A “gummy squirrel” sea cucumber, Psychropotes longicauda, living at a depth of 5,000 meters. Image courtesy of the DeepCCZ expedition/NOAA
Tirza Meyer is a contemporary historian and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy and History, who has come to devote her work to the ocean. After studying how the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was negotiated, she is now dedicating her time to the question of how we have discovered, and continue to discover, life in the ocean, a very contemporary development.
To an historian, the contemporary period begins at the end of the second world war and – at least for Tirza Meyer – stretches some distance into the future. In her own academic history, the law of the sea has played an important role. It started when her supervisor at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway invited her to work on a project about deep-sea mining. That led to a dissertation about the role of Elisabeth Mann Borgese in making the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,UNCLOS, a reality and creating regulations for using the resources of the sea.
Tirza Meyer
“After the war there existed an international community with the United Nations, the human rights, and ideas of internationalism. By giving resources for everyone to share the idea was that the world could become more just.”
Last year, Tirza Meyers published a book about Elisabeth Mann Borgese’s years-long work with UNCLOS. Her own work has also resulted in her being a member of a reference group for the Norwegian delegation to the International Seabed Authority, ISA, an autonomous international organization, through which states parties to UNCLOS organize and control all mineral-resources-related activities in the Area for the benefit of humankind as a whole.
”Based on my knowledge of the development of the convention on the law of the sea, I can comment on what may happen in the future. In my field, my colleagues and Istudy the past to understand how things are developing and how they may continue to develop in the future.”
Marine protected areas and mining that threatens biodiversity
As recent as in March 2023 negotiations were concluded on the Treaty of the High Seas to protect the ocean, tackle environmental degradation, fight climate change, and prevent biodiversity loss, an addendum to UNCLOS in an area that wasn’t well known during the 1970s and 1980s when the convention was negotiated. When ratified by at least 60 states the addendum will enter into force, enabling large marine protected areas on the high seas and require assessing the impact of economic activities on high seas biodiversity.
Tirza Meyer (in white and green) with colleges at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania. Photo: Hanne Nielsen
This year the ISA wants to reach a contract for the exploitation of minerals from the seabed. So far deep-sea mining has only been done as small-scale trials but the new contract can lead to large-scale seabed mining, something that is problematic in many ways and that is portrayed as a necessity since there will be a large future demand for minerals, not least for the green transition.
“I believe many biologists who work with the deep sea agree that we first need to gather information before mining, that risks devastating large areas, should take place. It is a very inflammatory issue, as a historian I can only comment on how we ended up where we are today.”
Costly research at enormous depths
Tirza Meyer has turned her eyes to the contemporary history of deep-sea research and she focuses on the abyssal and hadal zones, the part of the ocean – most of it – that is deeper than 4 000 meters and that has been named after the Greek word for bottomless and the Greek mythological underworld. She recently returned from a research trip to Australia.
“The research institute in Perth that I visited had been able to have access to a research vessel and a submersible thanks to funding from a wealthy individual. That is both interesting and problematic. One can speculate about how their research had been affected if he had decided to use his money on something else. A lot of the research is also funded by companies that want to mine minerals and that need knowledge about the seabed.”
In Tasmania, she met researchers working with under-ice observation. They work in inaccessible areas since it isn’t possible to drill through the polar ice and the instruments you send down under the ice tend to disappear. But there are great opportunities for discoveries. In 2021 researchers discovered the largest colony of fish nests in the world under the polar ice, with approximately 60 million fishes of the species Jonah’s icefish (Neopagetopsis ionah) over an area of 240 square kilometres.
”They discovered the area with a remotely operated underwater vehicle or ROV. I spoke with one of the people who made the discovery at a conference in London ”The Challenger Society Conference”. It’s a special world where you talk about how many species you have under your belt, that is how many new species you have discovered.”
New knowledge changes our view of the deep sea
The development has been fast and new species are discovered every time you send an instrument into the deep. Our idea of what the deep sea is has changed as we have gotten access to new technology that has changed our view of an area that we didn’t use to have access to.
