Oceans

Exposure to natural environments can have calming and stress-reducing effects on humans. Moreover, previous studies suggest that these benefits may be greater in areas with higher species richness. Our study took advantage of a "natural experiment" to examine people's behavioral, physiological, and psychological reactions to increases in levels of marine biota in a large aquarium exhibit during three stages of restocking: Unstocked, Partially stocked, and Fully stocked. We found that increased biota levels were associated with longer spontaneous viewing of the exhibit, greater reductions in heart rate, greater increases in self-reported mood, and higher interest. We suggest that higher biota levels, even in managed settings, may be associated with important well-being and health benefits, particularly for individuals not able to access the natural analogues of managed environments.

The ocean is a vast series of diverse yet interconnected ecosystems.  Ocean waters cover the majority of the planet and are home to countless varieties of life.  The volume of living space provided by the seas is 168 times greater than that of land-based habitats; 90 percent of earth’s living biomass is in the sea (Clark 2006). Despite this opulence, ocean life is in peril, but unlike other threatened ecosystems, the impending oceanic crisis is largely unseen and largely unmentioned even among environmentalists.  While animal advocates and environmentalists rally on behalf of dolphins, seals, and whales, neither group seems too worried about Chinook salmon or Atlantic halibut—but they ought to be.

Following Barcode vs Plastic Waste, supermarkets would be responsible for all plastic recollection associated with products they sell, while Public Administration would maintain the duty of control: a barcode which identifies any item sold, and offers the possibility to track all plastics, containers or packaging.
We would be able to track weights and types of plastic material, sold in each purchase along with the products.

La surexploitation désigne un état de prélèvement des ressources naturelles qui dépasse la capacité de renouvellement naturel. En d’autres termes, une surexploitation continue peut conduire à la complète destruction d’une ressource. La surexploitation des écosystèmes marins menace dangereusement la biodiversité : le thon rouge de l’Atlantique ou de la Méditerranée avait par exemple disparu de la Mer Noire et était menacé d’extinction en 2007. En 2002, au sommet de Johannesburg, les acteurs présents ont lancé un programme de réduction de la surexploitation et de réhabilitation des ressources halieutiques d’ici 2015. Douze ans plus tard, et un an avant la fin du programme, la situation est grave.

El clima de la Tierra ha cambiado muchas veces de maneras diferentes a través de su historia geológica, y hablamos de unos miles de años. Hoy en día existe una “presunción” que señala a la actividad humana, principalmente bajo la forma del aumento en las concentraciones de gases de efecto invernadero (GEI) en la atmósfera, como una presión inexorable sobre el sistema planetario que gobierna el clima de la Tierra, lo cual incrementa preocupaciones alrededor de la posible reacción abrupta del clima o patrones de precipitación que haría difícil a cualquier sociedad humana adaptarse.
Ésta es la percepción generalizada del público en cuanto oye las frases de “Cambio Climático” y “Calentamiento Global”. Algo alarmante, y me refiero a esta idea apocalíptica concebida y que gira alrededor de los cambios del clima terrestre, a lo que se suma el uso indiscriminado, incluso por parte de los medios de comunicación, de estos términos como si fuesen, en ocasiones, lo mismo.

In the twenty-first century, human-caused changes are being recorded at an unprecedented scale in the oceans, radically transforming our perception of the oceans and seas. Initially seen as a space outside of society, the ocean has become a theatre of geopolitical, economic and environmental struggles that often treat the sea as ‘land’. At the same time, there is a growing consensus among scholars that terrestrial models of land-use planning are inappropriate for maritime governance. As oceans differ in function and space from terrestrial systems, the environmental and societal processes need a more holistic approach to conceptually grasp the oceans’ relevance to humanity. In this welcome scholarly move, anthropologists have more recently focused on exchanges and interactions between humans and the environment, oriented towards the ocean and marine ecology as a space of anthropogenic interference with natural processes. This chapter shows that maritime anthropology is no longer a marginal or peripheral niche, but an important vector in global connections and globalization, involving maritime‒marine and nature‒human dimensions, not only historically and in the present day, but from a future-oriented perspective as well. 

