SEATIMES: How Climate Change Transforms Human-Marine Temporalities

In coastal communities around the world, peoples’ experiences of time are tightly entangled with life in the sea. The seasonal comings and goings of fish and other marine life are integral parts of the pace and rhythms of these societies, memories of earlier abundance or scarcity of fish are central to their imaginations of the past, and peoples’ hopes and fears for the future are often connected to how they envision marine resources to grow or disappear. What happens, then, when marine species start moving in unprecedented ways?

Climate change transforms marine ecosystems

Climate change is now actually causing sea temperatures to rise so much that many marine species have begun to change their seasonal movements significantly, fled altogether or found new waters to inhabit. SEATIMES aims to investigate what implications these changes have for the rhythms and temporalities of human-marine relations.

How do coastal communities experience these changes? How does it affect people’s daily lives? How do they respond, and how do they attempt to find new ways of living with the emergent ecologies that these changes engender? And what can these transformations tell us about how temporality is a product of human-nonhuman entanglements?

SEATIMES will answer these questions by conducting ethnographic research in three different sites which experience these transformations differently: in West-Africa, e.g. Senegal, where the sardinella is fleeing out towards colder water, in Maine where warming waters produce optimal breeding conditions of lobsters, and in the North-Atlantic, e.g. Norway where the warmer sea temperatures attract new species such as snow crabs and Pacific oysters.

In all these sites, changing mobilities of marine species seem to create new forms of relations between humans and marine life, but so far, we know little about exactly what forms these relations take and what kind of effects they have on the temporality of human-marine ecologies. SEATIMES aims to produce knowledge about what implications climate change has for human-marine relations and how these transform the temporality of these relations. Moreover, SEATIMES aims to develop a better theoretical understanding of how temporality canbe understood as emerging from multispecies relations, that is relational assemblages that include both humans and animals. The project will thus contribute to a broader understanding of how humans and marine life are entangled, a knowledge which is crucial for developing policies and ways to live better and more sustainably with life below water.

Recent scientific studies have shown that sea temperatures are on the rise and cause significant changes to the geographic range and composition of marine ecologies (Sunday, Bates, and Dulvy 2012; A.J. Richardson and Schoeman 2004; Belkin 2009; FAO 2018; Walther et al. 2002; Free et al. 2019). A major effect of these changes is that many of the ocean’s marine species seek out locations better suited for their feeding and breeding habits. The resulting relocation of marine life has been described as an “epicunderwater refugee crisis” (Reuters 2018) that has severe consequences for the livelihoods of fishery communities. However, as with other environmental problems (Chakrabarty 2009; A.L. Tsing 2005), the effects of global sea warming are not the same everywhere (Halpern et al. 2008). While some places see fish stocks moving further out to sea, other places see certain species experiencing explosive growth as warming temperatures and overfishing of predatory species create optimal living conditions for them. In other parts of the sea again, warming waters attract new species, some of which become target for an already thriving fishing industry and others that pose significant threats to existing marine ecosystems. In all these places, the underwater refugee crisis leads to new emergent ecologies (Kirksey 2015) that transform the ways in which fishers and fishery communities are entangled with life in the sea.

A new multispecies marine anthropology

The changes in marine ecologies caused by warming sea temperatures are by now well documented by research within the natural sciences. The social sciences, however, have so far had a relatively narrow approach to these issues. While much research within maritime anthropology and human geography has been done on how humans relate to marine resources, it has tended to focus on how fishery has been and can be sustainably managed, i.e. by formal and informal policies (e.g. Acheson 2003) and on how marine ecosystems provide services to humans (see Hirons, Comberti, and Dunford 2016).

While both of these approaches have contributed important insights into how humans can make sustainable use of natural resources, their views on how humans and marine life are entangled are also quite limited. They tend to approach humans and marine ecosystems as fundamentally distinct and as primarily related through resource extraction or service provision. They thus reproduce a common, but also questionable, distinction between the cultural world of humans on the one side and the natural world of marine ecosystems on the other, where relations between them is primarily seen as economic and instrumental. Furthermore, they build on a view of human-animal relations that sees humans as dominant subjects and marine life as more or less passive resource objects. The result is that although the transformations in human-marine relations caused by climate change may tell us a lot about how people live closely entangled with life below water, how climate change affect these relations and how they lead to the emergence of new multispecies temporalities, current social science of fishing has so little to contribute when it comes to knowledge about these processes.

Moreover, while there have been significant advances within the so-called multispecies anthropology and posthumanist inspired anthropology that addresshuman-animal relations in more dynamic and mutual ways, the anthropologyof fishing has yet to adopt these perspectives and has consequently become marginalized within the state of the art of “more-than-human” scholarship. In addition, attention to these forms of human-marine mutual relations is insufficiently covered by the conventional anthropocentric methods of interviews and participant observation. While these are valuable for certain aspects of these relations, there is a need for developing better methods with which to research human-nonhuman relations.

Building on and aiming to contribute to these recent developments in multispecies scholarship and posthumanist theory that emphasize the multitude of ways in which humans and nonhumans are mutually entangled, SEATIMES aims to expand the scope of marine anthropology by attending to the complexity, variety and dynamics of human-marine relations. That is, we would like to change the focus from solely looking at human use of marine life to ways in which people live with and partake in what could be described as human-marine ecologies. Taking our cue from Greenhouse’s (1996) argument that people’s accounts of time disclose their formulations of agency, we think that a focus on the temporal aspects of human-marine relations will be particularly useful for revealing the multiple and shifting ways in which humans and marine life interrelate in relational assemblages where agency is not restricted to humans, but distributed among different kinds of human and nonhuman actants (Latour 2007).

We think that by combining approaches from multispecies and posthumanist studies with an attention to the temporality of human-nonhuman relations may contribute to, on the one hand, radically transforming the relatively conventional and limited anthropology of fishing and, on the other hand, developing a new marine anthropology that is able to speak to larger issues beyond its current limited resource management scopeand thus enhance its impact within more-than-human scholarship.

The primary objectives of this project are therefore: 

• To produce knowledge about the complexity and dynamics of relations between humans and marine life. 
• To produce knowledge about how human-marine relations are affected by climate change.
• To develop new empirically based theoretical understandings of how temporality emerge in human-marine relations.
• To mobilize these insights to develop a new marine anthropology that is able to address issues related to broader issues of human-nonhuman relations.
• To develop new anthropological methods better able to uncover human-nonhuman relations.

To understand the consequences of global climate change for societies around the world, we need to understand how humans relate to and live with the environment they are part of.

By achieving its objectives, SEATIMES will provide significant contributions to this understanding and will contribute to a radically transforming the social sciences of fishing and human-marine relations.