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What is marine justice?

Article  in  Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences · April 2019

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-019-00545-0

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Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (2019) 9:234–243
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-019-00545-0

REVIEW

What is marine justice?

Jennifer A. Martin 1 & Summer Gray 1 & Eréndira Aceves-Bueno 2,3 & Peter Alagona 1 & Tammy L. Elwell 4 &
Angela Garcia 5 & Zach Horton 6 & David Lopez-Carr 3 & Jessica Marter-Kenyon 7 & Karly Marie Miller 3 &
Christopher Severen 8 & Teresa Shewry 9 & Becky Twohey 10

Published online: 3 April 2019

# AESS 2019

Abstract
Marine justice is presented as a bridging concept and opportunity for scholars, activists, and policy-makers to combine differing
methods of knowledge production and communication to promote and deepen justice in an era of global environmental change,
sea level rise, overfishing, ocean acidification, and other coastal and marine issues. We open with an exploration of the historical
connections between the study of seascapes and the emergence and development of environmental justice. We then discuss five
conceptual domains—space, time, knowledge, participation in decision-making, and enforcement—in which attention to marine
environments resonates with and expands environmental justice framings. Using a series of examples to illustrate how environ-
mental justice and marine issues converge in scholarship and activism, we argue that this coming-together of concepts creates
new avenues for research and inquiry.

Keywords Climate . Environmental justice . Fishing . Oceans . Pollution . Marine environments

Introduction and economic injustice. Marine studies originated in relation

to concerns over equity and the undemocratic decision-
This essay connects two key multi-disciplinary themes—the making processes that relate to resource overharvesting and
study of marine environments and the study of environmental other factors that alter—and in many cases degrade—ocean
justice—in order to name an ongoing conversation that has ecosystems once considered inexhaustible. More recently,
been building in the environmental and ocean-related litera- these two bodies of scholarship have increasingly come into
tures. Since the 1980s, environmental justice and marine stud- contact as a result of a growing awareness of the impacts of
ies emerged independently as important foci of scholarship, people’s changing relationships with oceans over time.
activism, and policy. Both historically center around issues of To bridge these literatures, this paper highlights the concept
pollution, the uneven distribution of costs and benefits, power, of marine justice, a term that has only recently made its way into
knowledge production, and representation, but with different the scholarly literature (Widener 2018; Longo and Clark 2016),
starting points. Environmental justice emerged in response to and offers a discussion of some of the major thematic areas that
toxic exposure as it relates to histories and practices of racial emerged from a multi-disciplinary discussion that took place

* Jennifer A. Martin 5
Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University,
[email protected] Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
6
Department of English, University of Pittsburgh,
1
Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA 7
Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education &
2
Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Communication, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
Beaufort, NC 28516, USA 8
Research Department, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia PA,
3 Philadelphia 19106, USA
Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University
9
of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara,
4 Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara,
10
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA The Coral Reef Alliance, Oakland, CA 94612, USA
J Environ Stud Sci (2019) 9:234–243 235

