SEATIMES: How Climate Change Transforms Human-Marine Temporalities

Fish and other marine creatures shape the life of coastal people around the world. What happens then, when marine ecosystems transform radically and people are forced to find new ways to live together with life below water? In SEATIMES we study how relations between humans and marine life change when the world's oceans acidify, heat and become depleted and when marine life respond by finding new migration routes and new waters to inhabit. To better understand how these human-marine relations work and change, we look at these relations in a wider perspective beyond seeing them as economic resource relations. In SEATIMES we focus specifically on the temporal aspects of human-marine relations and look at: 1. How do changes in human-marine relations impact people’s relations to the past, their experience of the presence and their imaginations of the future? 2. How do society’s rhythms change as the seasonal variations of marine life and the everyday work patterns related to them change? 3. How do people respond by attempting to stop, slow down, restore or otherwise intervene in these changes? In order to understand the varieties of transformations in human-marine relations around the world, SEATIMES focuses on three specific cases. In Senegal, we investigate the disappearance of the important sardinella fish. In Maine, US, we look at how warming waters causes massive catches of lobsters. In Norway, we study how whale tourism is shaped by the changing migration patterns of whales. Through these cases, SEATIMES contributes to developing a new marine anthropology that provides a broader and better understanding of how humans and marine life are interrelated and how climate change causes transformations in these interrelations.

What happens to relations between humans and marine life when climate change forces the latter to flee and seek new waters to inhabit? Climate change is currently heating up the world's oceans, and marine life are forced to seek new waters better suited to their needs. For many coastal communities, this means that their close relations with fish and other marine species change considerably and impact their imaginations of the past, their hopes for the future and the very rhythms of their daily lives. The SEATIMES project aims to study these changes and asks what they can tell us about how humans are entangled with marine life and about how temporality emerges from such human-marine relations. The project will answer these questions by conducting ethnographic fieldwork and applying marine biological data in three different sites that experience these changes differently: in Senegal, from where the important sardinella stock departs; in Maine, US, where lobsters thrive be heated waters, but is also threatened by future overheating; and in Norway where warming waters attract new species such as Snow crab and Pacific oyster, some of which are welcomed, while others are seen as a potential threat. By comparing data from these different sites where human-marine relations are transformed in different ways and where different species are involved, the project will provide data on a broad spectrum of transformations in human-marine relations. Drawing on recent developments in posthumanist and multispecies anthropology, SEATIMES aims to develop a new posthumanist marine anthropology that is better able to account for how humans and marine life are entangled and how these entanglements are transformed by climate change.