HIST 415 / 515 The Environmental History of the Pacific Ocean Winter, 2017 12:00 – 1:20 LILLIS 175 Ryan Tucker Jones Office Hours: MW 1:30 – 3:30 History 415 / 515 examines the environmental history of the world’s largest geographical feature – the Pacific Ocean. This class is simultaneously an investigation into the origins of the Pacific’s current ecological crises, the foundations of oceanic identities from New Zealand to Alaska, and the multiple ways of understanding the ocean. We will be reading historical, anthropological, and scientific research and weighing the merits of each approach. Mondays will be focused on lecture, whereas Wednesdays will be primarily devoted to discussion.
Transcript
HIST 415 / 515
The Environmental History of
the Pacific Ocean
Winter, 2017
12:00 – 1:20 LILLIS 175
Ryan Tucker Jones
Office Hours: MW 1:30 – 3:30
History 415 / 515 examines the environmental history of the world’s largest geographical feature – the Pacific Ocean. This class is simultaneously an investigation into the origins of the Pacific’s current ecological crises, the foundations of oceanic identities from New Zealand to Alaska, and the multiple ways of understanding the ocean. We will be reading historical, anthropological, and scientific research and weighing the merits of each approach. Mondays will be focused on lecture, whereas Wednesdays will be primarily devoted to discussion.
Required Texts:
William Igagriuk Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People (New York, 2010).
Robert Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement from 1971 to 1979 (Fremantle Press: Fremantle, 2012). Also available as e-book.
= Required Readings
= For Further Research
Assignments (515 students please consult with professor):
1) 1 Map Quiz (10%) – January 23
2) 8 Reading Quizzes (25%)
Each Wednesday at the beginning of class you will be given a very short quiz with one question covering either that week’s reading or content from the Monday lecture. A list of possible questions will be distributed the previous week. Your lowest two quiz scores from the semester will be dropped. There are no makeup quizzes.
2) 2 Essays (65% - first essay 30%, second essay 35%)
The first essay is due Feb 17 by 5:00 pm and should answer the question: “What were the major similarities and / or differences between human conceptions and interactions with the Pacific Ocean before c. 1900? You should consider where or if to draw the major differences (i.e. between North and South Pacific, indigenous vs. non-indigenous, pre-contact vs. post-contact, etc) as well as attempt to offer an explanation for the differences or similarities.” Use at least 3 outside readings in addition to assigned readings. Papers should be c. 5 – 7 pages long, double-spaced.
The second essay is due on March 23, by 5:00 pm. This essay involves more substantial secondary research and include at least 5 outside readings in addition to the assigned readings. Topics should be chosen in consultation with the professor and relate to one of the themes discussed in the second half of the class. Papers should be 8 – 10 pages long, double-spaced.
Map Quiz Terms
1. Sea of Cortez 14. Great Barrier Reef
2. Kuroshio Current 15. Kodiak Island
3. Humboldt Current 16. Polynesian Triangle
4. Aleutian Islands 17. Tlingit people
5. Tasmania 18. Makah people
6. Haida Gwaii 19. Waipio Valley
7. Kororareka 20. Tuamotu
8. Midway Atoll 21. Tuvalu
9. Kamchatka 22. Bikini Island
10. Ainu people 23. Kotzebue
11. Viti Levu 24. Emperor Seamounts
12. Pearl River Delta 25. Challenger Deep
13. Wallace’s Line
CLASS SCHEDULE (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
WEEK 1 PACIFIC GEOGRAPHIES IN MOTION
Jan 9 Introduction
Paul D’Arcy, “Oceania: The Environmental History of One-Third of the Globe,” in J.R. McNeill and Erin Steward Maudlin, eds., A Companion to Global Environmental History (Chichester, 2012).
J.R. McNeill, “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific,” Journal of World History 5 (1994): 299 – 349.
Ryan Tucker Jones, “The Environment,” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (New York, 2014).
Moshe Rapaport, ed., The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society (Honolulu, 1999).
Jan 11 Ecologies of Colonization
Tim Flannery, “When Thou Hast Enough Remember the Time of Hunger,” in The Future Eaters (New York, 1994).
Atholl Anderson, “Faunal Collapse, Landscape Change and Settlement History
in Remote Oceania,” World Archaeology 33:3 “Ancient Ecodisasters” (Feb., 2002): 375 – 390.
Patrick Vinton Kirch, “Flightless Ducks and Palm Forests,” in Kirch, A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief (Honolulu, 2012).
Terry Martin and Carl Lipo, The Statues that Walked: Unravelling the Mystery of Easter Island (New York, 2011).
