This World Ocean Day, let鈥檚 change how we relate to the ocean
By Dr Susan Reid and聽Professor聽贰濒蝉辫别迟丑听笔谤辞产测苍, two members of the team behind聽
World Ocean Day brings an inundation of ocean wow-facting 鈥� how little we know of them, how much of the planet鈥檚 surface they cover, how much oxygen they generate, how many people they feed or how much biodiversity they host. The internet abounds with such listicles.聽
It is, to use an apt Australian term, a complete furphy, to contend that we do not know the ocean. Recognising the diverse ways that the ocean is known goes some way to understanding the complex relational dimensions. The worldviews of different First Nations coastal people around the world don鈥檛 鈥渒now鈥� the ocean and its environments; they live with them as an integrated way of life.聽
Unfortunately,聽extractive imaginaries,聽economics, and the legacies of colonial conquest still dominate how the ocean is known and related to. These legacies, and an extractive development agenda, stream deep into international governance bodies and legal frameworks such as聽the聽聽and the聽Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty.
Guided by聽extractive ways of knowing the ocean, bodies such as the International Seabed Authority (ISA) are mandated by UNCLOS to manage deep seabed mining within the international seabed area. For International Biodiversity Day, the ISA recently聽聽its celebration of deep ocean biodiversity. Did someone say blue wash?
World Ocean Day is the sixteenth iteration of the UN鈥檚 observance day for the ocean. With origins in聽the UN Conference on Sustainable Development聽or聽, it is no surprise that the event hinges to the UN鈥檚 sustainable development goals (SDG). The principal goal for the ocean is聽SDG 14聽聽Life Below Water, which aims to聽"[c]onserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.鈥� To achieve this, SDG 14 seeks to stop certain human activities: (marine pollution, acidification, overfishing, impacts from marine plastic pollution) and enable others (sustainable fishing, conserving coastal and marine areas, better ocean law).
One could argue that World Ocean Day raises public awareness of the importance of the ocean to all our lives and highlights critical issues affecting marine environments. The charge of blue washing to ensure ongoing ocean exploitations would not be off target either. Conditions in the ocean have deteriorated under the UN鈥檚 watch and certainly since World Ocean Day was first launched, as the UN itself has extensively reported in its聽World Ocean Assessment聽and聽.
As with the SDG goals, the concept of a World Ocean Day first emerged at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, a decade after the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was adopted in 1982 (in force 1994). It was a response to growing concerns about the state of the ocean and the need to build ocean literacy. That these concerns emerged 10 years after the UNCLOS came into force can partly be attributed to the nascency of marine scientific knowledges during preceding decades. When final negotiations toward UNCLOS began in 1973鈥搇ittle was understood of either marine ecological relations or the impacts of human activities and wastes. As oceanography and marine technologies advanced these impacts became clearer. Nevertheless, though World Ocean Day and SDG 14 reflect growing concern about the ocean鈥檚 conditions they also represent a commitment to keep exploiting them 鈥榮ustainably.鈥�
UNCLOS provides the legal framework governing (or one might argue, facilitating) ocean exploitation, over most of the earth鈥檚 biosphere. Such is the comprehensive nature and jurisdictional reach of the convention that Tommy T.B. Koh, then President of the UN鈥檚 Third Conference on the Law of the Sea, (which finalised UNCLOS), described it as聽
As the overarching legal framework governing human uses of the ocean, the convention reflects shifting terrains of聽post WWII and Cold War geopolitics, and the emergence of new nations from colonial rule. There was also increasing awareness of ocean resources, thanks to the developing fields of marine science. UNCLOS offered legitimacy and legal assurances for companies keen to exploit those resources. Despite聽 and other environmental provisions, the convention鈥檚 marine protections are generally weak and difficult to enforce. By some accounts, UNCLOS is in fact a constitution for the ocean,聽without the ocean.聽
More recently, a new treaty for the high seas has been finalised, known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty (BBNJ). The high seas comprise the water column in the international area beyond national jurisdiction 鈥� almost two thirds of the ocean. To date, UNCLOS has upheld a long-standing free seas doctrine, which facilitates unregulated exploitation in the high seas. The BBNJ treaty does not extinguish that doctrine but it does provide the basis for expanding marine park protections in the high seas. For this the BBNJ ought to be rightly cheered. However, the new treaty also functions as a legal framework for the exploitation of marine genetic resources. One could then also argue that the BBNJ is yet another regulatory measure that enables corporations to exploit a new ocean resource.聽
Our project,聽聽explores deep seabed mining, overfishing, squid fishing, ice and oil, and the fictions and imaginaries washing between. We seek to get into and under different ways of knowing these very disparate events and processes to interrogate the complex and often turbulent implications of their epistemologies, more-than-human marine relations and impacts, ethical dimensions, and geopolitics. To use an earth-bound term, our methodology is a rhizomatic gathering of what is going on.聽
Our mission is to catch fleeting incidents that are of long dur茅e, where the past, present and future collide. We proceed by gathering and curating narrative- and image-led short pieces, which we call 聽鈥� a聽swirling motion in the ocean that brings colder, deeper waters to the surface聽鈥� and scales that are so at odds with each other that no linear understanding is possible.
Our hope is that along with collaborators around the world we can build a living, moving聽research protocol聽that seeks not to know but to capture connections and upwell new understandings about how the ocean connects and disconnects the global north and south, questions of social justice, relations with more-than-human marine others, environments, food sovereignty, and more-than-human dignity.
Dr Susan Reid聽is a cultural theorist, creative researcher, writer, and lawyer interested in multibeing ontologies and ocean justice.聽Susan is collaborating with Prof. Elspeth Probyn on the project,聽Extracting the Ocean. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Sydney for her thesis "Imagining Justice with the Ocean", which examines ocean epistemologies, legal frameworks, and multibeing relations in the context of extractive, oceanic frontiers. Susan is also a lawyer,聽admitted to the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory; with an聽LLM (International Law) from the Australian National University, and an MA (Design) from the University of Technology. Publications include聽鈥淥cean Justice:聽Reckoning with Material Vulnerability鈥�;聽聽鈥淚magining Justice with the Abyssal Ocean鈥�;聽鈥淭aking Code to Sea鈥�;聽鈥淪olwara 1 and the Sessile Ones鈥�;聽鈥淭ransitioning Currents in Times of Climate Change鈥�; and聽Feminist,聽Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene:聽Archive
贰濒蝉辫别迟丑听笔谤辞产测苍聽is Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published several monographs including聽Sexing the Self聽(Routledge, 1993),聽Outside Belongings聽(Routledge, 1996),聽Carnal Appetites聽(Routledge, 2000),聽Blush: Faces of Shame(Minnesota, 2006), and聽Eating the Ocean聽(Duke, 2016), and co-editor of聽Sustaining Seas聽(Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). Her most recent publication is "Aqua/geopolitical conjuncture and disjuncture: invasion, resources, and mining the deep dark sea,"聽Cultural Studies聽(2023): 1-22. Her current project funded by the ARC,聽Extracting the聽Ocean, is focused on forms of oceanic marine extraction (from fishing to mining and bioprospecting).