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W. JEFFREY BOLSTER Opportunities in MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY ABSTRACT The ocean may be the next frontier for environmental historians. People have depended on the ocean for centuries and quietly reshaped it. Recently the tragic impact of overfishing, habitat destruction, and biological invasions has become apparent. Yet the history of human interactions with marine environments remains largely uninvestigated, in part because of the enduring assumption that the ocean exists (or existed) outside of history. Historians should take seriously the challenge to historicize the ocean. That will include investigating its changing nature and peoples’ historically specific assumptions about using and regulating it. Arguing that marine environmental history can complement on-going research in historical marine ecology, this essay invokes recent scientific work while staking out distinct terrain for historians. FOR MILLENNIA THE bountiful sea provided a larder, a living, and the possibility of riches for intrepid fishermen. Its scale in time and space, however, even for experienced mariners, appeared all out of proportion to that of familiar worlds ashore; and seafarers and landlubbers alike could not help but regard the sea as inscrutable, threatening, and eternal. Suddenly, in the blink of a twentieth-century eye, the tables were turned: The sea appeared fragile and vulnerable in the face of human arrogance. Overfishing, destruction of marine habitats, and shipborne biological invasions cast the time-honored phrase “men against the sea” in a new light. Following publication in the journal Nature of an essay estimating that large predatory fish had declined worldwide by 90 percent, Newsweek’s cover story on July 14, 2003, asked, “Are the oceans dying?”1 That question, unimaginable not long ago, seemed all the more ominous for its lack of historical precedent. The recent crisis in the ocean has been regarded rightfully as an ecological and political problem, but rarely understood in light of history—as if nature and science were somehow realms separate from the study of the past. During the W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Opportunities in Marine Environmental History,” Environmental History 11 (July 2006): 567-597. 568 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 11 (JULY 2006) 1990s the Black Sea Figure 1. Newsweek Cover, July 14, 2003. ecosystem collapsed, literally starved to death by a bloom of invasive jellyfish that indiscrim- inately devoured zoo- plankton, phytoplank- ton, and larval fish, leaving virtually nothing for the rest of the food chain. For creatures in and people around the nearly landlocked Black Sea, the horror un- leashed by the cteno- phore Mnemiopsis leidyi was immediate and vivid; but ships have been carrying invasive marine hitchhikers from one sea to another for centuries, quietly re- shaping the oceans of the world. The Black Sea Cover image courtesy of Newsweek. catastrophe was differ- The ominous question posed by Newsweek in 2003 seemed ent because of its scale especially startling because the ocean has rarely been understood and the presence of as if it existed in history. cameras.2 When the Canadian government closed the Grand Banks cod fishery in 1992, cod stocks and spawning biomass were frighteningly low, and the average size of individual fish had plummeted. Fishermen knew they were catching juveniles and that the fishery was unsustainable, but few Newfoundlanders could imagine alternatives. To hear politicians at the time, however, one might have thought that the problem was a recent one, and that the closures would be brief. Fourteen years later the decimated cod population has not yet rebounded, the fishery remains closed, and Newfoundland’s coastal economy and society are still staggering. The collapse, of course, was hardly just a few years in the making: Newfoundland’s banks had been fished rigorously for centuries.3 Initially that ecosystem’s productivity was staggering. In 1578 Anthony Parkhurst wrote from Newfoundland of capturing capelin, a bait-fish favored by cod, “with a shove-net as plentiful as you do wheat with a shovel, [enough] in three or four hours for a whole city.” In 1664, when European fishermen were already catching about 200,000 tons of cod each season, the Jesuit Relations noted “these waters so abound in codfish … that ships are quickly filled with them.” Yet as early as 1703 an Englishman lamented from coastal Newfoundland that “the fish grows less, the old store being consumed by our continual fishing.” By then the five-hundred- MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY | 569 year fishing spree that ended in 1992 was well underway. When the Canadian government finally pulled the plug, Newfoundland’s marine ecosystem had changed beyond recognition