The World Oceans: The Science and Fiction of the Inexhaustible in the Times of New Limits to Growth

In the 1970s the world's oceans were not just another resource to be developed, they were imagined as a place of inexhaustible supply, an unlimited reservoir of proteins, mineral resources and human living space, supplementing the exploited landmasses. This article argues that the sciences, technologies and politics of ocean exploration promoted the image of the earth's biotic and abiotic matter as convertible and replaceable in perfect metabolic cycles. Human matter, the earth's only excess living resource, was seen as feeding directly into these global supply chains and recycling systems. The eco-technological reorganization of the earth's environment,, based on biomass as the communal unit, opened the oceans up as a new dimension in the global economy and ecology of flows.