The Ruined Seascapes of the Wasteocene

Bibliographic Data

ID3914310
AuthorsMichael A Vina (0000-0001-9331-3556, University of Lisbon, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume17
Issue2
Pages393-410
Publication date2025-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-11713486
OpenAlexW4412706446
LanguageEN
References cited29

Along the south-central coast of Ecuador, the shifting seascape and broader economic processes bind inhabitants with the unique sociomaterial qualities of fish and their commodified products, such as fishmeal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that the vitality contained within fish eggs is not located within the fish itself but rather within the relationship between fish bodies and the specific human knowledges that coproduce the subjective life of fish and its commodified forms. By examining the concealment of fish from industrial boats to fishers' households as a form of "marginal gain," this work connects hope and anxiety with fishers' notions of decline and indeterminacy. Fishers' reappropriation of fish forms a critique of fishmeal economies through shifting environmental histories of the sea that are sensed through nonhuman bodies and experienced simultaneously as beneficial and detrimental. Rather than viewing these human and nonhuman configurations as another example of human hubris in the Anthropocene, this article proposes that such relations are better understood within the Wasteocene, a logic that exposes the ways that human and nonhuman bodies are rendered physically and conceptually wasted through fishers and corporate instances of caring and killing

Geography · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Geology

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