recall that the Gorillaz’s whale encounters a Casio (a brand of electronic piano) among the plastic pollution in the sea. However, it is not songs about ocean or recordings of ocean that drive the final part of this chapter, though much interesting work stands to emerge from blue ecocritical analysis of ocean representation in music. Instead, I conclude this chapter by taking up the interaction between the materiality of sound and ocean. Helmreich, in “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures,” identifies visual representations of ocean as a recent aspect of the lineage of ocean knowledge. He explains that in the nineteenth century, ships such as Britain’s HMS Challenger drew their knowledge of the abyss from dredging—​ bringing up objects from the bottom of the sea using buckets attached to piano wire.The deep was a mysterious zone of unknown depth, a dark and frightening realm of thick secrecy. (“Spaceship,” 1227) In the early twentieth century, the next phase of this lineage, he contends, “sonar, or sound navigation ranging, afforded a dimensional portrait of the deep that had been unavailable through the patchwork deployment of sounding lines” (“Spaceship,” 1227). By way of historian Sabine Höhler, Helmreich shows how “sounding with sound . . . marked an arc toward visual representations of the deep” (“Spaceship,” 1227). I return to the mediation of sound data to visual representation in the next chapter, but for now point to the importance of sound in the larger history of ocean representations, whether we identify sound as a transitory phase in ocean knowledge making and representation or as an independent component of ocean representations. As I  mentioned in the previous section regarding plastics, I  write my final thoughts of this book during the COVID-​19 pandemic, an event which will undoubtedly exacerbate plastic pollution. However, while the pandemic drives the

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inevitability of more plastic damage to ocean, the global restrictions on travel and stay-​at-​home orders have another significant effect on ocean: a quieting. In 2012, research published by Rosalind M. Rolland et al. in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B revealed that the restrictions that curtailed nonessential boating and cargo shipping in the Bay of Funday, Canada, following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States resulted in a “6 dB decrease in underwater noise with a significant reduction below 150 Hz” (2363). Rolland et al.’s research identified that the reduction in ambient noise could be associated with decreased baseline levels of stress-​ related faecal hormone metabolites (glucocorticoids) in North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis). This is the first evidence that exposure to low-​frequency ship noise may be associated with chronic stress in whales, and has implications for all baleen whales in heavy ship traffic areas, and for recovery of this endangered right whale population. (2363) Rolland et al. report that “underwater ocean noise from anthropogenic sources has increased over the past 50 years” and that this “acoustic pollution” is a byproduct of “a rising tide of human maritime activities including seismic exploration by the oil and gas industries, military and commercial use of sonar, recreational boating and shipping traffic” (2362). Because sound travels more efficiently through deep water marine environments—​better than does light, the study explains—​acoustic pollution disseminates across broad expanses of ocean. The majority of human-​ generated noise, the study shows, emanates “from the propellers and engines of commercial shipping vessels” and “directly overlaps the frequency band of acoustic communication signals used by the largest of cetaceans, the baleen whales” (2363). The reduction in shipping traffic following the 9/​11 terror attacks, the report shows, “resulted in an unplanned experiment on the effects of underwater noise on western North Atlantic right whales” (2364). “In the immediate aftermath of 9/​11,” the study confirms, there was “a marked decrease in ship traffic in the Bay of Fundy, Canada, and acoustic recordings revealed a noticeable decrease in low-​ frequency background noise levels” (2364). Right wales, the study shows, are at greater risk of interference by acoustic pollution because of their near shore habitats and have been “seriously impaired by mortalities from ship collisions and fishing gear entanglements” (2366). However, Rolland et al. also demonstrate that “acoustic pollution from anthropogenic sources presents a less visible but pervasive disturbance to these coastal-​dwelling whales that may have negative consequences for population viability” (2366). Rolland et al. conclude, as well, that their findings are not unique to Bay of Funday cetaceans. Interestingly, too, Rolland et al.’s research identifies that “acoustic studies have shown that right whales alter their vocalization behaviour in noisy habitats by increasing both the amplitude and frequency of their stereotyped upcalls” (2365) implicating anthropogenic acoustic pollution in communicative behavioral modifications among cetacean populations.

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Since the relaxation of shipping restrictions imposed during the 9/​11 aftermath, there has been no other global event that has imposed similar shipping restrictions to a similar degree—​until the COVID-​19 pandemic. As a result of stay-​at-​home orders across the globe, much of the world has witnessed significant decreases in acoustic pollution. Urban soundscapes are altered by the reductions of transportation acoustics: automobiles, busses, trains, delivery vehicles, trans-​terrestrial cargo shipping all slowed decidedly as cities “closed” around the globe. As communities around the world began to impose quarantine and lockdown protocols in response to the COVID-​19 pandemic, media outlets began reporting seismographic research conducted by Thomas Lecocq and the Royal Observatory of Belgium. In a March 2020 Nature article, Elizabeth Gibney, turning to Lecocq’s research, reports that “data from a seismometer at the observatory show that measures to curb the spread of COVID-​19 in Brussels caused human-​induced seismic noise to fall by about one-​third” (176). For Lecocq and the Royal Observatory seismology research teams, this reduction is noise is critical because anthropogenic-​generated sound can mask “natural” seismic sounds and make research difficult. The quiet of the pandemic has led to the ability to better hear seismic sound. Gibney reports, too, that this is why many seismic monitoring stations are located in remote areas away from human sound centers. While the pandemic silence is of interest in seismic research, it has also affected maritime acoustic pollution levels similar to those recorded in the post-​ 9/​ 11 quieting. Limits of nonessential travel and restrictions on and shortages of maritime labor have resulted in what Valeria Vergara, a researcher with Ocean Wise’s Marine Mammal Conservation Research Program who specializes in acoustic communication in beluga whales, calls “significant setbacks for commercial shipping, cruise ships and oil tanker sectors” that has reduced global acoustic pollution, or what Vergara calls “acoustic smog” (Vergara). Vergara’s research focuses on communicative sounds of beluga whales, and she reports that “nicknamed ‘canaries of the sea’ belugas are among the most vocal mammals of the planet, and underwater noise severely impacts their ability to communicate effectively and remain in touch with one another, especially for mothers and their newborn calves” (Vergara). Vergara estimates that while it is too early to evaluate the full impact of the new quiet on belugas, she predicted that this year may be the quietest period whales have had in a very long time thanks to “an unprecedented hiatus in ocean noise” (Vargara). As more studies like Vargara’s address the new quiet conditions for cetaceans across the globe, blue ecocriticism stands to embrace the moment to consider, as well, the role of sound in ocean. As new materialist research takes up oceanic concerns, a few new materialist projects have begun to examine the materiality of sound and an even smaller emerging body of work has begun to consider the materiality of marine sound. Cousteau’s 1953 The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure—​ the book on which Cousteau based the Academy Award winning eponymously named film addressed earlier—​recounts the early development of the aqualung, and its title remains misleading. Ocean is never silent. (I also always wondered why

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the book was called The Silent World if it is about what has never been “seen.”) In his 2012 watershed book The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea, Callum Roberts explains: As well as the timeless notes of whale song, Cousteau’s seas were filled with the scratch and rasp of foraging animals, the whistles and clicks of dolphins, the low groans of whales, and the rumble of breaking waves. By that time, the thump and growl of boat engines had invaded the oceans. (166) The next chapter takes up the primacy of sight, of seeing, in ocean representation, yet, in order to do so ethically, blue ecocriticism must acknowledge not merely the presence of sound in ocean and in ocean representations but as a simultaneous material condition of ocean and a principal contributor to ocean representation in cultural imaginaries. As Bruce Johnson explains it, “an auditory rather than a predominantly visual approach to the past produces a different cultural history” (259). Johnson’s statement should not be read, however, as indicative of a fundamental opposition between sound and light, between hearing and seeing, but as recognition of their interplay and the variations of perception they provide. Likewise, Johnson’s point might also be understood within the framework of literacies and the history of orality and alphabetic literacies, the privilege assigned literacy (reading and writing, reductively) as visual methods of communication over auditory ones, and the permanence and circulation of the visual over the auditory. In either case, blue ecocriticism takes up the materiality and cultural relevance of sound. New materialist thinkers have begun to address the very materiality of sound, often through consideration of the properties of vibration.11 Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich, in their fascinating paper “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” explain that many auditory experts define sound as “a vibration of a certain frequency in a material medium rather than centering vibrations in a hearing ear” (78). This attention to vibration shifts the focus (a visual metaphor) from commonplace understandings of sound as inherently bound to biological hearing. This shift in focus from the sensory mechanism of the ear to the materiality of sound itself situates sound not only as a material object itself, but enmeshes the materiality of sound with the materiality of the media and bodies that necessarily must vibrate for sound to emerge. That is, sound is never independent of its enmeshing with objects, materials, or media. It is not that vibrating media produce sound, but that media—​be they solid, liquid, or gas—​and vibration enmesh to form sound. Sound’s materiality is inextricable from movement or vibration of other material bodies and the exchange of those vibrations between material bodies. As such, sound appropriates materiality through its movement of and with those materials and media. Likewise, sound seeps into the realm of visible materiality as those vibrations produce visible—​or perceptible—​movement of material objects. In this way, we might understand sound as a material process, not only as the reception and interpretation of that process through interfaces like hearing. Hardin clarifies

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these distinctions as the difference between sound-​receiving and sound-​producing bodies (67). This distinction, though, reduces the material process of sound to simple binary that retains separation between maker and recipient. New materialist thinking emphasizes not only the materiality of sound, but the enmeshed properties and relations formed through and within sound as material process. Given the ubiquity of sound in and of ocean—​not as a characteristic of but as an inseparable part of—​considerations of the material properties and the ontologies of vibration within oceanic environments and bodies as avenue to a more encompassing understanding of both ocean and representations of ocean inform blue ecocritical objectives. New materialist approaches to sound make evident the inaccuracies in familiar aphorisms like “ocean makes sound” or “sound travels in ocean” in favor of “ocean is sound” to convey not a binding of sound to ocean that retains essentialist bifurcation of ocean and sound but the ontological position that ocean and sound are the same, indistinguishable. In “The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” Steve Goodman describes the ontology of vibration, emphasizing the relation between vibration and object: An ontology of vibrational force delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities. Sound is merely a thin slice, the vibrations audible to humans or animals. Such an orientation therefore should be differentiated from a phenomenology of sonic effects centered on the perceptions of a human subject, as a ready-​made, interiorized human center of being and feeling. While an ontology of vibrational force exceeds a philosophy of sound, it can assume the temporary guise of a sonic philosophy, a sonic intervention into thought, deploying concepts that resonate strongest with sound/​noise/​music culture, and inserting them at weak spots in the history of Western philosophy, chinks in its character armor where its dualism has been bruised, its ocularcentrism. (70) With this in mind, then, blue ecocriticism espouses a new materialist approach to sound, not trapping its critical work in outmoded cultural studies approaches that attempt only to reveal, for example, social, political, and historical meanings of music, instead expanding inquiry to the very materiality of ocean/​sound. Certainly, there is value, as I  suggest above, in attending to the representation of ocean in music as contributor to cultural imaginaries, but to limit blue ecocritical inquiry to only those interpretive methodologies restricts what can be known about those representations and the materiality of ocean/​sound. Like new materialism’s acknowledgment of both the material and the discursive aspects of bodies, theories of ontologies of vibrational forces critique several entrenched theoretical orientations. Goodman notes that “the linguistic imperialism that subordinates the sonic to semiotic register is rejected for forcing sonic media to merely communicate meaning, losing sight of the more fundamental expressions of

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their material potential as vibrational surfaces or oscillators” (71). Bringing to mind feminist new materialism, too, Goodman is explicit that neither should an ontology of vibrational force be misconceived as either a naive physicalism in which all vibrational affect can be reduced scientifically. Such a reductionist materialism that merely reduces the sonic to a quantifiable objectivity is inadequate in that it neglects incorporeal affects. (71) “On the other hand,” Goodman shows, the phenomenological anthropocentrism of almost all musical and some sonic analysis, obsessed with individualized, subject feeling, denigrates the vibrational nexus at the altar of human audition, thereby neglecting the agency distributed around a vibrational encounter and ignoring the nonhuman participants of the nexus of experience. (71) This point is particularly relevant to blue ecocriticism given its efforts to negotiate between and among the materialism of ocean and representations of ocean. Goodman’s ontology of vibrational force provides a dynamic approach to integrating such inquiry: What is prioritized here is the in-​between of oscillation, the vibration of vibration, the virtuality of the tremble. Vibrations always exceed the actual entities that emit them. Vibrating entities are always entities out of phase with themselves. A  vibratory nexus exceeds and precedes the distinction between the subject and object, constituting a mesh of relation in which discreet entities prehend each other’s vibrations. Not just amodal, this vibrational architecture . . . produces the very division between subjective and objective, time and space. (71) Goodman continues, if the ontology of vibrational force can help construct a conception of a politics of frequency, then it must go beyond the opposition between a celebration of the jouissance of sonic physicality and the semiotic significance of its symbolic composition and content. (71) For Goodman, such ontologies of vibration “shoots right to the core of an ontology of things and processes and the status of (dis)continuities between them” (72).

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For blue ecocriticism, then, ontologies of vibration and sound present a dynamic moment of consideration of ocean’s materiality and objectivity. Integration of sound studies into the realm of oceanic research extends beyond the considerations of acoustic pollution and nonhuman sonic communication alluded to earlier. Helmreich, in particular, has brought his work in sound studies to bear upon his work in ocean anthropology. As he explains, “submerging into the ocean almost seamlessly merges with a sense of submerging into sound—​and into a distinctively watery soundscape” (168). Helmreich considers “the cognitive, affective, and social effects of transducing—​ that is, converting, transmuting—​sound from the medium of water into that of air” (169). “Such alterations and conversions,” he contends, “are about the simultaneous structuring of matter and meaning” (169), a claim that situates oceanic sound studies in conversation with new materialist thinking. Helmrich’s approach here echoes many of the discussions regarding the technological mediation of representations of “nature” addressed in the collection Mediating Nature:  The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy. Helmreich, though focused on anthropological methodologies, proposes an approach that I contend serves blue ecocriticism’s approaches in inquiry by providing a less ocularcentric approach that contributes to a more fluid and submersive epistemology. Helmreich proffers “an inquiry motivated not by the visual rhetoric of individual self-​reflection and self-​correcting perspectivism, but one animated by an auditorily inspired attention to the modulating relations that produce insides and outsides, subject and objects, sensation and sense data” (169). If, as I proposed earlier, our sense of oceanic place is primarily dictated by land-​based cartographies that map places in fixed positions at the scale of human perception, and we acknowledge that ocean is always already a space of perpetual motion at similar scales, then Helmrich’s proposed auditory approaches open the doors to a significant aspect of blue ecocriticism’s submersive epistemology. In the next chapter, I  take up visual aspects of ocean and representations of ocean. I  do so, however, with the understanding that visual perception can only ever constitute a fragment of the human perceptual and sensory interaction with ocean. I acknowledge the ocularcentrism in most representations of ocean but do so with the recognition that the visual aspects of ocean can never operate independently of the auditory perception. Even film and video depictions or photographic depictions that remove or alter sound from the representation inherently create an auditory experience. In this way then, blue ecocriticism’s attention to new materialism and, to a lesser degree, OOO inspires a fluid synthesis of engagement with and within bodies and objects.

Notes 1 Charles Stillwell invented a machine in 1883 to mass produce the now familiar brown paper bags as a way for people to carry their groceries. Supermarkets and grocery stores (as well as other retail businesses) use more than 10 million paper bags annually in the United States.

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2 See Shaviro; see also Galloway. 3 See Fishing, Gone? 4 See Haraway’s “Promises of Monsters,”“Situated Knowledges,” and “Cyborg Manifesto.” 5 Many interesting philosophical conundrums emerge from such thinking, including questions of object-​ oriented origins. For example, for me to say “the material components of the what would be turned into Styrofoam” implies that the ontologies of those components—​say for instance Styrene, a primary component of the manufactured product Styrofoam that can be manufactured but also occurs naturally in the resin of Liquidambar trees of the Altingiaceae plant family, as well as some other plants, including peanuts, coffee, and cinnamon, as well as in coal tar (Steele)—​might be traced to foundational origins ad infinitum. 6 Eukaryotic organisms have cellular structures with a nucleus enclosed within membranes; they may be multicellular or single-​cellular organisms.They are unlike prokaryote organisms that do not have membrane-​bound organelles. 7 As a kid, I was taught to “read the water,” to look for signs on the ocean’s surface, in its movement, and in the air above it to better interact with ocean. I learned to discern between a ripple caused by the light touch of wind and a ripple caused by a school of small bait fish just below the surface. Tides, currents, rips, surges, swells, chop, and so on all identifiable as texts that can be read. 8 For more about Paul Chadwick’s Concrete comics, which take up embodiment and environmentalism in nearly all episodes, see my essay “Follow the Concrete Submersible” in my collection EcoComix. 9 See Dobrin and Morey, Mediating Nature: The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy for more about how imaging technologies through which we view at microscopic scale rely upon mediating technologies to translate sensory data into images and are thus always already interpretations imbued with ideology and politics. 10 Admittedly, these lists are far from comprehensive and represent only a few artists that immediately come to mind. It is inevitable that any list I provide here as example will lack the music that you know or prefer. 11 See for example works by Eidsheim, Enriques, and Goodman. Likewise, much of the new materialist studies of sound and vibration emanate from musicology—​see for example David Troop’s Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication.

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—​—​—​. “Situated Knowledges:  The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. 1990. 183–​201. —​—​—​. “A Cyborg Manifesto:  Science, Technology, and Socialist-​Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London and New York: Routledge. 1990. 149–​181. Hardin, Joe Marshall. “If a Tree Falls:  Mediations into and of Natural Sound.” Mediating Nature: The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy. New York: Routledge. 2020. 66–​78. Harman, Graham. “Undermining, Overmining, and Duominings:  A Critique.” Add Metaphysics. Ed. Jenna Sutela. Aalto, Finland: Aalto University. 2014. 40–​51. Hayles, N.  Katherine. “Constrained Constructivism:  Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation.” Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture. Ed. George Levine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1993. 27–​43. Helmreich, Stefan. “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures.” Social Research. 78, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 1211–​1242. Hohn, Donovan. Moby-​ Duck:  The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea & of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists & Fools Including the Author Who Went in Search of Them. New York: Penguin Books. 2011. Horton, Zach. “The Trans-​Scalar Challenge of Ecology.” ISLE:  Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 26, no. 1 (Winter, 2019): 5–​26. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press. 2014. Johnson, Bruce. “Hamlet: Voice, Music, Sound.” Pop Music. 24, no. 2 (2005): 257–​267. Jue, Melody. “Proteus and the Digital:  Scalar Transformations of Seawater’s Materiality in Ocean Animations.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 9, no. 2 (2014): 245–​260. —​—​—​. “Churning Up the Depths:  Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and ‘Oceanic.’ ” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Eds. Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 2014. 226–​241. Kahn, Richard. “Environmental Activism in Music.” Music in American Life:  The Songs, Stories, Styles, and Stars that Shaped Our Culture. Ed. Jacqueline Edmondson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. 412–​417. Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. On the Nature of Things.Trans. Sir Robert Allison. London: Arthur Humphries. 1919. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Anchor Books. 1989 (reprint 1990). McMenamin, Mark, and Dianna McMenamin. Hypersea: Life on Land. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994. Moore, Charles Captain. Plastic Ocean. New York: Penguin Books. 2012. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. —​—​—​. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2007. —​—​—​. “Hyperobjects and the End of Common Sense.” The Contemporary Condition. http://​ contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/​2010/​03/​hyperobjects-​and-​end-​of-​common-​ sense.html. March 18, 2010. —​—​—​. “Hyperobjects are Viscous.” Ecology without Nature. October 25, 2010. http://​ ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/​2010/​10/​hyperobjects-​are-​viscous.html. —​—​—​. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press. 2011.

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O’Connor, M. R. “The Strange and Gruesome Story of the Greenland Shark, the Longest-​ Living Vertebrate on Earth.” The New  Yorker. November 25, 2017. www.newyorker. com/​tech/​annals-​of-​technology/​the-​strange-​and-​g ruesome-​story-​of-​the-​g reenland-​ shark-​the-​longest-​living-​vertebrate-​on-​earth Peeken, Ilka, et al. “Arctic Sea Ice is an Important Temporal Sink and Means of Transport for Microplastic.” Nature Communications. April 24, 2018. www.nature.com/​articles/​ s41467-​018-​03825-​5 Picheta, Rob. “Coronavirus is Causing a Flurry of Plastic Waste. Campaigners Fear it May be Permanent.” CNN. May 4, 2020. www.cnn.com/​2020/​05/​04/​world/​coronavirus-​ plastic-​waste-​pollution-​intl/​index.html Pratt, Theodore. The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Warner Brothers. 1964. Qiufan, Chen. Waste Tide. Trans. Ken Liu. New York: TOR. 2019. Roberts, Callum. The Ocean of Life:  The Fate of Man and the Sea. New  York:  Penguin Books. 2012. Rolland, Rosalind M. et al. “Evidence that Ship Noise Increases Stress in Right Whales.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 279 (2012): 2363–​2368. Rundell, Katherine. “Consider the Greenland Shark.” The London Review of Books. Vol. 42, No. 9. May 7, 2020. www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v42/​n09/​katherine-​rundell/​considerthe-​greenland-​shark. Stanton, Andrew, and Lee Unkrich. Finding Nemo. Pixar Animation Studios. 2003. Stanton, Andrew, and Angus MacLane. Finding Dory. Pixar Animation Studios. 2016. Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2015. Troop, David. Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication. London: Serpent’s Tail.  2018. United Nations Environment. Single-​Use Plastics: A Roadmap to Sustainability. United Nations Environment Programme. 2018. Vartabedian, Becky. Multiplicity and Ontology in Deleuze and Badiou. London:  Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. Vergara, Valeria. “Quiet Oceans:  Has the Covid-​ 19 Crisis Reduced Noise in Whale Habitats?” Ocean Wise. April 11, 2020. www.aquablog.ca/​2020/​04/​quiet-​oceans-​has-​ the-​covid-​19-​crisis-​reduced-​noise-​in-​whale-​habitats/​?utm_​source=wordfly&utm_​ medium=email&utm_​ c ampaign=20COVIDStewardshipWeekofApr il15&utm_​ content=version_​A Weisser, Christian R., and Sidney I. Dobrin. Ecocomposition:  Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2001.

