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A tentative timeline

Now slightly over halfway through my time at the National Library, I’m nearing the end of my collection phase. One of the challenges of doing library/archival research abroad is that you have to find a balance between locating/recording records and analyzing/writing about them. My June 1st deadline for my presentation at the NLA is a helpful incentive to move into this second phase as well.

The challenge of researching this subject, I’ve discovered, is that it requires becoming familiar with multiple chronologies across literatures that only occasionally acknowledge the existence or significance of the others. For instance, although virtually all “ballast water management” documents note the importance of woodchips, few discuss the industry, since it had very little influence on the policymaking process. Similarly, aquaculture gets short shrift in just about all literature save its own, despite being the linchpin for policy action in Australia.

What follows is my first attempt to create a master chronology for the environmental history of ballast water in Australia. It heavily emphasizes Tasmania, although it features material from other regions as well. I’ve also divided up the “historical events” into distinct categories. There is sometimes overlap across divisions, so this breakdown codes events to the subject headers they MOST influenced. For instance, ballast water science and management have obvious interconnection, so I try to align policymaking events and/or publications with “management”, while most other ballast water publications would fall under “science.” Its sometimes admittedly arbitrary, but since the purpose is for cross referencing by year, perfect alignment isn’t necessary.

Vertical & lateral approaches to complex problems

Tackling the challenge of limiting ballast water-mediated species introductions is a complex issue to wrap you head around. It involves multi-interest groups, each with its own technical expertise they can wield to understand and solve the problem, each with a greater or lesser stake in accomplishing the task. It involves many different types of species from environments all around the world. Some are well studied and understood, others undescribed. It involves large technical systems – including massive bulk carriers and container ships. The enormous investment in these ships means any technical changes must fight against significant institutional inertia. From the perspective of state management, ballast water and species introductions intersect with a dizzying array of institutional interests (agriculture, fisheries, shipping, state science, conservation, etc.), which in the case of Australia in the 1980s and 90s, existed in relative isolation. This is just scratching the surface. Multiply this eco-political-technical complexity to the scale of the planet and it should come as no surprise that the time it took to move from a recognition of the problem to national regulations, to a binding international set of guidelines. Change was measured in decades rather than years.

Without belaboring the point, this subject of complexity has been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve learned more about the research process that Australian scientists, engineers, and policymakers undertook to tackle this issue. Combing through the technical reports, conference proceedings, published and unpublished papers, and chatting with several participants in scientific working groups, the overwhelming complexity of the problem is readily apparent. With so much on the line, how do you negotiate a path forward?

There appear to be two primary ways that I’ve uncovered so far, which can roughly be divided into a vertical and lateral approach. Each came with their own benefits, and also consequences.

By “vertical”, I mean the logical reduction of a complex situation down to its barest essential parts. An example of this from the 1990s was Australia’s initial focus on toxic dinoflagellates as a model organism. By the mid 1990s, Australia contended with several charismatic invasions, of which algae was only one. A benthic fanworm (polycheate) was crowding out sea flood habitats in New South Wales, a seaweed (Undaria) was affecting mollusk harvesting in Tasmania, and an imported seastar (Asterias) was being dubbed a “plague” in the Australian media. Each species occupied its own niche and habitat, responded (or often didn’t) to different potential management strategies, and had wildly varying consequences, real or potential. Rather than tailoring a solution to all, Australia initially focused its efforts on controlling dinoflagellates. The rationale being, if we can tackle this microscopic organism, we’ll catch almost everything else.

The vertical approach was beneficial because it freed technical expertise to focus on essentially one problem. This has knock-on benefits in policymaking too. Speaking with Dr. Hallegraeff, he related a story of attending an early meeting of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as they were trying to agree on draft ballast standards that would apply everywhere. For two days, they went nowhere. Multiply the complexity of challenges faced in Australia to every known aquatic invasive the world over and it would seem daunting indeed. When he and his colleagues presented the idea of using a model organism, he related, “we could talk again!” If a management strategy could limit or reduce the risk of introducing something that small – the largest share of the challenge would be solved.

“Lateral thinking”, meanwhile, provided a different set of opportunities. This was the descriptor Dr. Pat Hutchings used when I asked her to describe the work she took part in as a member of a scientific working group on ballast water in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Scientific Working Group on Ballast Water was, once again, prompted by the discovery of “toxic dinoflagellates” in Tasmania by Gustaaf Hallegraeff in 1985 (although Hutchings and others had begun publishing on the subject years earlier). Pressure from the aquaculture industry motivated the Bureau of Rural Resources to establish this working group to 1. Understand the nature and scale of the problem and 2. Investigate methods to counteract it. The composition of the working group reflected the nature of the challenge. It included state officials, including the department of Rural Resources and the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS), as well as representatives from other state and federal agencies. In also included representatives from the shipping industries, in particular scientists and engineers from one of Australia’s largest shipowners, Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP). Finally, it included scientists, including Hallegraeff and Hutchings.

