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Drones are revolutionizing ocean conservation. By flying closer and seeing more, drones enhance intimate contact between ocean scientists and activists and marine life. In the process, new dependencies between nature, technology, and humans emerge, and a paradox becomes apparent: Can we have a wild ocean whose survival is reliant upon technology? In Oceaning, Adam Fish answers this question through eight stories of piloting drones to stop the killing of porpoises, sharks, and seabirds and to check the vitality of whales, seals, turtles, and coral reefs. Drone conservation is not the end of nature. Instead, drone conservation results in an ocean whose flourishing both depends upon and escapes the control of technologies. Faulty technology, oceanic and atmospheric turbulence, political corruption, and the inadequacies of basic science serve to foil governance over nature. Fish contends that what emerges is an ocean/culture – a flourishing ocean that is distinct from but exists alongside humanity.
Acknowledgments ix
1. Beginning: Intimacies of Conservation Theology 1
2. Technicity: Touching Whale Exhale with Drones 28
3. Elementality: Confronting Whalers Through the Air and on the Seas 49
4. Governmentality: Flying to the Limits of the Law Against Shark Fin Poachers 72
5. Storying: Tracking Northern Fur Seals and Their Extinction Media 96
6. Crashing: Falling Drones and Abandoned Tern Colonies 119
7. Living: Coexisting with Sharks 140
8. Ending: Coral/Cultures 164
References 191
Index 223
Adam Fish is a Scientia Associate Professor of Arts and the Media at the University of New South Wales, author of Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States, and coauthor of Hacker States and After the Internet.
"Oceaning is full of fascinating stories, finely rendered and theorized, about today's tools of ocean monitoring. Adam Fish's tales of marine conservation technologies maps fresh configurations of oceanic bodies, intimacies, and elementalities. You will not see that drone hovering above the seashore in quite the same way after you read this absorbing book."
– Stefan Helmreich, author A Book of Waves
"This beautifully crafted, elegantly written, and poignant book offers a nuanced and complex rendering of the power and potentiality of drones to remake ocean conservation. Rooted in the lively materialities of ocean life, Oceaning foregrounds animal lives in a crucial way and never strays from considering the ethical dilemmas of conservation practices, eschewing the politics of purity as it demands we do something about the human impact on nonhuman life. This outstanding work is an absolute delight to read."
– Stephanie Rutherford, author of Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power
"The invisibility and inaccessibility of Earth's oceans has meant they are exposed to all the tragedies of the commons. That is changing quickly. Drones are part of increasingly granular webs of planetary sensing upon which any robust ecological governance depends. Adam Fish's book explores how as oceans and their myriad forms of life are increasingly visible, they become more conservable, defensible, and governable."
– Benjamin Bratton, University of California, San Diego