4 SEEING OCEAN

Like sound, the sensory interactions of light and sight, as well as the absence of, are critical to both oceanic ecological systems and to representations of ocean. The opening paragraph of Chapter 2 in this book explains, “It is commonly accepted that humans have seen about 5% of the ocean, rendering the remaining 95% unknown and yet-​to-​be-​discovered.” I then provide several examples that depend upon visual elements in order to convey a sense of scale (The Bellman’s Map, The Blue Dot, Cosmic View, and Cosmic Zoom, for example). The conceit of sight, of the visual, of the image, of seeing is more than prevalent in the cultural imaginary ontogenesis of ocean. The primacy of the visual saturates human–​ocean interaction in an ocularcentric epistemology that is at once revealing and limiting. That opening sentence of the discussion of scale also connects seeing with knowing, emphasizing an authenticity of the visual experience, an experience that is exacerbated by visual media technologies and digital circulation.There appears, that is, a need to see ocean or visual representations of ocean to know or understand ocean. Seeing is believing, the commonplace idiom tells us; pics or it didn’t happen. To hear or read that scientists found a single-​use plastic bag in Mariana’s Trench is informative and persuasive to a degree, but seeing the bag, seeing the evidence, we assume, confirms the information, persuades to a more significant degree, even at a historical moment of prevalent image manipulation. Seeing, we suppose, proves and validates experience. Sight, it would seem, plays a critical role in scalar representations. Note the prevalence of the visual in the examples of scalar representation in Chapter 2: the Powers of Ten films, Google Ocean, etc.Vision is encumbered by and in scale.Things we can see and things we cannot because they are too small to see or too vast to see with the un-​augmented human eye, as well as the metaphor of being able to see at scale as representative of the ability to conceptualize scale. Our field of vision unable to connect the unseen macroscopic and the unseen microscopic with the immediately visible field of vision, what Richard Kerridge has identified as the

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“middle range.” He explains: “this middle perspective is the one we need in order to visualize the actions of human individuals or communities” (“Foreword,” xiv). As Latour has shown, scale and power are impossible to understand without the visual (Visualization, 29). Scalar representations rely on the visual to convey relational scaled information. Since scalar representation—​or any representation, for that matter—​can only ever convey metaphors of scale (or visual metaphors of ocean or any other object), scalar thinking is virtually inextricable from imaging technologies and visual mediation. It is through the visual that the power of the “god’s eye view” is enacted. Just as Clark explains regarding the impact of the Earthrise image, visuals provide “an instance of the contingent privilege of vision in the human sense of what something ‘really’ is (‘… but what does it look like?’)” (30). Clark’s distinction is critical to understanding the role of the visual in representation, particularly in terms of scalar representation. For ecocritic Madison Jones, scale and visualization are inseparable when it comes to matters of ecological literacies. He writes, By displaying topologies of place at scales beyond the individual and human perspective, geovisualization technologies present posthuman perspectives. However, these scalar technologies also produce discrete challenges for environmental communication. By presenting geological perspectives of deep time, digital technologies undermine human(ist) conceptions of place and environment. (79) This chapter considers the function of the visual in representations of ocean and, in turn, the primacy of vision in cultural imaginaries, what Hans Jonas identifies as the “nobility of sight” (136). Such considerations stir visual rhetorics, media studies, and new materialism into blue ecocriticism’s visual field. Any engagement with visual representation—​ whether tied to blue ecocriticism or not—​ makes evident the primacy of the visual, the ocularcentric qualities of representation and, therefore, ethically demands recognition that such visual primacy is inherently exclusionary. Visual primacy—​in representation and in validating sensory experiences—​ occludes the visually impaired. The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 285 million visually impaired people globally, about 3.6% of the world population (“Blindness,” WHO). This of course, requires that blue ecocritical inquiry regarding light and image be established within the penumbra of disability studies. Doing so not only highlights the ethical imperative of accounting for disability but also sheds light on posthumanistic ethics. With this in mind, blue ecocriticism’s approach to the visual engages not only nonvisual representations of ocean but considers the embodied experiences of visually impaired people in ocean representations. The primacy of the visual in ocean representation manifests in familiar connections between ocean deficit and ecological literacy in ways that prevent visually impaired subjects access to that significant aspects of those literacies. Likewise, blue ecocriticism will need to take

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up the effects of anthropocenic environmental incursion and destruction on the spread of diseases that contribute to visual impairment of human and nonhuman organisms alike—​that is, understanding visual impairment not as a human-​only matter. Reporting their findings in 2019, Lillian R.  McCormick, Lisa A.  Levin, and Nicholas W. Oesch of Scripps Institution for Oceanography, for example, show how reduced oxygen levels in seawater contribute to visual impairment of squid, octopus, and crab species.The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, connects the reduction of oxygen levels due to global warming to repressed ocular development in “the market squid (Doryteuthisopalescens), the two-​spot octopus (Octopus bimaculatus), the tuna crab (Pleuroncodes planipes) and the graceful rock crab (Metacarcinus gracilis)” (1). Attention to the diversity of visual impairment is critical to blue ecocritical inquiry, but that attention must not be consigned to only anthropomorphic concerns. Sight, and by association image and the visual, is both physiological and interpretive, material and conceptual, technological and natural. Most organisms classified in the kingdom Animalia rely to one degree or another on sight as a critical sensory experience, though many deep-​sea organisms do not—​or at least do not in the ways we assign as “seeing.” The McCormick et al. research conveys the necessity of sight for many ocean organisms in food gathering and in defense against predation. While we are most likely to understand “interpretive” to imply the human method for ascertaining meaning, I  mean it here in a broader sense of the physiological transition from physical property to mediated analysis. For humans, I  will show, often such mediations depict nonvisual sensory data as visually authentic representation, black boxing the mediating technologies, processes, and ideologies of visual representation. Likewise, for blue ecocriticism, acts of interpretation—​the criticism aspect of ecocriticism—​are often harnessed to sight, image, optics, and the visual as critical work is often trapped by visual metaphors: to shed light upon meaning, to expose, to see, to point out, and so on. Criticism exposes; criticism reveals. Exposure makes vulnerable. Acts of “reading,” be they alphabetic, semiotic, or object-​oriented, are predicated on the ability to see—​literally and figuratively—​that which is to be read. Like Fiske’s reading of the beach, the ability to see the object of observation and critical reflection binds criticism to the visual and to the traps of visual metaphors. Consider, for example, Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar—​a name that conjures the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory, suggesting close visual observation—​that begins with Mr. Palomar learning to read a wave: You cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates. These aspects vary constantly, so each wave is different from another wave, even if not immediately adjacent or successive; in other words, there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time. Since what Mr. Palomar means to do at this moment is simply see a wave—​that is, to perceive all its simultaneous

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components without overlooking any of them—​his gaze will dwell on the movement of the wave that strikes the shore until it can record aspects not previously perceived; as soon as he notices that the images are being repeated, he will know he has seen everything he wanted to see and he will be able to stop. (4) Like Fiske, Mr. Palomar wishes to inscribe meaning to his observations, to find in the visual some degree, not of meaning qua meaning, but distinction among component parts. Mr. Palomar’s observational strategies appear born of a need to classify and control, to categorize and systematically define. Calvino writes, Mr. Palomar now tries to limit his field of observation; if he bears in mind a square zone of, say, ten meters of shore by ten meters of sea, he can carry out an inventory of all the wave movements that are repeated with varying frequency within a given time interval. The hard thing is to fix the boundaries of this zone, because if, for example, he considers as the side farthest from him the outstanding line of an advancing wave, as this line approaches him and rises it hides from his eyes everything behind it, and thus the space under examination is overturned and at the same time crushed. (6) Mr. Palomar’s observations lead to uncertainty, to a need for further questions and observations. In the chapter that follows “Reading a Wave,” Mr. Palomar turns his visual inquiry to questions of ethics, gender, and visual scrutiny in “The Naked Bosom” as he observes a woman sunbathing topless on the beach. In his attempt to adjust his gaze to have “the bosom completely absorbed by the landscape, so that my gaze counted no more than the gaze of a seagull or a hake” (10).What Mr. Palomar gives us, then, are ruptures in visual interpretation that manipulate scalar, materialist, semiotic, linguistic, ethical, and political interpretation. For blue ecocriticism, the primacy of the visual demands not merely learning to read beaches, waves, and bodies (human and nonhuman), but the undercurrents of the function of the visual—​materially and metaphorically—​in the construction of ocean in cultural imaginaries.

Yehi Or When examining image and nature, visual rhetoric, ecosee, ecomedia, ecocinema, and the likes, blue ecocriticism acknowledges the role the material properties of light and the philosophies of light play in our ability to theorize representations of ocean. To claim this, though, is also to acknowledge that much work in visual rhetoric, ecomedia, new media, and ecocinema remains blind to the material properties of light. We tend to take for granted light’s presence or absence. Light is

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most often reduced to an a priori condition that we naturalize as ambient without considering the material properties of light as central to the visual primacy of ocean—​or other—​visual representational media, including the alphabetic. Blue ecocriticism’s new materialist inquiries will need to take up work in light studies to examine the role of light in ocean and oceanic representations. In part, such inquiry will address the interactions between light-​receiving and -​producing technologies and light not as metaphor, but as material body that interacts with other bodies. As such, the very ideas of technology, mediation, and telepresence become primary sites of blue ecocritical theorization. Such inquiry, when placed in conversation with concepts of techne provides the intellectual processes that allow us to discern between metaphors like technology and nature for the convenient political sake of staking ranges of value upon such categories, and upon the technologies that allow us to discern between metaphors like light and dark. Light, that is, is a foundational property of blue ecocriticism. In 1967, Lynn White, Jr. famously laid the blame of the current ecological crisis upon the Biblical verses in Genesis 1:27–​28 that declare that “God” created “man” in “his” own image. White (a metaphoric name evoking the achromatic color, a symptom of light) situates this claim within a rubric of crisis, a term, I must confess that I  find problematic as the numbers of environmental and public health crises expand in the current moment. Historically, humanity seems always to be in the state of one or another crisis. If there are always crises, then they are not in fact crises, but the status quo. However, if we take White’s contextualization seriously and are attentive to crisis as a framework for thinking about environmental, technological, or cultural crises, then we must acknowledge that the very idea of crises emerges from the idea of complexity and that crises are misfunctions within complex systems. White’s claim about the origin of environmental crises falling to Genesis 1:27–​ 28 conveniently skips twenty-​six sentences of text that precede the in-​his-​own-​ image lines. The passed-​over sentences include the first lines of Genesis (1:1–​3), which famously declare that before making man in his image—​or making anything else, for that matter—​before creation, when there was only darkness, God said ‫“ יְהִי אוֹ ר‬Yehi Or” translated into Latin as Fiat Lux or in English as “let there be light.” Light, it seems, is the beginning—​the beginning of everything including environment and, therefore, of environmental crises. Of course, light is not merely the beginning of just the Judeo/​Christian creation myth; light plays a role in many creation stories, as do oceans. In Theogony, Hesiod writes,“First of all, the Void came into being, . . . Out of Void came Darkness and black Night, and out of Night came Light and Day, her children conceived after union in love with Darkness” (56–​57). Chinese cosmogonic myths depict light and darkness in terms of yin and yang as a primary component of universal forces. Light represented as masculine and active energy and darkness as feminine and passive energy. Norse creation and Armageddon myths situate creation in Muspellheim, a place of light and fire guarded by the flame-​sword wielding

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Surt. Egyptian creation myths identify that in the beginning there was Nun, an expanse of darkness and chaotic waters, from which the god Atum emerged and produced the god Shu and goddess Tefnut who then had children: Geb (dry land) and Nut (the sky). Once Geb was born, the Earth was formed providing a place for Ra the sun god to rest and to shed light. In the Dogon of Mali tribal creation story, the god Amma existed before time and created the earth and marries her. Amma then creates the sun to shed light on Earth.1 Hindu creation myths begin in the expanse of ocean nothingness on which a giant cobra floated and in whose coils Lord Vishnu slept. When awakened,Vishnu finds that a lotus blossom has grown from his navel and that Brahma emerged from the flower. Vishnu commands Brahma to create the world and Braham uses the lotus flower to create the heavens, the earth, and the skies. He then produces demons and darkness from his buttocks and gods and light from his face. The Japanese creation myth, which first appears in the 712 CE text the Kojiki, the first book written in Japan, begins with a shapeless, silent chaos. Particles began to form sound and to rise above the chaos. Light, the lightest of the particles, rose above all others, to make light the highest part of the universe. The particles that could not rise remained to form the earth. The Pueblo people Zuni’s creation narrative teaches that in the beginning the people of the world resided in the fourth world, a place of darkness deep in the earth. The sun, known as the creator Awonawilona, ordered two of his sons to guide the people from the darkness into the daylight world where no people lived, freeing them from darkness. The Central Bantu tribe, The Boshongo, tells a creation narrative in which Bumba—​also known as Mbomba to the Kuba people of Central Africa—​was alone in a dark, watery world. Bumba gets a stomachache and vomits up the sun, which lights the world and dries up much of the water to expose the land. Bumab then vomits the moon and stars to light the night sky. Even the science-​based narrative of the Big Bang Theory describes an explosion of light and matter. While many of these and other creation stories have been regarded by many cultures as truths that explain creation, others (myself included) understand creation myths to be a bit more metaphorical. We might understand, for example, “Yehi Or” to indicate three kinds of possibilities tied to the human desire to understand the world in which it lives: on the one hand, we might understand the attention to light in creation myths as introducing the possibility of image. That is, Yehi Or announces simultaneously the importance of the image to creation narratives and the importance of the image to the human experience. That is, image is predicated upon the very idea of light and the possibility of image is dependent, to an extent, upon the physical properties of light. This means that in order for a god to create man [sic] in his own image, as the Judeo-​Christian myth accounts, there first had to be a possibility of image. Light provides that possibility of image. Second, Yehi Or is not merely an announcement of the separation of darkness and light, but an announcement of the possibility of life. Sunlight, or varying forms of simulated sunlight, are a necessary foundation for life through processes like photosynthesis and energy exchange. Thus, for a god to create “man,” or more

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accurately, for the conditions to emerge that resulted in the emergence of life, light must be present. And, third, speaking strictly metaphorically, Yehi Or is an announcement of knowledge; to shed light, that is, is to dispel ignorance, to remove from the shadows, to enlighten. In many ways, then, Yehi Or binds life and image and knowledge in symbiotic relationship. Light offers possibilities of life and image and binds the two in an inextricable ecology. The pronouncement of light in these narratives, then, can be read as recognition of material semiotics. Such a pronouncement, though, becomes problematic with ocean as light dissipates at depth, and the unseen, the darkness of ocean’s deeper reaches remain obscured.

A concise history of light While creation myths hold much interest in understanding representations of ocean and light in cultural imaginaries, inquiry regarding the study of light and vision, or what we might simply identify as “optics,” has been central to philosophical and intellectual inquiry for more than 3,000  years. The trajectory of such expansive study is impossible to address comprehensively here, however, M. Suhail Zubairy’s “A Very Brief History of Light” and Richard F. Haglund’s “The Properties of Light” provide a concise overview of that history. By way of Zubairy and Haglund, I offer here an oversimplified summary of the history of intellectual inquiry regarding light, vision, and image as framework for blue ecocriticism’s attention to light and image in order to connect visual/​image with ocean. Haglund explains that the history of optics “from the fifth century BCE until the early 17th century CE can be read as a single, prolonged attempt to elucidate, first qualitatively and then quantitatively, the nature of light as it is revealed through the phenomena of propagation, reflection, and refraction” (4). For Zubairy, that history can also be cataloged geographically in four distinct regions and periods: The first era, with its center initially in Athens and then Alexandria, belonged to the Greeks. This era extended from about 800 BC till around 200 AD. It seems that hardly anything of significance in our understanding of light was contributed between 200 AD till around 750 AD when Muslims burst onto the scene. The second era belongs to the Islamic civilization, with its centers in Baghdad and Cordoba. It had its golden age till around middle to late thirteenth century when Mongol invasion destroyed the eastern center in Baghdad in 1258and the decay set in the Western Center of Cordoba. The third era started in Europe around the fourteenth century when medieval Europe that had slipped into a dark age after the fall of Roman Empire started to emerge out of it. The crusades (1095–​1272) and the conquest of Islamic Spain made the Muslim scholarship and the Greek traditions accessible to the Europeans, helping to initiate the glorious era of scientific revolution in the West. The last era started with the dawn of twentieth century that opened not only with new and revolutionary theories of Physics but also

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with a revolution in communication technology. This has helped to make science, and optics, a global preoccupation. (4) Some of the earliest considerations of light came from Empedocles of Agrigentum and Leucippus, both working in the fifth century BCE. From the outset, considerations of light took up what we might now acknowledge as materialist considerations. Much of the earliest theorization of light, according to Zubairy, revolved around understanding not light, but vision in order to “to explain how objects, near and far, their shape, size, and color, are perceived by us” (4). Leucippus, for example, theorizes the concept of eidola, a kind of shadow of some kind of material simulacrum which envelops the bodies, quivers on the surface and can detach itself from them in order to convey to the soul the shape, the colors and all the other qualities of the bodies from which they emanate. (Haglund, 4) A century later, Plato’s academy introduced the idea of emissions, situating light as derivative of the element fire and contending that the ability to see results from “a conjunction of a ray emitted by the object seen and a visual ray emitted by the seeing eye” (Haglund, 4). Despite Aristotle’s dismissal of emissions theories, the theory remained prevalent in studies of light until the 16th century. The mathematician Euclid, a student of Plato’s, theorizes in his treatise Optics What Haglund describes as “a model of ray optics that translate into recognizable geometric optics, including the law of reflection from a plane surface; the concept of a near point for the eye; and the focusing of light by concave surfaces” (4). Roman Philosopher Lucretius also contributes to such mathematical approaches to light through his theories of light geometry and the effects of light intensity. Similarly, the first-​century mathematician known as Hero of Alexandria developed an influential theory of reflection. A century later, Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, in his text Optics, develops a remarkably accurate theory of refraction and reflection from curved surfaces. The notion of surfaces in relation to understand light, remains central to many current theories of light and makes evident the metaphor of the surface as critical for blue ecocriticism. Like Ptolemy, medieval optics scholars directed much attention to the concept of refraction as a means of understanding the nature of light.Writing in Baghdad in the 9th century, Abu Hsuf Yaqub Ibn Is-​has further theorized the idea of the ray of light as needing to produce a physiological effect upon the eye. In the 11th Century CE, Abu Ali al-​Hasan, in his book The Book of Optics expands inquiries regarding refraction to identify that light functions in relation to receptors in the eye. Much of his work considered the physical properties and functions of the human eye, distinguishing his work from previously forwarded research about the eye as light receptor which relied on observations of nonhuman animal eyes. Al-​Hasan’s theory

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of light as geometrical ray and the eye as receptor of light became the accepted version of the function of light well into the 17th century CE. As Haglund explains, because Al-​Hasan “understood how they eye lens refracted incoming rays of light, he was able to show that every point on the surface of an object in the visual field of the eye maps to a point on the optic nerve to make a small-​scale replica of the object, a model surprisingly consistent with modern neuroscience” (4). In this way, Al-​Hasan’s early consideration of surface, object, ocular interface, and interpretation helps form contemporary materialist and visual rhetorical theories of light. Likewise, as Haglund relays, “by the beginning of the 12th century, western European scholars had in their possession both the works of the Greeks and those of the Muslim scholars” allowing them to compare, contrast, and synthesize various approaches to understanding reflection and refraction. By the middle of the 17th century, Haglund explains, “the concept of light as a geometrical ray emanating from an object and collected by the eye was firmly established, and the emphasis shifted to theoretical questions about the mechanisms of refraction and reflection that could only be answered by understanding he properties of light” (4). This period of light study also shifted from methodologies of observation to controlled experimentation which allowed René Descartes and others to build a “science of light and optics as part of a more general mathematical theory of physics” (Haglund, 5). Haglund explains that the “Cartesian theory is distinguished by the concept of light as a vibration in a diaphanous medium that translates the undulations from object to eye” (5). As noted in the previous chapter, materialist inquiries regarding sound have also taken up the concept of vibration as central to understanding the form and function of sound, and, for blue ecocriticism, then, such parallels stand to offer connections between sensory perceptions not as independent material or physical properties and actions, but interrelated sensorial and embodied engagements with ocean. Two competing theories of light found footing in the early 18th century in the works of Isaac Newton and Christian Huygens. Newton’s research set out, by way of a prism, to show, according to Haglund, “that white light could be decomposed into constituent colors that were dispersed according to a corpuscular model” (5). When Newton published his book Opticks in 1710, his theories, though, were criticized as being an unusual combination of “projectile and corpuscular ideas as well as crude wave theories” (Haglund, 5). Newton’s theories were predicated on the idea of an “ether” that served as media through which light projectiles passed. His concept of the corpuscular would later be overturned in favor of theories of waves, such as that forwarded by Christian Huygens who postulated secondary wavelets to trace the propagation of light waves in time. By the end of the 18th century, Newton’s corpuscular theory was set aside in favor of experimentally measured velocity of light in materials, including evidence that light has a property not previously considered called polarization that did not correspond with Newton’s corpuscular theory. Etienne Malus proposed a theory of polarization that shows, according to Haglund, that “light is a transverse electromagnetic wave in which electric and magnetic fields run perpendicular to one another and to

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the direction of propagation” (6). Malus’ thinking would lead other light theorists to several mathematical descriptions of refraction and reflection as well as to the pairing of the study of optics with electromagnetism, the study of electromagnetic force, highlighted by Michael Faraday’s conclusions that polarization could be influenced by magnetic fields and Johann Georg von Soldner’s calculations which reveal, according to Zubairy, “that light weighs and bends like high speed projectiles in a gravitational field” (18). A century after von Soldner’s findings, Albert Einstein, Zubairy shows, “calculated the bending of light by combining the equivalence principle with special theory of relativity to predict a deflection of light from the sun by the angle of 0.87 arc second. This is the same value that Newtonian theory predicted” (18). However, Einstein came to these conclusions prior to developing his theory of relativity, which, when applied to his theory of the bending of light, “the predicted value for the bending of light doubled to 1.83 arc second,” placing his findings at odds with Newton’s and leading to significant experimental research to determine which theory was correct (Zubairy, 18). Sir Arthur Eddington’s 1919 research about gravitational pull and solar eclipse confirmed Einstein’s position. Einstein’s theories, along with those of Neils Bohr and Max Planck, would lead to a transformation in the study of physics which would diverge from Newtonian concepts, particularly as Newton’s physics did not provide explanation for “effects that happened at sub-​atomic level or at highspeeds, speeds comparable to the speed of light” (Zubairy, 19). Reductively, that is, Newtonian physics became less relevant as both theoretical and technological approaches to understanding light and physics adjusted to varying scales. In its place, theories of quantum mechanics would replace Newtonian physics and establish quantum physics and alter how we understand light as both particle and wave. What I have presented in this summary is an extremely oversimplified history of the study of light. For blue ecocritical inquiry, the history of the study of light is inseparable from the ways in which ocean is and can be represented or experienced visually. Likewise, the very account of light projected through narratives of science contributes to cultural imaginaries and to questions of image and visualization within ecocritical studies.