over the course of a year-long Mellon-Sawyer seminar focused Color Environmental Leadership Summit authored their land-
on the topic of sea change at the University of California, Santa mark BPrinciples of Environmental Justice,^ which laid out a
Barbara between 2013 and 2014. The Mellon-Sawyer Seminar 17-point agenda for the growing environmental justice grass-
program supports interdisciplinary and comparative research roots movement (Lee 1992). Three years later, the movement
that brings together faculty, visiting scholars, postdoctoral fel- acquired policy visibility when President Bill Clinton issued
lows, and graduate students from the humanities, social sci- Executive Order 12898 that required all federal agencies to
ences, and related fields. As collaborators, we represent a vari- consider environmental justice concerns in all government
ety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, economics, ge- policy making (Mohai et al. 2009).
ography, history, law, literature, media studies, marine sciences, Environmental justice soon acquired several meanings. It
and sociology. Because research on the oceans was so often a was a set of methodological tools that included ethnography,
multidisciplinary endeavor, a central goal of the seminar was the spatial statistics, epidemiology, and citizen science (Taylor
identification of opportunities for integrating diverse thinking 2000; Mohai et al. 2009); it was a body of scholarly literature
about marine environments and the human cultures that depend composed mainly of place-based case studies (Bullard 1990;
upon the sea for their survival (Estrada 2012). Together, we Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss 2001); and it was a social move-
posed the question BWhat is Marine Justice?^ and worked ment that aimed to improve the lives of ordinary people living
through the disciplinary tensions, possibilities, and conceptual in risky or unhealthy environments (Faber 1998; Freudenberg
frameworks that this concept helps to inspire. and Steinsapir 1992; Brulle 2000). In all three of these areas,
Our findings are presented in three parts: We begin by there are concerns over procedural justice, which involves the
explaining the historical connection between the emergence processes by which collective decisions are made, and distrib-
and development of environmental justice concepts and the in- utive justice, which focuses on the allocation of benefits and
creasing attention in marine studies to issues of equity. We then burdens in a society, and, more recently, justice as recognition,
use a series of examples to show the ways in which these two which tracks the devaluation of some social groups through
literatures converge in scholarship and activism, highlighting everyday and institutional interactions and unequal enforce-
how Earth’s seascapes are fundamentally linked to questions ment (Schlosberg 2007; Walker 2012).
of environmental justice. In the final section of the paper, we By the early 1990s, scholars and activists far beyond the
present the concept of marine justice and discuss five conceptual USA had begun using the term to call attention not only to
domains—space, time, knowledge, participation in decision- local pollution and health problems, but also to a much
making, and enforcement—in which marine spaces come into broader set of struggles against colonialism, dispossession,
contact with and expand traditional environmental justice fram- modernization, neoliberalism, and globalization (Hallowes
ings. These conceptual domains are not intended to be compre- 1993; Friends of the Earth Scotland 1999; Adeola 2000;
hensive, but are offered as starting points. We conclude with a Nixon 2011; Steady 2009; Walker 2009, 2012, 16–38;
reflection on the importance of bringing scholars, activists, and Westra and Lawson 2001; World Commission on
policy-makers together to combine differing methods of knowl- Environment and Development 1987). During the 2000s, en-
edge production and communication to promote and deepen vironmental justice discourse expanded again, this time to
justice in an era of global environmental change. include climate justice (Roberts and Parks 2007; Dawson
2010; Ciplet et al. 2015; Harlan et al. 2015). Although diverse
in their perspectives and goals, climate justice activists in gen-
Environmental justice eral argue that policies to address global climate change
should seek to protect the world’s most vulnerable people,
The term Benvironmental justice^ originated in the early and that the costs of addressing climate change should be
1980s, when scholars and activists—mostly in the United fairly distributed based on culpability, impacts, ability to
States South and Midwest—set out to understand and amelio- pay, and other considerations (McKee 2012; Nixon 2011).
rate the negative health effects experienced by poor people Despite the growth and diversification of environmental
and people of color as a result of their disproportionate expo- justice scholarship, several key challenges have remained con-
sure to industrial, agricultural, and urban pollution (Pollack sistent throughout its history (Pellow and Brulle 2005; Mohai
and Grozuczak 1984; Urban Environmental Conference et al. 2009; Pellow 2018). The first is a methodological ques-
1985; Gottlieb 1993; McGurty 1997, 2007; United Church tion about appropriate standards of evidence, including
of Christ and Commission for Racial Justice 1987). By the distinguishing correlation from causation and intention from
late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars in international environ- negligence in claims of environmental injustice (Hamilton
mental law had started a similar debate about the global com- 1995; Banzhaf 2012). Some environmental justice scholars
mons beyond state jurisdiction under the key term of Binter- continue to express concerns about the difficulty of scaling-
generational justice^ (Brown Weiss 1989, 1990; D’Amato up from local case studies to broader theories of power and
1990). In 1991, the attendees of the First National People of politics (Benford 2005; Getches and Pellow 2002). And many
236 J Environ Stud Sci (2019) 9:234–243

