The world’s oceans are facing multiple environmental crises. Ronald C. Po argues history can play a critical role in helping us to understand how these problems emerged and how they can be tackled in more conscious and pragmatic ways.
Long before “sustainability” and “climate change” were watchwords, people around the world had different ideas about how oceans should be governed and how marine resources should be used. These ideas affected how people used the ocean and imagined its uses – and they continue to influence assumptions about what the sea has to offer humans and what it can withstand.
For this reason, today’s ocean-related crises are not solely environmental or technical problems but deeply historical ones. By asking questions about the past, historians can help us see how certain practices and ideas about extracting marine resources, consuming seafood and governing marine spaces became normalised.
Issues like overfishing, hyperactivity in maritime trade, depletion and coastal transformation did not begin in the 20th or 21st centuries. They were instituted slowly through learned habits, imperial ideologies, market mechanisms and knowledge that cast the sea as boundless, removed from human control or unworthy of political consideration.
Why the past still matters
Scientific research and policy interventions are indispensable to addressing contemporary ocean crises. Yet decades of conservation campaigns, regulatory frameworks and scientific warnings have not halted biodiversity loss, overexploitation or ecosystem collapse.
This is not a failure of science but rather proof there is a missing piece in the puzzle. What is missing is an understanding of how demand, legitimacy and desire were historically produced.
Behaviours we now recognise as ecologically damaging were once part of broader cultural ideals that told people what it meant to be prosperous, refined, a strong nation or an imperial power. Solutions that fail to acknowledge how these beliefs were created and reinforced run the risk of being ineffective and temporary.
Historical analysis provides insight into why societies repeatedly underestimated environmental risk, why short-term gains were prioritised over long-term resilience and why appeals to restraint often failed to resonate. By uncovering these deeper cultural logics, it is possible to complement scientific and policy-oriented approaches with a critical understanding of the human factors that shape environmental decision-making.
Survival is not sustainability
One point that is sometimes raised when looking at the history of sustainability is the fact that people in the past managed to survive despite putting pressure on their environments. We might be forgiven for thinking that if people in the past overcame similar levels of environmental strain as we see today, then there is no need to worry.
But survival is not sustainability. Examples abound through history of civilisations surviving for centuries while slowly poisoning their life-support systems.
Harm was often postponed instead of prevented, outsourced instead of eliminated – pushed into the future, onto the edges of society, onto colonial hinterlands or onto other species. Stability in hindsight was often a period of protracted crisis in which red flags were seen but accepted as normal, unnoticed or too politically difficult to address.
Sustainability should be viewed not as a hypothetical ecological balance or the endless perpetuation of the status quo, but as a historical relationship between society and the sea that has been defined by cultural values, shaped by social and political organisations, and moulded by economic imperatives and sea stories.
Viewing sustainability from this perspective prompts us to ask questions about the past like who had access to marine resources and under what conditions? How were limits understood, transgressed or fought over? Which cultures valued restraint and which promoted rapacity? And how were responsibility and risk allocated between communities, regions and generations?
Recognising how different societies have answered these questions – and succeeded or failed to sustain themselves – allows us to view sustainability not as a technological goal but as a continually developing cultural and moral endeavour. This underlines that sustainability is not just about resource management but about critically examining and rewriting the narratives societies tell themselves about the ocean.
The Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative
The principle that history is not just background context but a crucial analytical tool for understanding how current ocean crises were made possible is the starting point for a new project I have launched called the Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative (BSSI).
The aim of the BSSI is to explore how people have understood, used and valued the sea in the past, and why this history matters for the ocean’s future. Many of today’s marine problems, from overfishing to climate change, are not just scientific issues but the result of long-standing human habits and beliefs about the sea.
By learning how these ideas developed over time, the BSSI helps explain why damage continues despite warnings, and how changing the way we think about the ocean can support more sustainable choices.
The purpose is not to argue that the past offers templates for today. Contexts were (and are) always different. Technologies have evolved and social conditions can never be duplicated. History can’t serve as a cookbook. But it can help us see more clearly.
By reconstructing how earlier societies confronted marine abundance and scarcity, where they adapted, where they resisted change and where they misread the limits of their environments, history helps identify recurring patterns of thought and behaviour.
Such patterns include blind faith in techno-fixes, belief in inevitable market solutions, political suppression of environmental knowledge and cultural narratives that cast extraction as innovation. Awareness of these patterns can allow us to approach today’s challenges in more conscious and pragmatic ways.
This work is crucial because if environmental crises were historically made, they can also be historically unmade. By situating contemporary concerns within long-term histories of marine use and imagination, we can open up new possibilities for conceiving sustainable futures.
The Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative (BSSI) is a new initiative based at the London School of Economics and Political Science exploring how people have understood, used and valued the sea in the past, and why this history matters for the ocean’s future.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Alones provided by Shutterstock.