Mediated ocean The 1953 edition of Cousteau’s Silent World contains “32 pages of photographs plus 16 in full color through the courtesy of The National Geographic Society” (cover) and that “these extraordinary color photographs first appeared in the society’s official journal, the National Geographic Magazine, October, 1952, illustrating an article by Captain Cousteau entitled “Fish Men Explore a New World Undersea” (Acknowledgments, np). Such an aesthetic and previous publication in National Geographic contributes to an ethos already established by the Society’s magazine. The Preface to the book acknowledges, too, that the photographs were produced using Ektachrome, a type of film manufactured by Kodak that renders photographs with a distinctive aesthetic often attributed to National Geographic, connecting the

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aesthetic and ethos of the magazine to the book. Ektachrome was particularly popular among outdoor and wildlife photographers because of its ability to capture color images at faster shutter speeds than did Kodachrome. The preface also identifies that the Ektachrome photographs included in the book are “the first ever made in significant depths, using artificial light and scientific color correction” (Preface, NP). As such, the photographs were understood as pioneering visual representations of undersea environments. As noted in Chapter 1, Cousteau’s 1956 documentary based on the book is regarded as one of the first films to depict underwater scenes in color, as well. In this way, then Silent World makes evident the role of technological mediation in oceanic representation, exposing the gap between the object—​ ocean—​and the technological transmogrification of object into image, into visual metaphor, and into the archive of cultural memory and imaginary. That the images included in the book and those in the film are lauded for their technological innovation—​the ability to depict color, to add artificial light, and to employ “scientific color correction”—​reveal the disconnect between the technologies of visual representation and the authenticity of the image’s representation of the object.That is, Silent World simultaneously reminds us that significant technological mediation is needed to “see” ocean and that those technological mediations construct visual metaphors rather than inherently accurate representations. An image, as Rene Magritte has so clearly taught us, is not the thing itself. If an image is not the thing itself, then we have to also acknowledge that the thing we see is not the thing itself, either. Blue ecocriticism, as part of its posthumanist approach, acknowledges that the biophysio wetware technologies that allow the interface between objects and the visual perceptions of objects afforded through the function of light should be understood as physio-​technological interface. That is, the light receptors in the eye—​human and nonhuman—​mediate the physical properties of light through a series of connections that create image in the brain, which can then be perceived and interpreted by the mind. Physically, the complexity of any of these technologies requires, at minimum, the acknowledgment of technological mediation. Such an acknowledgment, then, also demands the ethical consideration of how we naturalize sight and give primacy to the visual in representation of the real. Such recognition requires two parallel allowances: first, that visual representation requires technological (biological technology or human-​constructed technology) mediation, and, second, that such mediation is always already a matter of ethics and politics. Because we have the tendency to naturalize or black box mediating technologies, the technologies themselves are often remanded to neutrality. Such acknowledgment, then, requires consideration of not just the visual rhetorics of images that populate cultural imaginaries but of the technological mediations that situate those images within ethical, political, and ideological contexts. Mediation, a form of hybridity, makes evident—​as all embodied augmentations do—​that the physical, biological, technological, and ecological characteristics of image are always already countersigned in each of the other characteristics. In saying so, then, we can initiate the consideration of light in relation to image studies by acknowledging the complex systems in which light and technology necessarily interact for the very

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idea of image to be considered. That is, if, as we come to recognize that we live in a visual culture and that saying so invokes complexity and network, then the starting point is rather simple: Yehi Or. More often than not—​and certainly not unproblematically—​mediation in media studies is tied primarily to theories of communication. Prior to the advent of digital media, such theories reduced communicative interaction to distinctions between human-​to-​human communication and mediated communication and presumed active engagement with media. Questions of mediation focused primarily on the effects media imposed on communicative situations, and, in fact, early theories of mediation did not address media in the act of mediation. However, as Leah A. Lievrouw explains, In the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction of digital media and information technologies confounded established distinctions between interpersonal and mass communication, and generated another wave of theorizing that brought conversation, symbolic interaction, social constructionism and small group process into accounts of computer-​ mediated communication, virtuality, online community, and other novel forms of mediated communication. (304) The generation of media scholars that followed these shifts, scholars who emerged native to the digital age, began to examine the complexities of digital mediation in ways that account for the dynamic connections between the digital, the material, and the social that had not previously been accounted for. Thus, communications theorists now identify mediation as the prevailing characteristic of communication, particularly as the use of digital tools evolved from limited, professional settings to ubiquitous personal or domestic uses. That is to say, as Sonia Livingstone explains it, whereas media and communication studies would analyze the relation between media and politics, say, while in other disciplines they analyze the relation between politics and the environment, or society and the family. But in a heavily mediated world, one cannot analyze the relation between politics and the environment, or society and the family without also recognizing the importance of the media—​all these spheres and their intersections have become mediated. (2) Mediation emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as way of addressing connections between media and interpersonal communications within social and cultural contexts (Lievrouw, 309). The editors of the landmark collection Inter/​ Media argued for mediation as a key term for emerging communications theories (Gumpert and Cathcart, 135) and later James A. Anderson and Timothy P. Meyer would contend that such frameworks focus on emerging media forms. Many of

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these newer theories of communication, mediation, and emerging technologies focused on the effects the varying technologies had on communicative situations, often focusing on the “impacts” of “new technologies on users’ attitudes, values, behaviors, and perceptions” (Lievrouw, 309). Similarly, those researchers concerned with media policies began to consider the role of new media in traditional regulatory structures in industry, including things like privacy, decency, and service obligations. Others began to question the role of mediation in technological determinism. Such inquiries also encouraged more interdisciplinary perspectives regarding mediation and communication; theories developed in science and technological studies, for example, necessarily were brought into conversation with communications theories. Such cross-​pollinations invigorated new perspectives. For example, science and technology studies provided mediation theories the idea of mutual-​shaping, the argument that “society and technology are co-​determining and articulated in the on-​going engagement between people’s everyday practices and the constraints and affordances of material infrastructure” (Lievrouw, 310). Similarly, such interdisciplinary influences allowed communications theorists to begin to consider localized and individual-​subject focused ideas about meaning and interaction and, later, to be able to make distinctions in mediation between presence and telepresence and the role of interactivity in meaning making. Much of this work focused on the role specific media forms play in communication and information circulation. Most recently, considerations of mediation have turned from the media to the very act of mediation, influenced by a larger cultural turn and research from the humanities. As Lievrouw explains, “key approaches and concepts from critical and cultural studies have been imported into the new media context, particularly a ‘cultural transmission’ view of media as powerful instruments in the reproduction and transmission of dominant ideologies, interests, and power structures”(312). Lievrouw shows how such a turn has accounted for mediation and representations of ideas like “gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class and the influence of these representations on people’s senses of self or identity (especially among children and youth)” (312). Noticeably absent from Lievrouw’s summary—​and, in turn from the overall larger conversation about mediation—​ is the mediation and representation of nature, environment, and other nonhuman entities and subjects. Consider, for example, the opening lines of Lievrouw and Livingstone’s Major Works in New Media: No part of the world, no human activity, is untouched by the new media. Societies worldwide are being reshaped, for better or for worse, by changes in the global media and information environment. So too are the everyday lives of their citizens. National and subnational forms of social, political and economic inclusion and exclusion are reconfigured by the increasing reliance on information and communication technologies in mediating almost every dimension of social life. (1)

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Blue ecocriticism cannot situate new media or new visual media as simply an extension of mass communications media forms. Doing so would limit the understanding of new media technologies as little more than new iterations of entrenched communicative interactions and consign their function to outmoded theories and models. Instead, blue ecocritical approaches attend to new media and emerging visual media technologies as providing new methods for communicative interaction that require new theories of visual mediation. To cast new media simply as new approaches to entrenched methods of personal and mass communication is to reduce our understanding of the very idea of mediation as merely the act of communicating via media. Mediation must now be considered in light of more than just production/​consumption communication models. Because of the relationship between visual technologies and representations and the role of that relationship in the formation of cultural imaginaries, blue ecocriticism works to account for ideas and functions like circulatory velocity, “always-​on” technology, mobility, ubiquitous computing, the Internet of Things, global social networks, optimization, targeted marketing, and so on. Perhaps, as Roger Silverstone has contended, the most relevant of all such influences in mediation is the emerging role of domestication, the appropriation of new media technologies into our individual, daily lives. Central to Silverstone’s idea of media domestication is the understanding that new media are always already both material and symbolic. For Silverstone, mediation is a dialectic circulation of meaning. Silverstone’s premise is of particular interest to blue ecocriticism given the role domestic or self-​made media now plays in the creation and circulation of oceanic images. From the countless videos posted on video-​sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo to still images circulated on Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, and other social media sites, visual representations of ocean in the form of images and videos of vacation experiences, animal encounters, scuba experiences, fishing, whale watching, shoreline landscapes and seascapes, and so on permeate cultural imaginaries. Mediated ocean is now crowdsourced. With easy access to mediating equipment such as action cams, smartphones, global positioning system (GPS)-​enabled tracking software, motion-​sensor cameras, consumer drones, and other imaging technologies, everyday experiences of ocean are becoming visually and digitally mediated beyond the individual subject–​object encounter and shared globally via hypercirculatory networks. Of course, while many of the circulated encounters might be interpreted as mundane, the more exotic encounters become super-​mediated, virally shared to the point that saturate multiple networks, each re-​mediating the encounter a bit differently. Unique or visually spectacular images fuel cultural imaginaries beyond the mundane, yet those images we might classify as banal or familiar also accumulate in relation to other similar commonplace representations, reinforcing and perpetuating within cultural imaginaries. To this end, blue ecocritical inquiry warrants significant consideration of nonprofessional mass-​accessed media in order to distinguish between the role of official and unofficial representation, as well as how collective and cultural memories and imaginaries are constructed through the tropes and archetypes of self-​produced media.

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In her presidential address to the International Communication Association entitled, “On the Mediation of Everything,” Sonia Livingstone asks as to what it might mean that we now claim that “information and communication technologies now mediate every dimension of society” (2). Such claims echo Kenneth Burke’s notion of “Terministic Screens,” the systems that influence—​if not control—​the ways in which individual subjects perceive the world and the ways such perception then dictate actions in the world. Burke explains that “the nature of our terms affect the nature of our observations, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one field rather than another” (Language as Symbolic Action, 46). Thus, how we talk about mediation is as relevant as the mediation itself, or how we identify what it is to mediate. For Livingstone, asking such questions, on the one hand, is asking about changes in the discipline of communication studies, but it is also, on the other, asking as to the implications of mediation on the ways in which we come to know and interact with the world and the grand claims that “everything is mediated.” What Livingstone’s analysis makes evident is that whether or not communication is changing in a mediated world, clearly the technologies through which communication occurs are and that those changes require new theories and new ways of thinking about mediation and communication. Similarly, her analysis looks to definitions of mediation across multiple languages and a prevailing understanding that in English the concept is most frequently understood to mean something akin to “getting in between,” often linked with ideas of negotiation or resolving disputes to carry a positive sense of resolution. However, Livingstone acknowledges that in academic inquiry, the positive attribution is often set aside in questioning media mediation in order to ask questions about control over media, ideology, capital, and so on. The very notion of “getting in between” echoes the Hegelian claim that there is no pure experience prior to mediation. If this claim is accurate, Livingstone posits, then there is need for understanding how media mediate (4). Livingstone and many other communications and media theorists invest in this claim; yet, in their interrogations into mediation, few extend their inquiries of mediation beyond the social into the environmental, ecological, or natural. Blue ecocriticism takes up that specific task: developing theoretical approaches to understanding how media mediates ecology, environment, and nature. Blue ecocriticism necessarily considers what comes between—​the technological and the interpretive—​ocean and the individual and collective experiences of knowing those environments and natures. Often, this notion of “in between” is also understood to suggest interface. Similar to Burke’s terministic screens that point to the mediative qualities of language systems, “interface” is understood to suggest the device or process in between the subject and the experience. Interface is not only the facilitator of interaction but is the determiner of interaction. The interface dictates how interaction can occur. Alexander Galloway argues in The Interface Effect that the “interface is not a thing, it is always an effect” (33); however, the digital turn brings to light that, in fact, interfaces are always already also things, they are material, whether digital, mechanical, or even biological and physiological. The interface is understood as

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the thing and the process through which independent systems interact and communicate with each other. Imbricated in interface and mediation, then, is also an understanding of separation and distinction. Interface reinforces boundary at the same moment as facilitating interaction. For mediation, particularly mediation by way of new media, these boundaries fortify separation between viewing subject and object viewed. In the case of mediated environmental or ecological understanding and experience, what comes in between reinscribes separation between the human subject and the natural world. Such separation also adopts a sense of the mediating interface as black box, a device—​metaphorical or literal—​which is understood in terms of its inputs and outputs, but its internal functions remain unknown. As such, mediating technologies often obscure their political, ethical, and ideological influence upon their outputs and obfuscate their influence upon ecological literacies and cultural imaginaries. In terms of the mediation of visual information, blue ecocritical work is alert to the politics and power invoked in notions of environmental or ecological literacy. Such politics and power may be considered from ideological standpoints, but the materiality of mediating devices play a significant role in literacies and cannot be separated from the politics of mediation. Consider, for example, the ramifications of mediating devices like medical x-​ray machines on bodies. When a patient requires an x-​ray, few patients ever ask as to what kind of x-​ray machine the doctor will use to make the images that will inform diagnosis. Few of us are even aware that there are different kinds of medical imaging devices that can be used to produce x-​ray images or what the distinctions between the machines are. As one radiologist explains to me, there are many companies that make x-​ray machines, and each type of machine can provide a different type of image of the same object. Just as the images included in Silent World convey a National Geographic aesthetic and ethos by way of the choice of film technology, so too does the choice of x-​ray machine affect the imaging output. The same radiologist explains that like any other manufactured device, there are good x-​ray machines and less-​reliable x-​ray machines. The images one machine makes may be very different than the image of the same object another machine makes, just as a professional photographer will explain that the image made with one company’s lenses are inherently different than images made with another company’s lenses because the designed grind of the glass is unique to each company’s lenses. Variations in lenses and film types affect the output of the photographic image, as do developing technologies, screen constructions, and a host of other mediating technologies and processes that render. Likewise, biological wetware technologies, like human and nonhuman ocular interfaces (eyes) receive images in various ways that contribute to the image’s appearance. The transparent eyeball blind to its own ideologies. In the case of x-​ray imaging, the differences in image can result in varying diagnosis and intervention. Thus, the variance in imaging contributes to a difference in what is known about the object as well as the methods by which that knowing—​what we might reductively identify as literacy—​frame how we come to understand the image. In

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this way, then, we see the effect the mediating device plays as never apolitical or innocent. The same should be considered about all mediating devices and the role they play in constructing the image of ocean and, thus, ideological positions of literacies. Consider, too, the ways in which variations in ultrasound machines contribute to literacies about women’s bodies and reproduction as a medical process. Or, the ways in which technologies like ultrasound “translate” audio data into visual data to contribute to how we “see” bodies without recognition or critical consideration of the algorithms or circuitry required for such translations—​the black box of ultrasound. Alternatively, consider how deep water (or deep space) telemetry is translated from radio and other forms of audio and even speculative data into visual topographical images that viewers tend to accept as accurate representations of oceanic spaces without questioning the politics or ethics of the use of imaging devices, the translations of data they employ, or even the devices themselves or the ideologies supported or refuted through their use. Because imaging ocean requires sophisticated visual technologies that “translate” nonvisual data akin to ultrasound like sonar or bathymetric soundings into visual texts, ocean image and representations are conjoined with technological mediation in the construction of ocean image and representation. Those black-​boxed mediations are frequently naturalized as providing authentic representations or simply rendered invisible—​unseen—​in the process of representation. Consider, for example, Helmreich’s explanation of the role of sound in the “lineage of oceanographic apprehensions” I noted in the previous chapter when addressing sound. Helmreich cites Höhler: Oceanographic research commencing in the mid-​19th century could not rely on the direct observation of its object but had to create its images of ocean depth through remote investigation. Depth became a matter of scientific definitions, systematic measurements, and graphic representations. In the course of a century, the opaque ocean of the 1850s was densely depicted in physical terms and transformed into a technically and scientifically sound oceanic. (119, cited in Helmreich (“Spaceships,” 1228, italics in original) The creation of images, the mediation of audio data into visual representation, here left assumed as devoid of politics of translation, technology, or interpretation. For ecocriticism, analysis of technologies of representation is most often limited to considerations of textual or semiotic outputs, not the technologies that produce those outcomes. Blue ecocriticism, thus, identifies the ethical imperative to make apparent the mediations and mediating technologies that construct visual representations that occupy various positions in cultural imaginaries. Interpretation of visual representations operate in similar fashion as Donald Davidson’s (by way of Willard Van Orman Quine and Neil Wilson) principle of

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charity, which (reductively) encourages interpretation in the most rational ways without being bogged down by the details that might lead to irrational or inaccurate interpretations. For blue ecocriticism, this suggests that posthuman technologies of sight—​biological, augmented, or even machine—​or what we might think of as hypermediated visuals or the synthesis of sight and technological mediation, requires more than principles of charity, demanding explicit consideration of the ethics, politics, and ideologies bound up in technological image mediation. The ability to gather nonvisual data and translate it into visual representation that is accepted as authentic representation makes evident the layers and complexity of technological mediation to the ability to see ocean. Thus, any invocation of ecological or environmental literacy requires a deeper consideration of the roles mediating technologies play in determining the substance and politics of that claim of literacy. Since neither literacy nor technology are ever free of ideological agenda, so too must blue ecocriticism acknowledge that visual representations of ocean are also bound to the ethics, ideologies, and politics of mediated representation. Given the current overall significance of visual communication, attention to the role of representational technologies makes evident the role of rhetoric, manipulation, and construction in the production of visual information. Because the primacy of the visual in ocean representation and the necessity for complex technologies to provide images of difficult to access oceanic environments, much of what we now “see” of ocean relies on various forms of telepresence technologies. Reductively, telepresence can be thought of as a set of technologies that allow a (human) user to experience sensory stimuli from a location other than that which they occupy. Telepresence also permits the user to affect the other location to one degree or another. Simple telepresence systems, like videoconferencing, allow users to see or hear information from another location and to transmit their own input to that other location. More immersive, complex telepresence systems provide other forms of sensory interactions, such as the control of a robotic arm in a deep-​water submersible or the control over, for example, a drone’s flight.Telepresence, that is, provides a simulated experience of being present in another place, including the ability to manipulate objects in that place by way of telerobotics, a form of control of semiautonomous robots by way of wireless communication. Telepresence is an important form of mediation for blue ecocriticism, as telepresence and telerobotics technologies extend the human range of access to what of ocean can be seen. In 2012, the Ocean Research and Conservation Association (ORCA) filmed the first video of a giant squid off Japan’s Ogasawara archipelago. It was the first time a giant squid had been filmed in its natural habitat. In 2019, the same team of researchers, using a remote camera developed by ORCA founder Dr. Edith Widder called the Medusa, filmed another giant squid, this time about 100 miles southwest of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. Medusa, a new iteration of Widder’s “Eye-​in-​ the-​Sea” camera system, operates remotely, using bioluminescent patterns to attract deep water species to the camera frame. These cameras are designed as unobtrusive systems

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to record life in the abyss. Called Eye-​in-​the-​Sea, the system operates automatically on the sea floor. Most importantly, however, it is designed to go unnoticed by animals. The system uses bioluminescence to its advantage. It can detect animals nearby when they give off bioluminescent light, trigger a video camera to record the light being produced, then turn on a red light out of the animals’ normal vision range. The result: the collection of illuminated footage, without alerting the subject or scaring it away. (NOAA) Unlike many of the remote-​operated vehicles (ROVs) used to explore ocean, the Eye-​n-​the-​Sea cameras, like the Medusa, do not frighten organisms with whirring motors, excessive movements, or flashing lights. Instead, the Eye-​ in-​ the-​ Sky cameras relay on stealth, unobtrusive remote presence. Ocean-​focused scholars like Helmreich and Alaimo have taken up the role of ROVs in telepresence observations of inaccessible parts of deep ocean. Consideration of ocean exploration by way of telepresence is critical to blue ecocriticism, particularly given the inextricable connections between remote exploration, ocean research, materialist methodologies, and capitalist interventions. Consider, for example, the incongruities between the use of ORCA’s Eye-​ in-​the-​Sea camera’s for exploration that resulted in the giant squid footage and ORCA’s claims that “we have explored less than 5% of the deep ocean. There are great discoveries to be made and great resources to be tapped: new species, new pharmaceuticals and new industrial compounds,” which attributes a use-​value of seeing to exploitation and resource extraction (“Stealth Cameras”). Similarly, consider the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, which is marketed as a program for “Discovering the Mysteries of the Deep Sea” (XPRIZE). Boasting a $7  million prize purse, the XPRIZE “is a global competition which challenged teams to advance deep sea technologies for autonomous, fast, high-​resolution ocean exploration” (XPRIZE). The objective of the prize is to encourage the development of deep-​water imaging technologies and telerobotics that can provide visual information of deep-​water environments and contribute to more sophisticated bathymetric mapping. Entries in the 2018 competition applied a variety of imaging and remote operating technologies. The competition testing required teams to photograph and map an area 2.48 miles deep, yet several of the entries in the competition employed technologies that did not require vehicles to actually dive to that depth. In 2018, a team from Duke University, for example, proposed using an 18-​rotor aerial drone to deploy sound navigation ranging (SONAR) pods near the surface above the area to be mapped. Other team’s proposed keeping devices at the surface, as well, using lasers to scan the bottom. Other entries employed diving drones that would not descend to the full depth but would relay data from the bottom back to the surface. Other teams propose using more traditional, autonomous submersibles. While such competitions—​XPRIZE is funded by Shell Global and supported by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—​drive technological innovation, it is impossible to separate such exploration and the mission of the

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XPRIZE from the economics and ethics of exploration for the sake of oil mining and contributions to the economics of petrocultures that clearly Shell has in mind when funding this prize. Blue ecocriticism is attentive to such connections and the ethics that connects exploration, visual representation, and cultural imaginaries. Being able to better “see” and map the ocean is inseparable from being able to better exploit ocean.

