Blue Ecology

Søren Frank

Related terms: Anthropocene, attunement, deep time, endurance, ordinariness, post-sustainability

In Bræen (1908; Ice, 1923), Johannes V. Jensen evokes a primaeval thaw that floods the Earth and drives the glacier out of sight:

The great thaw sparkled in the eye of the sun over the North. The ice sheet was in rapid retreat. […] This was not to be wondered at, for the weather that had come on was enough to melt mountains. Thunder-showers and warm rain gushed down incessantly […], and between them the sun broke through, so smilingly powerful, so full of hope, that even the beasts raised their heads from the wet earth and looked upon the world as though it had become new”

The scene illustrates an elemental transformation where rain, sun, and melting ice remake the world. It is not a myth of apocalypse, but one of renewal and attunement. This interglacial moment, drawn from the Pleistocene deep time, can be read as a proto-Anthropocene scene: a reminder that climate and water, flux and survival, have long shaped both planet and human imaginaries.

In our epoch of climate upheaval, Steve Mentz suggests that “the unstable and destructive environment in which we live now increasingly resembles a dynamic sea rather than stable land” (2018, 71). ‘Blue ecology,’ building on this insight, shifts ecological thinking from land-based ideals of balance to oceanic modes of immersion and transformation. It challenges the managerial fantasy of restoration and instead asks how we might remain in a world already changing. This entry explores ‘blue ecology’ as a conceptual response to the Anthropocene, tracing how oceanic thought challenges terrestrial assumptions and reframes the ethical, temporal, and political horizons of ecological life.

Western ecological imagination has long been shaped by land-based metaphors such as ‘rootedness’ and ‘cultivation.’ These ‘green’ imaginaries – what Mentz calls “[a]gricultural and pastoral visions of sustainability and predictability” (2018, 71) – presuppose stability. In a time of rising oceans, melting ice, and volatile climate systems, it is the sea, not the forest, field, or garden, that offers the most adequate model of Anthropocene conditions. ‘Blue ecology’ emerges from this shift in metaphor, scale, and medium. It proposes the ocean not as a backdrop but as an epistemology: a way of knowing premised on turbulence and nonlinearity. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey reminds us, the ocean has a long tradition of being scientifically framed as the evolutionary origin for life on Earth, but “given the imminent threat of sea-level rising”, the ocean is now also inextricably associated with “our anticipated destiny” (2019, 138). Her emphasis on ordinariness as an adaptive hermeneutic strategy draws attention to those whose daily lives unfold within rising tides and eroding shores (2019, 147–48, 157). In DeLoughrey’s framing, oceanic thinking is not abstract but remains embedded and a matter of everyday culture.

For Mentz, the oceanic instability is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited. “Shipwreck” becomes a central figure: we are no longer navigating toward safe harbours but drifting among ruins (2015). ‘Blue ecology’ thinking thus entails a reorientation not only of ecological theory but also of ethics and aesthetics. It values proximity over distance, partial knowledge over mastery, and improvisation over control. To think ‘blue’ is to abandon the idea that nature can be restored to equilibrium. It is to accept that ecological life, like the ocean, is always exceeding human designs. Importantly, this orientation does not imply nihilistic resignation but calls for a different kind of commitment: one that recognises fragility as a precondition for care and relation. As Mentz points out: “In this disorienting space, human structures remain fragile but also deeply needed” (2019, 8–9).

The Anthropocene is not a temporary disruption but a geological revolution. According to Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, it marks a bifurcation in Earth’s history that signals the end of Holocene stability, not a crisis to be managed but “a point of no return” and a new regime to be endured (2017, xi, 19). What makes this epoch oceanic is not only its physical effects – rising seas, storm surges, heavy rainfall –but also its temporal and epistemological structure. The Earth no longer behaves as a background for human progress; it asserts itself as a dynamic agent, shaped and reshaped by feedback loops. The Anthropocene exposes both the potency and the impotence of human agency: we have been powerful enough to alter the climate system, hence our telluric force, yet we are now powerless to reverse the processes we set in motion (2017, xi).

This is one reason why Jeremy Davies urges us to situate this epoch within deep time, to see it not as a break but as part of a long sequence of planetary thresholds and transformations. “If you want to grasp the force, the scale, and the shape of the catastrophe as it unfolds,” he writes, “look for how it opens a fresh chapter in the long sequences of planetary time” (2016, 2). In this perspective, the Anthropocene is legible only through what the ocean already teaches us: that change is not linear, that lasting equilibrium is an illusion, and that history is always embedded in material flows of both gradualist and catastrophist propensities. The image of glacial retreat in Bræen anticipates this oceanic temporality. The melting ice and endless rain signal not just destruction but transformation. The Anthropocene as an oceanic epoch invites us to think not in terms of crisis and recovery, but of thresholds crossed and unruly foundations.