Diver and remotely operated underwater vehicle. Illustration: Reviel Meyer
”Earlier a kind of dredge was used to collect fish from the deep sea. Then you didn’t know from exactly what depth the fishes came and they were also harmed when they were raised the the deep. One example of this is the fish barreleyes (Macropinna microstoma) which has a transparent head filled with liquid. The first description and drawing of the fish are from 1939 and they show a fish with a head that has collapsed in the lower surface pressure. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that a camera on an ROV revealed what it looked like in its natural habitat.”
Another example that shows how we are in the middle of an era of discoveries and new knowledge is that the first map of the Mid-Atlantic ridge was done as late as 1953 and that it’s not until the present day that we can map the seabed and measure the depth of the sea, using satellites and modern bathymetry. In the 1970s we also discovered hydrothermal vents, openings in the seabed with hot water mixed with minerals, and bacteria feeding on minerals through chemosynthesis, an alternative to photosynthesis, that was unknown until then.
”Apart from deep-sea research being very expensive and much remaining to be discovered, it’s also an international endeavour. I hope that we can learn more about the ocean together, without devastating it.”
This is the 41st article in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment’s series of articles on selected research, education or collaboration initiatives from each department. You can find the previous articles here:Archive
This text was first published on the WaterBlog@KTH on 10 March 2023.
The sun setting on our right in beautiful orange hues, water flowing calmly and gentle breeze on our faces. This was the tranquil atmosphere on Río Guapi on a Saturday evening in early October 2022, as we were travelling down the river in a traditional fishing boat of the Guapiñeros. In the next moment, loud cheering and clapping echoed through the mangroves and houses lining the river. The sail prototype had been unfolded and successfully set up on the boat. The next twenty minutes had everyone brimming with excitement as the fishermen expertly navigated the boat towards the barrio of Puerto Cali, using the sail that the team had built together just hours before, utilising the ancestral knowledge of the fishing community.
Econavipesca team sailing down Río Guapi (Photo by Jose Miguel Vecino)
Local and ancestral knowledge as a strategy to reach sustainability goals
The use of local knowledge is considered key to achieving the climate strategies and plans, as outlined by Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in a recent report (IPCC, 2022). Both the IPCC and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) emphasise the importance of local and indigenous knowledge in understanding and creating solutions for sustainable futures (Tengö et al., 2021a-b). Moving towards more sustainable futures, in practice, requires a thorough understanding of the local traditions and how concepts of change are used in the local context. The preservation of fishing traditions, sailing and sailmaking are interesting examples. On the one hand, recognizing the value of preserving local ancestral knowledge (related to fishing and sail making), but also recognizing that the older generation wants their children to take steps to improve their future, embarking on studies etc. Thereby wanting a better future, with less hard work that fishing entails, for the next generation. This is one example that we discussed with fishermen in Guapi showing that the involvement of local communities is necessary for getting a better understanding of how local knowledge and cultural traditions are key for understanding how change can come about. In addition to this, also recognizing that the local and global level is interrelated (Larsen et al. 2011) when implementing policy to achieve climate objectives and UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Improving the possibilities to improve (local communities) life situation and increased involvement in economic development is central to the strategy for the regional development of Latin America (Sida 2021, page 9) relating to several SDGs, including SDG12, sustainable production and consumption.
Local knowledge, culture and values are important to be included together with scientific knowledge in the co-production of new solutions and for input to advising policies. This aspect of co-creation in a transdisciplinary team to take advantage of both the traditional knowledge of local communities and scientific knowledge of academics from several different disciplines (including anthropology, environmental history, technology, engineering, and design etc.) is an important methodology of the Pacífico Econavipesca project.
