Week 10: Seeing the Ocean As a Place

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In this weeks’s reading of The Ocean Reader, the author exposes how terracentrism, our land-centered worldview, has pet us from recognizing the ocean as a dynamic and vulnerable place that requires human awareness and action. They write how human struggle to “…think of the Ocean as a place” largely because we cannot visibly shape the sea in a meaningful manner in the same way we alter the land. We can plow or pave the earth but changes to the ocean tend to happen out of sight, creating an illusion that it is “changeless, inexhaustible, and impervious to the onslaught of harvesters”. This misunderstanding has greatly contributed to the staggering overuse of the oceans resources each year, such as the 90 million tons of fish.

By introducing the concept of terracentrism, the text calls out the bias that treats the ocean as secondary to land when it in reality covers more than the majority of the planet. The idea that human actions can’t truly affect it due to its vastness has allowed environmental harm to go unchecked. A small but symbolic decision to capitalize the ocean pushes the reader to rethink this bias and view it from a new perspective. Rather than seeing it as a generic feature of the globe, the author argues that capitalizing the term recognizes the ocean as proper place with respect equal to that of continents and nations.

Ultimately, this passage calls for a shift in how we see the world. The ocean is not the empty space we tend to think it as, rather, it is a living interconnected system that is facing an unprecedented crisis. Acknowledging the ocean as a place is the first step to take in protecting the future we share with it.

week 9

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as I began reading the first page of the assignment I had developed a few ideas from the book such as the conflict humanity has with the environment as well as modernism and post modernism in which the author coins the term terracitrism and the old concept of seven seas.The author describes the seven seas as “one big ocean and while its regions have been conceptualized as seperate bodies of water and named as different oceans,the fact is,they are all connected “. It invites the reader to realize that all bodies of water that we depend on are all interconnected and makes one realize that we dont have seperate life lines.The author warns of impending dangers such as the 2011 japanese disaster in which epochal tsunamis being created by the underwater earthquakes.The big point the author claimed was that if we leave our enviornment unnoticed and leave ourselves clueless to these natural disasters caused by us then they will cause deadly consequences to many.While this may seem like dire consqueneces the author also highlight the importance of oceans as they provide for many marine mammals.

Unity with the Ocean

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For this post I will be talking about “The Blue Humanities” (Humanities: The Journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Web. 2013).

The article discusses the changing perception of the ocean among those in the Western world, more specifically in America and middle-class Americans. To some extent, the ocean probably provides more harmony with nature than land does. As the article puts it, “A passion for yachting developed on both sides of the Atlantic in the later nineteenth century, and, by the early twentieth century, swimming had become very popular”. While it depends on the person, you technically see a lot of land scenery all the time, living your life. So the ocean is new. But there is a difference in how people enjoy the land’s nature in comparison to the ocean’s nature. I’ve personally heard and seen online posts that often say you have to separate from civilization (aka human progress) to reconnect with nature. You’ll have to go somewhere deep, without any structures, roads, cars, etc. But with the ocean, there’s an immediate connection, and you don’t have to go somewhere devoid of civilization to fully enjoy. This brings to mind the perception that man is separate from nature.

To quote Paterson-Hamilton from the article, “Often it seems that the more people become urbanized, the more they want about them talismans of nature on their walls, their shelves, their keyrings”. There is a desire to connect with nature, and the ocean is a good place that allows one to see urbanized areas (coastal towns/cities, for example) alongside the refreshing breeze and hear the gentle waves of the ocean. Thus, there is no separation but rather unity.

The Ocean is the Center… or should be.

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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.

The Water Planet

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The first of the readings this week, although incredibly content and numerically heavy, really seemed to open my eyes about a reality we know, but don’t think of: water outnumbers us by an immeasurable amount.

It’s specifically the way it’s enumerated and compared within the Ocean Reader introduction: “The largest of the regions is the Pacific Ocean, which is an expanse of 64 million square miles (about 165 million square kilo- meters [km]). It is difficult to grasp such enormous dimensions. By contrast, the landmass of Asia, the largest continent, is only about 17 million square miles (44 million square km), while North America covers just 9.5 million (24.6 million square km), of which the United States represents less than half, with 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million square km)” (Roorda, 2). Obviously, the fact that the Earth is 70 percent water is considered a common place fact, but it’s never really actualized how greatly that stretches across the physical space unit its existence becomes contrasted to something we recognize. It returns us to this conversation from class prior, that human beings consistently need to label based on comparison and recognizing it because of what it is not.