The composition of this group required a creative approach that forced participants to think outside their wheelhouse of expertise. “You had to think literally”, Hutching told me during our conversation in April 2023. Beyond their varying incentives to participate, each viewed the problem through their particular skillsets. Some members’ chief concern was being able to measure the efficacy of any potential solution. Introduced species were appearing in ecosystems with few or no baseline studies – in other words, it wasn’t clear exactly which species were “invasive” or not.

Others focused on management options, especially open ocean exchange. Ships could, in principle, just exchange ballast water at sea, either diluting or exchanging coastal waters with ocean waters less likely to harbor problematic species. Some ships had been doing this as a result of regulations about dumping in coastal watesr since at least the 1950s. The problem was that “ballast water exchange” was imperfect (it didn’t remove all ballast and thus continued to harbor potential exotics) and ships captains generally preferred not to exchange ballast water at all. It’s costly (in time) and potentially dangerous in rough waters. This point was brought home to me when I spoke to Alan Taylor, a naval architect and engineer for BHP and member of the SWG. The danger of exchanging ballast improperly, he and other emphasized through throughout the Scientific Working Group process, could be extreme, jeopardizing the safety of the ship and crew. The nuance of this understandably complex issue could be difficult to convey to other working group members. “They knew nothing about ships”, Taylor recalled (referring to AQIS). Similarly, from the perspective of Hutchings, the lack of taxonomic expertise meant that even identifying species was potentially problematic. Everyone needed to find translate their varied expertise to arrive at a potential solution. “It was a very interesting committee to be on,” Hutchings concluded, “demanding” she added.

The combined benefit of both approaches was rather obvious. In the end, the SWG produced a remarkable set of studies in a relatively short period of time. Their findings informed the refinement of Voluntary Ballast Water Guidelines in the early 1990s, which themselves formed the basis of international guidelines developed by the IMO. They were also able to develop a process for conducting port surveys to better understand the nature of ecosystems being invaded. It would be adopted and refined over the next decade.

There were also consequences to both approaches, however. Hallegraeff readily recognized that his vertical, reductionist, approach to ballast water standards didn’t account for ALL species. Cholera, for instance, was one of the most feared potential exotics in ballast water, and screening for dinoflagellates would not capture bacteria. Naturally, any solution that focused on ballast water would not limit fouling (attached to exterior of hull) species. It is highly likely (though likely impossible to tell for certain), that at least some of the species at first suspected to be introduced via ballast were in fact the result of hull fouling. Similarly, the lateral approach was imperfect. Although remarkable and creative, the first SWG was never able to muster the tools or resources to completely master all the dimensions of the problem that participants identified. Baseline studies were incomplete, and a “taxonomic impediment” persisted. No commercially acceptable alternative to ballast water exchange presented itself, despite its obvious flaws. The problem would continue, and it would be taken up by a NEW working group under different leadership, but with a remarkably similar mandate. But that’s a story for another time…

Right time and place?

In late September of 1985, Gustaaf Hallegraeff, a specialist on marine algae and state scientist working for Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), dipped his sampling bucket into the waters of the Derwent River in Tasmania. Hallegraeff (himself a transplant from the Netherlands), had moved along with the entire Marine Division of CSIRO to Hobart earlier that year.  Hobart in the 1980s was a sleepy port city and capital of its smallest state. It was also the least populous state and combined with its dependence on export-oriented industry, had languished during the cash-strapped 1970s. By the 1980s, Tasmania was clawing its way out of recession and the Federal government favored moving CSIRO’s Marine offices from Sydney to this much more remote location, in part, because it would inject some much-needed capital and spur development of its primary industries.

Hallegraeff may have felt ambivalent about this move, but this didn’t stop him from immediately taking advantage of this change of scene. In his own telling, one of the first things he did in Hobart was sample the river. It was then experiencing an algal bloom, or what is colloquially referred to as a “red tide”. What he discovered was shocking – the bloom was composed of a species of single-celled algae (dinoflagellate) that had never been observed in Australia, or indeed, in the southern hemisphere. More alarming still, the species, Gymnodinium catenatum, was one of the relatively few species of dinoflagellate that produce toxins harmful to humans – at least when filtered through shellfish and later consumed as seafood. Unfortunately, the Derwent River also played host to a nascent, but quickly expanding aquaculture industry – so the risk was obvious. “I knew that this organisms had killed children in Mexico”, Hallegraeff would later explain, so he promptly called Tasmanian public health authorities to alert them about the hazard. Albeit reluctantly, the state temporarily closed its affected shellfish farms.

