The 100-year story of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, a scientific collaboration originally formed by eight northern European nations to address problems of overfishing in the North Atlantic. The author uses archival research and interviews to profile key ICES members and to provide insight into the relationship between fisheries science and biological oceanography. Contains a small section of historical photographs.
Set against the backdrop of ongoing geopolitical conflict of the twentieth century, the history of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) illustrates the complexity of forging international collaboration to tackle environmental resource issues and pursue scientific knowledge. Originally brought together to address the problem of overfishing in the North Atlantic, ICES founders envisioned an international scientific collaboration that would achieve knowledge impossible from investigations by a single nation. In describing the successes and failures of the scientific and management approaches that ICES pursued, Helen Rozwadowski has used the organization as a lens to reveal the ways in which humans have changed the marine environment over the last century, and especially the ways in which they have sought to control and modify those changes. ICES is the world's oldest international marine scientific organization. Formed in 1902 by eight northern European nations, it now has nineteen member nations from both Europe and North America and has evolved from a "gentlemen's agreement" renewed through diplomatic channels into a modern intergovernmental organization. From the start, ICES scientists embraced the idea that their work could solve practical fisheries problems, and ICES is one of the few scientific forums in which virtually all areas of marine science are represented.The Sea Knows No Boundariescontains vivid portraits of many key figures in ICES history, including Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian marine scientist who went on to lead famous polar explorations; the autocratic British Fisheries Secretary Henry Maurice; the Icelandic educator Arni Fridriksson, who hired and trained a generation of scientists; and the renowned Norwegian oceanographer, Harald Sverdrup, who brought European oceanography to the United States. Commissioned for the organization's centenary, the book is the result of an exhaustive review of organizational archives and interviews with many of its present and past participants. Rozwadowski's history of ICES provides unique insight into the relationship between fisheries science and biological oceanography. Helen M. Rozwadowski, an award-winning environmental historian, is undergraduate coordinator and adjunct professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology. "The Sea Knows No Boundariesis a fascinating discussion of the vagaries of international cooperation against the backdrop of the 20th century's two world wars and their resulting diplomatic problems. . . . It is a "must read" for marine policy scholars, for historians of oceanography and the life sciences, and for environmental historians. - Keith Benson, co-editor ofOceanographic History: The Pacific and Beyond "A fascinating and extremely captivating book, which covers not only the development if ICES but also the development of fisheries science as a whole." -Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology
By accident, the world-famous brewery Carlsberg became a central force in global marine science during the first three decades of the 20th century. Within a core group of scientists and managers, Johannes Schmidt (1877-1933) was the key figure combining the efforts of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the Danish state and several private companies. Launching 26 oceangoing expeditions Schmidt made landmark discoveries such as the breeding ground for the Atlantic eel in the Sargasso Sea. The scientific frontier was pushed literally kilometres into the deep sea and across the World’s oceans. While the formal North Atlantic Empire of the small state of Denmark was in decline, an informal empire of science was erected instead. Shortlisted for the Society for Nautical Research Anderson Medal for published works on Maritime History in 2016.
In the continuous search for sustainability, the exchange of diverse perspectives, assumptions, and values is indispensable to environmental protection. Through anthropological and ethnographic analyses, this collection addresses how interests, values, and ideologies affect dialogue and sustainability work. Drawing on studies from three continents - Europe, North America, and South America - the paradoxes and the plurality of meanings associated with the creation of sustainable futures are explored. The book focuses on how communication practices collide with organizational frameworks, customary practices, livelihoods, and landscape. In so doing, the authors explore the meanings of environmental communication, pushing beyond environmental advocacy rhetoric to emphasize stronger anthropological engagement within communities to achieve more impactful environmental communication practice. Empirically the book's chapters explore a diverse set of issues, ranging from coastal management in the European north to Native American place naming in Alaska. They further share findings from studies of contaminated land remediation in Sweden, conflicts over water resources in Chile, management of heritage and national parks in Northern Arizona, and cultural transmission in Slovakia. This is an open access book.
