Environmental History of Oceanic Noise Pollution

The concept of “ocean noise” precedes the concept of “ocean noise pollution” by about half a century. Those seeking a body of scholarly literature on ocean noise as an environmental problem (rather than as an area of military or scientific interest) may be disappointed to find that the literature in this area is mostly from the last few decades and deals primarily with contemporary levels of noise in the ocean and their proximate causes. The concept of ocean noise as pollution began to emerge in scientific and environmental discourses relatively recently (late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). On the one hand, this means that ocean noise pollution is an emerging environmental issue and its history is unfolding in the present. On the other hand, it means the existing literature is quite limited in geographic scope, historical period, and theoretical orientation: in-depth theoretically informed studies of the roles of capitalism, colonialism, and militarism, for example, in producing the ocean noise problem have only recently begun to emerge in the scholarly literature. In this sense, the study of the environmental history of ocean noise is far behind other more familiar and established topics in environmental history. However, from the literature below, we may gather fragments of something like the environmental history of ocean noise that may inform future historiographic efforts to piece together narratives of the environmental, political-economic, and technological histories of ocean noise pollution. Several challenges remain: Tracking when and how ocean noise pollution emerged as an environmental problem is complicated by differences in scholarly and public access to information about noise sources controlled by different institutions (e.g., military, industry, scientific). Another challenge is the uneven attention given to different types of noise depending on how loud they are and what kinds of marine life are most obviously affected by those sounds. Popular and to some extent scholarly interest in ocean noise has tended to focus on the loudest (rather than the most chronic) sounds in the ocean, and the impacts of these sounds on megafauna such as cetaceans rather than a wide spectrum of life in the marine biome. Scholarly and popular interest in naval sonar in the 2000s was important for crystallizing a particular formation of ocean noise as an environmental problem but it also obscures the fact that most human-generated ocean noise has more mundane causes stemming from the infrastructures of global capitalism, such as commercial shipping. This bias toward spectacular and instantaneous noise-induced harms such as those caused by naval sonar and the neglect of slow and cumulative noise-induced harms reflects a broader tendency in the history of ocean noise pollution: the division of ocean noise into discrete categories of sound (e.g., geological, biological, meteorological, hydrodynamic; self-noise; ambient noise; target noise) which were to some extent separated by disciplinary and institutional boundaries. This fragmentation of the spectrum of ocean noise, and of the research communities studying it, has delayed scientific, legal and popular recognition of the fact that human contributions to noise in the ocean were not isolated events but part of a cumulative transformation of the ocean soundscape. The persistent division of noise primarily benefits noise-producers, whose activities are not assessed according to their contributions to ocean noise generally but according to discrete regulations for different types of noise (e.g., shipping, seismic surveys, naval sonar, and construction noise). Contemporary forms of ocean noise governance reflect the long-term division of the ocean noise spectrum, giving each category its own permitting processes and mitigation measures. By dividing noise in this way, it becomes easier for militaries and industries to comply with sector-specific regulations without addressing the cumulative impacts of noise pollution across the marine environment. Readers of this bibliography will also likely observe that there is a paucity of material on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of ocean noise. This gap reflects broader patterns in the areas of focus and areas of neglect in environmental history. Whereas the history of noise pollution in terrestrial contexts (particularly in densely human populated areas like cities) has received considerable attention, the history of noise in the ocean is in its infancy. Consequently, the scant literature in this area is only beginning to show the features of a mature subfield within environmental history (e.g., differences in general versus regional studies). The literature below is helpful for tracing the contours of this nascent area of study within environmental history.