Earthscan, London, England 2008.
Hardcover, 213 pages, $127
Connecting ocean changes with modern culture
Oceans Past is an academic compilation, written by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, marine biologists, and others, which aims to provide an academic view of historical changes in ocean ecosystems.
Each of the eleven chapters stands alone as a case-study of a particular ocean issue, ranging from a study of restaurant menus from New England seafood houses around the turn of the 20th century, well-illustrated with period menus, to an anthropological and ecological account of how native Key West sponge pickers were displaced by Greek hard-hat divers in 1905, and the attendant cultural and fisheries collapse that quickly followed.
Of particular interest to local readers are pieces on the expansion and abandonment of historic cod and haddock fishing grounds in the Gulf of Maine, written by Stefan Claesson of the University of New Hampshire, and a little-known cautionary tale of how the North Pacific right whale fishery was discovered and largely depleted within the decade 1840-1850, an augury for the many rapid marine animal depletions of the coming years.
The important message of this book is that the oceans used to be quite different, and often much more fecund, with fish, whale, sponge, and even small marine snail populations highly altered from what they were only a century ago. While rapid, this time frame of change also underscores that these depletions for the most part have taken place over scales longer than a single human memory.
In this environment of shifting baselines for our individual memories of marine species, and with the confusion of rapidly rising and crashing fisheries, we must all too often deal with the contemporary pressing environmental issues of our own decade. However, it is illustrative to remember what original populations once looked like, if not for restoration back to those virgin abundances then at least as a reference population for understanding what state the oceans are really in today.
Oceans Past highlights the role that humans have played in this dynamic process of marine environmental change, and goes one step further than most biologists are willing to do by commenting on the influence that these changes in marine ecosystems have had upon the real politics, welfare and culture of associated human societies, thereby providing insights into the connection of management of ocean resources and the sustainability of own modern culture. As we today live in a time of record lobster catches of the last twelve years, it makes one wonder how a historian will represent our times, and how they will judge the marine management and economic actions we take.
I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the Florida sponge fishery. A boom fishery of the day, thousands of tons of these marine sponges were picked with poles and hooks in the sparsely populated Keys, for export to the burgeoning cities of the eastern seaboard. New technology arrived in 1905 in the form of underwater dive gear, and violent racially-motivated confrontations on the waterfront ensued, with the burning of boats in Key West, Florida as one unsavory byproduct of this intense hunt.
But the real victim in the end was the marine environment. Fishermen not only overfished the banks of sponges, but in removing these filter feeders, they also precipitated the spread of disease, which ultimately proved nearly fatal to this once-rich marine resource. The eventual collapse of the sponge populations in the 1930s is now also believed to have perhaps been the first step in the unraveling of associated coral reef ecosystems, and so this focused story of two camps of sponge fishermen in early 20th century Florida is an example of how long-term environmental stress caused by over-fishing may lower biological and commercial productivity, increase the likelihood of ocean disease events, and eventually take a harsh toll on all the people who made their living from the sea.
The chapters in Oceans Past were originally presented as papers to an international conference – entitled “Oceans Past: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the History of Marine Animal Populations,” held in Kolding, Denmark in October 2005.
Contributions came from researchers based in Russia, Canada, Australia, Denmark, U.K. and the U.S. The book employs academic historical techniques to improve understanding of the patterns and processes of change in the marine environment, incorporating evidence derived from primary sources as varied as archaeological finds, newspaper reports, business advertisements, municipal archives, fishing returns, whaling logbooks, trade journals, personal records, and state departmental memoranda.
Like most academic journals, this makes it a bit dry at times, and overly expensive for the lay reader at some 70 British pounds. However, academic libraries will likely have a copy, and it contains some of the densest and yet most easily readable material on the history of how we interact with the residents of the ocean around us, and would make for some enjoyable and educational winter evenings for the focused reader.
Oceans Past is also available at: http://shop.earthscan.co.uk/ProductDetails/mcs/productID/821