Deep dark As noted in Chapter  2, Heidegger found the possible effect of a whole earth image suspect; yet, writing in “The Age of the World Picture,” he also acknowledges the inevitable importance of such an image:  “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture” (“Age,” 134). For ocean, though, it is often the uncaptured image, the unseen, the invisible, the un-​imaged that invigorates ocean in cultural imaginaries. The unseen ocean, it is assumed, is the yet-​to-​be-​seen ocean, ocean not yet conquered, the spectacle to be. Like the power of naming, seeing conveys a sense of power over an object or an idea (“I see what you mean”). From the physical absence of light at depth to the necessity for technological mediation in order to “see” much of the ocean environment, the ocean unseen is as critical an aspect of blue ecocritical inquiry as is that which is seen of ocean and ocean representations, in part because to see is to conquer. To navigate oceanic darkness requires not only technological mediation but large degrees of abstraction.2 As Aliamo explains, too, “the invisible, unmarked, ostensibly perspectiveless perspective is common in visualizations of climate change as a global phenomenon” (Exposed, 143–​144), and we might adapt her claim as applicable to ocean, as well, as many forms of representation overlook or do not see ocean crises. Visual representations of ocean might be taxonomized historically as falling into two primary categories: the thalassophobic and the reverent—​and both frequently containing elements of the other, as well as traces of the sublime. For example, the visual trope of the shipwreck in Western paintings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the depictions of sea monsters on European medieval and renaissance maps contribute to a more encompassing sense of fear of ocean (recall Tuan’s Landscapes of Fear) whereas images like Clark Little’s Hawaiian waves photography or tourist industry images of ocean as place of relaxation contribute to a sense of ocean as site of serenity—​the contradistinction between an image of a sailboat anchored in a tranquil Caribbean bay from that of a broken-​masted sailing ship being destroyed in a storm. Yet neither the reverent image nor the thalassophobic image can be understood absent of the other. A third category has emerged more recently, which we might identify as growing from environmentalist politics to represent anthropocenic damage to ocean, images that blend the rhetorics of the thalassophobic and reverent with the politics of persuasion. Images such as the Mariana’s Trench Plastic Bag picture, the violent images presented in documentaries like Black Fish or The Cove, images of plastic pollution in ocean environments,

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images of seal clubbings and whale hunts, images of commercial harvesters extracting tons of fish from ocean, images of oils spills like that of the Deep Water Horizon event, images of hypoxic zone fish kills, images of coral bleaching, and so on all contribute to a growing body of images designed to convey and persuade a particular set of political, ethical, and ideological perceptions. Such images are inseparable from the capitalist systems that create the conditions under which such persuasive visual rhetoric emerge and the inseparability of those systems from creating the situations of the content represented in such images. As Lawrence Buell has put it, “Just because it is invisible to the human eye does not mean it is not constitutive, penetrating you even when you are not aware” (ix). This is more than a case of “can’t see the forest for the trees”; it is a matter of can’t see the ocean for the ocean. The unseen ocean, then, is revealed (or, more accurately, speculated, imagined) through blue ecocritical methodologies adapted from engagement between new materialism and scalar thinking. Seeing is itself material and embodied, and the objects of the unseen, maintain embodied enmeshing. For example, new materialists examine the relationships between human and nonhuman bodies and microscopic or macroscopic objects. Often, plastics, a kind of strange hyperobject or a “persistent” object, we might say, occur at microscopic scales (microplastics), like many other toxins, while simultaneously occupying massive-​scale incursion—​both physical and chronological—​in ocean. To say so, reduces the moments of interaction with plastics outside of chronological scale; a microplastic—​or any plastic or any other object—​encountered soon after it enters into ocean is a remarkably different object than one that has spent decades interacting with ocean. Referring to Jan Zalasiewicz’s consideration of plastics in “The Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene,” Richard Kerridge explains that Zalasiewicz’s descriptions consist mainly of things we cannot see directly—​things that challenge the human body’s field of vision. They are either too small or too big: the fibers too small to see, the vast oceanic sweep, the penetration into every deep corner. We are able to encounter the plastic waste at the two extremes of perspective, the panoramic zoom out ant the microscopic zoom in, but not, it would seem, in the middle range, the range available to human vision without technological assistance. (xiv) Kerridege is right, but the unseen dimension of his claim is compounded in chronological scale. Seeing is always an activity of the past, of seeing what was, even if only microseconds ago. Seeing, then, is like criticism, like ecocriticism, always a composition of the past with the hope that it might reveal a glimpse of the future. Zalasiewicz describes the kind of fragmented view Kerridge attributes, the inability to see in totality, as akin to trying to study a painting in a dark room with only a small fine-​beam pen flashlight that can only illuminate a few splashes of the painting at a time (116). Zalasiewicz explains that the theories and methodologies formed

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in seeing those limited splashes are applied to the unseen and drive the speculations about the unseen. This approach, Zalasiewicz explains, is effective only in as much as it is “manageable” (116). “To try to pick out some more general truth from the mass of detail,” Zalasiewicz writes, “typically emerges once sufficient of that detail has been collected to show patterns emerging from what seemed initially to be bewildering chaotic” (116). To a significant degree, the very notion of the chaotic can be attributed to that which is unseen, or that which cannot be seen in a way that adheres to familiar systems of organization. Zalasiewicz’s concept of the limited view represented through the simile of the pen light is particularly applicable as it conveys the reality of deep-​water vision and imaging as the attempt to imagine the unseen as equivalent to the seen. On the one hand, the incompatibility of the human body with marine environments and the potential dangers for the human body absent of technological augmentations contribute greatly to the thalassophobia that douse cultural imaginaries. The golden age of maritime literature bathes in the image of ocean as a place of danger and death to the extent that such textual influences on ocean narratives permeate cultural imaginaries deeply. Such incompatibility is at once corporeal and material. On the other hand, we might conjecture that a significant part of the thalassophobia that haunts cultural imaginaries lurks in the shadows of the dark depths of ocean. The unseen of the bathypelagic zone—​popularly referred to as “the midnight zone”—​ imagined in metaphors of terror. Dark, cold, crushing pressure dominate our descriptions of the depths. The word depth itself evokes the specters of the extreme in its metaphoric use. Deep colors, a term magnified in the digital age now referring to colors rendered in greater than 24 bits, are colors that display dark ranges. Deep blue, deep red, and deep purple, for example, bear the intangible shadow of darkness. Alaimo’s “violet-​black” theory of prismatic ecology manifests as a chroma-​apparition of deep purple: “A violet-​black ecology hovers in the bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, and hadal zones, the three regions of the deep seas, one thousand meters down and much deeper, where sunlight cannot descend” (“Violet-​Black,” 233). Alaimo explains, “The deep seas epitomize how most ocean waters exist beyond state boarders, legal protection, and cultural imaginaries” (“Violet-​Black,” 233). We might attribute much of that absence as indicative of the rhetorical power of the visual. The abyss unseen remains out of the gaze of cultural imaginaries. The unseen remains unmapped and uncontrolled. Even the texts that pervade cultural imaginaries, often become indistinguishable from them, textual bodies of and within cultural imaginaries, unable to convey the image of the unseen, offering only hinted glimpses, like figments in the shadows, splashes in the pen light beam. Consider research by Alexander L. Davis et al. published in Current Biology in July 2020 that shows that “at least 16 species of deep-​sea fishes have ultra-​black skin” with pigmentation that “allows animals to absorb light from bioluminescent sources, rendering them visually undetectable against the dark background of the deep sea” (Davis). According to Davis et al., “By reducing reflectance, ultra-​black fish can reduce the sighting distance of visual predators more than

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6-​fold compared to fish with 2% reflectance” (Davis). Predictably, though, Davis et  al. speculate that the discovery of these ultraback strategies might lead to the development of human-​benefiting (read: marketable) product development: “This biological example of efficient light absorption via a simple architecture of strongly absorbing and highly scattering particles may inspire new ultra-​black materials” (Davis). Consider, too, the images of deep-​water organisms like dragonfishes and anglerfishes, which until very recently unseen in their natural habitats, are described as nightmares, alien, and monstrous; they are unseen images that haunt from depths. Such terrors saturate representations of ocean and capitalize on the dread of the unseen abyss, inscribing, circulating, and perpetuating fears of deep water across cultures and representations. From the oral traditions of Indigenous populations to contemporary digital media that resists indigeneity by way of hypercirculation, the unseen is monstrous. Consider the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy narratives of the sea serpent Apotamkin of Passamaquoddy Bay and the Kuku or GouGou, which, in some narratives, lurks in the sea and feeds on people who enter the water in canoes. Or the “Legend of the Salt Chuck Oluk” as conveyed in E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake’s narrative “The Sea Serpent,” which recounts a Tillicum allegory of the white man’s greed for gold manifest in the appearance of a sea serpent. Or, consider the bountiful numbers of films that play on the darkness of depth to elicit fear, including (but certainly not limited to):  The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Leviathan, Deep Star Six, Deep Rising, The Abyss, Below, Deep Blue Sea, Dagon, The Rift, Sphere, The Shape of Water, Dead Calm, Open Water, The Reef, Pioneer, Underwater, Sharknado, and, of course, Jaws and countless other derivative shark-​horror films. Similarly, many video games employ similar dark/​horror strategies to establish the unseen dark ocean as a space of danger and death. Produced by San Francisco based game designers Worlds Entertainment, the open world survival action-​adventure video game Subnautica and its sequel Subnautica:  Below Zero capitalize upon the tenacity of darkness in cultural imaginary to evoke fear and anxiety of ocean depth. In the game Subnautica, a spaceship has crashed into the remote ocean planet 4546B, evoking Crusoe-​like tropes of being stranded and tropes of being lost at sea narratives. The objective of the game is ocean exploration and survival. The video trailer for the game includes narration sound bites that convey “sunlight. I’ve been dreaming of it for months” and “father was right; we shouldn’t have gone so deep,” a sentiment echoed in films like Underwater’s dialogue “we don’t belong here” and DeptH’s questions of deep-​water exploration. The Subnautica games rely on familiar thalassophobias as well as viewer’s familiarity with images of “real-​life” marine organisms, which the games allude to in the alien life forms that populate the game’s environments, reinforcing, too, both narratives of the possibility of oceans on other planets and constructions of ocean as alien. Similarly, the 2013 Steam game Depth produced by New Zealand-​based game company Digital Confectioners, which allows players to play as either a diver or a shark, is set in the darkness of deep ocean where sharks and divers engage in violent combat, perpetuating narratives that depict sharks as violent enemies hiding in the darkness. Ocean’s darkness, and the organisms it veils, oozes throughout cultural imaginaries.

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Darkness suffuses thalassophobia. Its saturation is evident in what can be seen; its providence in that which remains unseen. Zalasiewicz’s pen light, like a flashlight in a horror film, may reveal the seen within its beam, but in doing so, it reinforces the monstrosity of the unseen. Light reminds viewers that the darkness remains just beyond that which is illuminated. Carson’s, Verne’s, Jue’s, and Alaimo’s “aquarium view”—​ and even the representative cover image of this book—​reinforces the power of the unseen. What lies outside the frame of vision, a viewer might conjecture, might be the same or similar to that which is seen in the frame, but the potential that it is wholly different drives the anxiety of the unseen. Professor Aronnax’s view through the observation window aboard the Nautilus, as well as his view from inside the diving helmet when he and Captain Nemo exit the submarine, provides visual access, allows Annorax and Consiel to observe and taxonomize. Yet, what remains beyond the frame perpetuates the apprehension of the unseen. Blue ecocriticism, thus, takes up darkness and the unseen as central components of visual representations and visual rhetorics of ocean, particularly connected to considerations of scale and materialism. In its inseparability from black, blue reveals the seen and enshrouds the unseen.

Notes 1 The Dogon creation myth is an interesting study in the politics of sexualized bodies and masculine oppression of women’s bodies, as well, though not the topic of my greatly oversimplified summary here. 2 Note, too, that the metaphor “dark” carries historical implications tied to colonialism, slavery, and piracy. Demarcations like “the dark continent,” a phrase coined by Henry Stanley in his 1878 travelogue to name Africa as an unknown place, or the derogatory term “darky” used to describe African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States as popularized by the song and phrase “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” a song written by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown and popularized in 1931 by George White’s Scandals and then more famously by Kate Smith.The song is alluded to in the 1933 Marx Brother’s film Duck Soup in a line uttered by Groucho Marx’s character Rufus T. Firefly and again in Don Redman’s 1932 satirical song “Underneath The Harlem Moon,” which Randy Newman recorded, as well, in 1970.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed:  Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2016. —​—​—​. “Violet-​Black.” Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2013. 233–​251. Anderson, James A., and Timothy P. Meyer. Mediated Communication: A Social Action Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 1988. Buell, Lawrence. “Foreword.” Prismatic Ecology:  Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffery Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2013. ix–​xiii. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1968.

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Calvino, Italo. Mr. Palomar. Trans. William Weaver. New  York:  Harcourt Brace and Company. 1983. Clark. Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge:  The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cousteau, Captain J. Y. The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure Unfolding Wonders Never Before Seen by Man. New York: Pocket Books. 1953. Cowperthwaite, Gabriela. Black Fish. Magnolia Pictures. 2013. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1984. Davis, Alexander L. et al. “Ultra-​black Camouflage in Deep-​Sea Fishes.” Current Biology. July 16, 2020. www.cell.com/​current-​biology/​fulltext/​S0960-​9822(20)30860–​5. Depth. Digital Confectioners. 2014. www.digitalconfectioners.com/​ Eubank, William, director. Underwater. Chernin Entertainment, 2020. Fiske, John. “Reading the Beach.” Reading the Popular. Ed. John Fiske. New York: Routledge. 1989.  34–​62. Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. New York: Polity Books, 2012. Gumpert, Gary, and Robert S. Cathcart. Inter/​Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Haglund, Richard F. “The Properties of Light.” Springer Handbook of Lasers and Optics. Ed. Frank Träger. New York: Springer. 2007. 3–​32. Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Perennial. 1977. 115–​154. Helmreich, Stefan. “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures.” Social Research. 78, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 1211–​1242. Hesiod. Theogeny. 7th edition. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-​Merrill Company. 1953. Jones, Madison. “(Re)placing the Rhetoric of Scale: Ecoliteracy, Networked Writing, and Memorial Mapping.” Mediating Nature: The Role of Technology in Ecological Literacy. Eds. Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey. New York: Routledge. 2020. 79–​95. Kerridge, Richard. “Small Rooms and the Ecosystem:  Environmentalism and DeLillo’s White Noise.” Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. Eds. Richard Keridge and Neil Sammells. London: Zed Books, 1998. 1–​11. Kindt, Matt, and Sharlene Kindt. Dept.H. Pressure. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2017. —​—​—​. Dept.H. Murder Six Miles Deep: After the Flood. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2017. —​—​—​. Dept.H. Murder Six Miles Deep: Decompressed. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2018. —​—​—​. Dept.H. Murder Six Miles Deep: Lifeboat. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. 2018. Latour, Bruno.“Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. 6 (1986): 1–​40. Lievrouw, Leah A. “New Media, Mediation, and Communication Study.” Information, Communication, & Society. 12, no. 3 (April 2009): 303–​325. Lievrouw, Leah A., and Livingstone, Sonia. “Introduction.” Major Works in New Media. Eds. Leah Lievrouw, Leah A., and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage. 2009. xxi–​xl. Livingstone, Sonia. “On the Mediation of Everything.” Presidential Address 2008. Journal of Communication. 59, no. 1 (2008): 1–​18. McCormick, Lillian R., Lisa A. Levin, and Nicholas W. Oesch. “Vision is Highly Sensitive to Oxygen Availability in Marine Invertebrate Larvae.” Journal of Experimental Biology. 222 (2019):  1–​11. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Eye-​in-​the-​Sea:  An Innovative, Unobtrusive Camera System.”https://​oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/​explorations/​04deepscope/ background/​eyeinsea/​eyeinsea.html. n.d.

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Ocean Research and Conservation Association (ORCA). “Stealth Cameras.” www. teamorca.org/​cameras.html. n.d. Psihoyos, Louie. The Cove. Participant Media. 2010. Silverstone, Roger. “Domesticating Domestication: Reflections on the Life of a Concept.” The Domestication of Media and Technology. Eds. Thomas Berker, et  al. London: Open University Press, 2006. 229–​248. Subnautica. Unknown Worlds Entertainment. 2014. Subnautica: Below Zero. Unknown Worlds Entertainment. 2019. Tekahionwake, E. Pauline Johnson. “The Sea-​Serpent.” Legends of Vancouver. Ed. E. Pauline Johnson.Vancouver: David Spencer, Limited, 1911. 59–​70. Tuan,Yi-​Fu. Landscapes of Fear. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1980. Verne, Jules. 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea. New York: Wordsworth Editions. 1998. White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science. 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–​1207. World Health Organization (WHO). “Blindness and Vision Impairment Prevention.” www. who.int/​blindness/​publications/​globaldata/​en/​ n.d. Zalasiewicz, Jan. “The Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene.” Environmental Humanities:  Voices from the Anthropocene. Eds. Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2017. 115–​131. Zubairy, M. Suhail. “A Very Brief History of Light.” Optics in Our Time. Eds. Mohammad D. Al-​Amri, Mohamed El-​Gomati, and M. Suhail Zubairy. New York: Springer. 2016. 3–​24.

5 PROTEIN ECONOMIES

I begin this penultimate chapter with an anecdote:  in 2012, two years after the publication of his influential book What Is Posthumanism? and only a few months before the publication of his equally influential book Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, Cary Wolfe delivered one of the most memorable symposia I have attended on our campus. His talk was derived from the soon-​ to-​be published Before the Law and it inspired a wonderful conversation between Wolfe and the faculty and graduate students in attendance (over a delicious catered Jamaican luncheon) whose research addressed animal studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, ethics, and the like. During the conversation, I asked Wolfe a twofold question about the absence of marine animals in his theories of biopolitics and how we might think about migratory marine organisms in fluid spaces that are contested differently by international politics than are terrestrial species and spaces. Wolfe agreed that marine species and oceanic spaces added another dimension to his theories, and he thoughtfully offered some insight as to how. He then cordially employed the academic’s rhetorical safety net of “I’ll have to think more about that.” A few months later, at the ASLE conference in Lawrence, Kansas, Wolfe and I crossed paths in the hotel lobby. He nodded greetings and smiled at me, and as he walked past, he playfully said, “the shrimp are your problem.” ​ We can see the terror of human inscription on the terrestrial, the land cut and burned in harvest, deforestation, mining, erosion, canalizing, wounded, and scarred by anthropocentric incursions. However, ocean’s fluidity hides its many wounds, the blues and blacks of a bruise not always visible in the dissipating aquatic flow.We only see the evident oceanic destruction from the margins, from the edges of the shores where pollution or the bodies of asphyxiated organisms wash up, or on the surface, another dimensional edge. Our knowledge of contaminations and hypoxia is often available only through mediation. Our ideologies of what

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constitutes damage so remarkably influenced by definitions established in land-​ based contexts that aquatic ruin is difficult to conceptualize, especially when it remains unseen and, therefore, not evident and not relatable to the familiar. Our points of reference are skewed by fluidity. We see crisis and destruction at a single scale of observation, the microscopic invisible to our immediate view. The primacy of the proximal dominates the construction of representation, framing the ways in which we see the world, see ocean. We see so little of the ruin firsthand, even by way of technical mediation and visual representation. A good deal of the ecocritical project has taken up the relationship between nature and culture or, more to the point, the relationship between nature and technology. This chapter considers the technologies, politics, economics, and ethics of global protein economies bound to ocean in order to consider the reciprocal interplay between ocean representation and global ocean harvest in terms of the rhetorical positioning of human protein needs and nonhuman animal lives. Turning to both animal studies and environmental rhetoric, this chapter considers the role of protein harvest in marine conservation and oceanic thinking as a way to think about human–​ocean relationships. Historically, representations of ocean reinscribe narratives of ocean resources as endless. Verne’s Nemo, for example, regularly refers to the boundless resources ocean provides. Sylvia Earle, in The World Is Blue:  How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One, shows just how historically entrenched the ideology of limitless ocean is, citing an 1883 Thomas Huxley speech that exemplifies the culturally deep-​seated understanding of ocean and its inhabitants as boundless. She cites Huxley: The herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all great sea fisheries are inexhaustible: that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish. And any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently . . . to be useless. (Blue, 3) This narrative of inexhaustibility and its subsequent seemingly indelible affect upon cultural imaginaries—​Western and colonial, in particular—​began as early as the thirteenth century to drive unbridled economies of cod, mackerel, herring, and menhaden harvests. The significance of marine harvest was so crucial to many European economies that the colonization of much of North America and the Caribbean was driven by access to new exploitable fisheries. Cod, for example, harvested in North American Atlantic waters, were cured and shipped back to Europe where territorial wars were already being fought from Scandinavia to Portugal for harvest rights. The New World provided an assumed unrestricted and unlimited supply of fish. Pitt the Elder (1708–​1778), for example, declared Newfoundland to be the “grand cod fishery of the universe” and explained that if “these valuable provinces remain quietly in the hands of the English, they will be masters of the finest trade in the world, having other nations dependent on them” (Scully, 265). As Alaimo explains it, “the deep seas epitomize how most