This disconnect of disregarding water, and treating as some sort of minute thing compared to our landmasses, only for it to be larger than even our largest areas, really puts it into perspective how disproportionately human beings seem to recognize the world around them. It’s so common to hold this assumption that because we can identify ourselves as sentient, it places us above everything else in this ecological food chain. The decision making and this labeling of important versus not becomes ours to choose, ours to define in spite of never recognizing its capacity because of our typical definition models. Despite being so commonly terracentric in our speech, so selfish in the way we acknowledge the world around us and never considering how our speech, our action, even our momentary thought has lasting effect, the water really has all the power.

Week 10: Oceanic Abuse

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Out of the reading for this week, there was something that sparked my interest in Eric Paul Roorda’s introduction. The entire introduction was honestly a lot to take in because of its scientific nature but I especially liked when he wrote, “This awareness in turn contributes to a growing consensus that we need to take concerted action to avoid the devastating consequences of having ignored the Ocean for too long” (Roorda 1).

I thought this was interesting because I feel it’s captures the bigger idea that the Ocean should not be treated as a background but as a living system, something that is entangled without our own human existence. From our talk on Tuesday it this quote got me thinking about how the human relationship with the Ocean isn’t typically something that we are aware of, it just is. It’s become something that we as humans take advantage of without even realizing, because of the fact that it’s always been there. But what if one day it isn’t, what if we have ignored it for son long like Roorda is saying in this introduction. Which makes sense in his use of the word “Terracentrism”.

Roorda’s use of “for too long” highlights the historical guilt that the world may have for abusing its relationship with the Ocean. This one sentence brings both awareness and action into one place, it does the showing and the telling all tied up with a pretty bow. It brings the right amount of devastation to the table, some kind of motivation to open the eyes of his readers. I feel this quote really ties up his entire introduction and what the rest of it entails. The combination of urgency and consciousness for our Ocean and ecosystem that it involves.

Song of the Week: Before the night by Joël Fajerman (I loved the mythical(ness) that this song brings to the ocean front. Also sorry this post isn’t super strong, I’ve been fighting sickness for what feels like weeks now and just and my body finally caved!)

People and Oceans

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In the Vast Expanses, Helen M. Rozwadowski talks about how people and oceans have always been connected. She explains that the ocean is not just empty space between countries, but a place full of history, stories, and human activity. One sentence that caught my attention was, “The sea has always been part of human history, but only recently have historians begun to see it as a central force rather than a background.” This line means that the ocean has always mattered, but people are only now starting to see how important it really is.

I like how Rozwadowski uses the idea of the sea as a central force. Normally, when we study history, we focus on land, cities, empires, or wars. The ocean is often seen as a blank space. But she shows that the ocean actually connects people across the world. Through sailing, trading or exploring, humans have built relationships with the sea for thousands of years. The word “expanses” also gives a image of something wide and deep, reminding us that there is so much more to learn about the ocean.

Reading this made me think differently about nature and humans. Rozwadowski shows that humans and the ocean affect each other all the time. The sea gives us food and shapes our climate, but people also change the sea through travel, pollution, or stories. From this I thought that we should understand the ocean as part of our world, not something separate from us.

By reading this, now I see the ocean as something alive that holds memories and histories. Rozwadowski helped me realize that the ocean is like a storyteller. It remembers everything people have done and still connects us all through its movement and sound.

Reclaiming the Ocean’s Identity

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In the introduction to The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Eric Paul Roorda says, “Ocean is capitalized in this book…to claim a formal name for that vast place within the realm of World History, as if it were a country or a continent” (3). The author makes an interesting, stylistic decision that is seemingly a grammatical observation, but it operates on a deeper, more symbolic level as a political and ecological statement. By giving “Ocean” the status of a proper noun, the author transforms it from a background into it being an active subject—one with history, agency, and an identity. This whole passage invites readers to reconsider how language reflects the hierarchy and neglect. Lands, nations, and people receive capitalization, while the sea–source of life and essentially the means of global interconnection–remains lowercased, as it’s being linguistically diminished.