A.B. McDiarmad, et al, “Taking Stock – The Changes to New Zealand Marine Ecosystems since first Human Settlement,” New Zealand Aquatic Environment and Biodiversity Report No. 170 (June, 2016).
Jared Diamond, “Twilight at Easter,” in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2011).
Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth. Melbourne, 2013.
Vincent Clement, “Star Path to a New World: Reappraising an Account of a Polynesian Voyage to the American Continent from an Environmental History Perspective,” Environment and History 22 (2016): 29 – 48.
WEEK 2 CULTURAL ECOLOGIES OF COLONIZATION
Jan 16 ***** No class – Martin Luther King Day Holiday *****
Jan 18 North Pacific Colonial Ecologies
H.D.G. Maschner, et al, “An Introduction to the Biocomplexity of Sanak Island, Western Gulf Alaska,” Pacific Science 63:4 (2009): 673 – 709.
Tom Lowenstern, “Tikigaq: Whale,” in Ancient Land: Sacred Whale. The Inuit Hunt and its Rituals. New York, 1994.
Douglas Deur, “Salmon, Sedentism, and Cultivation: Toward an Environmental Prehistory of the Northwest Coast,” in Dale D. Goble & Paul Hirt, eds., Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples: Readings in Environmental History. Seattle, 1999.
Jon Erlandson, et al, “The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas,” Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology 2 (2007): 161 – 174.
Jon Erlandson, Madonna Moss, and Matthew Des Lauriers, “Life on the Edge: Maritime Cultures of the Pacific Coast of North America,” Quarternary Science Reviews 27 (2008).
Charlotte Cote, Spirit of our Whaling Ancestors. Seattle, 2015.
Judith Roche and Meg McHutchinson, eds., First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim. Seattle, 1998.
Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ed., Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changin Ideas. Vancouver, 2013.
Steve Langdon, “Comparative Tlingit and Haida Adaptation to the West Coast of the Prince of Wales Archipelago,” Ethnology 18:2 (Apr. 19797): 101 – 119.
WEEK 3 THE NATURE OF ENCOUNTER
Jan 23 Pacific Cultural Ecologies **** Map Quiz ****
Frederic Torrente, “Ancient Magic and Religious Trends of the Rahui on the Atoll of Anaa, Tuamotu,” in Tamatoa Bambridge, ed., The Rahui: Legal Pluralism in Polynesian Traditional Management of Resources and Territories (Canberra, 2016). http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p337293/html/ch02.xhtml?referer=&page=9#
Paul D’Arcy, “Local Worlds: the Sea in Everyday Life,” in Peoples of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania (Honolulu, 2006).
R.E. Johannes, Words of the Lagoon: Fishing and Marine Lore in the Palau District of Micronesia (Berkeley, 1981).
David Hanlon, Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890. Honolulu, 1988.
Margaret Chapman, “Traditional Political Structure and Conservation in Oceania,” Ambio 16:4 (1987): 201 - 205.
P.Wehi, M. Cox, T. Roa and H. Whaanga, “Marine Resources in Maori Oral Tradition: He Kai Moana, He Kai Ma Te Hinengaro,” Journal of Marine and Island Cultures 2 (2013): 59 – 68.
Edvard Hviding, The Guardians of Marovo Lagoon: Practice, Place, and Politics in Maritime Melanesia. Honolulu, 1996.
Jan 25 European Cultural Ecologies
Julie Cruikshank, “Two Centuries of Stories from Lituya Bay: Nature, Culture, and La Perouse,” in Do Glaciers Listen: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver, BC, 2005).
Charles Mann, “Lovesick Grass, Foreign Tubers, and Jade Rice,” in 1493
Warren Cook, Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543 – 1819. New Haven, 1978.
Brett Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590 – 1800. Berkeley, 2006.
Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race. Canberra, 2008.
Thomas Cole and Brownen Douglas, Tattoo: Bodies, Art, and Exchange in the Pacific and the West. London, 2005.
David Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration. Minneapolis, 2016.
Douglas Cole and Maria Tippett, “Pleasing Diversity and Sublime Desolation: The 18th-Century British Perception of the Northwest Coast,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 65:1 (January, 1974).
WEEK 4 SCRAPING THE SEA
Jan 30 Above the Waterline, above the Equator
Josh Reid, “The Power of Wickaninnish Ends Here,” in The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makah. New Haven, 2015.
Andrew P. Johnson, “The Battle of Sitka,” in Dauenhauers and Black, eds., Anooshi Lingit Kaa
Robert Boyd, The Coming Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774 – 1874. Seattle, 1999.