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ocean waters exist beyond state borders, legal protection, and cultural imaginaries. Even as some marine areas such as coastal zones are considered inexhaustibly abundant, the open seas have long been considered empty space” (“Violet-​Black,” 233–​234). As the economic significance of large-​scale fish harvesting remains central to any conversation regarding the relationships between humans and nonhuman inhabitants of ocean, blue ecocriticism must necessarily account for more than nine hundred years of cultural accordance and disposition that reduce fish—​ all fish—​to economic artifact rather than living organism emphatically bound to global ecosystems and human lives. Even as we begin to understand the necessity of seeing fish as an essential node in complex networks of oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems, representations of ocean organisms do so much more apathetically than do representations of terrestrial organisms. Perhaps, the one evident exception, though, is that of oceanic mammals, which are granted exceptional positioning in many cultural imaginaries, though not in others (consider, for example, the narratives performed and revealed in the 2010 Oscar-​winning documentary The Cove directed by former National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos). Blue ecocriticism, thus, takes up the very idea of harvest in relation to human–​ ocean interactions and the interplay between the representations of ocean animals and the positioning of ocean organisms in cultural imaginaries. Such an inquiry is a massive undertaking, one that requires more significant engagement than can be afforded in this book. Thus, what I introduce in this chapter serves merely as beginning to a larger conversation that approaches the ethics, politics, ideologies, and representations of ocean organisms and ocean harvest from a blue ecocritical perspective within the contexts of human–​ animal and human–​ environmental interactions and is framed within the concept of protein economy. Such an undertaking beyond that addressed here will inevitably collaborate with critical ecology, posthumanism, social justice, public health, health sciences, and animal studies, to name but a few. In fact, apropos of Wolfe’s comments, it seems to me that blue ecocriticism is ripe for substantial interaction with animal studies, in particular, given both the massive diversity of nonhuman life found in ocean and the historical representations of the relationships between nonhuman ocean life and humans and the distinctions made in those representations between “higher-​order” life forms and “lower-​order” life forms—​distinctions often reduced to the capacity for manifestations of “intelligence” in relation to the human. The invocation of economy suggests at least two comingled directions of critical intervention. On the one hand, it provokes the familiar critique of the role of capitalism in environmental decimation. On the other, it suggests the ecological economy of energy exchange and the need for protein ingestion by the human for survival, a narrative that maintains human primacy in such economies while simultaneously educing other life forms to “protein” in the that human-​focused economy. Clark and others have rightly identified that while there is desire—​if not impetus—​to lay blame on the current ecological and environmental crises on capitalism, other economic and cultural institutions hold equal responsibility for the current situation. Clark explains, “it is now not enough to identify modern

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capitalism as the exclusive agent of environmental violence. Aside from the fact that socialists systems of government have also had appalling environmental records, the process culminating in the Anthropocene includes events that predate the advent of capitalism” (2–​3). Nonetheless, critique of capitalism’s impact on global environments is more than warranted and is certainly not a new notion. Marx draws specific lines between economy and environment. John Bellamy Foster reminds us by way of Marx’s Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy that it was Marx’s arguments against the criminalization of forest use that led to his study of political economy (Foster, 2018). Foster, in his book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and Paul Burkett in Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective have shown how ecologists readily dismiss Marx’s work. Yet, as Elizabeth Terzakis, by way of Foster and Burkett, and others have argued, Marx’s work offers critical intervention in Anthropocene ecological thinking. My intention here, however, is not to review Marx’s ecological thinking or the manner in which his critique of capitalism contributes to our appetites to find blame in capitalism for the current ecological condition (see Naomi Klein, for example). Foster, in both Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and Marx and the Earth: An Anti-​Critique, as well as Burkett, Kohei Saito, and others have taken up such projects extensively. Rather, my purpose is to point to Marx’s specific claim regarding estranged labor and “man” as species-​being. Marx posits that Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art—​his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible—​so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. (31) Marx’s notion of palatable and digestible, it seems to me, reveal a good deal about scalability and the need to scale in such away so as to make the unimaginable, incomprehensible vastness of ecological entities manageable. For human–​ocean interaction, this requires significant consideration of the attribution of economy within cultural imaginary formations of ocean.

The economics of protein I first encountered the idea of protein economy in Paolo Bacigalupi’s multiple-​ award-​wining (Nebula, Campbell Memorial, Hugo, Compton Crook, and Locus) biopunk novel The Windup Girl. Set in twenty-​third-​century Thailand after the world’s oceans have risen due to anthropogenic global warming, corporations known as “calorie companies” control global food production and distribution.The calorie companies are dependent upon gene-​hacked seeds and genetically modified crops, which not only provide the world with protein, but as a side effect also

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trigger the evolution of mutant pests, as well as illness and plague (invent the car and you invent the car crash).The genetically modified seeds also render other seed strains impotent, unable to reproduce, making it necessary for farmers to purchase new seeds each growing season from the corporations—​a concept in the book that seems hauntingly evocative of agrochemical and biotech company Monsanto’s patented genetically altered soybean and corn seeds and their legal battles to control seed replication. Bacigalupi’s Thailand, however, remains independent of this corporate control, closing its borders to calorie companies and maintaining its own seed banks and other methods of growing protein, such as a substantial reliance upon algaculture—​the growing of algae. Beyond Bacigalupi’s fictionalized protein economies, however, the term protein economy plays a powerful role in global discussions about the production and distribution of protein for human consumption. Employed as an industry term in meat production, protein economy denotes an implicit capitalistic function, binding human protein needs to economic demand and privilege. Within protein industries, protein economy most frequently refers to the production and distribution of beef, pork, poultry, and mutton; seafood is often identified as an independent economic entity that comprises aquaculture, mariculture, and wild stock harvest (what I will refer to as industrial harvest). Protein demand increases with the rise of individual and national income levels. As environmental activist and founder of the Worldwatch Institute Lester R. Brown has explained, This innate hunger for animal protein, which manifests itself in every society, has lifted the world demand for meat each year for 40 consecutive years. One of the most predictable trends in the global economy, world meat production climbed from 44 million tons in 1950 to 233 million tons in 2000, more than a fivefold increase. (158) Brown situates his consideration of protein economy within a framework he identifies as “eco-​economy” a shift in world view that that emphasizes the relationship between earth and economy and questions as to “whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment” (3). “Economists,” he explains, “see the environment as a subset of the economy. Ecologists, on the other hand, see the economy as a subset of the environment” (3). He continues: Evidence that the economy is in conflict with the earth’s natural systems can be seen in the daily news reports of collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, expanding deserts, rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, falling water tables, rising temperatures, more destructive storms, melting glaciers, rising sea level, dying coral reefs, and disappearing species. (4)

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Brown reports that “Today, 1.1 billion of the world’s 6.1 billion people are still undernourished and underweight. Hunger and the fear of starvation quite literally shape their lives” (146). Hunger, he explains, “is a productivity problem” and “two of the world’s three food systems—​rangelands and oceanic fisheries—​are already being pushed to or even beyond their sustainable yields” (147). Hunger, we might also say, is a problem exacerbated in the Anthropocene. According to the World Health Organization, “The proteins derived from fish, crustaceans and mollusks account for between 13.8% and 16.5% of the animal protein intake of the human population” (np). Brown explains that globally 1.1 billion people are undernourished and underweight. The meshing of this number with a World Bank estimate of 1.3 billion living in poverty, defined as those living on $1 a day or less, comes as no surprise. Poverty and hunger go hand in hand. (147) Brown’s eco-​economy considers three primary food systems: croplands, rangelands, and oceanic fisheries. His primary objective is to eradicate world hunger. He shows that in the last half of the twentieth century global demands for protein pressured increased production of animal protein from rangelands and oceanic fisheries. “World production of beef and mutton,” he shows, “increased from 24  million tons in 1950 to 65  million tons in 2000, a near tripling” (149). However, “The growth in the oceanic fish catch exceeded even that of beef and mutton, climbing from 19  million tons in 1950 to 86  million tons in 1998” (150). Brown, shows, too, how industrial harvest pressures cannot be met through wild harvest, instead requiring an invigoration of aquaculture and mariculture methods. However, as he rightly notes, too, “Coastal aquaculture is often environmentally damaging because it depends on converting wetlands into fish farms or because it concentrates waste, leading to damaging algal blooms” (160) (the greening of blue?). He explains that Public attention has focused on aquacultural operations that are environmentally disruptive, such as the farming of salmon, a carnivorous species, and shrimp.Yet these operations account for only 1.5 million tons of output. World aquaculture is dominated by herbivorous species, importantly carp in China and India, but also catfish in the United States and tilapia in several countries. (161) What Brown does not address in detail, though, is the energy economy of the actual production of aquacultured protein. Brown shows that “roughly 1.2 billion tons of the world grain harvest are consumed directly as food, with most of the remaining 635 million tons (36 percent) consumed indirectly in livestock, poultry, and aquacultural products” (149). Yet, what these numbers do not reveal is the ratio of protein expenditure needed to produce fish protein. The largest hurdle

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that aquaculture must overcome is that current feed technologies require the input of more protein to feed fish for maximum growth than the output of those fish provide. To simplify, a basic understanding of ecological energy systems shows that in the energy exchange from producer to consumer, consumers require the input of more energy than did the producer in the food chain. Likewise, at each stage of energy exchange within an ecosystem, a significant portion of the energy exchanged is transferred outside of the ecosystem through heat and other energy releases. We can think of this in terms of feed conversion ratios. That is to say, the very act of protein and energy exchange is an economic exchange in which energy is lost at each stage. Aquaculture has yet to find a way around this economic loss. To be clear, though, the environmental and energy exchange failings of aquaculture do not connotate, then, that wild harvest is either more economically feasible or less environmentally devastating. Not part of Brown’s assessment is the significant energy expenditure needed for industrial harvest, particularly as connected with petrocultures. Blue ecocriticism will necessarily engage the representations of protein economics and their impact on cultural engagement with oceanic protein harvest and manufacture. In this way, the nascent tangential discipline of energy humanities will likely provide significant insight. Ultimately, population growth drives global protein economies. However, while increased population seemingly demands elevation of protein availability, such demands are more complex than a simple increased-​population to increase-​demand causality might suggest. That is, simple supply/​demand models cannot account for the dynamics of protein economies. Protein demands are mediated needs, often dictated by cultural practice, as well as population size and location. For seafood production and harvest, this becomes a particularly relevant fact as seafood demand increases geographically as wealthier populations can demand the transport of ocean proteins to regions not adjacent to the protein sources. Industries, like the seafood industry, are hyperattentive to the ways in which they represent seafood consumption to the end of increased sales and distribution. Industry media, such as Seafood Source News and Marine Stewardship Council, promote representations of sustainable harvest, for example, to the end of improving sales.1 The undergirding message often decrying that restrictions on ocean harvest manifest as impediments to economic growth and are couched in a rhetoric of ethics and empathy for providing protein sources to the world’s hungry.The politics and ethics of protein intake require consideration of such media representations.That is, protein economies require humanistic inquiry as well as economic and scientific. To over simplify for example, in the last several years, mainstream Western media has introduced concepts of alternative protein sources, such as the recent popularity of plant-​based beef substitutes (see, for example, the media attention given over to Burger King’s Impossible Burger). Likewise, media have begun to bring artificial, lab-​g rown proteins to the attention of mass culture. In 2018, for example, New York Times writer Kim Severson predicted that lab-​grown meat and plant-​based meat substitutes would become commonplace menu items. However, what Severson overlooks is the extreme cost of producing such alternatives, which renders these protein sources novel and economically

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inaccessible to most of the world. Alternative proteins, that is—​even if we lump farm-​raised fish into this category—​remain a dividend of privilege, not a potential solution for global hunger. Likewise, as I will show in the next section, the distribution and access to ocean proteins is mediated in embattled rhetorics of access and legal rights. Protein economies are inseparable from protein politics, which are then inseparable from just about any other politics or economies. Protein politics encompass a diverse spectrum of considerations including maritime law, cultural harvest practices, cultural consumption practices, corporate mediation, environmentalist advocacy, nonhuman subjectivity, surveillance, international territorial sovereignty, and a host of other political interventions. As such, the very notion of protein economies is ensnared in international and cross-​cultural political disputes that range back to at least the thirteenth century and continue to unfold as disputes over harvest rights remain central in international politics. Consider, for example, the international arguments regarding the historical harvest rights that Barbados claims to hold to harvest flying fish in the waters identified as possessions of Trinidad and Tobago. In 2006, by way of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, international law established a maritime boundary between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago to resolve a boundary dispute that had emerged in 1990 when Venezuela signed a maritime boundary treaty with Trinidad and Tobago.This treaty is historically bound to developments of Barbados’ fishing industry and government control of that industry highlighted by riots in 1937 that sparked active government intervention in Barbados’ development of a fishing industry. Much of the growth of the industry emerged as harvest technologies improved—​both fleet and gear—​ allowing for more substantial harvests. By 1944 the Barbados infrastructure began to increase in support of the newfound industry, building landing bases, increased freshwater plumbing, and electricity to coastal regions. Subsequent developments of communities surrounding the new landing ports followed. By 1952, Barbados had shifted to commercial gillnetting and in 1978 fishing fleets began employing iceboats instead of dayboats allowing for increased harvest and wider-​ranging international distribution. Flying fish are an important food fish for the regions, and they are also used as baitfish for recreational fishing in the tourist industry and as baitfish in industrial harvest, as well, and the image of the flying fish has become iconic in Barbados’ tourist industry.2 The contestation over harvest rights between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago intertwine with questions of international ownership of ocean and resource and are tied to histories of technological development, cultural positioning of flying fish, and the economics of flying fish harvest. Though oversimplified here, the case of the political battles regarding ocean harvest between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago is only one of near countless similar political battles that have unfolded—​and continue to do so—​across human territorial histories. Easily noted are similar political contestations between Tunisia and Libya regarding harvest rights of sedentary fish species; Eritrea and Yemen regarding access to waters around the islands of Hanis and Zuqar; ongoing disputes between China, the Philippines, and Vietnam; and many other conflicts over

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fisheries access. Most of these conflicts have complex histories and deep-​seated cultural ramifications. More recent harvest disputes are often tied to the 1982 development by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which grants sovereign states exclusive rights to the “resources” in the waters adjacent to the state’s lands. In most instances, EEZs extend out 200 miles from a state’s land, but many countries also claim rights in territorial seas that extend beyond the 200-​mile allocation. The attribution and enforcement of rights to ocean access are a central aspect of global politics and have spawned the international disciplines of Maritime Law (also known as Admiralty Law), which governs ships and shipping, and Fisheries Law, which oversees fisheries management, which includes things like harvest quotas, sustainability, seafood safety, seafood labeling, and similar ocean-​harvest-​related legalities. These legal disciplines are easily traced back to early Roman law regarding maritime property rights as conveyed in the Pandects (or Digest) which Justinian had compiled and written beginning in AD 530 and then published in AD 533. My intent here is not to account for a history of fisheries law or to comprehensively represent the extent of ocean harvest disputes as doing so is the undertaking of several linked disciplines over countless historical texts. Rather, my intention is to suggest that the connections between protein economies and protein politics are entrenched in ideological, cultural, and legal representations that are paramount to the formation of ocean–​human relationships across cultural imaginaries. Certainly, the circulation of representations of ocean and ocean inhabitants are influenced by—​ if not indistinguishable from—​the textual portrayals of the politics of protein economies. Examinations of the histories of ocean harvest are ripe for blue ecocritical consideration, and extracting connections between specific political histories, the representations of those political positions, and cultural constructions of ocean stand to expose significant understanding about the ways in which we come to know ocean. While such inquiry would make evident the vast array of economies and politics that might be addressed, such inquiries also make evident the complexities of protein economies and the rhetorics that feed their representations. Across many cultures and locations, representations of ocean inhabitants are subsumed within rhetorics of protein economies, situating ocean organisms—​all manners of fin fish, cartilaginous fish, crustaceans, cetaceans, and other marine mammals—​as protein resource bound to global politics and economies. Such cultural representations require considerations of both biopolitics and geopolitics as inherent aspects of human–​ocean interaction.The politics and representations of industrial harvest serve as a telling location for beginning such blue ecocritical consideration.

Industrial harvest I adopt the term industrial harvest or industrial fishing here to distinguish from other forms of fishing, including subsistence fishing and recreational fishing, which hold interconnected but different positions in protein economies and cultural imaginaries. Often referred to as commercial fishing, fishing for the distribution and

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sale of marine animals to the end of financial gain, industrial fishing has been a prominent part of western culture since at least the thirteenth century. However, I distinguish industrial fishing from commercial fishing to indicate a more contemporary, corporate approach to large scale harvest. While I  do not recount the full history of the evolution of commercial and industrial fishing here, I do note that the evolution of harvest technologies is indistinguishable from—​both as contributor to and result of—​protein economies and protein politics. Such a relationship, for example, can be seen in the development of trawl technologies like the “wondrychoum,” which Mark Kurlansky, in The Last Fish Tale, “A World without Fish,” and his hybrid graphic text World without Fish, explains was an early beam trawl device, a net suspended from a beam, weighted and dragged along the bottom of the ocean. The wondrychoum was designed to harvest greater quantities of North Sea fish stocks more efficiently. According to Kurlansky, British fishermen began using the wondrychoum and other beam trawl variants as early as the fourteenth century. The wondrychoum was limited in its efficiency because the pre-​steam power sailing vessels used to tow the trawl rigs had a limited towing capacity, which restricted the size of the nets that could be dragged through the water. For the device to work, the boat would have to pull the net faster than the water current to ensure that the net dragged behind the beam. Kurlansky shows that these early beam trawls could sweep only about two miles of ocean bottom in an hour, limited by the technologies that powered the vessels, caught in a formula that pitted drag and weight against limits of speed and power. Nonetheless, the wondrychoum changed global harvesting methods with such scalar efficiency that we can now point to it as an identifiable techno-​historical moment that profoundly influenced our current fisheries management problems and, concurrently, the ways in which we conceive of the organisms harvested by—​whether intentionally or as bycatch—​those technologies and the understanding of ocean as resource. That is, the development of trawl technologies shifted the inscription of ocean within cultural imaginaries. Early English fishermen, in fact, anticipated the effect of the wondrychoum and petitioned Parliament to ban such technologies. Kurlansky writes: But in 1376 fishermen petitioned Parliament to ban it, or at least increase the size of the mesh, because it swept up fish indiscriminately, taking many undersized young fish.Though it was not banned, fishermen in Cornwall and Scotland continued to denounce this type of gear, insisting that their hook-​ and-​line technique avoided bruising of nets, thus harvesting higher quality fish. But they also insisted that the beam trawl damaged spawning grounds and would decimate fish stocks. (Last, 127) Such petitions continued into the seventeenth century, but according to Kurlansky, “by 1774, beam trawling had become one of the principal fishing techniques in the North Sea” (“A World without Fish”).

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Globally, the histories of industrial harvest are complex ecological and political entanglements that knot ocean animals into the snarl of global hunger, poverty, capitalist economics, territorialism, and biopolitics. The texts available about these histories are abundant and their considerations reveal much about the representation of ocean and ocean organisms as they evolve across cultural imaginaries. In the United States, for example, the history of industrial harvest and its intersections with textual representation and the place of fish in US culture imaginaries is inextricable from the international and local histories of World War II. As historian of science, Carmel Finley explains across much of her work, contemporary industrial fishing practices emerged as the result of World War II and postwar technologies and policies. Her work is an informative assessment of global fisheries history, but for my purposes regarding blue ecocriticism, it is Finley’s examination of US fisheries relationships with the military during World War II that most evidently exemplifies the relationship between textual representation and cultural imaginary. Finley explains that during World War II, “The military essentially took over the management of the significant American fisheries during the war, including the sardine fishery in California and the salmon fisheries of both the Northwest and Alaska” (“The Role”). Simultaneously, the military invigorated the West Coast seafood industry by providing a captive market, driving capital into the market. Fish—​ particularly rockfish—​Finley shows, could be frozen and distributed to military outposts around the world. The military’s demand for fish as a primary food source for deployed soldiers created a need for increasing harvest amounts. From an energy humanities and protein economy perspective, then, we can begin to unpack the complex interconnections between the removal of organisms from oceanic protein exchange economies and inserted into human–​nature economies and account for the role of petro economies in that exchange, which then intertwine with global military and capitalist politics, binding the biological makeup of ocean organism bodies to global politics. And, let me be clear here: given the exorbitant amounts of money tied up in industrial harvest globally, harvest rights is a critical component of international politics. Because fish became such an important part of the military’s protein economy during the war, the US military included fisheries harvest in its national wartime propaganda campaigns, contributing an important representation of ocean and ocean organisms to the cultural imaginary and tying successful fish harvest to the success of the US war effort. The United States Office of War Information employed graphic artist/​designer Henry Koerner to create wartime propaganda posters. Koerner, who had been drafted into the Army, was assigned to the Graphics Division of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC, to design propaganda posters. Koerner’s success as a poster designer would lead him to a position after the war with Time magazine where between 1955 and 1967, he designed and painted more than fifty covers for Time. During his time with the United States Office of War Information, Koerner designed two posters promoting the importance of commercial fish harvest to the war effort. In 1943, Koerner produced “America’s Fishing Fleet and Men ... Assets to victory” (see Figure 5.1) and “Fish

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FIGURE 5.1  “America’s

Fishing Fleet . . . Assets to victory.” Henry Koerner, 1943

Permissions: Public Domain/​US Government Document

is a Fighting Food . . . We Need More” (see Figure  5.2). The posters romanticize industrial harvest with depictions of hard-​working American men loading fish bodies from bucket and net. The “Fish Is a Fighting Food” poster hints at a nostalgia of commercial harvest, with the masts of sailing vessels in the background, as two men offload a bucket of fish—​a method common in Atlantic cod harvest technologies in postwar New England, which seems to visually locate the meaning of the poster in a North Atlantic US waters context. Likewise, the color of the fish in the bucket suggests cod, seemingly confirming the geographic placement.3 The “America’s Fishing Fleet and Men” poster visually binds military need with harvest, depicting a warship in the background as three older white men—​too old, obviously, to serve the war effort as soldiers, so they do their part to provide fish to those able to serve—​extract fish from the same ocean on which the military vessel operates, binding ocean to these intertwined activities. In both images, the bodies of harvested fish are piled up, suggesting, on the surface, rich harvest opportunities, while also perpetuating narratives of ocean as holding endlessly abundant

