The Ocean Uprising

In this story, titled ‘The Ocean Uprising’, increased anthropogenic damage to the environment and decreased cognitive distance of the public to the ocean due to widespread use of AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles) create a window of opportunity for a fundamental change. A group of disruptive activists who carry out a successful coup that involves blowing up a pipeline and bringing people together in a collaborative art project, finally have their goal of a sustainably used ocean in close reach. But when a new geo-engineering technique turns the seabed into a valuable resource, industry actors take charge of the sustainability transformation, and every inch of the seabed is privatized. While the industry actors curate an overly green image for themselves, they actually manage and conserve their resources responsibly and ecosystems start to heal. All that’s left for the members of the disruptive activism group, who gave up their dreams of an anarchist, egalitarian, sustainability revolution, is to accept the new technocratic rule over the ocean and find their place within it, as decolonial tour guides.

She did like talking to an audience, it gave her a confidence she did not usually possess. The soft light radiating from the bioluminescent algae coating the walls bathed the room in blue and green colors. It was an interior design trick that simultaneously increased oxygen in the submersible, served as a light source and substituted for flowers and plants, which would not survive life in the twilight zone. Unlike the geo-engineers and scientists on the other platforms, who came for a few weeks to work and then raced back to their dryland homes, she and her companions had embraced the High Seas permanently and therefore had spent some time making their submersible feel cozy.

After all, the MS Cindy was their ‘flagship’, a reminder of their rebellious days, before they’d lost their edge and assimilated into the new regime. She had told this story a hundred times before, but had yet to grow tired of it, she loved the thought of educating people and keeping their legacy alive. “If you look out of the window to your left, you can still see some ruins of sunken oil rigs. On the right, you see some monitoring equipment from the geo-engineering platform from which we started.” She had to squint to even make out the aforementioned structures under the thick algae cover and the multitudes of swarming fish and crustaceans.

She noticed some cables sloppily wrapped around an artificial Lophelia reef. “Amateurs…” she sighed, but knew better than to openly discredit her employers, who were nothing but good to her. “As you probably know, the High Seas as we know them today originated from a coup carried out by a disruptive activism group, the ‘ocean uprising’, some members of which are giving you this tour today.” She could not help but make the story about herself and take credit for the events that unfolded twenty years ago. Of course, she and her crew got lucky, when a near perfect window of opportunity arose, influencing the public opinion in their favor. They had been active for years prior, blocking roads to oil refineries, hanging banners with environmentalist slogans from bridges in ports, even dismembering equipment to slow down those whose work was destroying the oceans. 

Their activism was generally not received well and though the general public shared their concerns about resource extraction industries on the High Seas, they didn’t agree with their more aggressive tactics. Amidst increasing shipping trade, oil exploitation and it’s resulting accidents, as well as border conflicts occupying the minds of politicians tasked with governing the High Seas, an autonomous, remotely controlled underwater vehicle hit the global markets. Unlike any of its kind before, this AUV was mass produced and semi affordable and therefore allowed industry, science and interested laypeople an intimate look into the ocean’s fourth dimension. “As you can see on the main screen, one of the AUVs belonging to this submersible has reached the seafloor and will now check if we could keep up our sedimentation rate of 1cm per week.”

She glanced over to a member of her crew checking the sediment stats, who gave her an affirming nod. “When these things were first introduced, we knew that this was our chance to win over the hearts and minds of the people. We wanted to create a piece of art so realistic yet so personal that everyone who saw it felt an immediate emotional connection to the sea. We issued a call for collaborators, who would be given access to AUVs and thus could capture any audio or visual they found appealing, which would all be combined into one multimedia artistic experience. It was our chance to literally immerse people in the ocean, engrain the High Seas into the consciousness of people, who had never traveled this far out. Of course, in order to do so, we had to capture a few of the AUVs from big corporations, which lead the media to label us as ‘eco pirates’. Instead of being offended, we were inspired. Diving deep into the history of marine radicalism, the ocean as a space which incubates revolutionary movements and seafarers as anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and collectivist people, finally gave us the encouragement to start our big coup. In concert with the release of our art project, we would blow up a pipeline in an already degraded ecosystem, to show those industry actors that we did not come to play.” 