Fishing and boats in the community in Guapi, Colombia
The objective of the project is to develop a sustainable artisanal fishing model that reduces the environmental, social, and economic impacts on the ecosystem in the municipality of Guapi, Cauca, in Colombia. A major challenge is to reduce dependence on fossil fuels for fishing boats and engage in dialogues with the local community about ways to create social entrepreneurship to make fishing activities more sustainable long term. The project involves universities in Colombia with strong commitment and previous experiences with the communities in Guapi. The focus of fieldwork activities is to create room for dialogues and mutual learning rather than importing or imposing certain technology or ways of thinking on any local community. The fieldwork activities where KTH has been involved have been carried out in collaboration with the research teams in Colombia to ensure these aspects and safeguard continued dialogues on how future solutions may look.
Guapi is a municipality on the pacific coast of Colombia. The town and villages here are all situated along Río Guapi, Río Guaji and Río Napi. The rivers are a source of life for these communities as they provide food, water, transportation, etc. In fact, their relationship with water is beyond material provisions. It is their deep connection with the diverse natural environment in the territory, a rich food culture, music and dance that follows the rhythm of the river, and their ancestors that have passed down a great wealth of knowledge. Artisanal fishing is one such knowledge that has been passed down through generations in Guapi. Currently, traditional fishing boats that run on gasoline motors are used to fish out at sea. However, gasoline is very expensive in the region and causes them a great economic burden. This is worsened by increased uncertainty of catching fish with reduced fish populations due to pollution and climate change, causing them to return with little to no fish on many days. Local environmental pollution of the river is also caused by leakages of gasoline. Hence, one of the main objectives is to create more sustainable fishing boats with reduced reliance on gasoline.
Municipality of Guapi located along Río Guapi (Photo by Gauri Salunkhe)Traditional fishing boat with gasoline motor used for fishing (Photo by Gauri Salunkhe)Mural in Guapi that depicts their dependence on the river and fishing activities (Photo by Gauri Salunkhe)
In the initial stages of the project Econavipesca, it became clear that the previous generation of fishermen would sail out to sea with homemade sails. However, with the introduction of modern technology like gasoline motors, this traditional knowledge of sail-making and sailing was forgotten. This was one of the early stages of co-creation, where local knowledge was re-discovered in dialogue with the community. The team then decided to examine possibilities to incorporate these traditional sailing techniques in present-day boats to reduce reliance on gasoline motors.
Co-creation in the focus of KTH fieldwork
In October 2022, the KTH project team embarked on their first field trip, including Gauri Salunkhe, a master’s student in Sustainable Technology at KTH. Gauri would spend three months on a field study in Colombia. This field study focused on understanding community engagement, co-creation strategies and actor interactions to identify challenges and opportunities for the sustainability of the project. She engaged in dialogue with different stakeholders such as academics and community team members to gather data for her field study, using methodologies such as observational studies, interviews, actor-network mapping, co-creative activities, reflective workshops, etc.
Video 1: Interview with Gauri Salunkhe about her field study experience in Colombia (Interview by Sebastián Serna)
This KTH field study began with a deep dive into the community, as Gauri, together with Katarina Larsen, a researcher at KTH, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, and Magnus Lindqvist, Senior advisor at the KTH International Relations Office, embarked on the fieldwork in Guapi (30 Sep 2022 – 04 Oct 2022) together with the project team in Colombia. Ask any member of the team about a key moment during this fieldwork, and the moment that would resonate in all the responses would be – “the sailing activity”. This brings us back to the scene at the beginning, on Río Guapi.
The sailing activity is an essential example of co-creation in the Pacífico Econavipesca project. Local knowledge of sail-making and sailing was incorporated with academic knowledge to design and build the sail prototypes. Instead of fieldwork activities solely organised by the academic team, with the community members only as participants, in this case, the community members’ representatives were key to planning and organising the activity. They gathered local resources, people and materials, specified fabrics needed for sails, and identified suitable locations, to build the sail prototypes. Since the traditional sail-making knowledge is only held by some elderly members of the community now, they were also an essential part of designing and building the sail.
