History holds the key to understanding the crises facing our oceans

Long before “sustainability” and “climate change” were watchwords, people around the world had different ideas about how oceans should be governed and how marine resources should be used. These ideas affected how people used the ocean and imagined its uses – and they continue to influence assumptions about what the sea has to offer humans and what it can withstand.

That is why today’s ocean emergencies are not just environmental or technical issues but fundamentally historical ones. Historians can help us understand these crises by questioning the past and revealing how particular ways of extracting marine life, eating fish and governing marine spaces became normal.

Issues with overfishing, frantic shipping trade, depletion and coastline conversions are nothing new of the 20th or 21st centuries. These issues arose progressively through habitual practices, colonial ideologies, economics and knowledges which framed the ocean as infinite, outside of human jurisdiction or undeserving of political interest.

Why the past still matters

Science and policy solutions are critical to solving our ocean crises. But decades of awareness campaigns, policy agreements and scientific predictions have failed to prevent biodiversity loss, overexploitation, and ecosystem collapse: The so-called tragedy of the commons.

This is not a failure of science but rather proof there is a missing piece in the puzzle. What is missing is an understanding of how demand, legitimacy and desire were historically produced.

Social behaviours that are now widely understood to be environmentally destructive were built on centuries-old ideas about what it means to be wealthy, civilised, a powerful nation or a colonial power. As long as our solutions don’t address how past societies became convinced of these ideas, we’ll be applying band-aids to problems that require surgery. Historical analysis can show us how and why past societies consistently downplayed environmental risks, chose short-term rewards over long-term sustainability, and ignored calls for conservation.

Survival is not sustainability

One point that is sometimes raised when looking at the history of sustainability is the fact that people in the past managed to survive despite putting pressure on their environments. We might be forgiven for thinking that if people in the past overcame similar levels of environmental strain as we see today, then there is no need to worry.

But survival is not sustainability. Examples abound through history of civilisations surviving for centuries while slowly poisoning their life-support systems.

Prevention was often delayed rather than acted upon–toxicity was outsourced rather than eradicated. It was pushed into the future, pushed to the margins of society, onto colonial peripheries or displaced onto other species. Stability, when viewed with the benefit of hindsight, was often a period of chronic crisis where warning signs went ignored because they were assumed to be normal, unheard or just couldn’t be addressed due to political trade-offs.

Approaching sustainability in this way means we can start to ask new questions about the past–who had access to marine resources, and under what terms? How were limits understood, exceeded or contested? What cultures prized temperance and which glorified greed? And how was responsibility and risk shouldered between communities, regions, and generations?

Recognising how different societies have answered these questions – and succeeded or failed to sustain themselves – allows us to view sustainability not as a technological goal but as a continually developing cultural and moral endeavour. This underlines that sustainability is not just about resource management but about critically examining and rewriting the narratives societies tell themselves about the ocean.

The Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative

History matters. Too often, however, discussions of marine environmental problems and possible solutions ignore history, assuming instead that historical events are background conditions for analysis rather than indispensable subjects of analysis themselves. If we want to understand how we got to where we are today with regard to ocean crises then history is essential for explaining how the current became possible.

To that end, I have started a new initiative entitled the Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative (BSSI).

The Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative will consider how humans have perceived, used, and valued the ocean throughout time and will explore why history matters when we consider potential paths towards more sustainable futures for the sea. For it is no coincidence that many of today’s problems are ones that have been recognized (and forecast) for centuries. They persist because they are the product of long-established ways of thinking about and relating to the sea.

Through careful examination of the historical development of these ideas we can better understand why damage has been able to occur in spite of ample forewarning, and how shifting our mental approach to the sea can help us facilitate more sustainable practices.

 The Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative (BSSI) is a new initiative based at the London School of Economics and Political Science exploring how people have understood, used and valued the sea in the past, and why this history matters for the ocean’s future.