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FIGURE 5.2  “Fish

is a Fighting Food . . . We Need More.” Henry Koerner, 1943

Permissions: Public Domain/​US Government Document

resources and devaluing the body of the fish as living organism. That is, the posters convey the evident propaganda message that the military needs fish while simultaneously reinscribing the foundational assumption that ocean resources remain endless. Clearly, too, the trappings of the masculine presence perpetuate not only ideologies that cast nature as being a resource for the human but also maintain masculine authority in the “man” and nature relationship. Not coincidentally, Koerner’s fishing posters were distributed the same year as the Office of War Information published a “Report on United States Fisheries” designed for news media to use as a single-​source overview of United States

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Fisheries.The report shows that “fish proteins are complete” (x), and that “six billion pounds of fish and shellfish will be needed this year to supply our men in uniform, our Allies, and ourselves” (x). The report encourages civilians to catch and can fish and provides resources for learning how to can fish at home. The report conveys that “The United States fishing fleet, handicapped by the requisitioning of craft by the armed services, the loss of manpower, and a limitation on materials, would have to provide in 1943 a billion more pounds of fish and shellfish that in any other year” (1). In its encouragement of civilian participation in harvest, the report also encourages fishermen to expand their harvest to fish traditionally less often sought for harvest: “sharks, skates, sea robins, mussels, and squid,” which the military hopes “will be seen more often in the markets” (7). This same year, Finley reports, “Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt administration, released a plan to assume complete control over the pilchard fishery on the West coast for the duration of the war” (“The Role,”). Reported in the United States Department of the Interior publication “Fishery Market News,” the takeover was intended to “ensure enough canned sardines for military, Lend-​Lease, and civilian requirements and increased quantities of sardine meal and oil” (1943, 5). In 1944, the “Fishery Market News” reported that Ickes approved “more than $3,500,000 of controlled materials and products destined for use in fishing vessels, engines, and shore processing plants” (1944, 17) to invigorate the fishing industry. As I  have noted, the global histories of industrial harvest are expansive and beyond the scope of this project, though they demand blue ecocritical attention in greater detail than provided here. Likewise, given the global perspectives and conflicts that surround industrial harvest as well as any other form of oceanic harvest, including subsistence and artisan harvest, one area ripe for blue ecocritical work is the contact/​conflict zone that emerges between industrial harvest ideologies and practices in relation to Indigenous ideologies and practices. Ranging from the technological histories and intersections between Paleoindian netting practices and contemporary industrial netting techniques to the localized legal and cultural conflicts regarding harvest rights—​for example, consider the tensions between recreational anglers and Indigenous peoples regarding salmon harvest rights along the Kenai River—​Indigenous voices stand to provide significant insight into and critique of industrial harvest practices. These are never simple relationships and how they unfold always makes evident the inconcludable separation of cultural imaginary and experimental practice and the reciprocal inability to retract those practices from informing cultural imaginaries. For blue ecocriticism, it is the larger role of representation that provides access to understanding the interactions between the placement of industrial harvest in cultural imaginaries and the effect such representations might have, then, on the human–​ocean interaction. In the United States, for example, industrial harvest maintains a particularly romanticized position in cultural imaginaries. Commercial fishing is often seen as a core aspect of Americana. From the Gorton’s fisherman logo used to sell frozen fish sticks4 to the New York Islanders professional

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hockey team’s 1995–​1997 logo, the image of the commercial fisherman familiarly represents commercial fishermen as white males, bearded to be rugged, wearing heavy rain gear to convey their battles against the elements. Locally, a similar icon is used by a chain of seafood restaurants. Consider, too, the romanticized depiction of commercial fishermen in Sebastian Junger’s best-​selling book The Perfect Storm:  A True Story of Men against the Sea and the subsequent blockbuster film version that aggrandized the image even further by showing the risks to human lives involved in catching fish for the American dinner plate. Only the bravest of men can be commercial fishermen (even if they are depicted as drunk and traumatized, they are still depicted as heroes), the texts imply. This is echoed, of course, in the popularity of reality television shows like Wicked Tuna, Deadliest Catch, The Trawlmen, Swords on the Line, Lobstermen, and all of the copycat television shows that have tried to capitalize on the popularity of commercial fishing reality TV. These contemporary representations of the human–​ocean interaction, though, remain anchored to the tropes of masculine conquest, ocean as barrier, thalassophobia, and vast resource that were prevalent in the literary works identified in Chapter 1, exposing the historical preeminence of such images and ideologies in Western cultural imaginaries. These tropes, though, are not confined to the literary and contemporary visual media. Other visual media, like painting, also often rely on images of commercial fishing boats in conversation with established images of cultural imaginaries, particularly in terms of the romanticizing of commercial harvest. Consider, for example, the works of marine painter Charles Napier Hemy including his 1888 painting “The Fisherman,” which depicts a lone commercial angler hauling a net. Or, Winslow Homer’s 1885 “The Herring Net,” which depicts two fishermen—​ dressed in fisherman’s foul weather gear much like the Gorton’s fisherman—​hauling a net laden with herring.The painting conveys the struggle of the two figures alone on the sea as they pull the net in rough waters. Homer, who had moved to Prout’s Neck, Maine, in 1883, regularly employed such imagery in his paintings—​“The Gulf Stream,” “The Fog Warning,” “A Basket of Clams,” and “Boy Fishing,” for example. Homer, of course, became known for his ability to depict ocean, in particular his representations of the human–​ocean relationship as many of his paintings depict an individual (or two in the case of “The Herring Net”) struggling against ocean conditions, as exemplified by “The Life Line” and “The Gulf Stream,” in particular. The traditions of representation that imbue these late nineteenth-​ century artists’ paintings, of course, are diffused with and among the same literary traditions I addressed in Chapter 1 of this book.Yet, those same images and positionings within cultural imaginaries extend across other media, as well. Consider, for example, Misc Games’ 2018 simulation game Fishing: Barents Sea.The game is a commercial fishing simulation game in which players start by operating a small fishing vessel and as they increase the size of their catches are able to upgrade equipment to increase their harvest further. Equipment upgrades include improved trawl technologies. Players can work their way through the levels of the game to command a large industrial

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fishing ship. Minigames embedded in the game play also include a fish-​cleaning challenge in which players gut their catches preparing them for market. This romanticizing is not limited to visual media. Consider, for example the popularity of Billy Joel’s 1990 hit song “Downeaster Alexa” on his album Storm Front, which bemoans the failings of the New England commercial fishing industry while casting the commercial fisherman as hard-​working American victimized by the restrictions placed on commercial harvest, suggesting that fishermen be allowed to harvest indiscriminately in order to make a better living. Joel has long been an advocate for commercial fishermen. Even Bob Dylan invokes romantic images of commercial fishing in “Tangled Up in Blue” (which would have made an even better title for this book): “So I drifted down to New Orleans; Where I was looking for to be employed; Workin’ for a while on a fishin’ boat; Right outside of Delacroix.” My intent in connecting these representative media to the political and economic complexities of industrial harvest is to initiate a consideration of the relationship between textual representations of industrial harvest and the positioning of harvest and ocean within cultural imaginaries. Clearly, even in this limited introduction, the examples I provide are inadequate to begin to explain the scope of this relationship. Yet, my intent is to establish that the representations of industrial harvest in relation to protein economies are engrained deeply in how we understand ocean and are tangled with technologies, economies, cultures, ideologies, and politics. These representations, too, construct strata of value assigned to nonhuman animals within these complex relationships and representations.

Blue animals Protein economies abstract the animal, the bodies of nonhuman oceanic organisms, renders them not-​animal, seafood not wildlife. They rob agency and subjectivity from the animal. Beyond the conundrum of protein economy in relation to the human–​animal interaction, marine animals—​particularly those that human politics and ideologies classify as food—​confound many of the inquiries of animal studies. For example, while it might be evident to include ocean organisms like cetaceans and some cephalopods like octopi in conversations about animal subjectivity, animal studies has been remiss in extending such considerations to nearly all fish species (with the notable exception of some but not all shark species), crustacea, and mollusks, for example. Ocean animals, that is, complicate the already complex taxonomical thinking that extends across biopolitical inquiry. Even Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich Disney/​Pixar film Finding Nemo gets caught up in the cultural reinforcement in the mantra “fish are friends, not food,” which gets turned on its head as the message is lost as “fish are food not friends”—​a phrase that has been adopted in social media like Facebook and Reddit for groups advocating fisheries harvest.The representations of fish, for example, as a primary functionary in human protein economies manifests in characterizing fish in bulk rather than as individuals within cultural imaginaries. That is, we tend to understand fish not as an individual

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animal but as an indefinable part of a conglomerate of other like organisms that make up an individual group or school. Harvest mentality drives this logic, as we tend not to think of a single fish outside of its school, outside of a harvestable mass. Even Finding Nemo seems to suggest that a fish independent of its school is at odds with the order of things. Consider, for example, Koerner’s representation of caught fish in his two posters. Neither image depicts a complete, single fish. Rather, we see each fish as part of the haul, part of the group. Global ocean harvest histories perpetuate the aggregation of individuals into a grouping. Contemporary fisheries management policies measure harvest in weight and total tonnage not in individuals.5 Similar ways of thinking that dominate aquaculture and maricuture farming of marine organisms further complicate the ability engage questions of subjectivity among industrial farmed fish, shrimp, and mollusks and confuse further the authenticity of subjectivity of the wild or the bred animal. Is the animal bred in farm animal? Imagine, for example, the value and insight animal studies might gain by applying Temple Grandin’s work in animal welfare and animal behaviorism in the livestock industry to the aquaculture and mariculture industry or to industrial fishing. Animal studies also theorizes as much about definitions of humanity as it has about definitions of nonhuman subjects, particularly form the perspectives of theorists like Wolfe, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. Yet their work, and that derived from their work, is complicated tremendously by the representation of and social construction of marine organisms. In his insightful synthesis and analysis of Derrida and Stiegler’s theories of nonhuman animal communication and the granting of subjectivity, Wolfe, in what we have to admit is an oceanic though less-​than-​fluid sentence, alleges that there is no doubt a vast qualitative difference between the developing modes of human exteriorization and “grammatization” and those of other species—​ a point on which both Derrida and Stiegler would agree—​ the animal behaviors and forms of communication we have been discussing are “already there,” forming an exteriority, and “elsewhere,” that enables some animals more than others to “differentiate” and “individuate” their existence—​and thus be “thrown”—​in a manner only possible on the basis of a complex interplay of the “who” and the “what,” the individual’s “embodied enaction” (to use Maturana and Varela’s phrase) and exteriority of the material and semiotic technicities that interact with and rewire it, leading to highly variable ontogenies, complex forms of social interaction, individual personalities, and so on. (Before, 76) Certainly, Wolfe—​ by way of Derrida, Stiegler, and Agamben—​ frames subjectivity in relation to communicative interaction. Yet, as this sentence shows, much of his attribution of such communicative interaction as “already there” suggests a kind of foundational understanding of what those interactions might entail and

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how their presence might make evident distinctions between communal existence and the conglomeration of individual agents—​be they communicating agents or noncommunicating agents—​in communal organization. Granted, I  have been arguing that because marine organisms are represented in communal organizational structures those representations complicate our ability to imagine individual ocean organism subjects and agents. Admittedly, such an argument betrays the desire to retrofit theories of terrestrial animal subjectivity into marine environments and frames aquatic organisms in preestablished terrestrial frames. Ocean frustrates other important theories in animal studies, as well. Haraway’s examination of diorama, for example, is difficult to apply to, say, crustaceans simply because crustaceans have not been assigned the value of being diorama-​worthy to the extent other animals have. Her remarkable work in When Species Meet and The Companion Species Manifesto:  Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness become more difficult to conceptualize when attributed to marine species like plankton, or if we wish to maintain anthropomorphic distinctions in levels of cognitive ability that are applied to the valuation of subjectivity, sturgeon or even, say, porpoises as is the case in the near-​ubiquitous representation of porpoises as intelligent and friendly. Certainly, there has been significant work regarding the individuality of fish, but much of this work remains the domain of ethology and the study of pain reception—​see, for example, Jonathan Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows:  The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins and Victoria Braithwaite’s Do Fish Feel Pain? I conclude here by returning to Wolfe’s playful jab:  “the shrimp are your problem” as a way of thinking through the relationship between representation and cultural imaginary. If as noted two paragraphs prior, Wolfe’s argument appears to demand that we bend theories of terrestrial animal subjectivity into marine environments, then “the shrimp are your problem” exposes this fundamental flaw. The designation of “your”—​though originally uttered in jest toward me—​reeks of the culturally entrenched understanding of ocean and ocean organism in a frame of possession. Of course, Wolfe’s tongue-​in-​cheek impromptu statement might be read as a good teacher encouraging me to think more complexly about biopolitics and shrimp, but it cannot be read out of the larger context of the relationship between representation and cultural imaginary. More to the point, the very notion of “problem” seems telling of that aspect of cultural imaginary. With this in mind, though, I turn to shrimp—​or prawn, depending upon your lexical preference and cultural reference—​as a matter of consideration of biopolitics and representations of ocean animals. On the one hand, it might be easier to turn to an ocean animal more readily part of the cultural imaginary, like a whale, porpoise, manatee, otter, seal, or octopus, animals we might dub as “popular.” Yet, Wolfe’s invocation of shrimp reminds us that the more “popular” ocean animals are the evident sites of critique and the less visible—​the unseen species—​stand to reveal much more about the human–​ ocean relationship. Likewise, we tend to be more sympathetic and empathetic to those popular animals given the way we have written them into cultural imaginaries. Wolfe’s work—​particularly that conveyed in Before the Law and Animal

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Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory—​opens the doors to considerations of biopolitics, the relationship between human and animal, classifications of higher and lower animals and animal subjectivity. But given his claim that “the effective power of the discourse of species when applied to social others of whatever sort relies, then, on a prior taking for granted of the instituation of speciesism—​that is, of the ethical acceptability of the systematic “noncriminal putting to death’ of animals based solely on their species” (Animal Rites, 7), (not to mention his detailed address of Ernest Hemingway’s writing without taking up any of Hemingway’s representation of ocean or ocean animals), considering shrimp reveals just how vexing the attribution of animal studies and ecocriticism’s land-​ based ideologies to marine animals is. Shrimp are critical contributors to human and nonhuman animal protein economies. In marine environments, shrimp are a primary forage for most animals larger than a shrimp, including nearly all fish species, as well as many cetaceans. Likewise, ocean scavengers rely upon finding shrimp detritus for substantial parts of their protein intake, including microscopic organisms that reside in the silt and mud of the ocean floor. Shrimp can be found globally, primarily in estuarine and inshore waters, but are found in waters as deep as 16,000 feet as Fenner A.  Chace and Donald P. Abbott have shown. The commodification of the shrimp body is central to human protein economies. While there are thousands of organisms categorized under the umbrella term shrimp, only about twenty of them serve human economic utility. Industrial shrimp harvest—​both wild shrimp harvest and farm-​raised shrimp—​continues to grow as global demand for shrimp increases. In the United States, shrimp harvest is the second highest earning form of commercial harvest, second to crab harvest. Globally, more than 3.4 million tons of shrimp are harvested, and in the United States more than 250  million pounds are harvested from the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic waters (American Shrimp Processors Association). While shrimp farming can be traced back to the fifteenth century in Asia, industrial shrimp farming took root in Japan in the 1930s.Technological advancements in the 1960s and 1970s elevated production efficiency, which contributes to lower market prices and drives an increase in daily consumption. These same improvements in harvest technologies subsequently made shrimp a commonplace item rather than a delicacy. In the United States, consumers eat more than 1.5 billion pounds of shrimp per year; shrimp is a common protein for just under half of the US population. Only about 10 percent of shrimp consumed in the United States are wild caught; most are farm raised. Most wild-​caught, never-​frozen shrimp are sold in regions adjacent to the coast; however, frozen shrimp—​both wild caught and farm-​ raised—​are distributed across the United States. Shrimp can be found on menus and in grocery stores across the United States. For example, Kyle, South Dakota, is the US city geographically furthest from ocean. Kyle has a population of 846 residents; Kyle has a single grocery store. Out of curiosity, I phoned Kyle Grocery and spoke with an employee there who relayed to me that they sell frozen seafood and that frozen shrimp are the most popular selling of the frozen seafood items.6 In a 2019 article in the New York Times titled with the important question, “What are

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We Supposed to Think about Shrimp,” Melissa Clark accurately sums up the US position on shrimp: “shrimp is a national obsession.” That obsession, though, also fuels serious questions about the environmental consequences of ever-​increasing harvest and aquaculture. Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood, and The Omega Principle:  Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet, conveys to Clark that “Shrimp breed like crazy and grow like bugs wherever there’s wetlands.”Yet, the last few decades of overharvest along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico have significantly depleted the populations of shrimp in those waters. But, as Greenberg notes, it’s not the shrimp themselves, as they are quite able to maintain populations even when harvested, but the devastation of the estuarine habitats in which they reproduce. Anthropogenic incursion in the forms of climate change, fertilizer runoff that creates large-​scale algae blooms and hypoxic zones, coastal construction and construction-​induced erosion, freshwater runoff and diversion, and other forms of pollution like oil spills have greatly reduced the viable habitats for shrimp. Likewise, and perhaps most publicly visible, shrimping is notorious for its bycatch. Clark reports that bycatch for shrimpers “can range anywhere from two to 10 pounds for every pound of shrimp caught” though the industry has worked to reduce those ratios by way of technological development such as turtle exclusionary devices (TEDs) (Clark, Melissa). That obsession manifests, as well, in an interesting positioning of shrimp in the US cultural imaginary as predominantly a part of protein economy not as animal subject. Consider, for example how devoid the textual world is of fictional shrimp, of shrimp characters whether anthropomorphized or not, of representations in art and other media, of representations other than that of shrimp as food. Certainly culinary art depicts shrimp routinely as object of desire and cuisine, rarely portraying shrimp as living animal but as cooked morsel. Even a simple Google image search turns up thousands of results depicting plates, grills, bowls, and pans cradling the bodies of skewered, fried, steamed, boiled, and chowdered shrimp before one comes across any image of a living shrimp or a shrimp in its native habitat. Clearly, shrimp are food not friends. Unlike representations of shrimp food porn, Chinese artists often depict shrimp, highlighted by the famed ink washed paintings of shrimp by Qi Baishi who is “one of China’s most celebrated modern master artists.” Reproductions of his Shrimps, which he painted in 1927, “are so popular that they are now synonymous with the painter himself. Whenever viewers see an ink wash painting of shrimps, they are mostly likely to utter the name Qi Baishi” (Shanghai Daily, A16). Similarly, William Hogarth’s The Shrimp Girl, is a rare artistic invocation of shrimp. Painted between 1740 and 1745, The Shrimp Girl depicts a young woman selling shellfish, including mussels and shrimp. Typically, it was the daughters and wives of fishmongers who would sell the shellfish, and in conveying this, the painting reveals a bit about the gendered roles of participants in protein economies. The portrait shows a young woman wearing a large brimmed hat, on which mussels, shrimp, and a measuring cup rest. The presence of the cup is indicative of the intent to measure out and sell

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the small animals. Interestingly, too, The Shrimp Girl was not made public until after the death of Hogarth’s wife Jane Thornhill in 1789 as it remained an unfinished work in her collection. The title was assigned to the painting not by the artist, but by Christie’s auction house when it was listed in its catalog during an estate sale following the death of Thornhill (Jones, Jonathan). Yet, few other representations infiltrate the cultural imaginary beyond connections to consumption. Such representations are highlighted by the famous shrimp scene and the role of shrimp in the 1994 film Forrest Gump, which includes the now iconic litany of shrimp foods as poetically delivered by the character Bubba Blue. The fame of the scene spawned the launch of the US-​based seafood restaurant chain Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, which features a cartoon shrimp as its logo. Note, too, the film’s romanticizing of the shrimp harvest industry, conveying the flair of Americana attached to the industry and the bravery and determination of the men who harvest wild shrimp. Shrimp are also minimally popular icons in the seafood industry, including their appearance in logos for seafood restaurants with names like The Drunken Shrimp, The Twisted Shrimp, and The Shrimp Shack. Other than Forrest Gump, fictional shrimp are scarce. I recall only a few named fictional shrimp characters: Pepe the King Prawn of Muppets Tonight, Jacques the cleaner shrimp in Finding Nemo, Da Shrimp (as part of the duo Lobster Mobster and Da Shrimp) in The Little Mermaid television series, Jumbo Shrimp from Fish Hooks—​all of which are produced by companies owned by Walt Disney Company, a company notorious for producing texts that influence cultural imaginaries—​Jumbo Shrimp, the enemy of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy in Sponge Bob Square Pants and the Sponge Bob video games, as well as the occasional unnamed shrimp that appears as a background character in Sponge Bob Square Pants. Most recently, the fourth episode of Disney’s Mandalorian the local population of the planet on which the episode is set harvest blue shrimp, and the first episode of the fourth season of Rick and Morty include a brief segment in which Rick appears as a shrimp version of himself. While we might attribute a cultural shrimp deficit to the inability to imagine shrimp as anything other than food, as individual independent of the colony or troupe, blue ecocriticism requires understanding the lack of representation of shrimp in any way other than as harvested food as bound to the inextricable relationship between representation and cultural imaginary. This explains, too, why the Jacksonville, Florida, minor league baseball team goes by the name “Jumbo Shrimp,” reflecting the importance of the shrimp industry in the region, specifically Mayport, Florida. That is, the Jacksonville baseball team is not named Jumbo Shrimp because shrimp exude the strength or prowess of an animal totem in the same way the Jacksonville Jaguars’ mascot does, but because of the economic influence shrimp have upon the region—​a different kind of totemic prowess. Consider, too, the inseparability of shrimp from adjacent aspects of global politics and economics other than harvest and consumption. For example, in many parts of the southeastern United States, shrimp is often prepared using a mix of spices known as “Old Bay Seasoning” currently distributed by the US-​based spice