Andrew Bushnell, “The ‘Horror’ Reconsidered: An Evaluation of the Historical Evidence for Population Decline in Hawai’i, 1778 – 1803,” Pacific Studies 16:3 (1993): 115 – 161.
John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i. Chapel Hill, 2015.
R. Hobby, “Lanai - A Case Study: The Loss of Biodiversity on a Small Hawaiian Island,” Science 47:3 (1993): 201 – 210.
Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741 – 1867. Oxford, 2014.
David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. oxford, 2013.
Feb 1 Below the Waterline, below the Equator
Gregory Rosethal, “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857 – 1870,” Environmental History 17 (2012).
Marry Wallis, Chapter V, Life in Fiji: Five Years among the Cannibals (Boston, 1851). http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-HeaLife-t1-body-d5.html#n104
Michael Stevens, “K ā i Tahu me te Hopu Tīti ki Rakiua: An Exception to the ‘Colonial Rule,” The Journal of Pacific History 41:3 (December, 2006), 273 – 291.
Katerina Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba. Bloomington, 2014.
Jennifer Newell, Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Exchange. Honolulu, 2010.
Ted Melilo, “Making Sea Cucumbers Out of Whales’ Teeth: Nantucket Castaways and Encounters of Value in Nineteenth-Century Fiji,” Environmental History 20:3 (2015).
James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land. Melbourne, 2008.
WEEK 5 THE WHALE
Feb 6 The Whale in the Pacific Ocean
Bathsheba Demuth, “Ocean”
David Haines, “The Harpoon’s Head,” in The Lives of Colonial Objects (Dunedin, 2016)
Worldwhalinghistory.org/home
Jennifer Jackson, David Patton, Tim Smith, “Two Intense Decades of 19th Century Whaling Precipitated Rapid Decline of Right Whales around New Zealand and Australia,” PLOS ONE 9:4 (2014).
Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves,” American Historical Review 118:2 (2013): 349 – 377.
Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790 – 1870. Albany, NY, 2012.
Jakobina Arch, “From Meat to Machine Oil: The Nineteenth-Century Development of Whaling in Wakayama,” Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power. Honolulu, 2013.
Feb 8 The Whale in the Pacific Imagination
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Selections
WEEK 6 STATES AND MISTAKES
Feb 13 Borders and Blunders (Lissa Wadewitz visit)
Lissa Wadewitz, ““Policing the Border,” in The Nature of Borders
Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, “Hui Nalu, Outrigger, and Waikiki Beachboys,” Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai’i. Honolulu, 2011.
Joseph Taylor, “Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Historicizing Overfishing in Oregon’s Nineteenth-Century Salmon Fisheries,” Environmental History 4:1 (January, 1999): 54 – 79.
Manako Ogawa, “Passage to Hawai’i: The Development of a Fishing Culture in Japan since Ancient Times,” in The Sea of Opportunity (Honolulu, 2015).
Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir.
Ping Hui-Lao, “Some Like it Hot: Sato Haruo’s Travels in the Colony,” in Simon C. Estok and Jonathan White, eds., Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016).
David Arnold, “The Closing of the Fisherman’s Frontier,” The Fishermen’s Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (Seattle, 2008).
Ross Coen, “Owning the Ocean: Environment, Race, and Identity in the Bristol Bay, Alaska, Salmon Fishery, 1930 – 1938,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 104:3 (Summer, 2013): 133 – 150.
Feb 15 No Class ******** Essay 1 due Feb 17 ***********
WEEK 7 WARS UNNATURAL
Feb 20 Ocean and Militarization
William Tsutsui, “The Pelagic Empire: Reconsidering Japanese Expansion,” in
Japan at Nature’s Edge. Honolulu, 2014.
John Culliney, “Decline of a Lagoon,” in Islands in a Far Sea: The Fate of Nature in Hawaii. Honolulu, 2005.
Gregory Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History
Mark Peattie, Nanyo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia. Honolulu, 1988.
Dirk Spennemann, “Japanese Exploitation of Central Pacific Seabirds, 1989 – 1925,” Pacific Studies 21:1/2 (1998): 1 – 41.
Mark Jaffe, And No Birds Sing: The Story of an Ecological Disaster in a Tropical Paradise. New York, 1994.
Feb 22 War and Development
Judith Bennett, “Legacies and Visions” Natives and Exotics: World War Ii and Environment in the South Pacific. Honolulu, 2009.
Carmel Finley, “The Social Construction of Fishing, 1949,” Ecology and Society 14:1 (2009)
Carmel Finley, All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management. Chicago, 2011.
William Tsutsui, “Landscapes in a Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan,” in Environmental History 8:2 (April 2003), 294 – 311.
Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Cold War Oceanography
Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850 – 1900. Cambridge, 1990.
