Derek Walcott’s poem shows that the Caribbean environment—especially the sea—is not just a backdrop to human events but a living archive of colonial violence and survival, which is exactly what environmental humanities asks us to see.

Walcott opens by relocating history from libraries and monuments to the ocean’s “grey vault.” In the poem, ships, bones, coral, and storms become chapter headings in a watery chronicle of conquest and enslavement. The sea “kept turning blank pages / looking for History,” reminding us that environmental destruction often erases human records even as it preserves other traces—like “bone soldered by coral to bone.” Environmental humanities studies these traces, reading landscapes and seascapes as texts that hold memory, ethics, and power. Oil slicks, hurricanes, and reefs aren’t scenery; they are evidence.

The poem also challenges who gets to be a historical actor. In the later stanzas, nonhuman creatures—the heron, bullfrog, mantis, bats, even “the dark ears of ferns”—form a kind of parliament. This is a multispecies politics, where the environment doesn’t merely witness events; it participates in them. By staging this chorus, Walcott pushes us to consider environmental justice that includes more-than-human voices and vulnerabilities. Walcott is clear that official milestones like Emancipation can fade “as the sea’s lace dries in the sun” if we ignore the ecological ground of memory. To care for oceans and coasts, then, is also to care for culture and history. Environmental humanities urges us to recover these submerged stories and to protect the places that hold them.

“The Water Will Carry Us Home” a short film animated by Gabrielle Tesfaye captures and retells the story of African people who were captured and thrown off ship during the trip through the Middle Passage. I’ve had brief knowledge before, where I was told that captured Africans would be thrown off ship or willingly jump off ship because in their hearts they believe that the ocean waters would take them home to Africa as they transform into mermaids. Tesfaye was able to tell history from an overlooked perspective, one that is rooted deep in culture and spirituality.

In the opening scene of the animated film, a masculine figure holds a key in one hand. Both of his hands carrying an eye. He is surrounded by many doors, and the one he chooses emerges him amidst stormy sea waters. The third eyes seen in the story can be seen as a perspective shift, or the one that sees beyond a colonial narrative of the past. The film includes an old excerpt of a news article stating how African people were to be sold, describing them as healthy, the dehumanization and commodification of their lives blatant. The third eyes sees beyond this, it is a symbol of reclaiming their stolen lives with the help of their connection with the ocean. The ocean wasn’t something to be feared, not when it were other humans who have stolen their lives. Nature heals more than it destroys, a mystical mermaid goddess figure appears to embrace and redirect those who’ve been thrown off ship. Their transformations into mermaids and gaining a third eye is one of a spiritual rebirth.

In the introduction to The Ocean Reader, the editors encourage us to shift our perspective from land-first to an aqua centric one. The central claim is that the Ocean is a single, dynamic place whose neglect—rooted in terra-centrism—demands reorientation and urgent action. Against the illusion of changelessness, they foreground trenches, currents, and tectonic volatility to reveal a restless planetary system that structures human history as profoundly as any continent. By capitalizing “Ocean,” the book confers political and historical stature, dismantling cartographic partitions and the fiction of inexhaustible abundance; as the text declares, “there is only one interconnected global Ocean,” a circulatory body binding the Pacific to the Atlantic, the Arctic to the Southern.

Organized across themes—from origins and seafaring to science, recreation, warfare, and dire present—the anthology models a new Ocean history where ecology, culture, and power interpenetrate. It gathers overlooked gems and diverse voices to show how people have used, studied, traversed, and fought over the sea, even as they removed ninety million tons of life and steered a hundred thousand ships. The culminating warning is: after ignoring the Ocean, we face crises of heat, acidification, depletion, and plasticized food webs. Understanding our world requires centering the Ocean—and acting before rising water writes history for us.