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Paper short abstract:

Ocean acidification is a global threat to shellfish aquaculture since many farmed species are sensitive to changes in carbonate chemistry. Looking to the sensory affects and interspecies relations between marine life, scientists and oyster farmers, this paper engages OA from a multispecies angle.

Paper long abstract:

This paper gives an ethnographic account of how environmental affect and multispecies relations gave rise to environmental awareness of ocean acidification and its far reaching consequences for national and international shellfish aquaculture practices and policy. The careful "arts of noticing" (Tsing 2015) of a community, concentrating especially in the effort of one family-owned hatchery, sounded an alarm for a nationwide industry where oysters became to the ocean what the canary is to the coal mine. Ocean acidification (OA) is recognized as a global threat to the shellfish aquaculture industry because many farmed species are sensitive to changes in carbonate chemistry, a consequence of OA, which is increasing at unprecedented rates. Looking to the material encounters, sensory relationships and inter-species narratives emerging between marine life, acidifying waters, natural scientists and oyster farmers, this paper engages ocean acidification from a multispecies angle. It presents a multimodal mapping that engages ocean acidification as a compound crisis of “natureculture” (Haraway 2016); that is as the complex outcome of the interaction of anthropogenic histories with ecological/chemical/climatic dynamics. The paper aims to be given as a performance lecture that includes audiovisual and more-than-human perspectives on environmental restoration "from the bottom up".