Academic and community team members of Econavipesca Project building the sail prototype together (Photo by Gauri Salunkhe)
Sailing on the river
A key moment for one member of the academic team was while building the sails together with the local community. “At the beginning, they were very protective with some information due to the (historical) projects culture in this part of the country … as they don’t know what people would do with the information”. However, the activity could give space to having an open conversation where everyone felt comfortable sharing their experiences with sailing. Many of them learnt it when they were children but lost touch over the years. Furthermore, it was the fishermen that had the local knowledge about the material, type of knots required, etc., not the academic team, so the fishermen’s active involvement, knowledge and skills were essential for this activity of re-introducing sail-making and testing the sails on the river.
Guapi fishermen sharing their sailing experiences with the academic team (Photo by Jose Miguel Vecino)
Initially, when we started the fieldwork in Guapi in October, we expected to build the sail prototypes, but not necessarily test them on the river. However, the community members were so enthusiastic to also test the sails on the river! As expressed by one (academic) team member who was organising the activity, “They were so interested in testing the sail, who am I to stop them? Just go for it!”. This experience highlights the importance of not imposing our own views and expectations on the project fieldwork activities but being flexible to carry it out according to the community’s wishes. The organiser of the activity described the smile on a fisherman’s face when navigating the boat like he was a little child again while looking at the sail. It is moments like this that inspire the team to continue working hard to implement new useful ways for co-creation in this project.
The Econavipesca team is all smiles as the sail prototype is successfully used to navigate down the river (Photo by Sebastián Serna)
Co-creation experiences from dialogues during fieldwork
Engaging in co-creative dialogues about future ways of more sustainable living in a fishing community like Guapi goes beyond dialogues with fishing associations. It also means involving different types of members of the community (that are not out on the fishing boats), such as the women (often involved in preparations before and after fishing trips) and younger generations in fishing communities. The young adults will determine the future of how fishing activities will develop in Guapi. It is important to improve the quality of life for fishermen, increase economic gains from fishing and dignify the work of fishermen to retain the artisanal fishing practices among young people in the future. Women are also an important part of the fishing journey who may be invisible at the moment. For example, they carry out preparations for the fishing journey, and process and sell the fish post-fishing. It is important to recognise this and involve them in co-creating solutions.
Some other lessons about transdisciplinary co-creation from this project are the importance of establishing dialogues for discussing terminology used, expectations by community and academic teams, and being open to learning from each other. This is important both within the academic team and across the academic and local community teams. Since participants bring different experiences and perspectives to co-creative learning processes, it is essential to create dialogues that give room for reflection on activities and to also align everyone to work towards a common goal.
Activities with students in Guapi about artisanal fishing during previous fieldwork (Photo by Jose Miguel Vecino)Dialogues with women leaders in Guapi (Photo by Katarina Larsen)Women in Guapi processing fish to be sold (Photo by Jose Miguel Vecino)
Experiences from the fieldwork in this project highlight that transdisciplinary co-creation is at the core of finding solutions for sustainable development. It has provided concrete examples of the importance of a dialogue-based approach to gathering different types of knowledge, and methods of catalysing participatory action and creating dialogues on future options by involving the community. It is when the community is actively involved and takes initiative, that they would be able to create and maintain solutions for themselves, which is required for long-term sustainability for the communities along the Guapi river.
Participants in the Pacífico Econavipesca project include the fishing associations of Guapi, Colombia, local and regional authorities, and the following academic partners: Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Colombia), Universidad del Cauca (Colombia), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), and Lund University (Sweden). The project is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). We wish to thank all participants in the project for their genuine commitment to the project work and, in particular, the local fishing community representatives for sharing their knowledge, stories and unforgettable experiences on the river of Guapi.
Academic and community team of Econavipesca with the completed sail prototype (Photo by Julian Hernández)
Gauri Salunkhe, MSc-student in Sustainable Technology at KTH
Katarina Larsen, researcher at Div. History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH
For more information on the project Econavipesca and interviews with KTH participants, follow the links below.
Agusdinata, D. B. 2022. The role of universities in SDGs solution co-creation and implementation: a human-centered design and shared-action learning process. Sustainability science. [Online] 17 (4), 1589–1604.
IPCC 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 3056 pp., doi:10.1017/9781009325844.