still worry about whether their field is doing enough to ame- often unequal and uneven among its 168 signatory parties (as
liorate persistent structural impediments, such as the difficulty of 2018), as well as among non-party nations, including the
of obtaining legislative reform and judicial relief in response USA (Okereke and Charlesworth 2014).
to claims of environmental harm (Cole and Foster 2000; Sikor Since World War II, overfishing has emerged as a central
and Newell 2014). Most recently, environmental justice schol- problem for research and policy, as the capitalization, indus-
ar David Pellow has suggested the need to extend environ- trialization, and globalization of fisheries have pushed many
mental justice to Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) as an stocks to the brink and threatened the human communities that
interdisciplinary and multi-methodological framework that al- depend on them (Jackson 2010; Jackson et al. 2001). This has
lows for deepening environmental justice’s reach across spe- presented numerous challenges related to managing coastal
cies and space (Pellow 2018). and ocean areas, including the distributional effects of fisher-
ies policies (Loomis and Ditton 1993; Grainger and Costello
2016). The details are unique to each case, but the pattern is
Marine studies familiar. In region after region, various parties have blamed
each other for the decline, while decision-makers have faced
In terms of their materiality, seascapes are incredibly complex intense political pressure to recover stocks without restricting
places. The world’s oceans are dynamic ecosystems charac- access (McEvoy 1986; Bolster 2012; Hubbard 2014).
terized by complex biophysical patterns of salinity, tempera- Enforcement is also a problem in many fisheries, exacerbating
ture, and water density that drive waves, currents, and tidal management challenges and increasing the likelihood of so-
systems that in turn shaped the biota and habitats from local to cial conflict (Wadewitz 2012; Roberts 2013). Although these
global scale. Efforts to understand the oceans have brought episodes usually have been treated as political stories, many
discrete and sometimes competing disciplinary approaches to also involve legal and ethical claims involving both distribu-
marine studies that vary across chronological and national tive and procedural justice (Finley 2011).
contexts, using terms as different as Bthalassography, hydrog- An increasingly important tool for managing fisheries is
raphy, or oceanography^ over the last 200 years (Anderson ocean zoning. Indigenous communities and other local peo-
and Rozwadowski 2016, 2). Of course, the study of the oceans ples have long apportioned coastal and ocean space for partic-
reaches much further back, in the Pacific Islands, for example, ular groups or specific uses. Many of these arrangements
for many thousands of years into the past (Salesa 2014; broke down during periods of colonization. By the mid-