Keywords: maritime anthropology, marine ecology, human‒nature interactions, maritime connectivity, oceans

Over the next ten years, the United Nations has invited the global community to think about, and make decisions concerning, the future of our oceans in a way that has not been afforded to other significant revolutions in our human development. Within the profoundly anthropocentric aims and methodologies of this ocean decade, it is negligent to not more explicitly consider our human narrative shared with our oceans as an essential component to understanding a more complete picture of coastal and ocean sustainability. Our human narrative shared with the ocean is essentially immersed within a particular world view which provides the very framework and context to this global endeavour. In the face of plundered and acidified oceans, we ought to be asking whether a continuation of this paradigm is in our best interest at all? I reflect on how the current state of our oceans is a direct reflection of our colonising relationship with the ocean as a mere resource. This paper comprises my mediations concerning the colonisation of our oceans even when our aims are toward a sustainable development. I have chosen to draw on a number of feminist philosophers to appropriately reflect the undeniably gendered cultural narrative we have shared with our Mother ocean. I go on to propose a blue ecofeminism as a possible emerging perspective within the established scholarship in feminist environmental philosophy to more wholistically contribute to the Decade of Ocean UN discourse.

http://www.bekapital.com/#!The-Ocean-Wild-like-an-Organ-Played-Jack-Kerouac%E2%80%99s-World-Ocean/c1ze1/5564437c0cf21fee13b63719
The first road Jack Kerouac dreamed of as path to the world and as an awakening call to his vocation as writer was not highway but ocean.  As he worked on a draft of his first novel in 1942 at the age of twenty, he wrote, “Into this book, ‘The Sea is My Brother’ I shall weave all the passion and glory of living, its restlessness and peace, its fever and ennui, its mornings, noons and nights of desire, frustration, fear, triumph, and death…”  The sea-as-road Kerouac dreamed of-- while still a student at Columbia in New York City where he had begun to meet those life-hungry writers like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs who would form the subterranean homesick Beats-- was huge, world-encompassing, sweeping across the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean down to the Caribbean and around to the Pacific:  “…the old ports of Spain and Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, Sidney, New Zealand; and Rio and Trinidad and Barbados and the Cape; and Panama and Honolulu and the far-flung Polynesians…”  The Sea Is My Brother, “the lost novel” published belatedly in 2011, survives as a rough sketch of those ever-early energies, drives, dualities, dreams, flights, hints at the style and scope that would give the world the amazing body of work in prose, poetry, and prose poetry that Kerouac wrought.

Phylotectonics is the study of descendant/antecedent relationships between continents, paleocontinents, and terranes based on their plate tectonic history.  This "Tectonic Tree" diagram illustrates the phylotectonic relationships of the major continents, paleocontinents, and terranes during the last 1.5 billion years.  For a description and discussion of how this diagram was created see Scotese (2017) , "Atlas of Oceans  & Continents: Plate Tectonics 1.5 billion years - Today."

Oceans, Space and Society: Towards a Blue Sociology
Felicity Picken, Palgrave Macmillan Press.

Oceans remain among the least measured, formatted and socialised spaces on Earth (Latour 2005). While marine-related sciences, archaeologists, geographers, historians and cultural theorists have become active in bringing oceans to the fore, there is no sociological work that attempts to do this. Consequently, sociology remains land-locked (Lambert et al. 2006) and subject to a land bias (Peters 2010) that has not only limited its utility in explanations of ocean space, but also denied it a laboratory with the potential to unlock established habits of thought. Theories about society are, by default, theories about the conditions of life on land and this statement appears utterly banal until a social life beneath the sea is contemplated. This book illustrates this position by demonstrating how forays into ocean space not only construct new relationships between humans and nature and new experiential dimensions, but also highlight the primacy of land-based co-ordinates in theorising ourselves and apprehending our place in the world. The book is also timely, since never before has there been such interest in, and earnest contemplation of, undersea worlds. These are now understood as serious contenders in climate change solutions, as spaces of refuge in the face of environmental extremes and uncertainty on land.

This book provides an opportunity for scholars in the human sciences and educated readers more generally to familiarise themselves with a social space that is truly emergent, not yet properly invented or constructed, but gaining importance as life on a blue planet is more fully considered. As an emergent social space and field of inquiry, undersea is highly instructional in the social life of extreme environments and, conversely, the less extreme conditions of life on land that are taken for granted. The 21st century has witnessed an explosion in underwater imagery, in scuba diving as one of the fastest growing recreational pursuits and in aquaria, penetrating everyday spaces or else much bigger spaces, holding entire undersea ecosystems on land. Undersea is also host to elaborate and unprecedented levels of underwater development as the built environment is also being seeded undersea in underwater museums, art galleries and hotels. These are no longer dreams but are developing at pace in both the global north and south culminating in the construction of self supporting underwater habitats in anticipation of climatic induced transformation and need for alternative living space .
All of these are forging new cultural economies, new social worlds and human experiences that have not yet been assembled in such a way that their effects can begin to be understood or anticipated.  With cases spanning offshore Cancún, through to Florida Keys and the Maldives, to occupied France in WWII and Swiss engineering in Dubai, this book traces the way in which people have begun to be interpolated by life beneath the sea, with the explicit aim of composing the beginnings of a blue sociology.
This book is distinctive in possessing three unique attributes:

• Substantially, it is the first to undertake a sociological analysis of underwater worlds and to develop an understanding about how these are performed and their transformative capacities.
• Sociologically, it is the first to investigate the importance and limitations of land to established ideas about human identity and social life.
• Methodologically, by attending to social life in a forcefully interactive space like the ocean, this book draws upon contemporary social theory to provide a relationally material account of society when it cannot avoid the indifference of non-humans. 

