Value in Injury: The Work of Science in Ocean Noise Regulation

Chapter 2 considers the novel marine hazard of ocean noise and how the vulnerability of acoustically sensitive whales to ocean noise has forced shipping capitals into acknowledging it as an acoustic-biological risk and an economic hazard. It uses Mara Mills’s concept of assistive pretext to consider how prospects of cetacean injury have become a frontier for capitalist-led innovation. It further seeks to connect the disarticulated moments of an ocean noise politics to the regulatory hotspot of the North Coast, where state regulatory inertia and the hidden work of shipping labor connect. As technoscience makes ocean noise’s nonhuman impacts more visible, it contributes to occlusions of the spatially distributed human labor necessary to sustain shipping, including shipping’s noise. For science this requires an ethics and a hermeneutics that can grant greater visibility to shipping’s various injured partners.