Kevin St Martin

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | Rutgers · Department of Geography

Competing with the cartography of capitalism, undermining its power to fix resources as open to capitalist appropriation and space as enclosed, will require a cartography of the commons that makes visible community and commons processes; it will require a shift in strategy from explicating and defending existing commons to mapping spaces into which...

The ocean plays a critical role in supporting human well-being, from providing food, livelihoods and recreational opportunities to regulating the global climate. Sustainable management aimed at maintaining the flow of a broad range of benefits from the ocean requires a comprehensive and quantitative method to measure and monitor the health of coupl...

The assessment and management of marine resources is an increasingly spatial affair dependent upon emerging geo-technologies, such as geographic information systems, and the subsequent production of diverse layers of spatial information. These rapid developments are, however, focused on biophysical processes and data collection initiatives; the soc...

Changing ocean characteristics, moving species, and competing ocean uses challenge fishing communities reliant on marine resources. Many communities have diversified what they catch, or where they fish to cope with variation in availability of fish. However, we often lack understanding of the frequency of these adaptation strategies in response to...

Calls to transform food systems along more ethical and sustainable lines are mounting alongside debates about what constitutes transformative change and strategies needed to achieve it. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have argued that transforming food systems requires transforming the governance of food systems, as dominant “productivist” appro...

As species respond to warming water temperatures, fishers dependent upon such species are being compelled to make choices concerning harvest strategies. Should they “follow fish” to new fishing grounds? Should they change their mix of target species? Should they relocate their operations to new ports? We examined how fishing communities in the Nort...

The language and practice of Marine spatial planning (MSP) is typically associated with state-led multi-sectoral planning efforts. Yet in countries like India, where the government is not yet promoting MSP, ocean space has already been divided using principles and practices that are characteristic of MSP elsewhere in the world. Instead of being ini...

We apply theories of environmental governance, assemblage, and geo-epistemology to critically reflect on ocean planning in federal waters of the USA. US ocean planning was initiated in July 2010 when President Obama issued Executive Order 13547; this set in motion what was then called coastal and marine spatial planning, but without a congressional...

Rapid climate changes are currently driving substantial reorganizations of marine ecosystems around the world. A key question is how these changes will alter the provision of ecosystem services from the ocean, particularly from fisheries. To answer this question, we need to understand not only the ecological dynamics of marine systems, but also hum...

Climate change is expected to have a profound impact on the distribution, abundance and diversity of marine species globally1,2. These ecological impacts of climate change will affect human communities dependent on fisheries for livelihoods and well-being³. While methods for assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change are rapidly devel...

We are currently in what might be termed a ‘third phase’ of oceans enclosures around the world, which has involved an unprecedented intensity of map-making that supports an emerging regime of ocean governance where resources are geocoded, multiple and disparate marine uses are weighed against each other, spatial tradeoffs are made, and exclusive ri...

Change, adaptation, and resilience have emerged as central concerns in the study of natural resource governance. The mobility of fisheries makes them particularly dynamic and susceptible to long term drivers of movement, such as changing climatic conditions and human pressures. To explore how movement impacts resource systems, this paper presents a...

In this period of environmental change, understanding how resource users respond to such changes is critical for effective resource management and adaptation planning. Extensive work has focused on natural resource responses to environmental changes, but less has examined the response of resource users to such changes. We used an interdisciplinary...

Community economy, since the mid‐1990s, has signalled an expanding and evolving project within radical geography that resonates with a host of initiatives taking place around the world. Activating community economy as an object of analysis and economic practice requires a rethinking of economy where the economy loses its power to structure and figu...

The oceans have become a juncture of great visions of blue growth as well as strong environmental concern. This paper discusses the essential role of the social sciences as the oceans increasingly emerge as a contested social arena. The marine social sciences have generated a vast knowledge about the development of fisheries and the implications of...

Research on enclosure has often examined the phenomenon as a process and outcome of state, neoliberal, and hybrid territorial practices with detrimental impacts for those affected. The proliferation of increasingly complex environmental governance regimes and new enclosures, such as those now seen in the oceans, challenge these readings, however. U...

“Communities-at-sea” is an approach that defines actual spaces at sea where we can document the presence of community as it relates to fisheries (e.g., shared ecological knowledge, history and culture, common fishing grounds and practices, and coproduced adaptations and innovations). It differs from social science approaches that have until now foc...

Introduction: Interrelated social and ecological challenges demand an understanding of how environmental change and management decisions affect human well-being. This paper outlines a framework for measuring human well-being for ecosystem-based management (EBM). We present a prototype that can be adapted and developed for various scales and context...

Increasing recognition of the human dimensions of natural resource management issues, and of social and ecological sustainability and resilience as being inter-related, highlights the importance of applying social science to natural resource management decision-making. Moreover, a number of laws and regulations require natural resource management a...

Governance projects to measure and organize socio-natural spaces have often resulted in the marginalization of human communities (e.g., national parks) or in the destruction of environmental resources (e.g., mining). In the United States, new marine spatial planning (MSP) policies seek to categorize and represent ocean spaces and activities in an e...

Social indicators, both mature and emerging, are underused

Climate change is often described as the greatest environmental challenge of our time. In addition, a changing climate can reallocate natural capital, change the value of all forms of capital and lead to mass redistribution of wealth. Here we explain how the inclusive wealth framework provides a means to measure shifts in the amounts and distributi...

