Teaching the Ocean: Literature and History in the Study of the Sea

During the past decade, there has been a surge of scholarship focused on environmental humanities pedagogy.1 This scholarship has implicitly favored the study of landscapes that clearly bear the physical changes associated with human habitation. The field’s terrestrial emphasis on landscapes visibly altered by human habitation poses an obstacle for those of us teaching the humanistic study of the sea, or what is increasingly called the blue humanities.2 Like land, the ocean has also experienced anthropogenic changes. Resource extraction, industrialization, overfishing, oil spills, seismic blasting, microplastics, nuclear testing and fallout, rising temperatures, and declining pH levels affect ocean ecosystems throughout the water column and around the world. Despite the ocean’s crucial role in global environmental systems and its growing presence in the environmental humanities, the ocean is conspicuously absent as a sustained area of focus in environmental humanities pedagogical scholarship.3 While human effects on the ocean are...