By Kianna M. Gallagher, Rachel Kelly, Claire Konkes, and Gretta T. Pecl

Image 1. Life in the tidepool. Image by Bliss Sandhu.

This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.

Oceans face many well-known environmental threats, yet finding effective solutions is often far more challenging. That’s because these problems aren’t driven by environmental factors alone – they’re also shaped by the social, cultural, and economic forces that influence how people use and value the sea. These “human dimensions” are complex and vary greatly from place to place, making them difficult to capture. In this work, we focus on the reciprocal relationships between people and oceans – the give-and-take relationships that contribute to both human wellbeing and marine health. By understanding these mutual relationships, we can identify more meaningful and sustainable ways of interacting with the ocean that benefit both people and nature.

We begin by positioning reciprocity as a distinct environmental discourse. Discourses acknowledge that how we speak about something determines how we come to know and interact with it, which, in turn, informs the institutions that form to govern this relationship and further reinforce dominant discourses. Environmental discourses are therefore culturally unique and inform the many different ways in which people and groups come to form their relationships with nature. Reciprocal relationships with the ocean offer a distinct environmental discourse that often challenges other dominant discourses about human-nature relationships, including, for example, humans as separate and superior to nature and nature as existing for human exploitation.

In this paper, we looked to the peer-reviewed academic literature for examples of reciprocity in human-ocean relationships. We mapped those examples to inform an understanding of the many different people-ocean interactions from which reciprocity has arisen.

We found that many terms are used across languages, cultures, and localities to capture themes of reciprocity, which we mapped to identify three primary themes. First, many accounts discussed the measurable benefits of reciprocal relationships for the oceans and nature; second, many interconnected social systems support reciprocal human-ocean relationships; and, finally, reciprocity offers an alternative to other ways of interacting with the oceans. When taken together, these themes highlight the value of building social systems that foster reciprocity between people and nature. As an alternative to dominant environmental discourses, such as extracting resources solely for human use or protecting ocean areas from human use, reciprocity highlights and effectively captures the connection between the social (“human”) and the ecological (“nature”) dimensions.

Reciprocal human-ocean relationships position people as important parts of ocean systems, who have the potential to interact with marine environments in positive, constructive ways. Reciprocity thereby offers a means to consider and create alternative narratives toward sustainable marine futures.