“Human Dimensions of Oceans: From a Sociological Perspective” blog series is live on FATHOM.

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CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE BLOG BY OCEAN NEXUS

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Feeding Global Markets, Starving Local Health: Fishmeal Production and Fish Oil Production and Health Concerns in The Gambia

In The Gambia, fishmeal and fish oil factories are feeding global markets while compromising local health and food security. Drawing on community testimonies and policy insight, this post examines how industrial pollution, weakened regulation, and export-oriented production deepen inequalities in coastal communities. It calls for a blue justice approach that centers equity, sustainability, and community well-being in national fisheries governance.

Entry into force on 17 January 2026: Making the High Seas Treaty Work

The BBNJ Treaty (High Seas Treaty) will enter into force on January 17, 2026, establishing the first binding global framework for ocean biodiversity. Yet recent preparatory negotiations revealed how fragile inclusivity remains: debates over SIDS’ recognition, finance, and participation showed that equity is not optional—it is essential to making the treaty work.

Are Tuna Fish?

There is a lot to be gained by paying attention to the ways in which we classify the world around us, scientifically or otherwise. For not only does classification influence the ways we think about nature and our place in it, but, I will argue, classification also has an immense influence on the ways human beings physically interact with nature.

More Than Mermaids: Reclaiming the Lost Feminist Voice in the Sociology of Oceans

The increased visibility of women in and around the ocean reflects women’s central role in producing knowledge about the ocean and developing equitable approaches to engaging with and protecting the ocean. Despite this visibility, though, inequality and discrimination still persist, suppressing female voices and upholding toxic tropes of women as silent, passive, or invisible. 

Degrowth, Environmental Sociology, and the Blue Economy

As expansionary growth becomes less and less feasible across finite and stressed ocean ecologies, we will likely see more and more rhetoric aimed at conceptualizing marine spaces as “new frontiers” for forms of development that appear exceptionally modern and less materially intensive. These include sectors often imagined as “non-real” or “non-material,” which typically involve financial schemes and real estate speculation. These approaches will offer ‘win-win’ framing, where economic accumulation can occur without harming—even benefiting—complex ecosystems. 

Lessons from La Lucha (The Worker’s Struggle): Organized Labor and the Industries of the Sea

All too often workers are seen as collateral damage in conservation and economic-based management decisions and irrelevant in the production of environmental knowledge used to inform those policy decisions. Perhaps that’s inevitable. But I would argue that workers are an essential aspect of the human dimensions of a fishery, or any maritime-based economy, and need to be systematically incorporated into policy-making—a process made possible by strengthening labor unions.

The Same Issue as the Sokol Hoax

The first thing is to remember to always take the dual nature of science – its explanatory power as well as its very human foundations – into account. Science will always reflect the social conditions of production, from the agendas of its owners to the time and place it was created to the technologies and strategies then available for researchers to much else. We should therefore be weary of ideas that accept our own time, place, economies, and culture as “natural,” for these conditions change.

Listen to the Science

If science speaks for itself, then powerful forces will invariably try to justify inequality and injustice on scientific grounds. Rather, it is important to understand that science is done by people living in societies. As environmental sociologists have long argued, we must therefore understand society if we are to understand science.

Against the Blue Current: Hegemonic Environmental Rhetoric in the Making of Pacific Futures

In this perspective piece, Aaron Padgett explores how “blue” political and economic agendas in the Pacific are underwritten by a view of the region as a strategic and resource frontier. Examining initiatives like the BLUE Pacific Act, the piece discusses how blue environmental rhetoric co-opts and diminishes Native Pacific place relations to create marketable slogans for the expanding security state.

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