D’Arcy 2008). Scholars in the humanities and social sciences twentieth century, they were replaced in many regions by
have long studied the oceans as important symbols; in the management programs that aimed to maintain what they
classical antiquity of Rome and Greece, Oceanus was a figure called Bmaximum sustainable yields^ by regulating the
of great importance, appearing in the work of the poet Homer. amount of resources harvested rather than by apportioning
The question of equity in marine studies has a more recent space. Proposals for marine protected areas reemerged at the
history. The term Bequity^ emerged in the scholarly literature 1962 World Congress on National Parks, then accelerated in
in the early 1980s among political scientists and economists the 1980s and 1990s (Gubbay 1995; McArdle et al. 2003).
(Young 1982; Hannesson 1985). Ecologists and other biolo- Early results are promising, but researchers are still evaluating
gists have started to incorporate the concept more recently to the effectiveness of these types of ocean zoning strategies to
improve conservation planning, especially for fisheries restore degraded resource stocks and establish fairer and more
(Loomis and Ditton 1993; Halpern et al. 2013). sustainable approaches to resource management (Allison et al.
The impacts of fish harvesting date back hundreds of years 2012; Frazão Santos et al. 2014; Gustavsson et al. 2014;
in some regions (Bolster 2012; Erlandson and Rick 2010; Kahmann et al. 2015; Kidd and Shaw 2014; Levine et al.
Roberts 2013; Steinberg 2001). Before contact with 2015; Sinclair 1990; Wise 2014). What is clear is that dividing
Europeans, indigenous peoples throughout the world up ocean space rearranges people’s relationships with marine
established elaborate systems governing the use of marine resources in ways that could have important consequences for
spaces and resources, including mechanisms for resolving dis- environmental justice.
putes (Salesa 2014; D’Arcy 2008). Colonialism in the eigh- Land use in coastal zones also profoundly shapes people’s
teenth and nineteenth centuries disrupted many of these tradi- relationships with the sea. Rampant seaside construction, for
tional systems by ushering in new customs, laws, and bureau- example, has resulted in severe impacts to coastal and near-
cratic structures (Walker 2012; Wadewitz 2012). International shore marine ecosystems and diminished public access to
efforts to regulate marine commerce, navigation, mineral shorelines, particularly among poor local residents squeezed
rights, and crimes on the high seas over the twentieth century out by development (Kahrl 2015). There are many such cases,
culminated in the United Nations Conventions on the Law of but the global decline of mangrove forests offers one of the
the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1958, 1960, 1973, and 1982. Although most gripping examples. Mangrove forests are among the
the latest UNCLOS went into effect in 1994, its results were world’s most productive ecosystems and serve as nurseries
J Environ Stud Sci (2019) 9:234–243 237

