In the past half‐century, fishing in one regional part of the Baltic Sea, the Stockholm Archipelago, has almost disappeared due to falling fish abundance, especially of herring ( Clupea harengus ). By examining published observations and archived material on historical fishing patterns, we found evidence of a remarkably continuous high level of fish supply throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite variation in fish recruitment, high abundance of mammal predators and high fishing intensities. We observe that fishing was part of a true market, i.e., fishing acted as an opportunistic predator, abandoning specific target species at low abundance and fishing on present surpluses. Our study contributes to advancing historical marine ecology and adds to critiques of explanations of declining and collapsing fisheries in terms of inevitable ‘tragedies of the commons’. Our observations of historical management approaches contrast with contemporary Swedish fisheries management and may inform a different strategy towards achieving sustainable fisheries in the Baltic Sea and elsewhere.

In a relatively short span of time, ocean data have gone from sparse and patchy to a dynamic and continuous stream of information, at least for some dimensions of the marine environment. This relative progress in knowledge has developed in tandem with expanded anthropogenic pressure on the global ocean and its ecosystems. In this chapter, we trace the development of these two trajectories over the past three decades through discussions of two case studies, one focusing on the collection of ocean data and one on the application of digital data for marine management. Against the background of these two cases, we then discuss the relationship between increases in the availability of digital ocean data, possible uses of those data, and how they inform a rhetoric of ocean sustainability through promises associated with claims for expanding the blue economy. Our analysis aims to identify and elaborate on a disconnect between the digital transformation that is affecting all areas of environmental science and policy, including the ocean, and aims for and obstacles to achieving sustainable ocean environments.

The Argo program is an international scientific network that coordinates an array of autonomous floats that roam (primarily) the upper 2000 meters of the ice-free ocean, collecting data on currents, temperature and salinity. The floats use satellites to communicate near-real time data to designated receiving centers, where the raw data are made available for immediate purposes before being processed and eventually published as high-quality data for scientific research. This study examines the emergence of the Argo program in relation to a perceived urgent need for climate-relevant ocean data in the late 1990s and considers implications of the interactions between the Argo program and climate change in subsequent decades. We outline how the physical floats, the data they record, and the aims and strategies formulated around the program have acted as ‘environing’ technologies and media that have brought the ocean into close interaction with climate science and climate change governance since around 2010. We suggest that as part of this co-environing process, the Argo program has helped produce novel views of the ocean's historicity, where feedbacks between technical mediation and environmental epistemology ties ocean variability to human temporalities. We show that this new historicity extends not only to the human past but also into ocean futures through association with the ‘cultures of prediction’ dominant in climate science and models. To conclude, we briefly place our argument in the context of contemporary aims for growing the so-called blue economy, promising a human-ocean relationship increasingly centered on notions of control, active management, economic development and climate change mitigation.

The EU’s Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) is presented as a coherent, high-resolution, multi-dimensional, multi-variable and near real-time representation of the ocean that integrates new data sources with advanced modeling, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The two-way exchange of information between marine ecosystems and the digital twin is intended to create a feedback loop between the digital and physical realms that is emblematic of environing media. The EU’s vision is that the DTO will empower citizens, inform politicians, support a blue economy, and improve protection of the marine environment. The sociotechnical imaginary of the DTO presents a narrative that a balance between sustainable exploitation and conservation can be had through the use of sophisticated digital technology. But what is at stake in this technocratic control over the world ocean, and where does it come from? Whose interest will digital twins ultimately serve? Understood in its historical and environmental context, the DTO caters to the aims of sustainable development, but risks veiling continued unsustainable development and growth under the guise of new digital technologies. We use the theoretical lens of environing media and sociotechnical imaginaries to critically unpack this narrative and its historical contingencies, and show how difficult goal conflicts are systematically glossed over through a veil of datafication and technological development.