The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History

Paul Sutter closes his essay on the state of the field of environmental history by calling attention to the relatively short time during which humans have transformed the planet—a point that certainly applies to the ocean. Anthropogenically induced global climate change is affecting ocean temperature and acidity. Overfishing has not only decimated marine populations but has emptied entire levels of the marine food web. Bottom trawling has scarred virtually all the commercially reachable seafloor. Attention to marine environmental issues has lagged behind similar attention to land by a century or more; only since the 1990s has the ocean's environmental status gripped the attention of mainstream media and ordinary people.1 Although the ocean seems remote, marine environmental activists and ocean boosters rightly note the many ways that all people are tightly connected to it. The seas provide food, energy, communication, and transportation of the goods and raw materials that fuel the global economy. Threats to oceans and the uses made of ocean space and ocean resources have prompted the formation of international legal regimes and agreements. The majority of the world's population lives along coasts—and the proportion of coastal dwellers is on the increase—therefore even more people will be involved in the challenges associated with sea-level rise and the increasing frequency and intensity of storms.2