Culture is key to advancing ocean sustainability

Representatives from across the Indian Ocean region emphasized the crucial role of culture in securing a sustainable future for island communities during a recent conference held at Stanford.

“This complex geopolitical area encompasses a variety of cultures, each with their own understanding of sustainability that differs from region to region,” said Arun Majumdar, inaugural dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, who grew up along the shores of the Indian Ocean. “Culture is important because if human dimensions are not integrated into the sustainability solutions we create, we may be going down the wrong track.”

Majumdar addressed researchers, community groups, government officials, and practitioners who had gathered to share tools, stories, and approaches for incorporating cultural heritage into environmental governance at the third annual Stanford Oceans Conference. Held March 17 to 19, the event was co-hosted by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Graduate School of Business as part of the Sustainability Research Conference series. On the third day, conference participants toured facilities and met with researchers at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. 

“This conference is a starting point for using science to identify cultural understandings of sustainability, but it’s not the only way,” said Krish Seetah, an associate professor of environmental social sciences, of oceans, and of anthropology who was born in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. “It’s important that we bring all disciplines to bear on equipping government officials and other decision-makers with the tools they need to understand how the past can inform the future.”

Defining culture

Cultural heritage can be an object or place of historical significance such as architectural ruins, a shipwreck, or abandoned agricultural fields. However, designations of land and seascapes as parks often prioritize wildlife protection over cultural preservation. Conference speakers highlighted how the two are inextricably linked.

"Landscapes are combined works of nature and humankind,” said Saša Čaval, an archeologist at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. “They include multiple layers of history representing different cultural periods and adaptations to changing environments.”

Čaval described the Le Morne Cultural Landscape in Mauritius. Unlike traditional protected areas, this landscape was established for its cultural significance. The site pays homage to formerly enslaved people who sought shelter in the area’s mountainous terrain to resist slavery. By preserving this culturally significant area, the Le Morne Cultural Landscape also conserves rich flora and fauna.

Cultural heritage can also be intangible and expressed through sacred rituals, stories, or Indigenous knowledge systems passed down over generations. 

“We are people who have our tradition, our culture, and we want to preserve it,” said Olivier Bancoult in a keynote address. Bancoult leads the Chagos Refugee Group, which represents over 1,500 people exiled by the British government in 1968 from the Chagos Archipelago in the Central Indian Ocean. “It’s so important for us to be here with you, to share our experience.”

Documenting culture

Nearly a dozen speakers presented methods and approaches for documenting culture. 

Peter Broadwell, manager of AI modeling and inference in research data services at Stanford University Libraries, shared how some aspects of cultural heritage can become more tangible through digitization. Oral histories can be transcribed through speech-to-text automation, for example, and handwritten records can be digitized.

Conference co-organizer Josheena Naggea spoke about her research on the traditional, spiritual, and cultural practices associated with the sea around Mauritius where she grew up, and the emotional toll of losing those ways of life. Through interviews with fishers, she found that communities steward the sea as a source of revenue and a place of worship and recreation – benefits devastated by the nation’s first major oil spill in 2020.

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“For real transformative change, we need to shift from a relationship of domination to one of care, returning to our Indigenous values,” said Naggea, the Blue Food Futures program manager at the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions. “The tools required for this transformation include participatory research and inclusive methodologies.”

Dimitris Xygalatas, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut, studies how spiritual ceremonies shape environmental stewardship. He described his research, which shows that sacred rituals can affect the emotional states of participants by increasing heart rate variability and decreasing cortisol levels. Certain actions become more rewarding and help reduce anxiety when they’re framed as rituals, he said.

According to Xygalatas, this framing can help promote meaningful cooperation. “Whatever the future looks like, it will depend on the ability to create sacred commitments towards the environment, culture, and community.”

Aligning culture and conservation

Speakers also shared how defining and documenting cultural heritage can inform policy measures to protect cultural and natural resources. 

“We have our formal definitions, but it’s clear that heritage can mean something so much deeper than what policy tells us,” said Rosabelle Boswell of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, whose team documents how the sensory experience of being near the ocean benefits people. Boswell noted the relevance of her research to environmental and cultural agreements, like the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, that seeks to halt biodiversity loss and maintain nature’s contributions to people. 

Other speakers focused on policy processes like marine spatial planning, which delineates the ocean for various uses like shipping and fishing, and the establishment of marine protected areas, whereby an area of the ocean is restricted to only certain types of activities.

Jagdish Koonjul, the former ambassador to the United Nations for Mauritius, shared stories from his career, which he dedicated to strengthening diplomatic relations and navigating sovereignty disputes in the Indian Ocean.

"I believe that we can valorize the traditions, skills, and expertise that islanders held in the past," said Koonjul, who retired in December of 2024. "It's important that we integrate their knowledge into modern means of marine governance."

“I think conservation has to evolve beyond seeing humans as the problem per se to preserving traditions that are sacred,” said Nai’a Lewis, director of the Big Ocean network in Hawaii. Lewis shared best practices for incorporating Indigenous knowledge into ocean conservation at scale. She cited the success of a working group at the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument that maintains cultural oversight by reviewing proposed activities within the monument’s waters.

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Asha De Vos, a marine biologist and the founder and executive director of the research nonprofit Oceanswell in Sri Lanka, emphasized the importance of equitable partnerships. “Technical know-how can’t do anything in a vacuum,” she said. “For a project to succeed, you need to understand local contexts and realities on the ground.”

Such capacity sharing begins with a holistic understanding that prioritizes the preservation of culture alongside conservation. 

“We want to make cultural heritage central to how we provide a sustainable future for islanders and protect the Indian Ocean region,” said Seetah. “We’re keen to integrate as many experts as possible from all over the world.”

Krish Seetah is also the director of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Additional conference funding was provided by the E-IPER program, the Center for African Studies, and the Department of African and African American Studies.

View the full list of conference speakers. Conference organizers include Krish Seetah; Josheena Naggea; Eeshan Chaturvedi, a graduate student in the E-IPER program; and Fiorenza Micheli, a professor of oceans, co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.