Ocean Memory

The Long Now Foundation welcomes

Melody Jue

Ocean Memory

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In this talk, Melody Jue approaches this question as a literature and media scholar, drawing on eight years of collaboration with the Ocean Memory Project. This interdisciplinary group of scientists, artists, and humanists explores how the concept of memory reshapes the questions we ask about the ocean.

Jue examines how ocean memory might be understood not only as history, but as a capacity for anticipating and responding to future conditions. She considers how understanding chemosensation underwater can disrupt our anthropocentric approaches to time, smell, and marine life as we know it. Jue will explain what underwater memory might offer for imagining and preparing for the long now both on land and in the ocean.

The Q&A for this talk will be hosted by Margaret Cohen, Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University.

Why This Talk Matters Now

As we face accelerating ocean warming and biodiversity loss, the ways we perceive and value the ocean shapes the planetary futures we imagine, and the actions we take to defend it. This talk reframes memory as an invaluable sensory capacity that can inform our long-term thinking and resilience in times of changing climate.

The Long View

By calling our attention to non-visual forms of perception, Jue challenges human-centered timelines that often dominate the discourse on environmental crises. Her work opens new ways of imagining responsibility and continuity across civilizations-long timelines.

Learn More

• READ Jue’s book Coralations, exploring marine coral as a climate archive.
• LEARN about The Ocean Memory Project, exploring how environmental changes are recorded in deep sea “memories”.
• WATCH Mark Lynas’s related 02012 Long Now talk on planetary boundaries, ocean acidification, and the threat to coral reefs.

Melody Jue is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and writings center the ocean humanities, science fiction, media studies, science & technology studies, and the environmental humanities.

Professor Jue is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater, which won the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Prize, and the co-editor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics with Rafico Ruiz. Forthcoming books include Coralations and the edited collection Informatics of Domination with Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee.

Her new work, Holding Sway, examines the media of seaweeds across transpacific contexts. She regularly collaborates with ocean scientists and artists, from fieldwork to collaborative writings and other projects. Many of her writings are informed by scuba diving fieldwork and coastal observations.

The Long Now Foundation is a globally-recognized champion of long-term thinking and responsibility, operating within the context of the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now. Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience on stage in San Francisco and with millions more around the globe through our podcast and videos.