Larelle Bossi

Human societies have long maintained a profound relationship with the ocean, yet this connection continues to challenge prevailing paradigms of marine governance. Despite a growing global commitment to Sustainable Development Goal 14 ‘Life Below Water’, the dominant perception of the ocean as an expansive, extractable resource persists. This world view is deeply embedded in international legal frameworks and underpins the logic of blue economic growth and wealth creation. However, as legal mechanisms struggle to respond swiftly to the accelerating impacts of climate change, and enforcement capacities remain limited, it becomes increasingly necessary to explore alternative frameworks for guiding human activity at sea. In this context, ethical approaches offer critical insights and tools. Developing a robust understanding of ocean values and articulating a ‘blue ethics’ can help shift governance beyond reliance on static baselines. This chapter explores five foundational ethical values that may inform the development of a blue ethical framework for ocean governance. These values reflect not only the distinctive characteristics of marine environments but also the multifaceted relationships – personal, cultural, and societal – that shape human interactions with the ocean. They have the potential to guide both transformative governance models and the ethical expansion of marine commercial activity.

The rapid expansion of offshore renewable energy has exposed new fractures in environmental politics. While often cast as a Blue vs Green debate – global climate imperatives versus local marine conservation – this framing may not go far enough. A more accurate lens is Blue vs Blue: a contest between competing visions of the ocean’s future. On one side lies the Green agenda, advancing offshore renewables for climate mitigation but rebranded as “blue.” On the other lie truly blue priorities: protecting biodiversity, respecting cultural sovereignty, and pursuing regenerative technologies. This paper situates the debate within the broader “Blue Economy” discourse, highlighting how ecological, cultural, and ethical attachments complicate the rollout of industrial-scale renewables. Ultimately, the question is whether oceans will be governed primarily as carbon sinks for global mitigation, or as relational spaces demanding protection, regeneration, and stewardship.

Ocean governance has traditionally relied on frameworks rooted in law, science, and economics — tools designed to quantify risk, enforce compliance, and regulate resource use. While these approaches have provided important institutional structures for managing marine environments, they often overlook the deeper cultural, ethical, and relational values that shape human–ocean relationships. This paper proposes a shift in the ethical framework of ocean governance by exploring the values of beauty, love, and abundance as guiding orientations for marine guardianship. Drawing on philosophical analysis and cultural interpretations of the sea, the paper develops these values as relational principles that illuminate alternative ways of understanding and governing ocean systems. Beauty reveals the intrinsic value of marine environments through aesthetic and phenomenological encounters with the ocean. Love expresses relational responsibility, emphasising care, reciprocity, and guardianship between human communities and marine ecosystems. Abundance reframes sustainability beyond scarcity-based management toward ecological flourishing and regenerative ocean futures. In a time of accelerating climate disruption, expanding blue economy industries, and increasing competition for marine space, these values offer an ethical orientation capable of enriching governance frameworks with deeper commitments to care, responsibility, and intergenerational flourishing. By foregrounding the cultural, aesthetic, and relational dimensions of ocean connection, this framework moves beyond minimalist compliance toward more transformative approaches to ocean governance grounded in relational ethics.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many have argued that we require transformational leadership to help us face the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4thIR). The authors propose the layered round table approach to be one response to this call to arms. Inspired by the hierarchical, systematised, impersonal, and transactional interactions of the military, the boardroom table (or traditional corporate organisational structures) has largely continued to reflect Max Weber’s bureaucratic theory of management 150 years ago. Whilst the round table has symbolised inclusivity and diversity, the authors argue that it has not quite displaced the exploitative tendencies of hierarchical management styles. Whilst most board rooms have introduced the round table to encourage discussions and debate, solutions are still largely decided upon by CEOcracies or expert advisors. In this chapter, the authors aim to lift the round table from out of the sphere of the symbolic, clarify these challenges, and posit ways in overcoming them via the layered round table approach. More than a symbol of inclusion and communion, it becomes the hub of solution creation and ensures the kind of transformational leadership required to face today and tomorrow. The authors present the layered round table as the seat from which managers can build the kind of cultural change which fosters more nurturing values, far removed from the mechanistic legacy of our corporate genealogy/past.

This chapter is a journey into the ontological significance of place in consideration of the Atlantic Tasmanian salmon industry and its challenges to the ethical discourse around the social license to operate (SLO) beyond the oxymoron of a name. It centres the discourse around the salmon itself. A once totem animal, responsible for the balance of Canada’s abundant ecosystem, now reduced to a mere source of protein, manipulated, and commodified by Tasmania’s ‘big business’ and against the SLO of Flanagan’s ‘Toxic’. It applies Ortega y Gasset’s mid-twentieth century solution to the problem of our western disconnection from place to the current neoliberal political framework. This welcomes an inclusive dialogue with kinship structures of the Mi’kmaq peoples reflected also in the ontological narrative of the First Nations people of Tasmania. This multidisciplinary journey necessitates a concept of the SLO founded upon ethical responsibility and a cultural license if it is to genuinely hold to account the corporate sovereign.

The genealogy of sin will always begin with Eve in what has become known as the Western narrative. In communion with the wicked serpent, Eve betrayed humanity when she ate the forbidden fruit from the Sycamore Tree. Since, women have been burdened with painful labours and sovereign husbands, and men have been sentenced to a life of toil for being influenced by a woman. What precisely constituted the original sin was never particularly clear to me. Was it listening to the serpent, eating the fruit, defying God’s instruction, consuming the knowledge of good and evil, or sexual consciousness? If the latter, how did the fruit beget the power of the orgasm, even if the shape and sweet nectar of the fig is suggestive of the woman’s vagina? It is no wonder that the creation story in Genesis is either disregarded as myth, or a misbelief outgrown by education and science. Yet, notwithstanding its discordance with the contemporary narrative, myths are stories that bring order and meaning to our existence. If understood as serving as a valuable probe into the worldview and values of a particular culture, the deep history of a myth tends to suggest that the fatuous character of its current interpretation is at best superficial, and ignorant at worst. It has been argued by feminist writers (Stone 1976, Sjöö and Mor 1987, Collard and Contrucci 1989, Merchant 1989) that our Ancestress caused the expulsion of all humankind from the original home of bliss in Eden for nothing more than celebrating life. In her own biblical rediscovery titled “When God was a Woman”(1976), Merlin Stone says that Eve was accused by the temple fathers of dreaming dreams and using her own mind.

Over the next ten years, the United Nations has invited the global community to think about, and make decisions concerning, the future of our oceans in a way that has not been afforded to other significant revolutions in our human development. Within the profoundly anthropocentric aims and methodologies of this ocean decade, it is negligent to not more explicitly consider our human narrative shared with our oceans as an essential component to understanding a more complete picture of coastal and ocean sustainability. Our human narrative shared with the ocean is essentially immersed within a particular world view which provides the very framework and context to this global endeavour. In the face of plundered and acidified oceans, we ought to be asking whether a continuation of this paradigm is in our best interest at all? I reflect on how the current state of our oceans is a direct reflection of our colonising relationship with the ocean as a mere resource. This paper comprises my mediations concerning the colonisation of our oceans even when our aims are toward a sustainable development. I have chosen to draw on a number of feminist philosophers to appropriately reflect the undeniably gendered cultural narrative we have shared with our Mother ocean. I go on to propose a blue ecofeminism as a possible emerging perspective within the established scholarship in feminist environmental philosophy to more wholistically contribute to the Decade of Ocean UN discourse.