for diverse fish and wildlife (Polidoro et al. 2010). Their exposed to weapons testing and manufacturing are still coping
destruction—due to aquaculture, real estate development, with the aftermath (Dé Ishtar 1994; Teaiwa 1994; Johnston
and other factors—has ignited a global movement spanning and Barker 2008). Meanwhile, activists seeking compensation
from Latin America to Southeast Asia to Africa. In the words for the risks and losses imposed on them during the Cold War
of one Ecuadorian activist, the effort to save these coastal face the challenge of organizing a movement among far-flung
forests is Bla lucha justa^: the just fight (Warne 2011, 65). communities living under diverse political regimes and deal-
ing with time-scales of exposure that span many generations
(Tate and Hull 1964; Kuletz et al. 2002; Chappell 2005; Firth
Convergences between environmental justice 2005; Maclellan 2005; Tetiarahi 2005).
and marine studies The concept of scale matters critically in both literatures,
because the ocean’s dynamic biophysical processes enable the
As scholars from varied disciplines, such as political science, movement of toxic, anthropogenic substances away from their
economics, sociology, and marine science, often discuss ma- point of origin. Consider the iconic marine-pollution case sur-
rine environments in prescriptive and academic terms, activ- rounding Minamata disease. Named for the Japanese seaside
ists have seized on the tools of citizen science as an expression community where it was first identified, Minamata disease
of political empowerment. Activist groups spearheaded some appeared in the 1950s, when house cats in the area began
of the first studies of marine-related environmental justice behaving bizarrely and dying from what was later shown to
issues. As early as 1989, for example, the Center for be a neurological disorder caused by mercury poisoning.
Environmental & Economic Justice worked to document Local residents, who also soon began suffering from the syn-
and combat the effects of pollution coming from US military drome, attributed their symptoms to the accumulation of in-
sites in coastal Mississippi, including the contamination of dustrial pollution in local fish and shellfish. The owners of the
fish harvested mainly by African Americans (Morse 2008). chemical factory responsible for the mercury emissions spent
More recently, the Gulf Coast has been the site of research considerable resources denying the links between human
exploring how racial segregation and infrastructure develop- health and marine toxins, and it took years for researchers to
ment have relegated African American populations to areas determine the causes (Ekino et al. 2007; Walker 2010). This
that are disproportionately vulnerable to flooding, and has case is often either used to illustrate problem solving in envi-
hampered their ability to recover from disasters such as the ronmental toxicology courses or framed by social theorists as
1927 Mississippi flood through Hurricane Katrina and beyond a hidden cost of Japanese industrialization (Almeida and
(Hardy et al. 2017; Mizelle 2014; Freudenberg et al. 2009; Stearns 1998). The Minimata case rarely has been understood
Elliott and Pais 2006; Morse 2008). Since the early 2010s, as a tale of environmental injustice or even a marine issue. It is
activists and academics have developed together new tools clear, however, that the politically marginalized local residents
for collaboration, such as the EJAtlas to track a Bproject-based of Minimata experienced disproportionate harms due to their
campaign or place-based struggle,^ including the Gulf of reliance on local ocean resources (Japan. Kankyōshō. Sōgō
Mexico’s Deepwater Horizon spill (Martinez-Alier et al. Kankyō Seisakukyoku 2013).
2016, 734). While the complex biophysical processes that facilitate
The convergence is more than a local story; however, it movement are critical to the convergence of environmental
also occurs simultaneously on a global scale. US policies justice and marine studies, just as important is the human
and markets have played important roles in shaping global value of staying in place. This dilemma plays out in complex
ocean environments for more than a century, but environmen- ways when we consider the problem of climate change and
tal justice issues related to marine pollution are by no means coastal development. In lesser-developed countries, the
limited to the USA. The oceans have served as both a conduit poorest people in a society—those who contributed least to
and repository for the global waste trade across national climate change-induced extreme weather events—are often
boundaries. Philadelphia’s municipal waste, for example, trav- the most exposed to coastal storms, fires, and flooding.
eled around the world for nearly 2 years on the vessel, Khian Entire low-lying cities and countries, such as the Maldives
Sea, illegally dumping toxic materials on a Haitian beach and and Marshall Islands, are threatened by human-induced sea-
in the Indian Ocean (Pellow 2007). Although the 1989 Basel level rises to which they contributed very little (McKibben
Convention was adopted to stop the transnational movement 1989; Pilkey and Young 2011). In more developed countries,
and disposal of toxics, especially from the global North to the however, the opposite is often the case: the wealthiest mem-
global South, the oceans became a receptacle for many kinds bers of the society often have the most assets exposed to loss
of pollution and waste. During the Cold War, nuclear technol- or damage in coastal zones (Nicholls et al. 2008; Steinberg
ogies not only shaped oceanographic research and internation- 2014). However, just because it is the wealthy who are the
al relations, but also affected many local communities in re- most immediately at risk does not mean that there will be an
gions such as the South Pacific (Hamblin 2005, 2008). People absence of environmental justice issues. For example, when a
238 J Environ Stud Sci (2019) 9:234–243