The capitalization of “Ocean” challenges terracentrism, as it is described in the first pages, it is basically a perspective that centers human civilization on land and keeps water as an absence or the outside margin. Roorda’s choice of wording in the quote I mentioned earlier resists the bias by asserting that the Ocean deserves recognition that is the same as continents and countries. The rhetorical effect is both grammatical and moral because readers must see the sea not as a blank expanse but as a named entity that demands attention. By saying, “to claim a formal name for that vast place” implies a reclamation, as if the Ocean has been stripped of its proper dignity by centuries of human exploitation and invisibility.

By capitalizing “Ocean,” we’re also quite literally, linguistically elevating the word so that it also resonates with environmental urgency because this is a place! The text repositions the sea as a proper subject of history–one that is currently endangered and constantly overlooked. The act of naming becomes an act of care, restoring narrative agency to the planet’s largest ecosystem. Roorda’s editorial, grammatical choice of giving the sea the name “Ocean,” as so much more than a stylistic choice, as it performs what their argument is, and it’s turning it into advocacy. In this subtle yet profound gesture, language becomes a tool to compel readers to see that the Ocean, like humanity itself, has a name that is worth honoring.

Ocean and History

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In “Introduction: People and Oceans” by Reaktion Books, a line that stood out to me was “ The time has come to put the Ocean in the centre of some of our histories, not to replace terrestrial history but to add the history of the Ocean itself to the other important histories we tell (pg.7).” This opens the narrative that we can make space for broadening our perception of the environmental humanities, one that is inclusive to the Ocean. There is this idea that some of us believe, that if we are to introduce a new idea it is made in lieu of another. This quote tells us that we can deepen our pre-existing understanding and knowledge of our history by adding the unfamiliar, which is incorporating blue humanities.The Ocean is perceived as unchanging, a timeless body of water that remains the same, even to those who are well acquainted with it such as sailors. Stories of the sea usually involve humans and the way that we interact with it. Whether that be through sea exploration, recreational activity or reaping the sea of its resources. Hardly ever are there talks of the Ocean being an archive, the land in contrast is something we’ve documented to be dynamic and ever-changing. Our history books are land-centric, which goes to show our limited knowledge of the vast Ocean. This terrestrial bias is included in our language, and interestingly enough how far our care extends to other species of animals. These animals are usually mammals that humans feel for, such as whales, dolphins, seals, etc. It’s difficult to empathize with what we don’t see in ourselves. Even when documenting Ocean history, it is usually through the lens of globalization and how we directly interact with the sea rather than the changes of the Ocean by itself. If we change the way that we look at the Ocean, as a space that’s worth acknowledging with changes unseen by the human eye, perhaps we’ll find new and deeper ways to care for it.  

Ocean Identity: Belonging only Within Itself

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In our Introduction of The Ocean Reader: Theory, Culture, Politics, Roorada gives us an overall view on the message this book is intended to grant us, a cultural retrospective in regards to how we as a society view the Ocean and in what ways as a community we begin our rethinking of the Ocean in itself rather in comparison to ourselves. Within the introduction, a topic we are exposed to is “Ocean” being “capitalized”… “as if it were a country or a continent.” Roorada explains to the audience that the purpose of this is “to challenge the conventional wisdom that the seas can be taken for granted. They cannot.” This ideology challenges how many different human societies, particularly the US, see the ocean as a resource, “a thing” to be exploited for personal use and profit. And yet – Roordan challenges us to see that even believing the Ocean can be taken for granted is the problem in the first place. Writing the name as “Ocean” is not a way of a human individual giving the Ocean an identity, as we have no individual rights to name the natural world. It is a way of showing recognition to what has always been present. 

The Ocean was here long before any humans set foot on this earth. Its waters gave life to all forms of organisms, covered the earth in its richness to provide for its creatures. The Ocean does not act on behalf of us. We are its servants, privileged to use it as a pathway into other worlds unknown to us. The Ocean gave us the ability to be interconnected with other human communities, the only course to cultures and expansion. The ocean gave humans food and material, a way to sustain ourselves long before societies stood. Yet how can we say the Ocean bends at our will? How can we look out on this majority, a geographical location that covers more of the Globe than any other “thing” on this planet and expect to obtain power over it? 

             Roordan reorganizes our thinking in regards to human ownership, what we conceive to be within our own domain of influence and what is actually out of our control. Ocean is the world and environment. We live within Ocean. The Ocean is a part of ourselves, we would not be human without it. Our connection with it is that of children, reliant on its resources, unable to survive without its nourishment. We, as a community must take it upon ourselves to reshape our viewpoint on Ocean, understand we have no control over the natural world and are subject to its dominion it places upon us.