Front and Back Covers, Volume 41, Number 3. June 2025

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 41 issue 3

Front cover caption, volume 41 issue 3

TENDING THE TIDES

A living collage of marine lives interacting with human systems and care practices. Sea cucumbers rest on Tanzanian coastal sands; oyster spat cling to North Sea reef structures; turtles navigate Akumal Bay's complex ecologies; lobsters and whales negotiate Maine's fishing waters; salmon traverse Heiltsuk territories; jellyfish drift with the tides. This montage foregrounds our special issue's proposition: ocean care is inherently a more-than-human collaboration.

Care manifests in various forms. In Kaole, communities cultivate sea cucumbers that cleanse benthic sediments while global markets threaten to commodify them. In Akumal Bay, the charismatic appeal of turtles enables biologists to advocate for overlooked seagrass protection, while hoteliers frame beach management as conservation. On North Sea mudflats, restoration biologists and oyster farmers debate which bivalve – ‘native’ Ostrea or ‘alien’ Crassostrea – merits protection, revealing politics embedded in ecological classifications. Along Maine's coast, lobster fishers enact ambiguous entanglements of care and capture, where fishing simultaneously supports livelihoods and embodies stewardship.

This composition resists any singular, sentimental reading of care. Some practices appear intimate and sustaining; others remain precarious, profit-driven, or compromised. Yet all are relational, reminding us that oceans are not passive backdrops but living co-productions.

The authors argue for an expanded ethical framework valuing diverse care practices – showing how conservation efforts often embed in broader socio-economic relationships rather than existing as purely altruistic acts. The challenge lies in weaving these practices into networks capable of sustaining both human and more-than-human communities.

Back cover caption, volume 41 issue 3

Where Land Spills into Sea

The cascade dominating this image invites us to follow water's journey from inland to sea – a visual metaphor distilling our special issue's core argument: what happens on land never remains confined to land. Heather Swanson's guest editorial traces how excess nitrogen from Baltic grain fields resurfaces downstream as hypoxic ‘dead zones’, depriving fish of oxygen and fishers of a livelihood. A shift in scale reveals the same pattern in synthetic microfibres shed from our clothing, now the ocean's largest source of primary microplastics. These converging currents represent not pristine nature but a global circulatory system engineered through our agricultural practices, consumption patterns and policy choices made far from shorelines.

Anthropology enters this flow by reframing ocean harm beyond the narrative of distant victimhood. The contributions here illuminate the dense social relations binding seabirds to agricultural subsidies, jellyfish to wastewater engineering and salmon to Indigenous fishing practices. In Mexico's coastal zones, tourism development and beach management directly impact sea turtle habitats, while in Maine, lobster fishing practices embody complex entanglements of care and capture across species boundaries.

Each article demonstrates that addressing marine degradation requires institutional changes on land and new cultural narratives that disrupt inherited divisions between terra and mare. The boundary between land and sea exists as managerial convention rather than material reality. In collapsing these boundaries, it challenges us to recognize an uncomfortable truth: whenever we stand on solid ground, we are already ankle-deep in the sea.