Reconstructing the history of ocean wildlife around Ascension Island

1. In 2016, the UK government announced plans for a large-scale Marine Protected Area around Ascension Island, a UK Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic. 2. To improve baselines for marine life to support ambitious conservation and assess change over time, archives were searched for historical accounts of wildlife from Ascension's discovery in 1501 to the present. For more recent changes, 139 interviews with past and present inhabitants were conducted. 3. Ascension's marine life has, from first discovery to the present, been consistently remarked upon for its exceptional abundance. Historical sources indicate declines in seabird and turtle populations from human exploitation and introduction of rats and cats. They are recovering with good management, although still below pre-settlement abundance. 4. Interviews with residents indicate more recent changes, notably declines in catch per unit of fishing effort at popular shore angling sites, a decline in yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and increase in Galapagos sharks (Carcharhinus galapagensis). 5. What is very notable, however, based on the interviews, was that there was no temporal signal suggestive of recent systemic decline, in marked contrast to many parts of the world where recent wildlife declines have been pervasive and steep. Ascension represents a remarkable and immensely important centre of abundance in a sea of depletion and change, warranting full protection for all the island's waters

The matter of Makira: colonialism, competition, and the production of gendered peoples in contemporary Solomon Islands and medieval Britain

Since civil tension disrupted Solomon Islands between 1998 and 2003, the Arosi of Makira have elaborated discourses according to which their island contains a secret and preternaturally powerful subterranean army base. These discourses have clear antecedents in Maasina Rule, a post-World War II socio-political movement sometimes analysed as a “cargo cult”. Offering an alternative interpretation, I compare Arosi discourses about the Makiran underground to the Matter of Britain as represented in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (completed c. 1138). I argue that both sets of discourses arise from the dynamics of mutually precipitating communities mythologizing themselves and each other in terms of the analogous oppositions colonizer is to colonized as allochthon is to autochthon as male is to female. This comparison, I conclude, recommends the medieval European phenomenon of a “matter” as a productive model for understanding contemporary ethnogenetic myth-making in and beyond Melanesia