Beginning: Intimacies of Conservation Technology

Beginning with a personal story about finding a humpback whale with a drone off the coast of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, this chapter proceeds to introduce the book's key concepts: intimacy, or how drones bring humans closer to marine species; technicity, or how drones are extensions of human bodies; elementality, or how drones are influenced by the sea and the wind; and governmentality, or how pilots aspire to a caring control over marine species with drones. Nature realism, or the drone operator's pragmatic ethos of conservation with technologies, is presented. Finally, the broad framework represented by the concept of ocean/culture is offered, which articulates how drone conservationists strive not for the merger of oceans and cultures but rather a differentiation of oceans from cultures.