Category: Oceans

Blog

Desalination and the Political (Blue) Economy of Climate Adaptation

Figure 1. Inside the largest seawater desalination plant in United States that produces 50 million gallon per day, located in Carlsbad, CA. Image © Brian F. O’Neill (2019).

A Blue Revolution?

Seawater desalination, the industrial production of drinking water from the ocean, is a practice of increasingly intense interest to thirsty cities across the globe. And why not? It promises the ability to provide a reliable water source that is (seemingly) invulnerable to climate change. What is more, the market is responding, with a global estimated value of roughly $18 billion[1] (c.f., Swyngedouw and Williams 2016). And there is significant expected growth, up to $32 billion (that’s about half the estimated size of the wind industry),[2] in the next four years.

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Conference Review

Seeing with Water: Reflections from the InterAsia Water(s) Graduate Conference at Yale University

Rains, rivers, tides, wells—waters, in their multifarious forms, have long shaped social worlds in and across Asia, as indeed in other parts of the globe. As the recent scholarship on its privatization, commodification, and trade, reminds us, water is a vital resource for human life. But it also exceeds such functions. Water mediates, reveals, nurtures, and obstructs social processes, as a site of mobility and immobility, cultural relationships and meanings, as well as political contestation and negotiations.

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Oceans

Ocean Justice

“Where we live, work, and play.” That’s the phrase environmental justice advocates have used for decades to reimagine the dominant meaning of nature. It’s meant to challenge the stubborn conception that the natures worthy of care are limited to unspoiled virgin forests and exotic creatures in the wild. The expression tries to interrupt the unthinking assumption that the environment is where people are not. It reasserts the truism that a human life is as sacred as a clear vista on a high mountain top.

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Oceans

Governance for the Anthropocene Ocean

In 2020, the world watched as climate, public health, economic, and racial justice crises converged. It has become increasingly evident that failures of collective and public policies around health and the environment have perpetuated individual suffering. If ever there was an opportunity for the collective to re-think business as usual… it is now. We are firmly situated in the Anthropocene: a time in which human activities are arguably driving our climate and changing environment. The ocean is not exempt from these human influences. Indeed, human energy demands and associated carbon emissions, unsustainable extraction of living and non-living marine resources, land-based activities, and natural processes are contributing to significant changes in marine and coastal environments. These changes include the persistence of plastic waste in most, if not all, ocean ecosystems and species, reduced oxygen and lower pH levels in coastal waters, unprecedented shifts in the range and distribution of marine species, and sustained elevated  ocean temperatures over time and space, among others. These conditions exemplify what we are now calling the Anthropocene Ocean. The Anthropocene Ocean is also occurring amidst rapidly changing societies and associated limits to land-based industrial expansion; feeding an emerging narrative about the economic potential of the ocean and its resources (Campbell et al. 2016). Our rapidly changing ocean is also now perceived as the next frontier for growth and expansion of our global economic system.

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Oceans

Fish, Men, and Sea

“More to Sea” is a photojournalism project I engaged in May 2018 to June 2019. This project was an independent project, which was done after I graduated in a marine governance course. I’m currently a PhD student at Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Technology in Sydney where I study livelihood sustenance of small-scale fishers and local food systems. With More to Sea, I aimed to learn how small-scale fishers were doing. Photographs were combined with fishers’ stories and published on a website (moretosea.nl) and social media. An ebook is about to be launched by Too Big To Ignore, which discusses problems faced by fishers, solutions found, and future scenarios. For the EnviroSociety blog, I have created this short video which shows a number of quotes and photos of fishers that illustrate relations to fishing livelihoods, and people’s knowledges of their environment.  

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Oceans

Shifting Baseline and Factish Resilience

The 1949 Fisheries Law in Japan underwent a historic revision in 2018, which went into effect in December 2020. The revision included the further application of science-based resource assessment, the introduction of the Individual Quota (IT) system, the expansion of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) to more commercially targeted species, and the loosening of the entry restrictions to open fisheries to private companies. While the inclusion of scientific knowledge and approaches could deepen our understanding of oceans and marine species in the Anthropocene, most coastal fishing communities in Japan, whose fishing operation is local and cooperative-based, could find this revision a threat to their communal livelihoods due to its  emphasis on rationalized single species-oriented approach to management, rather than a relational multi-species approach for their community wellbeing. This short essay aims to supplement and contextualize my recent article in Environment and Society (Hamada 2020) with the current state of Pacific herring fishery in Japan.

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Oceans

Lines in the Water: Thinking about access, tenure, and practice in traditional marine hunting communities

The sun beats down from a muggy, overcast sky. It turns the small hummocks of a calm ocean to a hammered pewter sheet as far as the eye can see. I sit towards the front of the boat with the harpooner’s assistant squinting out at the waters of the Savu Sea. It’s the end of a long hunting day on the water and we will soon call it quits and head home to Lamalera empty-handed after following a pod of sperm whales moving eastwards. We’re the farthest I have been out this season, but as I look north to the island, we are still directly south of the small peninsula of Atadei, on Lembata’s southern coast. At this moment I realize the endurance of Lamalera’s previous generations of marine hunters: as far as we have come, we are nowhere near the edge of the community’s historical hunting range.

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Blog

Thinking about Ownership of the Sea

The notion of property has had many accolades assigned to it. In some iterations, it is the bringer of freedom (Anderson and Huggins 2003); in others it is a wielder of power (Underkuffler 2003). It is also a way of distinction between culture and nature, boiled down to the ownable and unownable. Land, a cultural prism, has long been an easily divisible and ownable space, whereas the sea, in its distant bubble of “hypernature,” has never been for individual ownership (Helmreich 2011; Jackson 1995). (I speak here of course for our modern Western society; individuals and communities have apportioned and “owned” coastal areas in numerous cultures across centuries [see, e.g., Mulrennan and Scott 2000]).

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