While this was her favorite part of the story, she would have to cut it short if she wanted to finish the tour on time. The underwater traffic around Tristan da Cunha Island was insane, especially on a public holiday like today. “Now it’s almost time for the moment you have been waiting for the entire tour” she could barely hide the amused yet judgmental undertone in her voice, why were people such suckers for displays of wealth and power, poorly disguised as extravagant festivities? She tilted the submersible upwards, so that passengers could look to the epipelagic zone, where billions of jellyfish, sparkling in the brightest possible colors, were gathering. All at once, as if struck by lightning, the jellyfish stopped moving and started sinking to the ocean floor, slowly descending down the water column, like snowflakes. This jelly-fall did not just look spectacular, it also served as a pathway to carbon sequestration, as part of the ‘enhanced’ biological pump.

“Today we are celebrating the slowing of climate change, brought about by our innovative, efficient, sustainable and universally beneficial geo-engineering programs. This year’s festivities are sponsored by Saudi Aramcare, one of our most profitable geo-engineering businesses.” It took some mental energy not to roll her eyes. While the ocean was admittedly in much better shape since every inch of the seabed was bought by geo-engineering companies, she still felt like their revolution was stolen by sneaky, yet genius, capitalists. But what can you do when the enemy integrates your critique into their rebranding? 

She continued her story “our artwork went viral only a few hours after posting it, dominating the evening news on every channel, together with the pipeline explosion. To our surprise, public opinion shifted, we were suddenly painted as the underdogs, fighting for what is right. People took to the streets, demonstrating for change, our goals seemed in close reach at last. Of course, governments were completely overwhelmed, so industry actors stepped up. It was argued that the complexity of the world just could not be planned for by a political elite, only a free market could adapt to the new discoveries and innovations springing up faster and faster. Shortly after, the largest geo-engineering experiment to date was conducted, using the High Seas as a testing ground.” She remembers the crippling anxiety she felt when tons of iron, lab-grown diatoms and grinded up silicate rocks were released into the oceans. But what should have been a recipe for disaster turned out to be a groundbreaking success.

The seabed - now immensely valuable since it was mandatory for companies to compensate for all their emissions by financing carbon sequestration – would be protected from mining, oil exploitation, trawling. This wasn’t due to ethical reasons, but because the geo-engineering corporations would simply outcompete other industries. While the ‘ocean uprising’ was still grappling with questions about ocean grabbing, the intrinsic value of nature and the concentration of power, industry actors were creating facts. And while this crushed her dreams of an anarchist society living in harmony with nature, she had to admit that many things had changed for the better. “If you were wondering why we are driving so slowly, it is because the seamount we are currently passing is a marine protected area and we are not allowed to disturb the wildlife with our acoustic and radar signals. The company owning this area is very serious about conservation, it’s important for their image and it brings in extra revenue from tourist tours, such as ours.” 

She looked down through the glass floor of the MS Cindy, the beauty of the cold-water coral reefs growing on the seamount still took her breath away. At first artificial structures had to serve as a reef, with conservation workers using AUVs struggling to mimic natural processes. Now that the ocean got cooler and more alkaline again, real corals were growing back, and the reef would be mostly natural again soon. Whenever she felt especially frustrated with the fate of the High Seas or the ‘ocean uprising’, which had been inactive in recent years, she looked at nature healing and reminded herself, that she chose what was good for the majority over her personal ambitions.

“And now, for our final and most important stop of our tour...” she turns to her audience, which consists – to no surprise – of posh couples from wealthy industrial nations; “we will circle a ship that has been declared marine cultural heritage quite recently. It was used to bring enslaved people from their homelands to the newly established colonies in Latin America. If you look closely, you can still spot the balls and chains, they take hundreds of years to corrode. See, for our next mission, we aim to decolonize the High Seas imaginary, counter the dominant narrative of a historical freedom of the High Seas. Some nostalgic dryland dwellers complain that too much has changed out here, that we lost the mysterious last frontier, but to be frank, the only people who historically felt free in these waters, were white men.” She looks at the faces of today’s group of tourists to see if her words have had any impact. Most of them look uncomfortable, so she has done her job. “You might think that we have become irrelevant, that we only do simple monitoring and conservation jobs, but that’s not the case. We are not done here, there is always another fight to be fought.”

Credits: 

The text of this story is the copyright of Hannah Marlen Lübker. This image is the copyright of Elias Stern and reproduced with permission.