There is no doubt that “economy” is a keyword in contemporary life, yet what constitutes economy is increasingly contested terrain. Interested in building “other worlds,” J. K. Gibson-Graham have argued that the economy is not only diverse but also open to experimentations that foreground the well-being of humans and nonhumans alike. Making Other W...

Marine and coastal ecosystems provide important benefits and services to coastal communities across the globe, but assessing the diversity of social relationships with oceans can prove difficult for conservation scientists and practitioners. This presents barriers to incorporating social dimensions of marine ecosystems into ecosystem-based planning...

The shift toward ecosystem-based science and management stresses links among species and environments across a number of scales. Similarly, studies of fisheries are discovering the significance of communitiesas sites of cooperation, local knowledge, and co-managementand exploring the inter-relationships among fishermen, communities, and environment...

Unlike on land, people have not established physical communities in the ocean. Nevertheless, to understand the ecology of ocean ecosystems we must map the spatial impacts of ocean users. This speaker’s innovative research explores the links between certain coastal communities and their activities in specific ocean areas. To incorporate human factor...

In response to declining fish stocks and increased societal concern, the marine ‘commons’ of New Jersey is no longer freely available to commercial and recreational fisheries. We discuss the concept of ‘creeping’ enclosure in relation to New Jersey’s marine fisheries and suggest that reduced access can be a cumulative process and function of multip...

Although the Sustainable Fisheries Act that amended the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1996 defined fishing communities to be places with significant harvesting and/or processing activities, a collaborative mapping project in the Northeast has made clear the limits of such a port-based definition by documenting the pres...

This special issue relates the key analytical constructs of environmental justice scholarship - distributive justice, procedural justice and environmental racism - to a series of Third World case studies. It calls attention to the need to theorize both distributive burdens and benefits; treat the relative salience of race as a category of different...

Please click here to download the map associated with this article.The crisis in marine fisheries has lead to a re-thinking of fisheries science and management. The standard numeric and single species approach is giving way to more ecosystem-based and distinctly spatial approaches. This “spatial turn” is made possible by an intensi-cation of geospa...

"In response to declining fish stocks and increased societal concern, the marine ‘commons’ of New Jersey is no longer freely available to commercial and recreational fisheries. We discuss the concept of ‘creeping’ enclosure in relation to New Jersey’s marine fisheries and suggest that reduced access can be a cumulative process and function of multi...

Despite the many alternative insights produced within human geography since the height of the spatial science tradition of the 1960s and those within geographic information systems (GIS) itself, we still observe in our classrooms, hiring committees, and textbooks a dominant and singular understanding of GIS that fixes its meaning in ways that margi...

  Fishing economies are typically represented as pre-capitalist and as a barrier to capital accumulation rather than as an alternative economy with its own potentials. Privatization (and capitalism) appears logical and inevitable because “there is no alternative” described or given. The class analysis presented here focuses on questions of property...

Although feminism and the field of geographic information systems and science (GIS) have only recently begun speaking to each other, the feminist mapping subject is emerging across a variety of sites – academic, professional, and lay. However, it is most articulated in the work of critical GIS scholars. Both male and female, they are committed to n...

The 'human dimension' in fisheries management has historically been incorporated via a specific economic understanding of fisheries wedded to a single-species approach. Meeting the challenge of fisheries, however, will require a broadening of fisheries science towards an ecosystems-based approach. There is also the need for a parallel shift in soci...

The discourse of fisheries science and management displaces community and culture from the essential economic dynamic of fisheries. The goal of this dominant discourse is to enclose fisheries, to constitute them as within the singular and hegemonic economy of capitalism. Alternative economies, such as those based on the presence of community, are a...

Political ecologists working in many other parts of the world are now heading north, or simply going global, posing a series of important questions related to theory, methodology, politics, and policy along the way. This special issue, contains papers originally delivered at a conference held at Rutgers University in 2003 that addressed this phenom...

Fisheries are understood within a binary frame that is both spatialized into the First and Third Worlds and founded upon a developmentalist discourse of fisheries that produces the conditions for capitalism. The result is an inevitable march toward privatization of resources abstractly understood and their utilization by individuals as capital. The...

This paper suggests that the on-going enclosure of fisheries in New England is a degraded "capitalocentric" representations of the commons that make alternative solutions to commons problems difficult to imagine. While the commons of fisheries in New England is a degraded (even tragic) environment subject to industrial over-capitalization and incre...

The dominant discourse of fisheries science and management, bioeconomics, places the behavior of individual fishermen operating on an open-access commons at the center of its understanding of fisheries resources and the fishing industry. Within this discourse, fishermen are the sole actors and the fishery is the fixed stage for an inevitable ‘trage...

In the 1980s, the U.S. solid wood products industry (SWPI) has undergone a significant restructuring, characterized by changes in product and process technology, the employment relation, the structure of markets, and industry geography. Concomitantly, the international SWPI has seen major shifts in the geography of production and trade, particularl...

For more information about the publisher (the American Fisheries Society) and how to access the book which contains the final version of this chapter go to the following website www.fisheries.org. I shall suggest that in the future, fisheries management and its associated science will have to deal with 'places' far more than they have in the recent...