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company McCormick and Company. The creation of the spice led to the development of many recipes and the popularity of shrimp as a culinary treat directly influencing increased demand and subsequent increased harvest. Originally developed by spice wholesaler Gustav Brunn—​a Jewish German immigrant who had been arrested during Kritallnacht, confined to Buchenwald, freed after his wife bought his release, and immigrated to Baltimore in 1939—​Old Bay is made of a mixture of celery salt, black pepper, red pepper, and paprika. Black pepper’s history is tied to Muslim trade routes and the Silk Road. Traded since before 1000 BCE, pepper’s global economic history is implicated in colonialism and cultural and economic conflict. Paprika’s history unfolded in the Americas, and the spice was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century, taking a dominant culinary role on Hungary, in particular. Perhaps most daunting, ne horrifying, in the politics of human–​ocean relations regarding shrimp and shrimp harvest is the 2014 revelation that implicates global shrimp harvest and farming industries in the abhorrent practice of using slave labor. Reported in both The Guardian and by the Associated Press, a six-​month investigation identified that shrimp harvesters and farmers in Thailand relied upon forced unpaid labor in the production of their shrimp. According to The Guardian, “the world’s largest prawn farmer, the Thailand-​based Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, buys fishmeal, which it feeds to its farmed prawns, from some suppliers that own, operate or buy from fishing boats manned with slaves” (“Revealed”). Likewise, writing for the Associated Press (AP), Martha Mendoza reports that the AP investigation identified “enslaved workers who were forced to peel shrimp in Thailand for up to 16 hours a day for little or no pay, and many were locked inside for months or even years on end” (“AP Report”). “If you buy prawns or shrimp from Thailand,” The Guardian claims, “you will be buying the produce of slave labour, said Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-​ Slavery International.” CP Foods supplies shrimp sold in Walmart, Carrefour, Costco, Aldi, Tesco, Kroger, and Red Lobster. The Thai fishing industry is so dependent upon slave labor, The Guardian reports, that human rights activists have predicted that the entire industry would collapse without slavery, thus, the Thai government has little incentive to intervene. The economic impact of industrial harvest is so large that human rights violations like those of the shrimp industry perpetuate in the name of financial gain. These abhorrent actions are not the only contributor to ocean fisheries abuse. As noted earlier, illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fisheries harvest takes significant toll on ocean populations. Published in the July, 2020, issue of Science Advances, Jaeyoon Park et  al.’s article “Illuminating Dark Fishing Fleets in North Korea” identify “widespread illegal fishing by dark fleets in the waters between the Koreas, Japan, and Russia” (“Illuminating”). “Dark” fishing boats operate illegally, blocking monitoring technologies, remaining dark, unseen by public monitoring systems to avoid international harvest regulations. To go dark, as I noted in the previous chapter, is to remain unseen, undetected. According to Park, the “challenges with dark fleets and IUU fishing are epitomized in the waters between North

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Korea, South Korea, Japan, and Russia, where geopolitical tensions and disputed boundaries create a vacuum of shared data and management” and are directly linked to tensions surrounding North Korea’s testing of ballistic missiles in the region (“Illuminating”). The research also addresses the decades-​long puzzle as to why North Korean “ghost boats” have been found for many years washed ashore along Japan’s coast abandoned or containing human remains. Given the economic competition for harvest in the region, particularly for the more than $440 million of Pacific flying squid that are harvested each year, Park et  al. speculate that larger more technologically efficient fishing boats from China are likely forcing smaller wooden ill-​equipped North Korean fishing boats to travel further from their homes to locate fish, resulting often in tragedy. As I  mentioned earlier, I  have been revising the final parts of this project while I  am under stay-​at-​home orders during the COVID-​19 pandemic. While one might think that shrimp were not part of the global pandemic conversation, on July 10, 2020, China suspended shrimp imports from Ecuador claiming that shrimp imported from three Ecuadorian companies tested positive for carrying the COVID-​19 virus. Seafood News, an industry news source founded by fisheries insider John Sackton, reports that in response to the claims Ecuador formed a COVID-​ 19 Oversight Taskforce within the Ministry of Production, Trade, Investment and Fisheries, the Ministry of Health, the Secretary of Quality and Control and the National Chamber of Aquaculture of Ecuador to investigate China’s claims. According to Seafood News, the virus was found on the outside of the shrimp packaging from three companies (Seafood News). Reporting for Reuters, Dominique Patton writes that Ecuadorian shrimp producers responded to the allegations that China was “tarnishing the reputation of the industry” and that China was exaggerating the potential risks (Patton). There is much more that can be unpacked about shrimp, much more consideration that brings questions of animal studies into conversation with blue ecocritical inquiries. Such conversations will open inquiry regarding the relationship between how ocean animals are represented textually and how those representations then inform the human–​animal and human–​ocean interactions. In a now famous essay published in Esquire in 1989, Joy Williams proposes a moral challenge regarding those interactions. In “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp: Just What Are You Doing to My Good Nature?” she questions our willingness to take up political positions in order to protect certain animals—​what Morey would identify as econic animals—​ rather than others. For Williams, shrimp epitomize the unprotected organism, the animal loved by humans but only so far as they are valuable in the protein economy. What Williams seems to be offering is a response to Wolfe: shrimp are necessarily our problem.

Notes 1 See Lee van der Voo’s The Fish Market:  Inside the Big-​Money Battle for the Ocean and Your Dinner Plate for a detailed expose on the seafood industry’s appropriation of

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environmentalist rhetoric to the end of financial gain and the masking of destructive harvest practices. 2 See Parker. 3 In the original color productions these colorations are evident; they are less so in the black and white reproductions included in this book. 4 Gorton’s of Gloucester is a subsidiary of Japanese seafood conglomerate Nippon Kaisha, Ltd. 5 To be fair, though, in many parts of the world, recreational fishing management policies do account for fish harvest by individual fish, identifying how many individual fish an angler might harvest. 6 I have to admit, too, that since Wolfe’s playful taunt, I’ve written three articles about shrimp for recreational fishing magazines.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed:  Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2016. —​—​—​. “Violet-​Black.” Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press. 2013. 233–​251. American Shrimp Processors Association. Frequently Asked Questions. www.americanshrimp. com/​frequently-​asked-​questions/​ 2014. Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Windup Girl. San Francisco, CA: Night Shade. 2009. Balcombe, Jonathan. What a Fish Knows:  The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins. New York: Scientific American /​Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. Braithwaite,Victoria. Do Fish Feel Pain? Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. Brown, Lester R. Eco-​Economy: Building and Economy for the Earth. New York: W. W. Norton. 2001. Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature:  A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago:  Haymarket Books. 2014. Chace, Fenner A. Jr., and Donald P. Abbott. “Caridea: The Shrimps.” Intertidal Invertebrates of California. Eds. Robert Hugh Morris, Donald Putnam Abbott, and Eugene Clinton Haderlie. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1980. 567–​576. Clark, Melissa. “What Are We Supposed to Think about Shrimp?” New York Times. October 15, 2019. www.nytimes.com/​2019/​10/​15/​dining/​shrimp-​sourcing-​united-​states.html Clark. Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge:  The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Dylan, Bob. “Tangled Up in Blue.” Blood on the Tracks. Columbia Records. 1975. Track 1. Earle, Sylvia. The World Is Blue:  How Our Fate and the Oceans Are One. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. 2009. Finley, Carmel. “The Role of Fish in the World War II War Effort.” November 18, 2013. https://​carmelfinley.wordpress.com/​2013/​11/​18/​the-​role-​of-​fish-​in-​the-​world-​warii-​war-​effort/​ —​—​—​. All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum SustainableYield and the Failure of Fisheries Management. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2011. Fishing: Barents Sea. Misc Games. 2018. Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2000. —​—​—​. Marx and the Earth: An Anti-​Critique. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2017. Greenberg, Paul. Four Fish:  The Future of the Last Wild Food. New  York:  Penguin Books. 2011.

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—​—​—​. American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood. New York: Penguin Books. 2015. —​—​—​. The Omega Principle:  Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet. New York: Penguin Books. 2019. “Revealed:  Asian Slave Labour Producing Prawns for Supermarkets in US, UK.” The Guardian. June 10, 2014. www.theguardian.com/​global-​development/​2014/​jun/​10/​ supermarket-​prawns-​thailand-​produced-​slave-​labour Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto:  Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2003. —​—​—​. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. Joel, Billy. “Downeaster Alexa.” Storm Front. New York: Columbia Records. 1990. Jones, Jonathan. “The Shrimp Girl, William Hogart (c1745).” The Guardian:  Portrait of the Week. September 15, 2001. www.theguardian.com/​culture/​2001/​sep/​15/​art Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm:  A True Story of Men against the Sea. New  York:  W. W. Norton and Company. 2009. Kurlansky, Mark. Cod: A Biography of the FishThat Changed theWorld. New York: Penguin,  1998. —​—​—​. The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. —​—​—​. “A World without Fish,” June 2011. www.wondersandmarvels.com/​2015/​10/​a-​ world-​without-​fish.html. Kurlansky, Mark, and Frank Stockton. World without Fish. New York: Workman, 2014. Mendoza, Martha. “AP Report on Slave-​Peeled Shrimp Spurs Calls for Boycott.” Associated Press. December 14, 2015. www.ap.org/​explore/​seafood-​from-​slaves/​ap-​report-​on-​ slave-​peeled-​shrimp-​spurs-​calls-​for-​boycott.html Park, Jaeyoon, et al. “Illuminating Dark Fishing Fleets in North Korea.” Science Advances. 6, no. 30 (July 22, 2020). . https://​advances.sciencemag.org/​content/​6/​30/​eabb1197 Patton, Dominique. “China Suspends Imports of Ecuador Shrimp on Coronavirus Risk.” Reuters. July 10, 2020. www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​health-​coronavirus-​china-​shrimp/​ china-​suspends-​imports-​of-​ecuador-​shrimps-​on-​coronavirus-​r isk-​idUSKBN24B234 Petersen, Wolfgang. The Perfect Storm. Warner Brothers. 2000. Psihoyos, Louie. The Cove. Participant Media. 2010. Saito, Kohei. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. 2017. Scully, Denys. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Third Series. Vol II. London: Offices of the Society. 1908. Seafood News. “Ecuador Forms COVID-​19 Oversight Taskforce after China Suspends Shrimp Imports from 3 Companies.” July 13, 2020. www.seafoodnews.com/​Story/​ 1175790/​Ecuador-​Forms-​COVID-​19-​Oversight-​Taskforce-​After-​China-​Suspends-​ Shrimp-​Imports-​From-​3-​Companies Severson, Kim. “A Peek at Your New Plate: How You’ll Be Eating in 2019.” New York Times. December 21, 2018. www.nytimes.com/​2018/​12/​21/​dining/​food-​trends-​predictions-​ 2019.html “Ink Wash Shrimps by the Master.” Shanghai Daily. October 16, 2016. A16. Stanton, Andrew, and Lee Unkrich. Finding Nemo. Pixar Animation Studios. 2003. Terzakis, Elizabeth. “Marx and Nature:  Why We Need Marx Now More Than Ever.” International Socialist Review. 109. (Summer 2018). https://​isreview.org/​issue/​109/​marx-​ and-​nature Accessed February 25, 2019. Voo, Lee van der. The Fish Market: Inside the Big-​Money Battle for the Ocean and Your Dinner Plate. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 2016. Williams, Joy. “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp: Just What Are You Doing to My Good Nature?” Esquire. February 1, 1989. 89–​95.

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Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2003. —​—​—​. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2010. —​—​—​. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago press. 2012. World Health Organization (WHO). “Availability and Consumption of Fish.” www.who. int/​nutrition/​topics/​3_​foodconsumption/​en/​index5.html n.d. Zemeckis, Robert. Forrest Gump. Paramount Pictures. 1994.

6 BLUE FRONTIERS

I fear I  have gotten in over my head. Jumped in too deep. But that is where I want to be. The linearity of writing, the spatial confinement of the codex, the scale of ocean entrammel the ability to express even the shore glimpse of blue ecocritical possibilities. Scaled in or out, ocean glides outside of fixity and the land-​based epistemologies of writing and publication wrestle it back to green moorings. I set off in this project to critique ecocriticism’s seemingly blindness to matters of ocean and to irritate its land-​based favoritism. My objective is to encourage deeper attention to representations of ocean not by adhering interpretation and analysis to the established methods of ecocriticism (as amorphous as they tend to be), methods founded in land-​based linear thinking, but by developing critical approaches that embrace the fluidity of ocean in order to tease out ecocritical limits. My critique of ecocriticism is not intended to imply that ocean is entirely absent from ecocritical work, but that ocean has remained a secondary concern in the ecocritical project, a second class citizen of the ecocritical domain, despite its ever presence in all matters terrestrial. Ocean’s specter haunts ecocritical attention and ecocriticism conveniently does not always see it. There is no literary history absent ocean; there is no cultural imaginary devoid of ocean or ocean’s Phantom. Undoubtedly, the waters of ocean representation are rich with artifacts that bring to light, bring to the surface, evidence of the cultural/​textual, linguistic/​ semiotic relationship between human and ocean. Like Garrard’s explanatory bifurcation of ecocriticism into the inextricably bound categories of the literary and the cultural, blue ecocriticism engages with the cultural and textual manifestations of representations of ocean in order to expand ecocriticism’s engagement with one of the Earth’s most substantial environments, which also faces some of the most pressing environmental crises on the planet.That is to say, ecocriticism’s ocean deficit renders ecocriticism as being akin to trying to describe an island without

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mentioning the water that surrounds it, giving it its very island-​ness. If ecocriticism maintains its expansive disciplinary mission that includes the consideration of the impact of the human upon the physical and biophysical environment, then it must necessarily question its own neglect of the significance of ocean in that project—​a point that Dan Brayton has expressed in his ecocritical reading of Shakespeare. As I  explain at the outset of this book, blue ecocriticism calls attention to the ecocritical neglect of ocean and punctuates the need to expand the ecocritical lens to account for ocean more substantially, specifically because of the immense corpus of literary and textual representations of ocean deserving of critical attention in support of the ecocritical project. Given the presumed relationship between those texts, the cultural imaginaries they inform, and the active results of those cultural imaginaries upon human actions regarding ocean, ecocriticism’s ocean deficit appears to dismiss—​or at minimum devalue—​the role of ocean in global ecologies and environmental crises. In The Sea around Us, Carson writes that “Many people have debated how and when the earth got its ocean” (Around, 3). Her statement is framed in chrono-​ geological scale seeking geological evidence of origins.Yet, the statement might be read metaphorically, as well, indicating a question not of geologic origin but of representational influence, a question of when the ocean became the “world’s ocean,” an identifiable thing seemingly independent of the world writ large. Now we must ask, too, when will ecocriticism get its ocean? Admittedly, my methodologies here have been liberal and scattered, but not, I hope, absent of direction or possibility. Nonetheless, they remain navigable despite my desire that they take up the role of wayfarer, meandering as a means of discovery and a method for identifying new routes not limited to the surface or confined by disciplinary and institutional oversight—​though, I  concede that the very fact that I circulate these claims in a book published by an established academic press belies that desire. No matter, I hope to have shown how blue ecocriticism might diverge form the linearity of ecocriticism’s terrestrial focus and emerge bestrewn within fluid epistemologies, as a submersive epistemology that is fluid, diffused, and corrosive, operating as transdisciplinary. Submersive epistemologies, I explained in Chapter 1, approach submersion as immersion not in a homogenous singular entity, but in a nascent compound in perpetual flux, the constitution of which shifts, mixes, and moves fluidly as components of the representational ocean fluctuate through time and scale. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the need for attention to ocean is more than an imperative. As Carmel Finley summarizes: Many ocean scientists are writing critically of their discipline and its failure to prevent the depletion of marine fish and whale species. There is enormous concern about the impact of human activities on the productivity of the oceans themselves. Scientists believe the growing concentrations of man-​made greenhouse gasses are driving irreversible changes in the ways the oceans function. The oceans produce half the oxygen we breathe and absorb

Blue frontiers  229

a third of the carbon gasses we produce. The waters are more polluted and more acidic, and dead zones are spreading. (All, 1) My intent here, then, is to urge ecocriticism to take to the sea.

Works Cited Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare’s Ocean:  An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press. 2012. Carson, Rachel. The Sea around Us. New  York:  Oxford University Press. 1950. Reprint 1989. Finley, Carmel. All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2011. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge. 2011.

INDEX

17th Street Surf Shop xiii 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves 20th Century Fox 29 20,000 Leagues beneath the Sea (film) 30, 57 Abbott, Bud xii Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein xii Abbott, Donald P. 219 ABC 117 abduction 10–​1 Abu Ali al-​Hasan 182–​3 Abu Hsuf Yaqub Ibn Is-​has 182 acidification 64, 66, 122 actor network theory (ANT) 145 admiralty law 209 Africa 54–​5, 65 Agamben, Giorgio 217 Akrich, Madaleine 145 Alaimo, Stacy xi, xiv, 7, 9–​10, 14, 27, 38, 39, 40, 50, 51, 58, 71, 72, 75, 77, 88, 90, 124, 127, 139, 140, 144, 145, 153, 155–​56, 157, 159, 193, 194, 196, 198, 202–​03 Albarn, Damon 158 Aldi 222 Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research 158 Allen, Irwin 29, 80 Allen, Timothy 91, 92–​3 ambient poetics 12–​4, 16, 23 American Historical Review (AHR ) 37 American Sportfishing Association xiii Amoroso, Ricardo O. 129–​131 Anders, William 104–​05, 108

Andersen, Hans Christian 104, 111, 114 Anderson, James A. 186–​87 animal studies 201–​03, 216, 217, 218, 219, 223 Apollo 17 105 Apotamkin of Passamaquoddy Bay 197 aquaculture 32, 128, 205–​07, 217, 220 aquarium view/​aquarium aesthetic 121, 122, 154, 164, 198 Arctic Ocean 119, 158, 159, 202, 212 Aristotle 182 Arola, Kristin 12 A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe 113 Asia  219 Aslan, Austin 54 Associated Press 222 Association for Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) 7 Atlantic Ocean xi, xiii, 24, 37, 59, 61, 112, 219, 220 Atlantis 65 Atwood, Margaret 26 Augé, Marc  62 Australia  69 Bacigalupi, Paolo 67, 204–​05 Badiou, Alain 157 Bad Religion 163 Baghdad, Iraq 117, 182 Baishi, Qi 220 Balcombe, Johnathan 218

Index  231

Ballantyne, Robert Michael 22–​3, 139 Ballard, J. G. 66–​7 Baltimore, Maryland 222 Banaba 65 Bangun 161 Barad, Karen 150 Barbados 208 Barenaked Ladies 163 Barlow, Zenobia 44 Barton, David 41 Bauman, Zygmunt 56 Bay of Bengal 55 Bay of Funday, Canada 165 Beebe, William xii, 29, 73 Below 197 beluga 166 Bender, Bert 25 Beneath the 12 Mile Reef 29, 30, 57 Bennett, Jane 150 Berlin, Irving 163 Bikenibeu 65 Bjork 155 Blackfish 194 black pepper 222 blue cultural studies 36, 37, 39 blue humanities 151 Blue Marble 104–​05, 106, 107, 119 Blum, Hester 37, 40, 69 Boeke, Kees 109, 112, 113 Bohr, Neils 184 Boyer, Dominic 33–​34 Bowers, C. A. 43, 45 Boyle, Robert 111 Bozalek,Vivienne  12 Braithwaite,Victoria  218 Branch, Michael 4 Brayton, Dan xiv, 1, 7, 8, 21, 41, 159, 228 Brazil 69 Bremerhaven, Germany 158 Brontë, Charlotte 24, 63 Brown, Lester R. 205–​207 Brun, Gustav 222 Brussels 166 Bryant, Levi R. 143 Bubba Blue 221 Bubba Gump Shrimp Company 221 Buchenwald 222 Buckaroo Banzai 98 Buell, Lawrence 4, 195 Buffett, Jimmy 163 Burger King 207 Burke, Kenneth 189 Burkett, Paul 204

Byron, Lord 2 2, 23 Bryson, Michael 26, 28, 29, 31 Callicott, J. Baird 117 Callon, Michel 145 Calvino, Italo 177–​78 Calypso xii Cameroon 55 Canadian Basin 159 Canavan, Gerry 3 Capra, Fritjof 42–​43, 44–​45 Caribbean Sea 59, 119, 121, 194, 202 Carrefour 222 Carroll, Lewis 96–​98, 154 Carroll, Michael 2 Carson, Rachel 22, 25–​32, 65, 66, 122, 139, 151, 155, 198, 228 Catlin Arctic Survey 119 Casey, Edward S. 62 Casio 164 CBS  117 Celloplast 137 Central Intelligence Agency 117 Center for Ecolitercy 42 Chase, Fenner A. 219 Chadwick, Paul 123, 153–​54 Chambers, Ian 57 Charlie Chan at Treasure Island xii Charoen Pokphand Foods 222 chemical pollution 32 Chesapeake Bay xiii Chesney, Kenny 163 Chiba, Sanae 137, 138, 158 Chicago, Illinois 114 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 22 China 69, 160, 162, 208, 223 chronological scale 27, 31, 32, 58, 94, 95, 113, 123, 145, 146, 148, 153, 195, 228 CinemaScope 29, 30 Clark, Melissa 220 Clark, Timothy 4, 6–​7, 9, 40, 46, 49, 66, 67, 75, 76–​77, 90–​91, 93–​94, 101, 109, 124–​125, 126–​127, 176, 203–​204 climate change 32, 52, 54, 55, 63–​68, 73–​74, 75, 125, 194, 220 CNBC 130 CNN 117, 130, 161 cod 18, 202, 212 Cohen, Margaret 16, 20, 25, 40, 89. Cohen, Michael p. 4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 17, 23, 98 colonialism 16, 21, 22, 24, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 88, 125, 202, 222 Colossus of Rhodes 5

232 Index

Columbia University 120 Concrete 123 Concrete 153–​54 Conrad, Joseph 18, 23 Cony Island, New York 151 Coole, Diana 144–​145, 150 Cooper, James Fenimore 18, 19, 20, 22, 23 Copenhagen, Denmark 111 coral bleaching 32, 122, 195 Cosmic Voyage 112, 114–​115 Cosmic Zoom 112–​113, 175 cosmopolitanism 63 Costco 222 Costello, Lou xii Cosway, Antoinette 24 Cousteau, Jacques xii, 30, 166–​167, 184–​85 COVID-​19 161–​62, 164, 166, 223 Cretaceous Seaway 65 Cretaceous Western Interior Sea xii Crow, Cheryl 163 Crow, Chris 20 Current Biology 196 Dagon 197 Dallmeyer, Dorinda G. 126 Darrin, Bobby 163 Darwin, Charles 22 Da Shrimp 221 Davidson, Donald 191–​92 Davis, Alexander L. 196–​97 Dead Calm 197 Deadliest Catch 215 de Certeau, Michel 62 decolonization 55, 56 Deep Blue Sea 197 Deep Rising 197 Deep Star Six 197 Deep Water Horizon 17, 195 Defoe, Daniel 23 Delft, Dutch Republic 114 Deleuze, Gilles 156 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 4, 35–​36, 48, 57, 59, 64–​5 Dennison, Julian 42 Depth 197 DeptH 197 derangement of scale 90–​1, 94, 95, 108, 109, 124–​125, 130 Derrida, Jacques 145–​46, 217 Descartes, René 183 Deterritorialization 56 diaspora/​diasporic cultures 15, 57, 64, 74, 125, 163 Dickens, Charles 24

