Crossing the divides between the natural and social sciences and the arts and humanities, as well as between western and other (especially, Aboriginal) ways of knowing, this project also had an expressly decolonial agenda. Whereas in the US, and to some extent also in the UK, environmental humanities are seen to be closely associated with literary studies, in Australia, the project of the ‘ecological humanities’, inaugurated at the Australian National University in the late 1990s, was more firmly located in environmental history, ecophilosophy, and ethnography (especially Aboriginal Studies). This article contributes an Australian perspective to this special issue’s exploration of the parameters of the emerging cross-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities, and its relationship to ecocriticism. I go on to propose a blue ecofeminism as a possible emerging perspective within the established scholarship in feminist environmental philosophy to more wholistically contribute to the Decade of Ocean UN discourse. I have chosen to draw on a number of feminist philosophers to appropriately reflect the undeniably gendered cultural narrative we have shared with our Mother ocean. This paper comprises my mediations concerning the colonisation of our oceans even when our aims are toward a sustainable development. In the face of plundered and acidified oceans, we ought to be asking whether a continuation of this paradigm is in our best interest at all? I reflect on how the current state of our oceans is a direct reflection of our colonising relationship with the ocean as a mere resource. Our human narrative shared with the ocean is essentially immersed within a particular world view which provides the very framework and context to this global endeavour. Within the profoundly anthropocentric aims and methodologies of this ocean decade, it is negligent to not more explicitly consider our human narrative shared with our oceans as an essential component to understanding a more complete picture of coastal and ocean sustainability. Presumably, its entire body flashing with light scares away its enemies.Over the next ten years, the United Nations has invited the global community to think about, and make decisions concerning, the future of our oceans in a way that has not been afforded to other significant revolutions in our human development. The ultimate biolumiscent defence mechanism has to be the show created by the deep sea jellyfish periphylla. Spinning confused in the water, the ostracod chases after the flashes and the copepods slip away unseen into the darkness. But some copepods discharge packets of bioluminescent liquid whose flashes are delayed and go off like depth charges, confusing the ostracod as to their whereabouts. Copepods are a favourite prey and it actively searches for their flashes in the darkness. It's the size of a pea, but that's enormous for an ostracod. The most sensitive eyes in the deep sea belong to an ostracod called gigantocypris. Other prey animals such as copepods have developed tactics to use bright or flashing lights to communicate with one another and confuse their predators, allowing them precious moments to get away unharmed. A shrimp senses a threat and spins in the water, releasing a bioluminescent glue that startles the fish and leaving it illumiated in the dark and vulnerable to its own predators. Bioluminescence is useful as an escape strategy as well as for attack.
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