debris flow hit the wealthy coastal community of Montecito in animal bodies. And yet, almost all of the ocean is inaccessible
southern California in 2018, immigrant families employed in to humans, except for the most elaborately supported and
service jobs were disproportionately impacted in terms of loss equipped people. As such individuals descend, they encounter
of life and income, many of whom were forced to leave the alien environments with immense pressure, few fixed land-
area before aid could be allocated. The climate-related fire that marks, and where light and sound behave differently, altering
spurred the debris flow was also hardest felt by farm workers their sense of space and requiring different assumptions about
in Ventura and Oxnard in the neighboring region, who were their sensory perceptions (Alaimo 2013). As the geographer
exposed to extremely hazardous levels of particulate matter. Philip Steinberg observes, the four dimensional nature of the
Furthermore, coastal armaments and retaining walls built to oceans—which includes not only time, width, and breadth,
protect valuable seaside properties at the wildland-urban in- but also depth—renders any human encounter with marine
terface may increase risk to other nearby sites by altering the environments Bdistanced and partial^ (Steinberg 2013, 156).
flow of water and sediment. The insurance and infrastructure Understanding the oceans in this way has at least three key
costs of protecting such assets are often born only partly by implications for studies of environmental justice there. First,
property owners, with the rest of society also contributing. although many people live close to the oceans, few have direct
And although the popular media often treats climate change access to them beyond the near shore and below the surface
and sea-level rise as a global phenomenon, diverse local fac- (United Nations Environment Program 2012). Second, the
tors will shape risks in particular places, with complex conse- individuals and institutions with the resources to enter to such
quences for the people who live in these increasingly vulner- spaces have enjoyed more or less open access. The result is
able communities (Strauss et al. 2012; Farbotko 2010). that some people have been able to reap disproportionate ben-
efits from the oceans, while others nearby have benefited little
and have little say in ocean governance. Finally, since the
Concepts for marine justice oceans are a fluid medium, they present challenges to tradi-
tional conceptions of environmental justice. Most place-based
As the above examples suggest, marine spaces and resources environmental justice case studies rely on a function of prox-
involve a range of complex environmental justice issues. In imity to, or position downstream of, the source of the risk.
fact, oceans are inseparable from any and all core Pollution originating thousands of miles away, often from
environmental justice concerns that may originate in non-point-sources, can negatively affect people who use
terrestrial or other settings. Many of these issues are not coastlines and ocean resources, and those who consume these
new, but scholars and marine resource managers only resources can experience dangerous exposures even if they
recently have begun to conceptualize them as justice issues. live nowhere close to the emission or extraction sites—or even
For example, environmental sociologist Patricia Widener the ocean itself (Pilkey and Young 2011). Studying environ-
(2018) has drawn attention to the possibilities and limitations mental justice issues related to marine environments thus re-
of marine justice, building on and expanding the work of quires a more complex, multifaceted conception of space than
Longo and Clark (2016). terrestrial, place-based environmental justice scholarship.
In this section, we expand on the concept of marine justice
and explain why applying key methods, concepts, and insights
from the environmental justice literature to marine spaces will Time
not be as simple as merely shifting the thematic focus of such
research from turf to surf. For much of human history, many people believed, or at least
acted as if, the oceans were inexhaustible (Roberts 2013). In
Space an address to the 1883 London International Fisheries
Exhibition, for example, one scientist contended Bin relation
Until recently, the vast majority of environmental scholarship to our present modes of fishing, a number of the most impor-
has involved local, place-based case studies in terrestrial en- tant sea fisheries … are inexhaustible,^ in spite of the contrary
vironments. The oceans, however, operate on spatial scales so testimony of contemporary fishers, fishery inspectors, ship-
vast and deep that they do not easily conform to this approach. pers, and marketers (Hubbard 2014, 366). People could over-
Although all studies of human-environment relations must harvest whale populations, block the pathways of migratory
include both biophysical processes and social practices, the fish, or pollute estuaries, but these were only temporary local
spatial configuration of marine environments differs so dra- or regional phenomena. Globally, the oceans were too vast
matically from that of terrestrial environments that they often and too deep for people to fundamentally alter them. Over
require a different sense of scale (Harvey 1996). Ocean spaces the past generation, however, environmental historians and
are incredibly expansive and, unlike the atmosphere, are com- historical ecologists have revealed a different story: one in
prised of a fluid dense enough to suspend most human and which myriad regional accounts, combined with the broader
J Environ Stud Sci (2019) 9:234–243 239