from the one described by Parkhurst or the Jesuits.4 If the bookends of initial abundance and contemporary scarcity in the oceans are well known by now, most waypoints between them remain obscured or uninvestigated, ripe for historical analysis. It is increasingly clear that people have been using the oceans and leaving their marks for centuries, even though the marks long appeared invisible. Isn’t it time to recognize the oceans as part of history? Encouraging the development of scholarship, publications, and programs in marine environmental history, this essay argues that historians are uniquely situated to reconstruct the inextricably tangled stories of people and the oceans.5 THE NEED FOR MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY DURING THE LAST forty years dramatic biological changes have occurred in New England, West Indian, and Scandinavian waters, among other places, with profound socio-cultural consequences. The centuries-old Long Island Sound lobster fishery collapsed recently, probably from toxic insecticides, throwing lobstermen out of work and accelerating the transformation of working waterfronts into condominiums and office units.6 Caribbean coral reefs that beguiled divers during the 1970s are moribund. Stripped of life, they no longer attract local fishers or snorkeling tourists. Meanwhile, North Atlantic fishing villages from Norway to New Bedford are grappling with their identity and economic survival; dependent on cod for centuries, they are in death throes as grim as those of the Jamaican reefs. The sea around them, moreover, has not been simply depleted by overfishing: Its web of life is being restructured in profound and increasingly unpredictable ways.7 Within this recently constructed and chilling metanarrative of marine environmental decline, the uncontestable truth of our era, a few alternative stories have bobbed to the surface. Maine lobstermen are not complaining. Shiny new pickup trucks at town docks from Kittery to Eastport attest to record-breaking lobster landings during the last ten years, a result, some ecologists believe, of the radical refashioning of ecological relationships among finfish, kelp, sea urchins, and lobsters initiated by the virtual eradication of cod and other demersal fish.8 Maritime Maine has not always been the lobster coast. Maine’s maritime communities, however, have always trailed historic changes in near-coastal ecosystems with significant social and cultural adaptations. That tale, in all its detail, still awaits an environmental historian.9 While the long-term effects of humans’ manipulation of the ocean have become abundantly clear in recent decades, the process itself—little understood and, until recently, generally ignored—has been underway for centuries.10 Spencer Apollonio, former commissioner of Maine’s Department of Marine Resources, suggested that human harvesters using sails, oars, hooks, and harpoons may have removed more biomass from the Gulf of Maine during the eighteenth century than did their counterparts with diesel trawlers, polyester nets, and electronic fish-finders in the twentieth century. His back-of-the-envelope figures, worthy of careful 570 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 11 (JULY 2006) investigation, point to the impact of the colonial whale fishery, which was an early source of profits for a region that lacked a dominant export commodity such as sugar, tobacco, or wheat. New England’s peak shore whaling years were 1690 to 1725. Contemporaries claimed the near shore whaling grounds had been “fished out” by 1740, and documentary-based research indicates that a minimum of 2,459 to 3,025 right whales were killed by colonists between 1696 and 1734 in the coastal area between Delaware Bay and Maine, in addition to numerous pilot whales and occasional other great whales. Other informed estimates suggest the number of whales killed was much higher. Nor was this the earliest documented overfishing in North American waters. Sixteenth-century Basque whalers depleted right whale and bowhead populations in the Straits of Belle Isle between Labrador and Newfoundland by killing tens of thousands of whales from 1530 to 1620. Then Dutch and Basque whalers in the western Arctic killed 35,000 to 40,000 whales between 1660 and 1701, reducing stocks considerably and affecting the whales’ migratory patterns.11 Even if seventeenth- and eighteenth-century harvesters did not remove more biomass from the system than their twentieth-century counterparts, consequences followed from overfishing. Killing large numbers of whales in a relatively short time removed their qualitative contribution to ecosystem stability. Baleen whales are not apex predators. But as long-living large animals, whales embody vast biomass in stable form. Even in a relatively small area like the Gulf of Maine, the pre-harvest whale population concentrated