The language of sustainability – so dominant in environmental discourse – suggests that ecological crisis can be contained, managed, and reversed. It relies on metaphors of balance, repair, and optimisation: the idea that if we act wisely – that is, sustainably – we can preserve what is or restore what was. But as Davies cautions, this vision is no longer tenable. In the Anthropocene, the planetary system is not merely damaged; it is altered, re-assuming its earlier catastrophist workings. We cannot rely on the planet to sustain us, to uphold us. Exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene implies a rowdy geology. What we face is not a problem to solve but a crisis condition “to live within” (2016, 194). Davies argues for a shift from sustainability to durability – a practice of learning to live through irreversible change. This shift demands new forms of political and ethical imagination, less invested in equilibrium than in inhabiting and seeking to mould crisis (2016, 200). The Anthropocene’s tipping points foreclose the fantasy of stability. What remains is the challenge of endurance, adaptation, and cohabitation with unpredictability.

‘Blue ecology’ thinking embodies this shift. Unlike green frameworks that aim to conserve or steward fixed ecosystems, blue thinking begins with immersion in flux. The sea does not offer restoration; it demands navigation. This orientation also resists the geopolitical abstraction of much Anthropocene discourse. The managerial gaze – from satellites, models, and global dashboards – imagines the planet as a system to optimise. But such perspectives often obscure the lived, unequal experience of environmental change. ‘Blue ecology’ instead aligns with what DeLoughrey calls the ordinary: the slow violence of rising waters, the daily recalibrations of those living at the edge. To live within the Anthropocene, then, is not to sustain a vanishing world, nor an unruly Earth, but to make new ways of staying with the planet as it shifts.

Attunement means listening ‘indifferently’ to the volatile ocean rather than silencing it through models and metrics. “Indifference,” as redefined by Naisargi N. Davé (2023), is not apathy but a radical, respectful mode of coexistence that resists appropriation, objectification, and the intrusive curiosity that often marks human interactions with nonhuman others – a stance of non-intrusive coexistence that respects the opacity of others. Supplementing the ‘view from nowhere’ produced by satellite perspectives and planetary dashboards, ‘blue ecology’ insists on the importance of scale: on the granular, the situated, the embodied. The ocean is not only a system to be piloted from above; it is also a medium that must be navigated from within. We need both methods and perspectives.

In this sense, ‘blue ecology’ thinking also involves a politics of justice. The Anthropocene is not equally lived. Its causes and effects are unevenly distributed across classes, regions, and species. The fantasy of a unified ‘humanity’ managing a shared planet conceals the asymmetries of climate vulnerability. By attending to the ordinary, to coastal erosion and submerged histories, to the precarity of island life and the struggle of survival, ‘blue ecology’ thinking contests the homogenising tendencies of some Earth system discourses.

Attunement also reshapes our relationship to time. It invites us to think not in centuries or targets but in rhythms, in returns and disruptions. Mentz’s sea is not a future to arrive at, but a condition to live through – wrecked, yes, but still moving. In Bræen, the post-glacial world is not marked by loss alone. The animals, heads lifted from the wet ground, glimpse a renewed Earth. ‘Blue ecology’ thinking inherits that gesture, not optimism, but orientation. In a time of irreversible planetary transformation, attunement becomes both method and ethic. It is how we stay, not where we once were, but where we now are (going).

‘Blue ecology’ does not offer redemption. It does not promise sustainability or return. Instead, it teaches us how to remain attuned to transformation. Adopting a perspective from the sea rather than from the land, it reframes the Anthropocene not as an awakening but as a condition: an irreversible, oceanic epoch that undoes the Holocene’s promises of control and balance. From Jensen’s vision of the post-glacial flood to Mentz’s shipwreck epistemology and DeLoughrey’s “the ordinary oceanic” (2019, 162), ‘blue ecology’ reminds us that water has always shaped the edges of worldmaking. It offers no permanent shore – only a boisterous sea, and perhaps a possibility to stay afloat together.

‘Blue ecology’ thinking challenges the land-centred bias of environmental thought by introducing oceanic and littoral modes of sensing and narration. Attuned to the volatility and opacity of aqueous environments, it reconfigures environmental inquiry around non-linear, multi-scalar entanglements – currents, salinity, migration, and atmospheric exchange. In doing so, ‘blue ecology’ thinking supports the environmental humanities’ shift from isolated ecosystems to planetary processes, from human-centred to posthuman and multispecies perspectives. The ocean, as both material and metaphor, becomes a space where human sovereignty is challenged and ecological interconnectedness emerges.

Four Definitions

1. ‘Blue ecology’ hints at an ecological mode of thought grounded in oceanic materialities and metaphors, emphasising instability, relationality, and attunement over stability, mastery, and sustainability.
2. ‘Blue ecology’ is a way of knowing shaped by the ocean’s movements – its drift, depth, turbulence – and it values immersion and receptivity rather than control and containment.
3. ‘Blue ecology’ is a mode of responding to the Anthropocene not with managerial solutions but with practices of endurance, improvisation, and adaptation.
4. ‘Blue ecology’ thinking is both a poetics and an ethics: attuning to the volatile rhythms of planetary transformation, and embracing a situated, partial, and ongoing relation with a changing Earth.

References

Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso. First published in 2013 in French.

Davé, Naisargi N. 2023. Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Davies, Jeremy. 2016. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jensen, Johannes V. 1908. Bræen. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag.

Jensen, Johannes V. 1923. Fire and Ice. Translated by A. G. Chater. New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie.

Mentz, Steve. 2009. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. London: Continuum.

Mentz, Steve. 2015. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mentz, Steve. 2018. “Blue Humanities.” In The Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 69–72. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Mentz, Steve. 2019. Break Up the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.