Larsen, K., Gunnarsson-Östling, U. and Westholm, E. 2011. Environmental scenarios and local-global level of community engagement : Environmental justice, jams, institutions and innovation,” Futures: The journal of policy, planning and futures studies, vol. 43, no. 4, s. 413-423.
Minoi, J.L., et al., 2019. A Participatory Co-creation Model to Drive Community Engagement in Rural Indigenous Schools: A Case Study in Sarawak. The Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 17(3), pp. 173-183, available online at www.ejel.org
Moons, I.; Daems, K.; Van de Velde, L.L.J., 2021. Co-Creation as the Solution to Sustainability Challenges in the Greenhouse Horticultural Industry: The Importance of a Structured Innovation Management Process. Sustainability 2021, 13, 7149. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137149
Tengö, M. et al. 2021a. Indigenous Futures Thinking: Changing the narrative and re-building based on re-rooting. Workshop report. SwedBio at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm, Sweden.
Tengö, M. et al. 2021b. Creating Synergies between Citizen Science and Indigenous and Local Knowledge. Bioscience. [Online] 71 (5), 503–518.
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, et al. 2021. Technical Report for the first year of the Agreement. Project Econavipesca Del Pacifico: Ecosistema Para la Navigacion Pesquera Sustentable en el Municipio de Guapi, Cauca.
Sida 2021. Strategiplan för Sveriges regionala utvecklingssamarbete med Latinamerika 2022-2024, Datum: 21-12-13, Environment, climate and sustainable use of natural resources (Stödområde 2: Miljö, klimat och hållbart utnyttjande av naturresurser, page 9) ”Hållbar produktion och konsumtion (SDG12), men även SDG 3,5, 8 och 16, är viktiga för omställningen till grön/cirkulär ekonomi, som också måste ge fattiga och utsatta människor bättre möjligheter att förbättra sin livssituation och en ökad delaktighet i den ekonomiska utvecklingen.”
Building on insights from ecological economics and philosophy of technology, this book offers a novel, interdisciplinary approach to understand the contradictory nature of Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective option in the world economy. However, reports about miserable working conditions, environmentally deleterious mineral extraction and toxic waste dumps corrode the image of a problem-free future based on solar power. Against this backdrop, Andreas Roos explores whether ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ – an asymmetric transfer of labour time and natural resources – is a necessary condition for solar PV development. He demonstrates how the massive increase in solar PV installation over recent years would not have been possible without significant wage/price differences in the world economy – notably between Europe/North America and Asia- and concludes that solar PV development is currently contingent on environmental injustices in the world economy. As a solution, Roos argues that solar technology is best coupled with strategies for degrowth, which allow for a transition away from fossil fuels and towards a socially just and ecologically sustainable future.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of solar power, philosophy of technology, and environmental justice.
About the Author
Andreas Roos is an interdisciplinary scholar with a doctoral degree in the field of human ecology. His work draws from ecological economics, environmental history and philosophy of technology to understand the contentious relation between technology and ecology. Roos’s most recent work focuses on assessing the potential of renewable energy technologies to transform modern human-environmental relations. Publishing in top ranking journals, Roos’s other contributions include ecological perspectives on the digital economy and the possibilities for commons-based energy technology.
Join us for a joyous celebration of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory’s past decade of activities and the launch of its new start as a KTH centre. The afternoon will consist of recapping the many activities of the EHL since its start in 2011/2012 under the leadership of Director Marco Armiero (“Wasteocene“) and hosting a roundtable on the purpose, importance, and future of environmental humanities research, in Sweden, Europe, and worldwide.
If you are interested who was involved during the last decade in the EHL’s activities, check out this list.
Join us for an afternoon of reflections, sharing, and discussions, followed by a mingle. Mark your calendars!
Did you miss Rob Nixon and the Archipelago Lecture on November 10th? No worries! The recording is now up and can be watched below, with or without subtitles.
Abstract
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? Since the great recession of 2008, we have witnessed an upsurge in public science writing that has popularized research into forest sentience, forest suffering and the forest as collective intelligence.