Throughout the twentieth century, glaciologists and geophysicists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden made important scientific contributions across the Arctic and Antarctic. This research was of acute security and policy interest during the Cold War, as knowledge of the polar regions assumed military importance. But scientists also helped make the polar regions Nordic spaces in a cultural and political sense, with scientists from Norden punching far above their weight in terms of population, geographical size or economic activity. This volume presents an image of Norden that stretches far beyond its conventional limits, covering a vast area in the North Atlantic and the Arctic Sea, as well as parts of Antarctica. Rich in resources, scarce in population, but critically important in global and regional geopolitics, these spaces were contested by major powers such as Russia, the United States, Canada and, in the Antarctic, Argentina, Australia, South Africa and others. The empirical focus on Danish, Norwegian and Swedish influence in the polar regions during the twentieth century embraces a diverse array of themes, from the role of science in policy and diplomacy to the tensions between nationalism and internationalism, with clear relevance to the important role science plays in contemporary discussions about Nordic engagement with the polar regions.
Offering one of the first analyses of how networks of science interacted within the British Empire during the past two centuries, this volume shows how the rise of formalized state networks of science in the mid nineteenth-century led to a constant tension between administrators and scientists.
The dissertation examines how actors in Norway, Sweden, and the British Empire conceived the Antarctic as a space for science during the years 1912 to 1952. Instead of tracing a narrative of enlightenment, how science became the dominant form of activity in the Antarctic, I examine a series of episodes with particular attention to why particular kinds of science held sway within specific political, cultural, and economic contexts. Concerned more with how Antarctic science was planned and justified than how it was executed in the field, the project draws upon recent scholarship in geography and geopolitics, as well as the history of exploration. The six case studies involve an aborted Anglo-Swedish Antarctic expedition in 1912; Britain's interwar Antarctic whaling research program; debates among whaling magnates and their associates over the relationship between Antarctic science and whaling in interwar Norway; the culture of polar exploration that emerged at Cambridge (and to some extent Oxford) between the world wars; the approach to polar exploration and quantitative glaciology pioneered by the Swedish geographer Hans Ahlmann; and the complicated history of the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition (1949-52). I conclude with an epilogue arguing that the rise of international science in the Antarctic during the 1950s reflected the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War, rather than the triumph of science over politics.
During the nineteenth century, British and American naval supremacy spanned the globe. The importance of transoceanic shipping and trade to the European-based empire and her rapidly expanding former colony ensured that the ocean became increasingly important to popular literary culture in both nations. This collection of ten essays by expert scholars in transatlantic British and American literatures interrogates the diverse meanings the ocean assumed for writers, readers, and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during this period of global exploration and colonial consolidation. The book’s introduction offers three critical lenses through which to read nineteenth-century Anglophone maritime literature: "wet globalization," which returns the ocean to our discourses of the global; "salt aesthetics," which considers how the sea influences artistic culture and aesthetic theory; and "blue ecocriticism," which poses an oceanic challenge to the narrowly terrestrial nature of "green" ecological criticism. The essays employ all three of these lenses to demonstrate the importance of the ocean for the changing shapes of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture and literature. Examining texts from Moby-Dick to the coral flower-books of Victorian Australia, and from Wordsworth’s sea-poetry to the Arctic journals of Charles Francis Hall, this book shows how important and how varied in meaning the ocean was to nineteenth-century Anglophone readers. Scholars of nineteenth-century globalization, the history of aesthetics, and the ecological importance of the ocean will find important scholarship in this volume.
Between 1949 and 1955, the State Department pushed for an international fisheries policy grounded in maximum sustainable yield (MSY). The concept is based on a confidence that scientists can predict, theoretically, the largest catch that can be taken from a species’ stock over an indefinite period. And while it was modified in 1996 with passage of the Sustained Fisheries Act, MSY is still at the heart of modern American fisheries management. As fish populations continue to crash, however, it is clear that MSY is itself not sustainable. Indeed, the concept has been widely criticized by scientists for ignoring several key factors in fisheries management and has led to the devastating collapse of many fisheries. Carmel Finley reveals that the fallibility of MSY lies at its very inception—as a tool of government rather than science. The foundational doctrine of MSY emerged at a time when the US government was using science to promote and transfer Western knowledge and technology, and to ensure that American ships and planes would have free passage through the world’s seas and skies. Finley charts the history of US fisheries science using MSY as her focus, and in particular its application to halibut, tuna, and salmon fisheries. Fish populations the world over are threatened, and All the Fish in the Sea helps to sound warnings of the effect of any management policies divested from science itself.