scale climatic changes of the past century, add up to a global smallest living organisms (Rozwadowski 2005; Hubbard
ocean decline (Jackson 2010; Bolster 2012). 2014; Anderson 2006; Ingersoll 2016; Helmreich 2009).
Beyond these narratives of environmental change, ocean All of this points to a crucial question: How can scholars,
environments present biophysical challenges to terrestrial con- activists, and policy-makers mobilize such diverse,
ceptions of time. All earth systems include complex feedback fragmented, technical, and expensive knowledge to contribute
loops and time lags. In the oceans, however, this problem to environmental justice? Upstreaming offers a possible solu-
takes on a particular valence. For example, thermal inertia, tion. In this view, environmental justice scholars should be
or the slow pace at which seawater rises in temperature as it invited into shaping research projects from their
absorbs and distributes atmospheric heat, results in a time lag conception—instead of as an Boutreach^ component or after-
between yesterday’s carbon emissions, today’s increasing thought, which is too often the case in collaborations between
temperatures, and tomorrow’s sea level rises. Such lags pres- natural and social scientists. Engaging in this way would result
ent difficult questions about intergenerational justice, as well in new research agendas, and begin to address our gap in
as for people with uneven resources to cope with change, knowledge about what the filmmaker and artist Allan Sekula
including capacities to migrate, protect coastlines, define sea called the ocean’s BForgotten Spaces^ (Dawson 2013; Sekula
level rise, and shape institutional responses to claims of rights and Burch 2010). An outstanding example is The Superstorm
and redress. Such long-term, large-scale changes, if not ad- Research Lab, which has created an online forum for exchang-
dressed at appropriate scales, invoke what the literary scholar ing knowledge about environmental justice and resilience
Rob Nixon has termed Bslow violence^: harm dispersed (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/superstorm-
across space and time in ways that are difficult to grasp but research-lab). In the white paper, The Tale of Two Sandys,
can have profound social consequences (Nixon 2011). scholars from the lab analyze the uneven impacts of the
storm through research into New York City’s poverty,
housing, employment, infrastructure, and social services,
Knowledge revealing the unequal levels of access and risks experienced
by residents of this low-lying coastal metropolis (Dawson
It is often said that scientists know more about outer space 2010; Superstorm Research Lab 2013).
than they do about the deep oceans. In fact, people have long
explored, interpreted, and imagined the oceans, developing Participation in decision-making
rich local cultural and intellectual traditions that continue to
shape their interactions with the sea (Salesa 2014; Te Punga One of the central contributions of environmental justice is
Somerville 2012; Dening 1980, 2004). It is true, however, that its emphasis on the role of fair participation, sometimes
marine environments present unique logistical and technical referred to as procedural justice, in environmental deci-
challenges for those trying to understand them from a modern, sion-making. The vast, fluid, and dynamic nature of the
scientific perspective (Rozwadowski and Van Keuren 2004). oceans, their relatively open access, and the international
For the oceans, this scientific tradition only really dates character of their governance suggest that marine systems
from the mid-nineteenth century. As a result of his work on should pose great challenges for inclusive decision-mak-
the US Exploring Expedition (1838–1842), for example, ing. Many ocean spaces have a long history of marine
James Dwight Dana developed the first systematic theory environmental decision-making that includes traditional
about the geological forces that created the Pacific basin community-based systems, colonial bureaucratic authority,
(Igler 2013). The first successful trans-Atlantic cables were scientific management programs, and stakeholder-based
laid in 1858 and 1866 in depths up to 3 miles and required processes (McEvoy 1986). Today, political processes for
more intensive and systematic methods of mapping the sea ocean environments often include elements of each.
floor (Rozwadowski 2005; Starosielski 2015). Commerce, Various combinations of these approaches have proven
war, and technology—including stable platforms, deep sea useful for fishery conservation programs and marine spatial
submersibles, underwater cameras, boats, and sonar—have planning. The California Marine Life Protection Act of 1999,
played central roles in shaping marine science (Deacon for example, initiated a statewide process that, despite signif-
1997; Mills 1989, 2009; Reidy and Rozwadowski 2014; icant resistance, ultimately led to the establishment of dozens
Rozwadowski 2014). And yet, marine research remains of marine protected areas. Yet, such approaches seem to have
fragmented, with divergent views about such basic questions little potential for addressing global environmental problems,
as the relationships between science and the state, the contri- such as sea-level rise and ocean acidification. Public policies
butions of research to resource exploitation, the roles of theo- to confront these issues have often failed to incorporate di-
retical versus applied work, and the need for social science verse perspectives, and have often sought to protect valuable
and humanities perspectives as well as the importance of tra- coastal assets instead of resource poor communities. Even
ditional knowledges and meaning cultivated from the ocean’s some political efforts intended to protect vulnerable people
240 J Environ Stud Sci (2019) 9:234–243

