Jesse D Peterson

As mariculture-the cultivation of aquatic organisms in marine environment-intensifies to meet the demands of sustainable blue growth and national policies, novel ethical challenges will arise. In the context of ethics, primary concerns over aquaculture and mariculture tend to stay within differing value-based perspectives focused on benefits to human and non-human subjects, specifically animal welfare and animal rights. Nonetheless, the burgeoning field of feminist blue humanities provides ethical considerations that extend beyond animal subjects (including humans), often because of its concerns with new materialist, posthumanist, and other relations-based theories. This article examines feminist blue humanities and the contributions it may bring to understanding contemporary and future ethical challenges posed by mariculture and its intensification, especially the cultivation of low-trophic organisms. By offering an overview of feminist blue humanities, this article explores some of its particularities by drawing out three major ethical concerns facing contemporary mariculture, specifically material reconfigurations, radical alteration of the lives of low-trophic species through industrialization and increases in maricultural waste products.

Biodiversity informatics produces global biodiversity knowledge through the collection and analysis of biodiversity data using informatics techniques. To do so, biodiversity informatics relies upon data accrual, standardization, transferability, openness, and “invisible” infrastructure. What biodiversity informatics mean to society, however, cannot be adequately understood without recognizing what organizes biodiversity data. Using insights from science and technology studies, we story the organizing “visions” behind the growth of biodiversity informatics infrastructures in Sweden—an early adopter of digital technologies and significant contributor to global biodiversity data—through interviews, scientific literature, governmental reports and popular publications. This case story discloses the organizational formation of Swedish biodiversity informatics infrastructures from the 1970s to the present day, illustrating how situated perspectives or “visions” shaped the philosophies, dir...

The state of the ocean is increasingly described in terms of ocean “health.” The Implementation Plan for the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development describes the aim of the decade as achieving “a sustainable and healthy ocean” and refers to the ocean’s “health” throughout, including references to an overall “decline in ocean health” [Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), 2020], p. i, 6. Likewise, Sustainable Development Goal no. 14 aims “to achieve healthy and productive oceans” and “to improve ocean health” [United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), 2015, p. 23, 24]. In addition, scientific studies from all disciplines routinely use the same metaphor, including statements such as “the many benefits that society receives from a healthy ocean” (Duarte et al., 2020, p. 39), “the health of marine ecosystems” (Hagood, 2013, p. 75), and the “importance of ocean health” (Borja et al., 2020, p. 1).
However, we argue that the health metaphor (Suter, 1993; Jamieson, 1995) continues to be imprecise, ambiguous, and problematic. We suggest that the idea of ocean “health” misrepresents the Earth’s history of ever-changing and adapting ecosystems through time, wrongly suggests that ocean health is an apolitical and objective state and obscures how conditions in the ocean are irreversibly intertwined with human activities.

Those who write about environmental humanities call on researchers to be interdisciplinary. But what kind of interdisciplinary research is required and how might a researcher actually do this form of research? The article presents one way for doing interdisciplinary research, using ecocritical analysis on Theodore Sturgeon’s short story, ‘It’, and then using that as a basis for developing an alternative narrative for a 360° video poem. To address what makes this research practice environmental humanities and not just ecocriticism, this article puts the histories of ecocriticism and environmental humanities in conversation with their approaches to interdisciplinarity. What seems apparent is that environmental humanities value external and instrumental forms of interdisciplinarity but that it also may be a burgeoning transdisciplinary effort.

As agricultural runoff, wastewater, and other forms of pollution have increased the number and range of microalgae in aquatic environments during the last century, "harmful" algae have become a being of political and scientific interest. Taking seriously algal historicity and temporalities, this chapter asks in what ways do the oceans matter to "harmful" microalgae. It addresses the conundrum of trying to take on an algal perspective and using this perspective as a lens for understanding different ways that maritime environments come to matter for humans and harmful microalgae. Based on recorded anecdotes, observations, and approximately thirty years of reporting in the "Harmful Algae Newsletter" (HAN), I develop and interview the speculative algal character, Nodularia spumigena, which offers an alternative reading of these sources. Such speculative imagining underscores the relative benefits for attempting to understand human concerns from nonhuman perspectives, the relational interactions between humans and algae that permit the naturalization of some algae as "harmful," and the ensuing contradictions that arise between human desires about algae and the oceans. Seeking an algal perspective leads to more-than human ethical reflections which can assist in engendering reconciliation of human interests and activities in accordance with other beings.