WEEK 8 ECOLOGY OF DECOLONIZATION
Feb 27 Nuclear and Petroleum Adventures
Jeff Wheelwright, Degrees of Disaster: Prince William Sound: How Nature Reels and Rebounds, New Haven, 1996.
”The Hardships of Rongerik Atoll” in Jack Niedenthal, For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and their Islands. Majuro, 2001.
Mansell Blackford, Fragile Paradise: The Impact of Tourism on Maui, 1959 – 2000. Lawrence, KS, 2001.
Mansell Blackford, Pathways to the Present: US Development and its Consequenes in the Pacific. Honolulu, 2007.
Colin Michael Hall, Tourism in the Pacific Rim: Development, Impacts, and Markets. Melbourne, 1994.
Ben Finney and Karen Ann Watson, eds., A New Kind of Sugar: Tourism in the Pacific. Honolulu, 1977.
W.B. Jackson, “Survival of Rats at Eniwetok Atoll,” Pacific Science 23 (19696): 265 – 275.
Mar 1 Decolonization
William Iggiagruk Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, Selections.
Pyar Ali Memon and Ross Cullen, “Fishery Politics and their Impact on the New Zealand Maori,” Marine Resource Economics 7:3 (Fall, 1992): 153 – 167.
Kate Reedy-Maschner, Aleut Identities: Tradition and Modernity in an Indigenous Fishery. Montreal, 2010.
David Doulman, ed., Tuna Issues and Perspectives in the Pacific Islands Region. Honolulu, 1987.
Brian Bargh, The Struggle for Maori Fishing Rights: Te Ika a Maori. Auckland, 2015.
Mar 3 / 4 VISIT TO OREGON MARINE SCIENCE CENTER
WEEK 9 PACIFIC ENVIRONMENTALISM
Mar 6 Wilderness and Ecology
John Muir, “The Discovery of Glacier Bay,” in Travels in Alaska (Boston, 1915) http://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/chapter_10.aspx
John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, Chapters 16 and 21, in The Log from the Sea of Cortez
National Public Radio, “Echoes of ‘The Sea of Cortez’” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1903396
Steve Nicholls, “From Sea to Shining …” in Paradise Lost: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery. Chicago, 2009.
Sujit Sivasundarum, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and the Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795 – 1850. Cambridge, 2011.
Geoff Park, Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life. Wellington, 1995.
Roy McLeod and Phillip F. Rehbock, eds., Nature in its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific. Honolulu, 1988.
Mar 8 Radical Pacific Environmentalism
Bob Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow, Selections
Rex Weyler, Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World. Vancouver, 2004.
Frank Zelko, Make it a Greenpeace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism. Oxford, 2013.
Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, A History of the Australian Environmental Movement. Cambridge, 1999.
Haunani-Kay Trask, “Environmetnal Racism in the Pacific Basin,” Tok Blong Pacifik: A Quarterly of News and Views on the Pacific Islands, Sept.-Dec. 1995, 16 -33.
David Young, Our Islands, Our Selves: A History of Conservation in New Zealand. Dunedin, 2004.
WEEK 10 THE ENLARGING OCEAN
Mar 13 Slow Disasters
David Corlett, “Tuvalunacy,” in Stormy Weather: The Challenge of Climate Change and Displacement (Sydney, 2008).
Larry Mercullief, “Different Ways of Looking at Things,” and Ata Brett Stephenson, “Kaua e mangere – Do Not Be Idle: Maori Responses in a Time of Climate Change,” in Zoltan Grossman and Alan Parkers, eds., Asserting Native Resilience (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015)
C. Farbotko, “Wishful Sinking: Disappearing Islands, Climate Refugees and Cosmopolitan Experimentation,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51:1 (2010): 47 – 60.
Christine Shearer, Kivalina; A Climate Change Story. Chicago, 2011.
Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life. New York, 2012.
Tony Weir and Zahira Virani, “Three Linked Risks for Development in the Pacific Islands: Climate Change, Disasters, and Conflict,” Climate and Development 3:3 (2011): 193 – 208.
John Barnett and John Campbell, Climate Change and Small Island States: Power, Knowledge, and the South Pacific. London, 2010.
Michael Edwards, “Parochialism and Empowerment: Responding to Eco-colonialism and Globalisation in the Southwest Pacific,” in Alexander Gillespie and William Burns, eds., Climate Change in the South Pacific (Dordrecht, 2003).
Mar 15 Fast Disasters
Kathryn Schultz, “The Really Big One: An Earthquake Will Destroy a Sizable Portion of the Coastal Northwest. The Question Is When,” The New Yorker July 20 2015.
