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sustainability and the conditions through which market devices such as sustainability

guides emerge. In the next section of this chapter, I expand this inquiry by focusing

on the making of global marine knowledge, the framing of marine sustainability

th
st
issues, and changes to ocean law. I use several key 20 and 21 century figures to
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illustrate the main developments .

Oceanic Explorations, Concepts and Regulations, 20 th - 21 Centuries
st

[P]robably all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say, that
nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish. And any attempt to
regulate these fisheries seems consequently, from the nature of the case, to
be useless.

...claimed the English biologist T.H. Huxley in 1883 at the inaugural opening of the

Fisheries Exhibition, London (Blinderman & Joyce 1998, n.p.). Less than a century

later this assumption was replaced by the problem of stock decline, overfishing and

globally orchestrated regulation. Finally, new laws overturned the old Freedom of the

Seas doctrine and its assumptions of inexhaustible aquatic resources, including the

ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) in

1994. A discourse of ocean conservation as well as the notion of sustainable use of

aquatic resources emerged. Ocean environmentalism gained traction progressively

th
through the 20 century, lagging behind a terrestrial focused environmentalism,
th
which, according to historian Richard Grove (1992), had begun as far back as the 18

th
century with efforts to conserve the declining colonial lands. During the 19 century
th
and the early 20 century two different environmentalism discourses arose: ‘the

preservation of the wild and the conservation of resources’ (Grove 1992, p. 65).

Again, this was a terrestrial rather than aquatic focus as the sea did not yet figure in

environmentalist concerns. Nonetheless, these early concepts are relevant to the ocean

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