[[HOME]] | [[RESEARCH]] | [[TEACHING]] | [[DESIGN]] | [[CV]] ![[SeaLab-2020-screen.png]] _By the 1970s, kelp farming came to represent a new relationship with marine environments, one where humans transformed the wild oceans into pastoral landscapes, as seen here in the Hollywood imaginary of_ Sealab 2020 _(1972)._ ## Dissertation Research ### Project Title: A Race for Inner Space: Post-terrestrial Ecologies, the Domestication of Giant Kelp, and Ocean Farms in the Twentieth Century **Question:** How have human interactions with oceans shaped ideas about planetary processes and the global environment? **In 5 words:** Modern oceans would be farmed. **In 15 words:** After World War II, agricultural ideas shaped how elites imagined the future of human-marine relationships. **In <100 words:** My dissertation is a history of ideas about ocean farming. Why? Today's "blue economy," "blue revolution," and "blue carbon frontier" often rely on a premise that marine environments can--and should be--managed in ways similar to industrial land-based agriculture. This assumption, I show, marks a specifically modern understanding of Earth's oceans, one that started gaining prominence in the late 1940s. The project tracks these historical ocean futures--specifically, the shift from hunting to cultivating marine "crops"--to better understand the ongoing enterprise of transforming Earth's planetary processes into engineered systems. Today's ocean futures have a history. **In 500 words:** In this dissertation, I explore how and why scientists, engineers, artists, and writers promoted the idea of ocean farming in the twentieth century. The project follows different ocean farming imaginaries across a wide set of popular and technical archives from the 1940s to the 1990s. It does so to track an important shift in American environmental imaginaries: from the familiar tropes of a wild and uncontrollable ocean--described in the 1950s by Rachel Carson as "sea around us" which delimited the human capacity to control Nature--to a modern dream of a marine pastoral, premised on a vision of a single global ocean, domesticated by aquaculture, and engineered as a complex system. Over the second half of the twentieth century, Earth's oceans increasingly became imagined as a site for the future of human habitation and cultivation. This dissertation explores these cultural shifts to understand, in the most general sense, how planetary processes are made into objects of scientific control and management. The project begins by analyzing the discourse of mariculture--i.e., marine aquaculture--as a point of controversy in Cold War debates over ecological limits, ocean territory, the global commons, human population, and global warming. Farming the seas, boosters argued, would effectively expand Earth's "carrying capacity" without further taxing terrestrial resources. A shared pursuit of global aquaculture, some hoped, might foster international cooperation and forge institutions of common resoruce management. And, in the most ambitions programs, some theorized how aquaculture would allow humans to take control of Earth's biogeochemical cycles. Critics, however, claimed that ocean farms would be economically infeasible without new forms of property rights at sea. Others asserted that the cornucopian dreams of marine aquaculture were a distraction from issues of overfishing and marine pollution. The project picks up several case studies--beginning in the early 1970s--to understand the future worlds these projects hoped to manifest. These include: - the institutionalization of agricultural ideals in the founding of the National Sea Grant College Program; - the cybernetic links between marine farming research at the Oceanic Institute, NASA's program in closed systems ecology, and Biosphere 2; - and the Ocean Food and Energy Farm Project/US Marine Biomass Program which developed a model of open-ocean kelp farms intended to feed a growing population, produce feedstock for biofuels production, and was an early concept for cooling Earth's climate to reduce the risks of sea-level rise. With mariculture, modern plantation imaginaries were recast at sea. I also make the case that aquaculture was significant in conceptualizing a cybernetic view of Earth systems. Experiments with closed ecological life support systems, in the 1970s and 1980s, and investigations into contemporary climate engineering schemes, have recently become important sites for scholars studying the political ecologies of controlled environments. My dissertation, however, shows how aquaculture research was a major area of applied cybernetics, and one that informed later explorations of human life in closed systems. Moreover, debates over ocean farming took up the ethical, political, and ecological questions of living within technologically managed Earth systems, in parallel with emerging imaginaries of colonizing space. In short, mariculture set out a watery blueprint for engineering Earth's major planetary systems. ![[transects-small.gif]] _Learning the field methods of marine ecology by collecting data on_ Macrocystis pyrifera _stipes and algal cover offshore from Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove, California._ (Video credit: Freya Sommer, 2019) ![[Scripps Archives.jpeg]] _Working with the Wheeler J. North papers. Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, 2022._ (Photo credit: Author)