1 – Learn from the wisdom of the sea. The ocean is vast and knowledgeable. She has been here since the beginning of earthly birth, and indeed, we all trace our ancestry back to her. Observing the shore we gain a deep understanding of oceanic persistence through the rise and fall of tides and the continuity of waves. Deep time ecology is vaster on an oceanic level. Sea it through.
2 – Break and reveal the edges and limits of rationalism and human exceptionalism. The sea of microplastics currently breaking and melding with oceanic rocks undeniably marks our current geologic era. How did we get here? Our narrow vision of the world cannot continue growing, mutating, and devouring. Oceanism helps us move beyond the humanistic drastically, and saltwater must be allowed to erode human structures, whether they be physical, psychological, or societal. Let your hair absorb the brine.
3 – Edges: tracking, paying attention to, centering. The ocean is no longer an edge. Tracking the supposed edge reveals the cracks in human systematics and suddenly we found ourselves within an ocean of contradictions. Take the port city, an edge akin to that of a knife's blade. Within it, we find colonial pasts and a global network of objects, bodies, and ideologies. Beyond it, is the ocean, a peaceful spectator of a devastating human folly. An edge becomes a center.
4 – Making horizontal. The horizontality of the ocean proves to be a necessary vision of a newly possible world. The peace one feels when observing the horizontal line is not by coincidence: it is the peace one feels when regarding an old home. An ethic of horizontality should infuse oceanism and necessarily involves the shedding of hierarchy to make equal assemblages of humans and non-humans alike.
5 – Placing the ocean. To say the ocean is a space feels obvious. But is it a place? How do landed creatures, such as ourselves, place the ocean? Is it by adopting oceanic ontologies–visions of a world tinged by the deep sea blue and the aquatic creatures we have so blatantly ignored for centuries?
6 – Decolonizing through renaming, reclaiming, and reorienting. What is the Pacific Ocean, really? Does it contain multitudes–gods, stories, and histories? If not, what does it contain? Who is this name for? We must question modern metageographies and find new and old names, pulling into the past and the future to find something appropriate for our current crisis of delusion. Pull apart.
7 – Digging at history to (re)imagine futures. "We have already been here." So writes Māori poet and scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville, writing that an oceanic perspective is not new. Oceanic visions have long been the norm for shoreside peoples–those who charted the seas, made kin of waves, and storied the wide expanse of sea. History is a fraught word–it connotes that something is done and dusted, over and out. But a historical viewpoint is necessary for a new worldly imagination, because indeed, we have already been here.