This article explores how the concept of ecosystem ecologies, one of the most influential models of systems thinking, was developed in relation to the radioactive aftermath of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Islands. Historian Richard Grove has demonstrated how tropical island colonies all over the globe served as vital laboratories and spaces of social, botanical, and industrial experiment in ways that informed modernity and the conservation movement. I propose a similar relationship between the militarized American island colonies of Micronesia and how their constitution as AEC laboratories contributed to both atomic modernity and the field of ecosystem ecology. This was enacted through metaphorical concepts of island isolation and distributed visually by Atomic Energy Commission films that upheld an aerial vision of the newly acquired atolls for an American audience. Finally, the myth of isolation is also at work in the ways in which Marshall Islanders exposed to nuclear fallout became human subjects for radiation experiments due to the idea of the biological isolate.
This essay outlines the development of the “oceanic turn” and the rise of “critical ocean studies” as vital to figuring the Anthropocene. It builds upon the work of Elizabeth Povinelli's theory of “geontologies,” and by turning to the submarine sculptures of Jason deCaires Taylor it argues for a provocative Caribbean aesthetic of “sea ontologies.” By examining the multispecies collaborations of coral and reef ecologies, it suggests a new oceanic imaginary for the more-than-human Anthropocene.
We cannot think of a time that is oceanlessOr of an ocean not littered with wastage—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”A Poem that Renders the Sea as Pedagogical History, Lorna Goodison's “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the world's waters rolled into a chant.” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the currents of hot air.” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history,” their “small bodies” are “borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped by the student oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. Édouard Glissant has described the Atlantic as a “beginning” for modernity, a space “whose time is marked by … balls and chains gone green” (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay. Thus, Atlantic modernity becomes legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives. After the poem's irruptive consonance of the “bodies borrowed,” the vowels lengthen to mimic a “long drowned” history of the Atlantic, and the narrative is transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage “abyss is a tautology” that haunts ocean modernity (Glissant, Poetics 6), the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic. Instead of moving on to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word “Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips; Atlantic, as teacher's / strap whipped the rows on.” Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we are in “learn[ing] this lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian.”
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