Digital Confectioners 197 digital humanities 32, 34, 36 digital literacy 46 Disney 216 Drake 163 Duke University 193 Dürer, Albrecht 102, 104 Dutkiewicz, Stephanie 73–​4 Dylan, Bob 216 Eames, Charles 113–​14 Eames, Ray 113, 114 Earl, Sylvia 17, 118, 119, 155, 202 EarthFirst! 153, 154 Earthrise 104–​105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 119, 176 EarthScan 32 ecological literacy/​ecoliteracy  40–​57 ecocolonialism 88 Ecozon@ 37 Ecuador 223 Eddington, Sir Arthur 184 Egan, Grag 157 Eggers, Robert 20 Einstein, Albert 184 Eiseley, Loren 26 Ektachrome 185 electracy 46, 117 Empedocles of Agrigentum 182 Enceladus 2 Endless Summer xii energy humanities 32, 33–​4, 35, 36, 92, 207, 211 environmental humanities 7, 8, 32–​40, 44, 76, 139 Eritrea 208 Esquire 223 Euclid 182 Europa 2 Europe 222 Evans, Ron 105 Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 209 Extensible Markup Language (XML)  118 Facebook 216 Faraday, Michael 184 Farmer, John Stephen  68 Fidlar 163 Finding Dory 151 Finding Nemo xiii, 151, 216, 217, 221 Finley, Carmel 211, 214, 228–​29 fisheries law 209 fisheries management  32 Fish Hooks 221

Index  233

Fishing: Barents Sea 215 Fiske, John 152–​53, 156, 178 Fleischer, Richard 30 Flipper xii Flipper’s new Adventure xii Flores, Tatiana  35–​6 Florida xiii, 61 Florida Keys 31 Ford, Brian J. 110–​11 Forester, C. S. 18, 23 Forrest Gump 221 Foster, John Bellamy 204 Frankfurt School 5 Fraser, J. T.  114 Freeman, Morgan 114 Freire, Paulo 64 Friedner, Michele 167 frontier/​frontier mentality 16–​7, 18, 20, 21, 22, 88, 125 Frost, Samantha 144–​45, 150 Galloway, Alexander 189 Garrard, Greg 3, 4, 6, 7, 25, 49, 51, 227 Gasparilla Pirate Festival 10 Gaspar, José 10 Gass, William H. 24, 70, 71 Gattoni, Matilde 55 geographic information systems (GIS) 25, 89, 117 Ghana 55 Gia hypothesis 147 Gibbens, Sarah 73 Gibney, Elizabeth 166 Gilligan’s Island xii Gilroy, Paul 5 Gladstone, William Edward  69–​70 globalization 36, 38, 55, 56, 63 Global Fishing Watch  128 global multiresolution topography (GMRT) 120 Glotfelty, Cheryl 4, 5, 7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 74 Goldning, William  23 Gómez-​Barris, Macarena  12 Goodman, Steve 168–​170 Google 117, 121, 220 Google Earth 102, 104, 116, 117–​126 Google Maps 117 Google Ocean 119–​126, 140, 175 Gorillaz 158, 163, 164 Gorra, Michael 71 Gorton’s fisherman 214, 215 GouGou 197 Grand Banks 59

Grand Theft Auto (GTA) 120, 121 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTASA) 120, 121 Grandin, Temple  217 Great Lakes 19 Great Pacific Garbage Patch (aka The Pacific Trash Vortex) 159, 161 Greenberg, Paul 220 Green Day 163 Green Letters 7 Gulf of Mexico 57, 219, 220 Gulf of St. Lawrence 112 Gurevitch, Leon 102, 104 Hadow, Pen 119 Haglund, Richard F. 181–​84 Hanis 208 Haraway, Donna 43, 124, 145, 149, 152, 218 Hardin, Joe Marshall 164, 167–​68 Harding, Sandra 43 Hardy, Oliver xii Hardy, Thomas  24 Harman, Graham 141, 142–​43, 145 Hau‘ofa, Epeli 55, 59 Hawaii 53, 54, 59 Hayes, Nick 98 Hayles, N. Katherine 145 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 189 Heidegger, Martin 3, 108–​09, 124, 139, 194 Heise, Ursula 4, 6, 7, 9–​10, 56, 58, 62–​3, 106, 112, 116, 118 Hekman, Susan 144 Helmreich, Stefan 1, 10, 11, 105, 122, 123–​124, 125, 164, 167, 170, 191, 193 Hemingway, Ernest xii, 23, 219 Hemy, Charles Napier 215 Henley, Don 163 Henley, William Ernest  68 Heraclitus 60 Herbert, Frank 42 Hero of Alexandria 182 herring 17–​8, 202, 215 Hesiod 179 Heyerdahl, Thor xii, 30 Hines, Robert 31 Hirsch, E. D. 45 Hoekstra, Thomas 91, 92–​3 Hogarth, William 220–​21 Höhler, Sabine 164, 191 Hohn, Donovan 161 Holiday, Henry 96, 125, 15 Homer 69–​70 Homer, Winslow  215 Hook, Robert 110–​12

234 Index

Hordern, Nicholas 35 Horkheimer, Max 5 Horton, Zach 89, 138–​39 Hoyle, Sir Dref 109 Humboldt, Alexander von 26 Hungary 222 Hunt for the Wilderpeople 42 Huntington, Henry P. 52–​3 Huxley, Aldous 120–​21 Huxley, Thomas 17–​8, 202 Huygens, Christian 183 hydroelectric power 32 hyperobject 77, 94–​96, 145, 146, 147–​149, 162, 195 hypersea theory 147–​49, 151, 155 hypoxia 32, 63, 195, 201, 220 IBM 114 Ickes, Harold 214 Indian Ocean 59 Ingersoll, Karin Amimoto 53–​4, 58–​9 Iglesias, Luis 19, 20 illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) 32, 129, 222–​23 Impossible Burger 207 Indigenous peoples/​Indigenous methodologies/​Indigenous literacies 9, 14, 24, 34, 35, 42, 43, 46, 47–​7, 59, 64, 74, 90, 93, 106, 123, 124, 125, 149, 162, 163, 197, 214 Indonesia 162 Industrial harvest 209–​216 Ingersol, Robert G. 153 Instagram 188 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 65 International Communication Association 189 Intrinsic Graphics 117 Iovino, Serenella xiv, 7, 33, 37, 69, 115, 146, 149–​151 Isaura 55 ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 7, 37 Ivins, William  102 Jacksonville, Florida 221 Jackson, Wes  44 Japan 219, 223 Japan Agency for Marine-​Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)  137 Java 162 Jaws 30, 197 Jena, Manipadma 3

Joel, Billy 216 Johns Hopkins University 26 Johnson, Bruce 167 Johnson, Denis 25 Johnson, E. Pauline 197 Johnson, Jack 163 Jonas, Hans 176 Jones, Madison 117, 176 Journal of Experimental Biology 177 Joy, Eileen A. 72 Joyce, James 72 Jue, Melody xiv, 3–​4, 7, 69, 71, 77, 90, 119, 120, 121–​122, 123, 125, 139, 145, 146, 157, 164, 198 Jumbo Shrimp 221 Junger, Sebastian 215 Justinian 209 Kahn. Richard 163 Kagan, Jerome 34 Kenai peninsula, Alaska 49 Kenai River, Alaska 214 Kerridge, Richard 5–​6, 115, 175–​176, 195 Keyhole 117 Keyhole Earth Viewer  117 Keyhole Markup Language (KML) 118 Key West, Florida  30 Khan, Urmee 119 Killday, Bill 117 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie 131 Kincheloe, Joe L. 47, 49 Kindt, Matt 123 Kindt, Sharlene 123 Kiribati 65, 162 Klima, John 116 Knotts, Don 151 Kodachrome 185 Kodak 184 Koerner, Henry 211–​13, 217 Kolodny, Anette 21 Kon-​Tiki 30 Korzybski, Alfred 98 Kovach, Anette 50, 51, 52 Krech, Shepard III 49 Kribble-​Krabble  114 Kritallnacht 222 Kroger 222 Kroodsma, David A. 128–​131 Kuku 197 Kurlansky, Mark 210 Kyle Grocery 219 Kyle, South Dakota 219 Kyselka, Will  54

Index  235

labor 32, 67, 140, 163, 166, 204, 222 Lagos 69 La Pérouse, Jean François de Galaup, comte de 104 Latour, Bruno 102–​04, 106, 118, 145, 176 Laurel, Stan xii Law, John 145 Lecocq, Thomas  166 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van 114–​15 Legend of Zelda 120 Lem, Stanislaw 157 Leonard, Johnathan Norton 26–​7 Leopold, Aldo 3 Le Sage, Alain Rene 23 Leucippus 182 Leviathan 197 Levin, Lisa A. 177 Levin, Simon A. 90, 91–​3, 100, 101 Libya 208 Li, Cheng 38 Liet-​Kynes  42 Lievrouw, Leah A. 186, 187 Life magazine 110 light 175–​198 Little, Clark 194 Livingstone, Sonia 186, 187, 189 Lobstermen 215 Lobster Mobster 221 Louv, Richard 8, 41 Love, Glen 4 Lovelock, James 147 Lucan 55 Lucretius 145, 156, 182 Macedo, Donaldo 50 mackerel 18, 202 Magritte, Rene 98, 185 Maliseet 197 Malle, Louis 30 Malus, Etienne 183–​84 Manic Panic 163 Mandalorian 221 Manovich, Lev 102, 104, 106 Margulis, Lynn 147 Mariana’s Trench 14, 59, 137, 138, 141, 158, 159, 175, 194 Marine Policy 137 Marine Stewardship Council 207 Mario 120 mariculture 205, 206, 217 maritime humanities 36, 37, 39 maritime law 209 maritime literary criticism 37, 39 Marryat, Frederick 10, 18, 23

Mars 2 Marvin, Jefferey 114 Marx, Karl 204 Mauritania 55 Mayport, Florida 221 Mazel, David 4–​5 McCarthy, Cormac 72 McCormick and Company 222 McKibben, Bill 157–​58 McLuhan, Marshall 105, 106 McMenamin, Dianna 147–​49, 151, 155 McMenamin, Mark 147–​49, 151, 155 McNeill, Isabelle xii McCormick, Lillian R. 177 medical humanities 32, 34, 35 Mediterranean Ecocriticism 37 Mediterranean Sea 1, 5, 30, 35, 37, 57, 59 Megalodon xii Melville, Herman xii, 18–​9, 23 Mendoza, Martha 222 menhaden 18, 153, 202 Mentz, Steve 11, 14–​5, 16–​7, 18, 21, 22, 25, 35, 36, 37–​8, 40 Meyer, Timothy P.  186–​87 Miami, Florida 113 Micronesia 66 microcolonialism 123 microplastics 32, 157, 158–​59, 195 Microsoft X Box 121 Miéville, China 22, 121 Misc Games 215 Momaday, N. Scott 51 Monsanto 205 Moore, Charles 161 Morey, Sean 223 Morris, George 163 Morrison, Philip 115 Morrison, Toni  24 Morrison,Van  163 Morton, Timothy 3, 12–​3, 14, 77, 90, 92, 93–​6, 125, 139, 140–​141, 145, 146, 147–​49, 153 Moses 22 Mozambique 55 Münster, Sebastian 62 Muppets Tonight 221 Muspellheim 179–​180 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 63–​4 National Film Board of Canada (NFB) 112, 113 National Geographic 130, 184–​85, 190, 203

236 Index

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 193 Nature 166 Nature Communications 158 Neill, Sam 42 Nelson, Willie  163 neocolonialism 48, 49, 50, 52, 54 New England 20, 31, 212, 216 new materialism 12, 27, 139, 141, 144–​45, 149–​153, 155, 157, 159, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 176, 195 new thalassology 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 76, 151 Newton, Sir Isaac 183, 184 New York City, New York  67 New York Islanders  214–​15 New York Times 207, 219–​220 New Zealand 42, 197 Nixon, Rob 122, 162 NOFX 163 Norfolk,Virginia xii, xiii North America 202 North Carolina xiii North Korea 222–​23 North Sea 210 O’Brian, Patrick 23 object oriented ontologies (OOO) 12, 95, 138–​143, 145, 149, 157, 162, 170 ocean acidification 32 Ocean Conservancy 161 ocean deficit 8, 9, 14, 15, 35, 38, 39, 40–​57, 62, 74, 75, 89, 96, 149, 176, 196, 228 Ocean Research and Conservation Association (ORCA) 192 ocean rise 32, 147 Ocean Wise’s Marine Mammal Conservation Research Program 166 oceanic literacy 46 Oesch, Nicholas W.  177 Office of Strategic Services 211 Office of War Information 214–​15 Ogasawara archipelago, Japan 192 oil drilling 32 Old Bay Seasoning 221–​22 Open Water 197 Opperman, Serpil 6, 7, 33, 69, 115, 146, 149–​151 Orr, David W.  43–​5 Ottawa River 112 Outer Banks, North Carolina xiii Pacific Islanders 24 Pacific Ocean 37, 54, 55, 59, 65, 137, 159, 220

Pale Blue Dot 107–​108, 109, 119, 126, 175 Palmer, Jacqueline S. 131 Pandects 209 Pantone 68 paprika  222 Paravisini-​Gebert, Lizabeth  24 Pardon My Sarong xii Paris, France 102 Park, Jaeyoon 222–​23 Parry, J. H. 1 Passamaquoddy 197 Pastoureau, Michel 70–​1, 72 Patton, Dominique 223 Pearl Harbor 28 Pearl Jam 163 Peeken, Ilka 158, 159 Pepe the King Prawn 221 Perec, George 62, 96, 98–​100, 101, 102 Perera, Suvendrini 19–​20 personal protective equipment (PPE) 161, 162 Peterson, Brenda 67 Philippines 208 Picheta, Rob 161 Pierce, Charles Sanders 11, 124 Pioneer 197 pirate/​piracy xii, xiii, 10, 22, 32, 121 Pirates of the Caribbean 10 Pirzadeh, Saba 38 Pit the Elder 202 Pixar 216 Pizarro, Jordi 55 Planck, max 184 Plastic Beach 158, 163 plastics 14, 32, 137–​38, 153, 157, 158–​162, 164–​65, 194, 195 Plato 60, 182 Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor xii Portugal 202 postcolonial/​postcolonialism 24, 36, 38, 57 posthuman 34, 35, 67, 73, 93, 110, 192 posthumanities 32, 34, 35 posthumanism 12, 14, 22, 139, 141, 201, 203 posthumanist thought 14, 90, 106, 142, 145, 146, 162, 176, 185 Powers of Ten 112, 113–​14, 117, 154–​155, 175 Prakash, Madhu Suri 48 Prine, John 163 protein economy 66, 67, 201–​223 Prout’s Neck, Maine 215 Psihoyos, Louie 203 Ptolemy 182

Index  237

Puget Sound, Washington 153, 154 Purcell, Peregrine 35 Qiufan, Chen 72, 160 Queequeg 24 Quine, Willard Van Orman  191 Raban, Johnathan 15–​7, 24, 25, 63 Raitt, Bonnie 163 Rancière, Jacques 119 Reddit 216 Red Lobster 222 Red Sea 22 Republic of Kiribati 65 Republic of the Marshall Islands 65 Resilience 7 Reuters 223 Reynolds, Nedra 58 Rheder, Jocelyn 113 Rhetoric Review 12 Rhys, Jean 24 Rich, Adrienne 100–​101, 102 Rick and Morty 221 right wales 165 Riley, Glenda, 21 Rime of the Ancient Mariner 17, 98 Rise Against 163 Robbins, Harold 10 Roberts, Callum 161, 167 Robinson, Kim Stanley 3, 67 Rochester, Edward 24 Rock Star Games 120 Rolland, Rosalind M. 165 Routledge 32, 68, 71 Royal Observatory of Belgium 166 Rucker, Rudy 72 Ruiz, Iris D. 49, 52 Rundell, Katherine 151–​52 Russell, Henry 163 Russia 223 Ryen, Anne 51 Sackey, Donnie Johnson 12 Sackton, John 223 Saga of Eric the Red 16 Saga of the Greenlanders 16 Sagan, Carl 107–​08 Sailors Beware xii Saito, Kohei 204 Sánchez, Raúl 49, 52 San Diego, California 70 Saps at Sea xii scale/​scalar thinking 12, 13, 23, 27, 46, 47, 56, 73, 75, 77, 88–​136, 138, 139,

141–​142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 170, 175, 176, 183, 184, 195, 198, 201, 203, 204, 210, 220, 227, 228 Scandinavia 202 Schmitt, Harrison 105 Science Advances 222 Science Magazine 128, 129, 130 Scott, Walter  10, 23 Scribner, Sylvia 42 Scripps Institution for Oceanography  177 Seafood News 223 Seafood Source News 207 Sea Hunt xii Sea of Thieves 10, 121 sea rise 54, 55, 63–​8, 122, 162 sea shanties 163 Semali, Ladislaus M. 47, 49 Severson, Kim 207 Shah, Gopal 126 Shakespeare, William 7, 21, 23, 228 Sharknado 197 Shark Tale 151 Shell Global 193 shrimp 201, 217, 218–​23 Shrimps 220 Shubrick, William Branford  20 Siberia 159 Silfra 59 Silk road 222 Silko, Leslie Marmon 11, 27, 123 Silleck, Bayley 114 Silverstone, Roger 188 Sinatra, Frank 163 Sinbad the Sailor xii Singh, Mahendra 98, 107, 125 single use plastic bags 14, 137–​38, 141, 158–​159, 175, 194 SkyTruth 128 Slovic, Scott 4, 26, 69 Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum 114 SnapChat 188 Snow, C. P. 34 Soldner, Johann Georg von 184 Sound 163–​170 South Korea 223 Sphere 197 spiny dogfish 153 Sponge Bob Square Pants 221 Stabius, Johannes 102, 104 Stanton, Andrew 216 Starosielski, Nicole 160 Steinberg, Philip E. 4, 17, 23, 98

238 Index

Steingraber, Sandra 31–​2 Stevens, Edward 46 Stevenson, Robert Louis 23 St. Lawrence River 112 Stone, Michael K. 44 Storm Front 216 Strang, William  98 submersive epistemology 11–​2, 33, 34, 47, 54, 69, 70, 170, 228 Subnautica 197 Subnautica: Below Zero 197 Sullivan, Heather I. 74 Swift, Johnathan 23 Swords on the Line 215 Syndrom 95 Szasz, Eva 112, 113, 114 Szeman, Imre 33–​4 Table Mountain, South Africa 5 Tampa, Florida 10 Tampa Bay Buccaneers 10 Tarawa atoll 65 Tarpon Springs, Florida 30, 57 Taylor, Charles xii Taylor, E. G. R. 1 Teaiwa, Teresia  41 Tekahionwake 197 Terzakis, Elizabeth 204 Tesco 222 Thailand 204, 205, 222 thalassology 36 thalassophobia 58, 61, 196, 197, 198, 215 The Abyss 197 The Atlantic 27, 130 The Beach Boys 163 The Beatles 163 The Cove 30, 194, 203 The Creature from the Black Lagoon 197 The Guardian 130, 222 The Incredible Mr. Limpet 151 The Incredibles 95 The Journal of Ecocriticism 7 The Lighthouse 20 The Little Mermaid 221 The London Review of Books 151 The Meat Puppets 38 The New Yorker 28, 30, 151 The Reef 197 The Rift 197 The Sea around Us(film) 30, 57 The Seafarer 16 The Shape of Water 197 The Shrimp Girl 220–​21 The Silent World(film) 30

The Trawlmen 215 The Washington Post 130 Thomashow, Mitchell 90, 91, 93, 94, 122 Thornhill, Jane 221 Tidewater,Virginia  xiii Tillicum 197 Time magazine 211 Tobago 208 Togo 55 Tournachon, Gaspard-​Félix 102 Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) 52, 53 transnationalism 63 Trinidad 208 Tuan,Yi-​Fu 62, 194 Tunisia 208 Turner, Frederick Jackson 20–​21 Tuvalu 65, 162 Twitter 188 Underwater 197 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 208, 209 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 128 United States 69, 138, 160, 162, 165, 211, 214, 219, 221 United States Bureau of Fisheries 26–​7 United States Department of the Interior 216 United States Fish and Wildlife Service 31 United States Navy 20, 22 United States Office of War Information 211 University of Kansas xi University of Oregon’s Environmental Studies Program 33 University of South Florida xi University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences 129 Unknown Worlds Entertainment  197 Unkrich, Lee 216 Vartabedian, Becky 157 Vee, Anette 42, 46 Venezuela 208 Venice, Italy 114 Verdansky,Vladimir  I.  147 Vergara,Valeria  166 Verne, Jules xii, 22, 23, 30, 122, 125, 198, 202 Vietnam 208 Vimeo 188

Index  239

Virginia Beach,Virginia  xiii Vishnu 180 Voyager 1 107 Wagner, Robert 30 Waititi, Taika  42 Walmart 222 Walt Disney Films 30 Washington 153 water studies 68, 90 Wave Riding Vehicles (WRV) xiii Webb, Robert D. 29, 30 Weisser, Christian 142, 143 Western Interior Seaway 65, 123 White, Geoffrey 55 White, Lynn Jr. 179 Why Girls Love Sailors xii Wicked Tuna 215 Widder, Dr. Edith 192 Wigen, Kären 35, 37 Williams 223 Wilson, Neil 191 wind power 32

Wolfe, Cary 201, 203, 217, 218–​219, 223 wondrychoum 210 Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory 26 World Bank 65 World Health Organization (WHO) 176, 206 World War  II  29 Worldwatch Institute 205 World Without Sun 30 Wouk, Herman 23 XPRIZE 193 Yemen 208 YouTube 188 Zac Brown Band 163 Zalasiewicz, Jan 195–​196, 198 Zemblylas, Michalinos 12 Zoom 108–​115, 116, 118, 119, 125 Zubairy, M. Suhail 181–​84 Zuqar 208