or nations (Barnett and Adger 2003) can unintentionally mar- Concluding reflections
ginalize already underrepresented voices (Farbotko and
Lazrus 2012). In the extreme case of environmental refugees, We conclude this framework with a call to work together to
many of which come from coastal regions, the primary objec- use marine justice as a guiding principal to enrich our schol-
tive is of course protecting lives; much less concern is usually arship and address some of the most daunting environmental
given to maintaining livelihoods, memories, cultures, and challenges we face today as citizens of the world. We believe
mental health. With the loss of communities—even perhaps that building community within and beyond the academy as
the loss of entire vulnerable low-lying nations—it remains well as the core intellectual values of engagement and humil-
unclear whether there can ever be justice. ity is worth defending now more than ever. Based on our
experiences at the University of California, that begins strate-
gically with sitting in a room together and a commitment to
Enforcement meet on a regular basis with invited guests. One of the most
important insights we learned from each other was the difficult
Regulatory regimes at sea differ dramatically from those on but rewarding opportunity to reflect on the research we do.
land. The high seas are regulated through international, mul- The oceans’ complexity and the many ways to study them
tilateral treaties, but individual countries maintain claims to became a recurring theme as we discussed what some of us
the sovereignty of territorial seas and hold rights to contiguous called evidence and others used the term data or sources. We
zones, exclusive economic zones, and continental shelves. learned that it is easier to issue calls for interdisciplinary or
Beyond these near-shore realms lay the vast open ocean, transdisciplinary collaboration about the oceans than the hard
whose relatively lax regulatory and enforcement structures work of actually doing so. The concepts of space, time,
transcend the nation-state (Steinberg 1999, 2001). The un- knowledge, participation in decision-making, and enforce-
evenness, complexity, overlapping, and multilayered charac- ment started to emerge as critical links that brought together
ter of ocean regulatory regimes create barriers not only for ongoing conversations about the oceans and justice in the
effective environmental management, but also for socially academy and the rest of the world.
and economically marginalized communities to draw on pub- The five key concepts operated as links but they also
lic institutions for assistance. showed us the fissures and different assumptions within the
The historic weakness of ocean governance, compared disciplines of our group members. Here, we must acknowl-
with the terrestrial governance imposed by nation-states with- edge the very real challenges of marine justice scholarship and
in their boundaries, has led many observers to describe ocean activism. Through a self-reflexive process, we learned that
spaces as relatively open access (Liu et al. 2007; Ostrom 2007; while we all cared about marine issues in scholarship and
Ostrom et al. 1999). Among economists, this has often led to activism, we sometimes stumbled when it came to talking to
calls for clearer and more enforceable property rights to ma- each other. For example, we had one presenter who studied
rine space and resources, which they believe would contribute some of the local indigenous groups’ tendency to overharvest
to more rational management of scarce resources. All legal particular marine organisms over hundreds of years with the
regimes and property rights arrangements depend on the result of a simplification and impoverishment of local marine
ability and willingness of governments to enforce regula- ecosystems, but was unable to capture much social differenti-
tions, but this has proven much more difficult in marine ation within this community over many generations of human
than terrestrial environments. Political borders, which are life spans. What counted as marine justice in this instance was
essential for regulatory enforcement, are difficult to mark instructive if frustrating at the time. We struggled over the
and enforce in ocean spaces, and both commercial and assumptions about the hierarchies of disciplines and their
artisanal users may easily violate them (Wadewitz 2012). methods of quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive ap-
The borders themselves are also frequently contested, and proaches. The differences and often-unspoken aversions to
different countries establish the legality of traditional certain methodologies may have originated in personal expe-
claims to resources in very different ways (Carey 2010; rience and disciplinary training/acculturation, but were stub-
McEvoy 1986). New claims may challenge older legal bornly resistant to being let go of in the present moment.
structures, and many indigenous communities are seeking Through trial and error, we discovered some ways to work
to revive even older customary arrangements. This is par- through the challenges of bridging scholarship around marine
ticularly evident in remote coastal and island communities, justice together. After many weeks, one participant posed a
where regulations governing marine resources are often trenchant question about representation, especially about in-
imposed by far-away legislative bodies or bureaucratic digenous peoples in the various Pacific worlds, whose voices
agencies descended from colonial governments or we had thus far neglected. BWho should be in the room? Who
representing newer postcolonial authoritarian power struc- is missing?^ another participant elaborated. BWhose voice
tures (Shewry 2015; Warne 2011). needs to be heard here?^ We suggest a process of similar
J Environ Stud Sci (2019) 9:234–243 241

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