“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere”

(Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937)  

The ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem. The stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be entangled in the hazards affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of oceans, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. Scientific facts have made us realise that the future of our blue planet, a marine habitat per default, hinges on the blueing of our cultural imaginary. Situated in northern climes myself, I learn that global warming unfolds four times faster in Arctic waters than anywhere else on the planet. Slow but violent changes to marine environs and blue biodiversity (in for instance my own “backyard” betwixt the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic Sea) have in Sweden been understood as nested problems in need of increased scientific and technological solutions. In contrast, I will in this talk begin from the position that these interlinked problems of human environmental impact on oceans and coastal areas require connected, affective and cultural approaches of environmental literacy to complement scientific data on how to consume better with the sea. Helpful in this regard is the rise in feminist oceanic science fiction novels over the last few years. Titles include Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep (2017), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019) and Julia Armfield’s Our Wifes under the Sea (2022). 

Myself, I will explore a couple of “alien species” in these waters, ranging cannisters of mustard gas to Pacific oysters and other storied bodies out of order, so to try to provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist imaginary and nourish a new sense of relationality.