Social and ecological transformations of global marine fisheries

Two parallel trends in global marine fisheries contribute to the contemporary oceanic crisis: the rapid depletion of marine fish and the emergence of marine aquaculture. A dominant narrative explains depletion and new food technologies as the inevitable outcome of securing protein for the world's increasing population. A second sociological narrative explains fisheries depletion and the rise of aquaculture as the likely outcomes of productive processes under capitalistic relations. This dissertation is premised on the latter explanation, and begins with the hypothesis that social structural factors, such as material economic growth and modernization, have influenced the overexploitation of marine fisheries and the emergence of aquaculture. I explore this hypothesis by employing the theoretical frame of the metabolic rift. Derived from classical social theory and extended to current analysis of environmental change, the metabolic rift theory offers a foundation to investigate the human-ocean interaction in light of the social and ecological transformations of global marine fisheries. I use a comparative research design to explore both the scale and scope of change in the marine environment. First, I conduct cross-national, statistical analyses to evaluate the social structural factors of marine fisheries depletion. These analyses provide empirical evidence to test the ecological modernization hypothesis. Second, I conduct a qualitative case study analysis of the social context in which aquaculture emerges by comparing the presence/absence of aquaculture within two bioregional fisheries (Fraser River, BC and Copper River, AK). Identifying political-economic trends and human perceptions of current aquaculture practices provides a development scenario to track possible future trajectories of offshore aquaculture. Investigating both the quantitative and qualitative changes in metabolic interactions between humans and the marine environment offers an important contribution to understanding dialectical relationships of global environmental change.;This dissertation includes both previously published and coauthored material.