Sea Stories: The Role of History in Marine Science Education

The role of the Environmental Humanities is to help bridge the traditional divides between the science and the humanities, by bringing together knowledge of the natural world and the place of humans within it. There is growing awareness of the importance of stories in bridging these divides. History questions can reshape how we think about environmental issues, by bringing cultural and philosophical dimensions to legal, scientific, and policy-oriented research, allowing for the development of a fuller and more complex picture of the human engagement with the oceans. There is not a great deal of academic literature about the development of fisheries and fisheries science. Most of the attention has been focused on the Atlantic, where developments happened regionally over hundreds of years. Development in the Pacific has been much more compressed, with fisheries starting and collapsing with a short period time, such as the shark fishery during World War II. There has been little study of the massive post-war expansion of both fishing and whaling in the North Pacific Ocean, resulting in few sources for students who want a deeper understanding of how geopolitical pressures have shaped fisheries management in the North Pacific.