This talk roots the current appeal of forest communication in a widespread discontent with neoliberalism’s antipathy to cooperative ways of being. Nixon argues that the science of forest dynamics offers a counter-narrative of flourishing, an allegory for what George Monbiot has called “private sufficiency and public wealth.
About Rob Nixon
Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.
Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon, Orion, Critical Inquiry and elsewhere.
Environmental justice struggles in the global South are central to Nixon’s work. He is a particularly fascinated by the animating role that artists can play in relation to social movements.
We are happy to announce that the next Stockholm Archipelago Lecture is coming up on 10 November 2022 at 5pm (Stockholm time). Rob Nixon is going to give his presentation titled “The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life”. Feel free to join digitally! You find the link below.
Abstract:
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? Since the great recession of 2008, we have witnessed an upsurge in public science writing that has popularized research into forest sentience, forest suffering and the forest as collective intelligence.
This talk roots the current appeal of forest communication in a widespread discontent with neoliberalism’s antipathy to cooperative ways of being. Nixon argues that the science of forest dynamics offers a counter-narrative of flourishing, an allegory for what George Monbiot has called “private sufficiency and public wealth.
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Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.
Nixon writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon, Orion, Critical Inquiry and elsewhere.
Environmental justice struggles in the global South are central to Nixon’s work. He is a particularly fascinated by the animating role that artists can play in relation to social movements.
Adam Wickberg, researcher in our division, has published a new article together with John Durham Peters (Yale Univesity) in the esteemed journal “Critical Inquiry”, published by the University of Chicago.
In “Media: The Case of Spain and New Spain” Peters and Wickberg develop the new concept of “environing media”. They are focussing on the rich cultural heritage of Mexico, looking back over the last 500 years of its media history.
Here is the abstract of this intriguing piece. If it catches your interest, check out the whole article here.
Abstract
This article develops the new concept of environing media against the case of Mexico’s complex history over the past five centuries. To do this, it stakes out a theoretical development consisting in a shift in understanding from media as content-delivery systems to data processors, combining it with a processual understanding of environment as an ongoing and historical process of environing.
In addition, the article discusses examples of indigenous media, an area that has so far received very little attention. The Aztec empire was as dependent on media forms as the Spanish colonizers who replaced it, and there are numerous cases of knowledges and practices surviving in hybrid forms, for example as part of maps. For much of its history, the field of media studies has been biased toward questions of (1) ideological or attitudinal influence caused by (2) modern or emergent technologies.
This article goes in another direction by thinking about media as (1) environing and (2) residual. Media are agencies of civilizational and environmental order. The rise of digital media in recent decades has reinforced the fundamental logistical role of media as agencies that arrange, catalog, organize, network, and index people, places, and things. Our understanding of media as fundamental constituents of organization joins the recent interest in infrastructures. Calendars, clocks, towers, names, addresses, maps, registers, arms, and money are all infrastructural media. Such media become second nature, morphing biorhythms and altering ecosystems.
Today’s planetary digital infrastructure builds upon the long legacy of resource management via databases. We argue for a longer genealogy of the nature shaping logistical role of media that is so evident today. In this article, we refine and exemplify these claims via a case study of some environing media in Mexico, a country with a deep and rich media history.
Susanna Lidström (researcher at KTH), Tirza Meyer (postdoc at KTH) and former division’s PhD-colleague Jesse Peterson (now postdoc at Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet) have published an exciting opinion piece about our approach towards the ocean in the context of climate change and increased pollution. The authors argue that the health metaphor would be problematic in regard to describing the state of oceans.
The state of the ocean is increasingly described in terms of ocean “health.” The Implementation Plan for the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development describes the aim of the decade as achieving “a sustainable and healthy ocean” and refers to the ocean’s “health” throughout, including references to an overall “decline in ocean health” [Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), 2020], p. i, 6. Likewise, Sustainable Development Goal no. 14 aims “to achieve healthy and productive oceans” and “to improve ocean health” [United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), 2015, p. 23, 24]. In addition, scientific studies from all disciplines routinely use the same metaphor, including statements such as “the many benefits that society receives from a healthy ocean” (Duarte et al., 2020, p. 39), “the health of marine ecosystems” (Hagood, 2013, p. 75), and the “importance of ocean health” (Borja et al., 2020, p. 1).
