Oceans

A Missed Opportunity

Notwithstanding the important role of the ocean in the world's geography, the world-ocean historically has attracted little attention from human geographers. The history of geography is littered with prominent geographers making strident, but usually unheeded, calls for their colleagues to turn their attention seaward. Almost 2,000 years ago, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote, “We are in a certain sense amphibious, not exclusively connected with the land, but with the sea as well” (cited in Semple, 1931, p. 59). Early in the 20th century, the American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1911) admonished her terracentric colleagues when she proclaimed,

Forty years later, the geographer Richard Hart-shorne (1953) echoed Semple's criticism when he declared that the “fundamental error in popular geographic thought” (p. 386) was the tendency to view the ocean as simply a barrier rather than as a space of human society.

Despite these warnings, human geographers have typically ignored the ocean, probably for three reasons. First, much of modern geography has its origins in efforts by individual states to catalog and manage their resources. Even in social sciences that are less directly tied to the land (e.g., sociology, economics, political science), the state is often taken as the basic unit of society, and global processes are reduced to the category of international relations (relations among state units). As a space that lies primarily external to the territory or sovereign authority of any individual state, the ocean has, to a large extent, literally been beyond the map of most social scientists.

A second reason why many geographers have long ignored the ocean is the tendency, in both the human and nature-society traditions, to focus on activities that happen in specific places. Geographers historically have understood key social activities, such as production, reproduction, and consumption, as well as the cultural forms that support these activities, as occurring at discrete points on Earth's surface. As the nature of these points is transformed, “places” are constructed, and the territories that encompass these places develop into societies and, ultimately, states. Although the ocean consists of specific points (e.g., fishing grounds, offshore oil platforms), when looked at from a land-based perspective, the ocean is generally seen as a surface across which people and resources (e.g., fish) move, and thus, it becomes excluded from narratives of social development.

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