These attributes form the basis of a critically constructive examination that enlivens contemporary sociological debates about human-nature relations in contemporary contexts. These debates include the place of non-humans, ontological knowledge and post-humanism in the real and anticipated threat of environmental crises; in the emergence of new cultural economies based on oceanic space and in the promises and challenges of life on a blue planet. The book produces a platform from which radical implications for both the discipline of sociology and the ‘futures’ in which it increasingly works are made evident. These will be relevant and translatable to the social sciences generally, to interdisciplinary field of oceanic studies and to the growing interest in Science and Technology Studies, as well as educated general readers.

All undersea interventions are highly technological, scientific and social in dimension and this privileges new sociological approaches that treat science and technology, nature and humans symmetrically. Crucially, blue sociology can only be oxygenated by attending to the deployment of heterogeneous materials in social analysis, not least of which is the very lively, and to humans the life depleting, proposition of oceanic nature itself. This validates social investigations that aim to accommodate new members of society - an extended democracy of things (Latour 1991/1993) - where life on and within a blue planet is an entirely collaborative affair.

The book employs contemporary sociological approaches including Actor-Network Theory, Post humanism, Post sociality and Relational Materialism, as described by key theorists in this field including Bruno Latour, John Law, Michelle Serres,  Nigel Clark and John Urry.

Increased interest in oceans is leading to new and renewed global governance efforts directed toward ocean issues in areas of food production, biodiversity conservation, industrialization, global environmental change, and pollution. Global oceans governance efforts face challenges and opportunities related to the nature of oceans and to actors involved in, the scale of, and knowledge informing their governance. We review these topics generally and in relation to nine new and emerging issues: small-scale fisheries (SSFs), aquaculture , biodiversity conservation on the high seas, large marine protected areas (LMPAs), tuna fisheries, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification (OA), blue carbon (BC), and plastics pollution.

The early 1990s brought sweeping changes to the ways in which uses of the ocean are governed in Canada. At that time, the federal government signalled its intention to move away from the highly centralized fisheries management regime that it had employed in the past. In its place, there emerged a comprehensive new ocean management regime that was intended to encourage the development of other ocean industries and bring Canada’s domestic legislation into conformity with policy discourses that had become institutionalized through the Rio Earth Summit and subsequent UN conferences. Most prominent among these are: “sustainable development,” “the ecosystem approach” and an emphasis on the active participation of “civil society” in environmental management. This dissertation explores the ways in which this new policy approach has been engaged with and, in some cases, contested by variously positioned actors in eastern Newfoundland. I argue that what are ostensibly global managerial discourses are being reshaped within particular localities in support of very different, and often incommensurable, agendas. This suggests that ocean planning is not a value-neutral enterprise, but a politically charged conversation, the outcome of which will have significant and lasting ramifications for those living and working along the coast.

The hunting of small cetaceans (i.e., all toothed whales, except the sperm whale) for food or fishing bait is far more widespread than most people realise. While in recent years public attention has focused on hunts in Japan (specifically in Taiji) and the Danish Faroe Islands, small cetaceans are deliberately killed at similar or even higher levels in several other regions. Overall, approximately 100,000 small whales, dolphins, and porpoises are intentionally killed each year worldwide. In most cases, these are unregulated, or even illegal, hunts. Typically, they are unsustainable and poorly documented and their impact on populations is unknown. Where legislation is in place, appropriate control and rigorous enforcement measures are often lacking. This report aims to give a global overview of the scale of small cetacean hunts, the number of individuals and species targeted, and their ecological impact.

Plastics, owing to their various beneficial properties (durability, flexibility and lightweight nature), are widely regarded as the workhorse material of our modern society. Being ubiquitously and increasingly present over the past 60 years, they provide various benefits to the global economy. However, inappropriate and/or uncontrolled disposal practices, poor waste management infrastructure, and application of insufficient recycling technologies, coupled with a lack of public awareness and incentives, have rendered plastic waste (PW) omnipresent, littering both the marine and the terrestrial environment with multifaceted impacts. The plastic marine litter issue has received much attention, especially in the past decade. There is a plethora of articles and reports released on an annual basis, as well as a lot of ongoing research, which render the issue either to be overexposured or misconstrued. In addition, there are several misinterpretations that surround the presence and environmental impact of plastics in the oceans and, consequently, human health, that require much more critical and scientific thinking. This short communication aims at unveiling any existing misconceptions and attempts to place this global challenge within its real magnitude, based either on scientific facts or nuances.