The Derwent Estuary, near CSIRO’s Marine Research Offices in Hobart, Tasmania. Photo by author.

I recently spoke with Dr. Hallegraeff who related some of these events, and what struck me after the conversation was how important chance (or coincidence) seemed to be throughout it. By seeming coincidence, a specialist on algae and one of the few people in Australia capable of identifying the species, arrived in Hobart amidst a novel algal bloom. This algal bloom just happened to occur in close proximity to shellfish farms – the one socio-environmental variable that could transform this otherwise benign event into a public health emergency. Was it a coincidence that Tasmania, so intent on exporting its “clean, green” image during this period encountered this specific species of algae?

To greater or lesser degrees, no, but neither did straightforward causal connections immediately present themselves. Dr. Hallegraeff was a specialist on algae during a period of time when the science (and public anxieties) about “toxic dinoflagellates” were on the rise. He arrived in Tasmania in part because his employer, a state-sponsored research organization, wanted to spur economic development in a recovering economy. The state of Tasmania was also interested in using resource extraction to “export” its way out of recession. This resulted in a growing trade with Japan, which demanded hardwood woodchips to feed its rapacious pulp and paper mills. Hallegraeff would later discover those same woodchip ships brought G. catenatum to Tasmanian shores in their ballast tanks. Aquaculture played no small role in this story either. Their relatively quick acquiescence to shellfish closures makes sense when viewed through this export-oriented mindset. Tasmanian shellfish farmers had recently requested FDA licensure to sell their products in the United States. This was the gold standard for export licenses, one that opened markets across the Pacific and even in Europe. Tasmania would be the first state to achieve this feat, largely on the backs of their “clean, green” image. Tasmanian shellfish farmers couldn’t risk a public health scare, or worse, disaster derailing this process.

Of course, coincidence makes for a better (or at least more dramatic) story than one driven by the push and pull of supply and demand, state-driven science, the pressure to accelerate development by selling off natural resources, or the incentive to preserve an environmental imaginary as a valuable marketing tool. At the same time, it’s not as if chance played NO role. Hallegraeff didn’t have to end up in Australia, for instance, and this bloom didn’t have to manifest during that specific month (or even year). G. catenatum can exist in a hardy resting cyst state, and could’ve survived to bloom years later. Its blooms are notoriously difficult to predict, often awaiting a suite of environmental factors coming into precise convergence.

The contingencies in this process are many, and they are weighted by the difficulty of parsing the truly chance events from the deeper structural changes that set them in motion, many of which would come into conjuncture in the 1980s. Although this story begins in 1985, I could’ve begun it many decades earlier. Spoiler: my own approach will likely take this “deeper” approach. It would also last for decades to come (even to the present day, by some readings). I am not in a position, yet, to delimit this story. What I can say, is that the more I unravel, the more surprises (and seeming coincidences) I discover.

The Sun King’s Revenge: ESEH 2015

As I left the biennial conference of the European Society for Environmental History, I passed a senior scholar explaining why he was headed back to his hotel early. “This heat is unbearable,” he stated, “it’s too hot to think.” Temperatures in Versailles, France (the location of the 2015 meeting) hovered between 95-100 degrees for four straight days and by one account, became the highest July temperatures in the Paris region in 40 years. Public transportation to and from Versailles coped with frequent heat-related delays as train cars turned to saunas, pedestrians walking through the city scampered from one area of shade to the next, and long daylight hours delayed sleep until indoor temperatures reached a comfortable level (usually sometime around 1am). The conference venue offered little respite from the heat. The rooms at the Université de Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines (our host) allowed little air circulation and the high turnout of the conference (wonderful in every other way) only exacerbated the discomfort. Panel chairpersons propped open doors to tempt the occasional cross breeze and after the first day, people began carrying multiple water bottles.

It is tempting to reduce the experience of ESEH 2015 to this discomfort, but despite the best efforts of the French summer, few people I’m sure would deny the value of the conference. For historians of European environmental history, ESEH is a premier event. Scholars come together from around the world to discuss cutting-edge research, show off “experimental” forms of presentation, and network with like-minded scholars. While not a huge event (I heard approximately 400 attended), ESEH showcases the surprising maturity of a regional discipline still young enough that the founding generation of its scholars still actively participate. Its manageable size is one of its greatest attributes, as graduate students find themselves on panels with established scholars or sharing lunch with luminaries in their field. ESEH has typically been (and this year was no different) an accessible, friendly, and unfailingly interesting experience.

