Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative

Sidney I. Dobrin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429851803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

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.

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 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 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 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 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 “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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Unearthing ecocriticism
• 2 Scaling the ocean
• 3 Object ocean
• 4 Seeing ocean
• 5 Protein economies
• 6 Blue frontiers
• Index