Plastics are nowadays considered to be the workhorse material of our modern society with an ubiquitous presence that has increased manifold over the past 60 years, providing several benefits to the global economy. However, inappropriate and/or uncontrolled disposal practices, poor waste management infrastructure and application of insufficient recycling technologies, coupled with a lack of public awareness and incentives, have rendered plastic waste omnipresent, littering both the marine and the terrestrial environment with multi-faceted impacts. This short communication/commentary aims at delineating the plastic litter global challenge providing, at the same time, scientific views and perspectives on properly dealing with this material type, both upstream and downstream.

The called today "Athlantic Ocean" was not designed in the Antiquity by the addition of these two concepts. They mean two different conceptions of the world. There were also another expressiones for designe it, like "Exterior sea ". El lejano Oeste fue escenario no bien conocido, desde luego, pero de mención inevitable en el desarrollo de los mitos griegos. Particularmente importante fue la ubicación prácticamente definitiva de las Columnas de Hércules en el estrecho de Gibraltar. Pero precisa¬ mente Hércules había sido, según sus andanzas míticas, uno de los héroes del entorno olímpico más relacionado con dioses extraolímpi-cos tanto del grupo de los titanes como del reino de Hades. Es por otra parte una evidencia que el reino citado que lo es de la obscuridad, del fin de la ecumene, etc. tenía que acabar por aposentarse en el extremo más occidental posible del mundo por la propia mecánica interna del mito. De otro lado, ha sido estudiada la relación semántica entre Tâprapoç y Tapxrioaôç1. Igualmente veremos que el anochecer del mundo era morada de Titanes, no de Olímpicos. 1 Cf. Str. III, 2,12; J. Vara. ¿Tàpxapoç origen, en forma y función de TapTncroôç? Zephyrus XXXIV-XXXV, 1982, p. 239 s.; cuyo pirronismo no compartimos; E. Gangutia, "La Península Ibérica en la tradición homérica", Actas VIICEEC, ID ed. Madrid, 1989 p. 105.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has developed an AUV docking station for a 21-inch (54 cm) diameter AUV. The system was designed for operation with cabled undersea observatories in water depths up to 4 km deep and has been demonstrated in the open ocean, though at much shallower depths. The program demonstrated successful autonomous homing and docking, data downloads, uploading of new mission plans, battery recharging, and complete power cycling of the AUV. We describe the design, and at-sea tests.

How might we better care for, and with, the harbour? What modes of transdisciplinary practice, within and outside academia, including art and activism, might best support this care-work? These were driving questions for the Sustaining the Seas conference's postgraduate workshop, Speculative Harbouring, held in Blackwattle Bay in September, designed by Dr Kate Johnston and Dr Susanne Pratt. This paper will reflect on the transdisciplinary aspects of this two day walkshop/workshop in which a “Speculative Harbouring” experimental field guide was produced by postgraduate students. Through tangible practices of making, alongside critical questioning, the workshop created space to engage with some of the less cared for aspects of Sydney Harbour, from the microscopic underworld to the often-obscured cultural layers.

The genre of the field guide was loosely employed, and critiqued, to question privileged perspectives and ways of sensing. Prior to the creation of the guide, each participant was invited to draw on their disciplinary expertise and share a method for observing matters of care in Blackwattle Bay. This paper will suggest that by sharing our different disciplinary modes in relation to a tangible thing, which we were constructing together (a field guide), we had an expansive engagement with, and conversations about what Blackwattle Bay was, is and could be. Alongside walking with, and learning from, Blackwattle Bay interlocutors, the speculative guide enabled us to open a conversation about ecological and social justice futures. It encouraged us to consider how to think about, and harbour, a future that incorporates human and more-than-human justice.
~ Dr Kate Johnston (Department of Gender and Cultural Studies / Sustainable Fish Lab, University of Sydney) and Dr Susanne Pratt (Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation, University of Technology, Sydney)

The oceanic turn offers an elaboration of and corrective to various theories of world literature. Oceans constitute the inaugural global space and chime with models of world literature as a circulatory system, but they also trouble such definitions with apprehensions of unfathomable depths. Readings that track the southern-going ships of imperial and global expansion and extraction register the production of the world-system without re-centering the Euro-Atlantic literary marketplace. Rather than locating the postcolonial or the indigenous as peripheral or exotic, they attend to literatures immersed in zones of interfusion and which harbour world-making practices of connection, cosmopolitanism and hospitality. Oceanic literatures are also uniquely situated to move between the scales of the local and the planetary and are alive to multispecies relations in ways that expand and thicken conceptions of the world.

This report demystifies the Blue Economy and why it matters.  While focusing on the Caribbean, it lays out a global blue economy governance framework that is being used by countries across the world to better balance ocean health and ocean wealth.