About Ocean Justice
The ocean is a multibeing phenomenon and life world continually in transition.
Ocean evaporates and forms clouds, then becomes rain that spills into valleys and floods city drains. Seeping through cracks in the Earth’s mantle it mingles and boils with hot larval forces and erupts in jets through hydrothermal vents. The ocean circulates planetary basins: creeping from deep, black polar waters across the seafloor and sometimes not finding the sunlit surface again for a thousand years. Multitudes are carried and connected in the sweep of its currents.
The ocean travels with all of us, constitutively. Humans and other landed beings embody the ocean with every breath; others by taking in the flesh of marine beings and vegetables through their guts. Marine beings form through the ocean flushing their gills, mouths, membranes, tentacles and cloacae. As marine animals swim, commune, eat and hide from each other, play, hatch and die, they co-create and transition as and with the ocean.
Different material and social relations disappear or emerge as marine beings and their communities come and go. The changing climate, different time scales, and locations, as well as human actions and imaginaries, manifest yet other transformations–some known, others unfathomable
Ocean justice explores some of the ways that the ocean transforms and comes into being? It builds on concepts and generative drifts of inquiry inaugurated through doctorate research and now the basis of my current work. In 2018, I began investigating approaches to ocean justice alongside the complimentary concept: ‘multibeing’. The multibeing framework and methodology that I developed, explores relational, embodied ontologies and their transition across time, with a focus on the ocean and other watery phenomenon. To better understand the constitutive material and social milieu of being and the particular vulnerabilities that these give rise to, I draw extensively on marine scientific research, multibeing ethnography, field work and research-based art practice.
These critical, theoretical and creative explorations are a response to both the scale of resource extractivism’s unrelenting draw-down on the seas, and the complicity and conservation failures of the ocean governance regime that claim to protect them. It is research that challenge harmful extractive capital and colonial imaginaries as ecological forces changing the very constitution of the ocean. It is further informed by analysis of the legal, regulatory and governance structures relied on to facilitate ongoing extractive violences.
Today’s ocean is unlike ancestor oceans of near and distant pasts. Even more so because of the remarkable scale and intensity of human activities and industrial exploitations. The cumulative impact of mineral extraction, overfishing, pollution (plastic, oil, heat, sonic, chemical), shipping, militarisation and anthropogenic climate change is depleting marine animal populations and changing the very chemistry and dynamics of the ocean.
Despite increasing science and governance approaches, ocean conditions continue to decline. What cultural factors are missing or avoided? When thinking about the violent disruption to ocean worlds caused by human actions across time, how else might the contributing forces be examined and understood. What strategies are needed to uncolonise political and corporate forces and enabling legal regimes, which are so permissive of extractive violence? What existing and alternative tools and conceptual pathways can be explored to respectively uphold and create relationships with the ocean not otherwise premised on extractive claims? In denouncing corporate humanity’s excessive violence against the ocean, how to reckon with the complexity of material embodiment and the different ways that we are each implicated in extracting from the world? How might concepts of ocean justice be imagined and practiced by proliferating concepts of ocean and genres of being. What leads can be followed from the multibeing ocean? How are we to imagine our relations with the transitioning ocean? What practices ought to be foregrounded to resist extractivism and honour the kinships of seas?
The Ocean Justice blogs offer research samples and conceptual offerings from my past and current work that in some way respond to these inquiries and their bearing on ocean justice. Occasionally I’ll share the work of other critical ocean scholars, artists, cultural leaders, activists, legal theorists, scientists and others thinking and working in ways that are critical to ocean justice.
Peace and following seas to all.
Dr Susan Reid