Not too long ago, disciplines within the marine sciences and the social sciences were, to use a maritime metaphor, like ships passing in the night. The Ocean Nexus Center’s aim, to advance human-centered approaches that prioritize social equity in coupled human-marine systems, thus represents an important interdisciplinary step in an on-going effort to manage the oceans with people in mind.
Nevertheless, two years into the UN’s ‘Decade of Ocean Science,’ and in spite of tremendous advancements in ocean data and stated commitments from the public and private sectors, ‘the actual advancement of equitable outcomes in ocean industries still remains unclear,’ in the words of one Nexus scholar. Clearly, there is more work to be done.
In this environmental sociology blog series, we will propose that much (though certainly not all) of this work is fundamentally social in nature. Indeed, in performing ocean science it is likely helpful to understand how the work itself — from the questions asked to the categories used to the keywords constructed — is often shaped by social relations. Moreover, it is important to understand the institutional, economic, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts through which such relations arise.
While each blog post in this series will have a different emphasis, a running thread will be the idea that advancing equitable outcomes means, in part, learning how to balance a deep respect for scientific knowledge with an understanding that natural science is a fallible enterprise generated through historically specific conditions of production. For, as the ecologist Richard Levins said, natural science has a “dual nature.” It is perhaps our best tool for understanding physical worlds, yet it is nothing if not a human activity that reflects all the messiness of human life.
Even for those scholars and practitioners whose work seems remote from society, their object of study is continually influenced by social processes, and at varying scales. For example, the increasing global concern for climate change creates very different motivations and interpretations for a scientist studying glaciers in 2022 than one who studied them in 1982. The dissemination of their work’s findings carries historically distinct social implications, evoking different emotional, cultural, economic, and political responses now than in prior periods. Thus, the intellectual infrastructure for doing and understanding science shifts as background conditions change. In short, context matters.
Yet, ‘context’ is not easy to see, much less understand. To begin to grasp the importance of context, we must be willing to ask potentially uncomfortable questions about knowledge production. For example, how do the political implications of fisheries biology affect funding and promotion? Funding and desire for career security can impact the trajectory of our work (e.g. why we study this and not that), which brings to light the way that politics on various levels –within disciplines, institutions, and organizations–shapes the science we produce. Moreover, nobody works alone. We interact with mentors, peers, students, non-academics, and more to perform research. These relationships involve unequal power dynamics, and they also exist within the context of broader institutions whose motives may prioritize certain political economic motives over the promotion of equity.
Given these inequitable contexts, it is beneficial to incorporate approaches that focus on inequality. A central focus of environmental sociology is the ways in which both the ecological spaces and the social processes we study are deeply unequal, a trend that all agree is becoming worse. Since the 1970s scholars have demonstrated the disproportionate proximity of ‘environmental bads’ such as pollution to low-income, immigrant, and Black, brown and Indigenous communities. When applied to coastal ecosystems–both rural and urban–this focus on environmental injustice or racism exposes the enduring legacies of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, or processes of land dispossession: Indigenous groups that lack access to traditional fishing grounds or Black populations continually pushed into marginalized land vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. In an effort to rectify these abuses, social movements often play a central role. Increasingly, environmental sociologists are showing that identity and social privilege affect the types of agendas and strategies favored by not only social movements, but also governance actors, nonprofits, and firms–all in an effort to promote equity.
Yet it can be easy to take the social context for granted, or overlook it completely. This is a trend that has plagued scholarship on coastal communities and marine ecosystems for decades. By overemphasizing economic and/or ecological factors, scholars and practitioners ignore the historical context and cultural ramifications of fisheries policies, for instance. In fact, critiquing the enclosure and privatization of the oceanic commons has been a contribution of environmental sociologists to fisheries governance. Another example includes studies that historicize fisheries’ technological changes and ecological impacts as consequences of socially contingent, political economic imperatives, and how such forces have enabled the rapid exploitation of oceans and widened gaps between social and ecological processes. Environmental sociology can work to mend that rift–something that is vital now more than ever.
As environmental sociologists we focus specifically on the many layered interactions between social and natural worlds. In this environmental sociology blog series, our goal is to zero in on these layered interactions in order to take the Ocean Nexus Center’s aim to advance human-centered approaches that prioritize social equity in coupled human-marine systems seriously. We will provide posts that elaborate an environmental sociological perspective on this aim, for example with posts that discuss, for instance, exactly what Levins meant by the “dual nature of science,” social movements and the ocean, and on relationships between equity and scientific communication.
We would like to conclude this introductory post on a note of humility. This blog series will of course focus on environmental sociological perspectives, though we want to acknowledge up front that an environmental sociological perspective is far from the only perspective needed. Indeed, our plan is to better understand restrictions on human knowledge of the oceans (and each other) as much as it is to understand how much we can know. After all, as the philosopher of science William Wimsatt has argued for some time, we need to re-engineer “philosophy for limited beings.” All of us, no matter our field, are error-prone, even those who produce the best work. It therefore seems like the best thing to do is to, within reason, be open to a variety of perspectives as well as consistently question our own as we work toward equity in human-marine systems.
The first installment of the “Human Dimensions of Oceans: From a Sociological Perspective” series was originally published in 2023.