"Foreword by Klaus Dodds" [2019] ELECD 2595; in Liu, Nengye; Brooks, M. Cassandra; Qin, Tianbao (eds), "Governing Marine Living Resources in the Polar Regions" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) xiii

Book Title: Governing Marine Living Resources in the Polar Regions

Editor(s): Liu, Nengye; Brooks, M. Cassandra; Qin, Tianbao

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section Title: Foreword by Klaus Dodds

Number of pages: 5

Extract:

Foreword
While reading through Governing Marine Living Resources in the Polar
Regions, I felt an overwhelming need to find my weathered copy of
Rachael Carson's best-seller The Sea Around Us.1 First published in 1951,
Carson notes that the 1950s were `an exciting decade in the science of the
sea . . . During the fifties, also, the crossing of the entire Arctic basin was
accomplished by submarine travelling under the ice. Many new features of
the unseen floor of the sea of the sea have been described . . . During the
International Geophysical Year, 60 ships from 40 nations, as well as hun-
dreds of stations on islands and seacoasts, co-operated in an enormously
fruitful study of the sea'.2 And yet, as she concluded, our knowledge of the
earth's oceans remained `meagre'.
Meagre or not, the 1950s were filled with technological, scientific, legal
and geopolitical intervention in, on and under the world's ice sheets and
oceans.3 Initiatives such as the International Geophysical Year (1957­58)
were consequential for the scope and range of human exploration,
understanding and impact.4 Simultaneously, the UN Continental Shelf
Convention (1958) ensured that law was reaching sub-surface depths and
seabed. Coastal States were vying to extend and secure their sovereign
rights over the water column, the seabed and the life forms that called the
ocean home. Nowadays, we talk about terraqueous spaces and histories,
but, in the past, it might have been seen as `sea grabbing'.5
If Rachel Carson was ...