Operating from sampling platforms ranging from hip boots to oceanographic research ships, natural scientists have come up with a decent understanding of how oceans work, what is in them, how important they are to all life on Earth, and how they are threatened. But simply knowing these facts hasn’t been enough to sustain healthy marine ecosystems. To mention just one thing, human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are changing fundamental properties of the oceans such as temperature and pH. Now people talk about ecosystem-based management, a holistic viewpoint that recognizes humans as an integral part of ocean ecosystems. While humans are the cause of many problems in the ocean, they also can and must be the solution. People can be bombarded with facts, but if these facts do not fit the people’s frame of reference, they bounce off. Natural scientists are out of their realm in understanding why people behave the way they do and what motivates them to change their behavior. Time to send social scientists to sea.
Humans are everywhere on the oceans—fishing, shipping, swimming, drilling, boating, mining, sailing, rip-rapping, surfing, dredging, digging clams, harnessing wind, growing seafood, watching nature, fighting wars, and building beautiful structures like the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco or the opera house on Sydney Harbor. Even humans that have never seen the ocean use rivers to send their excess nutrients and contaminants there for processing. And they use the atmosphere to carry away their carbon dioxide, much of which winds up in the oceans. Global warming is a good case in point. The most likely scenarios for global climate change will result in massive changes to global societal structures, as well as the nature and relations of states to society and to each other. Natural scientists have determined that humans are largely responsible for the sharpness of global warming seen in recent decades, but society has not yet taken effective action. As seen at Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun in 2010, while we may understand the natural sciences well enough to take action, we haven't succeeded in understanding the people side. Sociologists, cultural anthropologists, psychologists, economists, behavioral economists, political scientists, and communication scientists could help. Social scientists have studied fishing communities and coastal zone management and other nearshore issues. However, according to a 2008 National Science Foundation workshop “Sociological Perspectives on Global Climate Change,” sociologists have been slow to take up global climate change in their research. Environmental sociology lies at the fringes of the discipline, says Sociologist Constance Lever-Tracy, and it has been difficult to engage mainstream sociology, which focuses on the interactions between people, societies, and nations, and regards nature as a stable, unchanging background. Thoughts on how to better engage social scientists in research on marine ecosystems? Can anyone suggest some relevant references in the social science literature? Stephen S. Hale [email protected]