However, we argue that the health metaphor (Suter, 1993; Jamieson, 1995) continues to be imprecise, ambiguous, and problematic. We suggest that the idea of ocean “health” misrepresents the Earth’s history of ever-changing and adapting ecosystems through time, wrongly suggests that ocean health is an apolitical and objective state and obscures how conditions in the ocean are irreversibly intertwined with human activities.
Critiques and Practices of Sustainability:
Environmental Humanities Perspectives on Chilean and Swedish Ecocultures of Water, Land, and Air is 7,5 credit course, established by Division postdoc Nuno Marques, among others. Facing global contemporary environmental challenges and the need to imagine sustainable ways of relating to the environment (outlined by the SDGs), this course analyzes forms of connection with the environment elaborated in ecopoetry, ecofiction and ecocinema from Chile and Sweden. This course will address critiques and practices of sustainability from an environmental humanities perspective combining ecocriticism, cultural studies, sustainability studies, and decolonial theories and practices.
Learning outcomes:
identify, understand, and critically and creatively apply concepts such as sustainability, environmental justice, slow violence, sacrifice zones, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, deep time.
assess how cultural products and expressions (visual and literary) from Chile and Sweden relate to global environmental concerns, propose situated forms of connection to the biosphere, and how they intervene in environmental discourses.
Practical information
The course entails 5 weeks of synchronous and asynchronous work through Zoom and Canvas. It comprises 5 units: a theoretical and methodological introduction; three thematic blocks dealing with life below water, life on land, and life on air, through the lens of sustainability in cultural productions from Chile and Sweden mainly from the twentieth century to contemporary works in 2021; and a concluding interdisciplinary colloquium with invited discussants.
Sabine Höhler, Susanna Lidström and Tirza Meyer from the Mediated Planet project at the Division will present in the WASP-HS seminar series #frAIday, organized by Umeå University. In their presentation they aim to sketch the history of opening the ‘black box’ of the ocean.
The Ocean’s ‘Digital Twin’? Marine Environmental Data Through Time
Sabine Höhler, Susanna Lidström, and Tirza Meyer
Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm
Much hope is tied to the creation of a digital twin of the ocean based on an ever more extensive body of ocean data. Representing the ocean in the digital space is a way of analyzing and modeling the ocean in a ‘laboratory’ setting. Studying the ocean stripped from its natural complexity, so the idea, can better inform and instruct humans on how to interact with the ocean environment. Our twentieth century understanding of the ocean as a central ecosystem in the planetary environment would not have been possible without long-term information gathering. However, also ocean data generation is a messy and contested process. Its history is even more important to study since we ‘know’ the ocean mostly in mediated ways. We observe the ocean almost exclusively through scientific instruments, and we formulate ocean policies, legislation, and development goals based on data and increasingly on digital information. That this data has a history makes the past, present, and future of the digital ocean not just a scientific but a political issue.
Our presentation aims to sketch the history of opening the ‘black box’ of the ocean. We use examples of the Challenger expedition in the 1870s, of satellite oceanography in the 1990s, and of present-day autonomous ocean sensor systems. We ask how the specific tools and the information they generated mobilized different understandings of the ocean as resource and territory, as climate moderator and as carbon sink. Dredges, satellites and deep-ocean floats created new ocean knowledges, politics, and also new ontologies. No matter how inclusive, refined, and versatile the databases are, so our argument, the digital ocean will not be a simple 1:1 representation or “twin”. While the data corpus may be quite functional to model ocean behavior, it will always rest on selections serving particular purposes and interest
Rob Nixon is the Barron Family Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. His books include, most recently, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently completing a book entitled Blood at the Root. Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.