For our contribution, we provide a reflective personal essay based on interviews and physical and digital experiences that explore how nonhuman organisms become registered data points for international Biodiversity Observation Networks (BONs). By employing a "following" approach (employed by geographers and STS scholars alike), we aim to describe and detail the journey of a Northern Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) from the frozen shores of Fysingens Naturreservat in Sweden to the Swedish Species Observation System (Artportalen) to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Assessing this pathway and its context assists in characterising these systems' facilities, the many actors involved in their execution, and the information pathways that connect the multi-scalar operations at work in this monitoring effort. Moreover, following this journey shows how this mediation of a "natural-being" tests the limits of this data infrastructure, produces sociological data simultaneously and raises issues related to intimacy, "dataveillance," and competition.

Industrial activities and sewage have led to a proliferation of algal blooms in the world’s oceans, some of which emit toxins. Usually, the intent to study, monitor, and control algal blooms and their toxins means safeguarding humans as well as other lives that they care about. However, by removing this anthropocentric frame, how might algal toxicity be revised? More generally, what might toxicity look like when other-than-human bodies, times, and places are considered? Starting from this question, this chapter attempts to describe how the intersections of algal toxins and algal, animal, and water bodies in different times and places can assist in developing more-than-human narratives about toxins. Mobilizing broad concepts of toxin and body, the chapter addresses the “trajectories” of algal toxins through more-than-human bodies in three sections. The first section looks at algal toxins relationship to algal bodies, highlighting how these “toxins” benefit algae as well as how these chemicals and bodies often cannot be extricated as a result of ontological indeterminacies. The second section points to the various ways by which algal toxins spread through the bodies of other organisms. Third, algal toxins are put in relation to the sea to disclose how they permeate the times and spaces of the sea. As a conclusion, the chapter highlights how non-humans assist in the production of toxic bodies, times, and places. It also reflects on what it means to decenter human interests in toxic narratives, suggesting alternative approaches for dealing with the interrelationship of more-than-human bodies that produce toxicity.

Popular media representations of dead zones in the Baltic Sea and elsewhere illustrate a tension between a collapsing versus a collapsed marine environment. By looking at a selection of science journalistic and advocacy texts, this chapter explores how certain “environments” and their inhabitants get collapsed while others do not by focusing on the relationship between dead zones and fisheries and the extent to which eutrophication represents environmental collapse. Whether texts describe overfishing as a contributor to eutrophication or eutrophication as a contributor to fish loss points to a normative and utilitarian relationship to the sea rooted in economic and ecologic logic and food chain narratives. In addition, the extent to which eutrophication represents collapse points to a politics of remediation practices that are based in either preventative actions taken to reduce external nutrient loading or geo-engineering solutions such as chemical sedimentation or water aeration. As a result, popular media about dead zones and eutrophication generally point to the socio-natural construction of environmental collapse and provide clues regarding what collapse means and for whom.

This dissertation researches how perspectives in western industrial societies communicate about and give meaning to environmental degradation through case studies on the causes and effects of cultural eutrophication—namely nutrient pollution, algal blooms, and dead zones—in the Baltic Sea. Utilizing this approach, this dissertation addresses the ecological problems of cultural eutrophication in marine ecosystems by exposing normative claims humans make about the Baltic Sea and its contents as well as detailing how seas that exceed human expectations may offer insights into negotiating differing perspectives, discrepancies in power, and ways of being among humans and non-humans in marine environments.

In the introduction, the dissertation develops the concept and study of “waste ecology” and then interrogates several concepts related to water, nutrients, algal blooms, and dead zones. Chapter 1 then provides an environmental humanities theoretical and methodological frame which outlines the use of more-than-human ethnography, textual and visual analyses, and storying to assess ways that people value, order, and assign meaning to cultural eutrophication’s consequences in the following five chapters. These chapters explore whether or not the Baltic Sea can die, how nutrients get depicted as pollution, how an “algal perspective” might reframe human relationships to algal blooms, how algal monitoring efforts contribute to a myth that humans can remain separate from nature, and how narratives of environmental collapse depend upon what collapse means and for whom respectively. A final chapter concludes the dissertation, summarizing what the previous chapters might tell us about human relationships to seas besot by cultural eutrophication as well as how a lens of waste ecology might be applied for reorienting these relationships.

The dissertation contributes to research and public discussions by providing grounds for critically re-evaluating human relationships to marine environments. It reveals normative material-semiotic assumptions about the Baltic Sea and its ecology and details social and cultural responses to threats that rupture such assumptions and analyses them, showing how these responses attribute varying degrees of value to certain ecological processes, plants and animals, and the sea. It argues for suspending judgment about environmental change while also critically reflecting on efforts that characterize the “environment” as insufficiently capable of handling human activities. Through this research, the dissertation decenters a human exceptionalist tendency to posit that only humans create waste, arguing that waste is co-created with and through (marine) environments
and that degradation is not a result of fragility in nature as much as a failure of or lack of imagination in social and cultural organization.