It is impossible to summarize a conference like ESEH. Papers addressed topics from over a millennium of history, on subjects from Finland to Canada, using methodologies ranging from quantitative modeling to analyses of visual imagery. It is a long-term goal of mine to compare this conference against past iterations to tease out thematic trends, just as I’ve already begun doing this for the annual conferences of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). In the meantime, my personal impressions will have to suffice.

The conference’s 90 panels offered a wide variety of choice, and (like the best conferences), attendees were presented with an embarrassment of riches that forced them to choose between concurrent panels that suited their interests. I typically gravitate to panels at conferences that feature disaster scholarship, the history of water and climate, innovative digital tools, and scholarship on the Low Countries. Despite such broad criteria, I rarely feel overwhelmed by my options at other conferences, but ESEH 2015 seemed to specialize in these topics. The first session on the first day, for instance, featured panels and papers on weather and food, GIS approaches to soil carbon sequestration in colonial Mexico, pre-modern flooding, disaster perception, and a roundtable on “Writing an Environmental History of Europe.” Of course some panels and papers were more impressive than others, and one can’t always choose the best, but I want to focus in this post on some of the more innovative or interesting of my experiences at the conference.

My own paper was featured in one of the earliest sessions in the conference and featured many of the “challenges and limits” of the venue. Entitled “Premodern Environmental Challenges and Limits,” and chaired by Richard Unger of the University of British Columbia, the panel consisted of myself, Kathleen Pribyl of the University of East Anglia, and Kieran Hickey of University College Cork. Like many panels to follow, the room quickly reached capacity. Despite initial technical difficulties, Pribyl initiated an engaging evaluation of the interrelationship between ecological challenges in the late Medieval period as a challenge for urban development. Hickey followed with an overview of a series of port registers that he hopes to mine for their insights into animal populations and their uses in early modern Ireland. My own paper addressed the second outbreak of cattle plague in the Dutch Republic and the influence of a confluence of disasters in the 1740s that mediated response. Like many panels constructed by the program committee, the panel appeared to show considerable breadth in geographic and temporal scope. Despite this, Unger sought unities between the subjects and the liveliness of the Q&A demonstrated a good degree of audience curiosity. Having worked primarily on shipworm-related research during my time in Holland, my presentation was also a welcome return to another familiar subject.

Day two featured one of the “experimental sessions” chaired by Verena WIniwarter and led by four graduate students of Alpen-Adria University, Klagenfurt in Austria. Rather than individual papers, this interdisciplinary cohort of PhD candidates led the audience along a “guided tour” of the water history of Vienna based on historical documentation, photographs, digital GIS-based reconstructions, and visible traces left in the cityscape. The students mixed humor, visualizations, and a keen sense of the history of their subject and in the end, offered a social ecology of the transition from Vienna as a site of agricultural to industrial production. They drew explicitly on the Viennese attention to “socio-natural sites” and the manner in which social practices and material arrangements reshaped nature. Although I’ve never been to Vienna, their presentation’s rich visuality engendered a vague sense of familiarity. Indeed, I began asking myself how much of this history was specific to Vienna and whether one could transpose their model of research and presentation to other contexts. This, I thought, would be a fantastic research project for undergraduates (albeit in a more condensed and manageable format). Rather than a powerpoint presentation showing a journey through Vienna, I imagined a story map highlighting key moments of environmental change back home. It would be a valuable exercise that could simultaneously teach students about web-based digital mapping, historical research, and spatio-narrative storytelling. I wasn’t alone. The first question from the audience asked whether they intended to distribute their “tour” on the internet. This experiment conceivably has many applications, but is most exciting to me as a pedagogical tool.

One of the highlights of day three was an engaging roundtable discussion on the Anthropocene. In a relatively short time, the idea of the Anthropocene (that humans have changed their environment to such an extent that it qualifies as a new geological era) has achieved a rare public and scholarly resonance. Despite widespread interdisciplinary interest, however, it sometimes seems as if the only thing that people can agree on is that the Anthropocene is a fertile ground for debate. Scholars dispute its beginning (what date, they ask, was the “golden spike” that marked the beginning of the era when humans achieved overwhelming significance in the geological record?), its implications (is it a moral challenge? Social or political? Or simply a new periodization?), and even its existence at all. The panelists of this large roundtable consisted of Christophe Bonneuil of CNRS and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz of the Centre Alexandre Koyré (who coauthored a French-language synthesis of the ongoing contributions of historians to the Anthropocene debate); David Edgerton of King’s College London; Egle Rindzeviciute of Sciences Po; Helmuth Trischler of the Deutsches Museum; and Sverker Sörlin of the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology. Although an entire blog post could consider the perspectives of the presenters, what struck me were two tensions highlighted by the audience. First, the lack of control historians have had over the construction of Anthropocene periodization and the predominant Eurocentrism implicit in its construction. Historians consider themselves the ultimate arbiters (or at least the best qualified analysts) of periodization in the recent geological past. Nevertheless, few scientists consult historians about the temporality of the Anthropocene, either regarding a possible golden spike or as Sörlin pointed out, the importance of the speed of change. Historians have much to offer the discussion, each panelist agreed, but we are equally culpable of perpetuating the narrative of an Anthropocene dominated by Euro-american perspectives. What would an Anthropocene discussion look like if approached by Chinese scholars, for instance? Would they also choose to exclusively highlight issues in European history? What alternatives might others’ find? How might the Anthropocene appear through sub-altern eyes? These questions were left largely on the table, and perhaps better than any other part of the discussion, this demonstrated the necessity for continued attention to this subject.

The final day of the conference featured another roundtable, this time on natural disasters. Discussants included Tim Soens of the University of Antwerp, Bruce Campbell of Queen’s University Belfast, Guido Alfani of the Universita Bocconi Milan, and Eleonora Rohland of the Foundation For Global Sustainability, Zurich/Institute For Advanced Study In the Humanities in Essen. Soens framed the discussion around a new article by social economic historians Bas van Bavel and Daniel Curtis called “Better Understanding Disasters by Better Using History.” The chief arguments of the paper called for greater attention to institutions and social relations as the critical mediating forces in the study of disasters. Only by comparing institutional and social responses to disaster can we hope to gain a better understanding of why some disasters affected certain populations, but not others, in certain regions, but not others, Soens explained. The comparative approach is here critical, and history offers a valuable “laboratory” of events to experiment with. I was familiar with this article, having used the van Bavel/Curtis argument to frame my Posthumus Conference paper on shipworms.

While not without limitations, my own critiques paled in comparison to Campbell who termed the approach “institutional determinism.” Nature and even disaster, he argued, plays second fiddle to the true purpose of van Bavel/Curtis’s argumentation – using disaster to explain institutions. Dynamic nature needs to be one part of eco-socio-cultural model of disaster, but it cannot be universally subsumed within a larger interest in insitutions. My own feelings on the matter fall closer along the lines of the Utrecht school, primarily because it favors regional variability. Neither approach (nor any “model” I’ve come across), however, truly considers the role of disaster perception and the complicated and contingent manner in which disasters affect populations. As interesting as this exchange was, by reacting to one article, the panel left the impression that a huge domain of historical disaster research was being ignored. Alfani offered interesting perspectives on (once again) plague in 17th century Italy, asking whether effective institutions could actually prevent plague. Seemingly the odd woman out, Rohland presented a different vision of disaster research, one grounded in her work on hurricanes, but one that she extended to contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene and climate change. Just as with the Anthropocene panel (and like most good roundtables), this event left the audience with new questions and few, if any, resolutions.

Two political science students from Paris lead a bike tour of the Grand Parc of Versailles

As I left the conference, sweating my way back to the Versailles train station, I couldn’t help but reflect on a (horribly appropriate) paper presented by Richard Keller on the Paris heat wave of 2003. The heat wave was a devastating disaster (killing 70,000 people across Europe) and one worthy of analysis from any number of perspectives, including Campbell’s and van Bavel/Curtis’s (though judging from his focus on social relations, Keller would likely lean towards the Utrecht school). The oppressive July heat during my walk seemed like a fitting confirmation that the study of disasters can sometimes seem frustratingly topical. At the same time, I passed the long avenue leading to the Palace of Versailles, still flooded with tourists despite the weather. During the conference I had taken a biking field trip through the gardens and the Grand Parc beyond. Le Nôtre’s landscaping, I remembered as I walked by, had seemed an almost too-perfect microcosm of environmental history, with its tensions between the power of culture to impose human design and the natural challenges to that ambition. Good conferences linger, I suppose. I am, after all, writing this post on the train, already two countries removed from France. It may have been “too hot to think” at times, but ESEH won’t be over for quite a while.