ABSTRACT
In recent times efforts have been made to predict the future of the key processes affecting the ocean. One major example concerns rises in sea level. By using the General Circulation Model (GCM), the expected sealevel fluctuations in the twenty-first century have been predictively modelled. Intense discussions have surrounded the possible impacts from sea-level rise on coastal physical processes, human settlements, and activities. Ocean uses, such as fisheries and maritime merchant transportation, have been focused on and there has been speculation about their possible evolution over the short and medium term. The result has been an extensive literature focused on ocean issues, which broadly falls into two categories: predictions, in which the trend of a given process, such as sea-level rise or coastal population growth, is projected into the future, usually through the use of linear equations; and scenarios, in which the prospect of giving shape to different functions and landscapes, such as where new seaport organisational patterns have been built up. Nevertheless, in this research framework, science has rarely been able to set up global views of the role of the ocean facing the change of the earth’s ecosystem provoked by climate change, and that of the social milieux contextually. Research has been essentially conducted according to sectoral criteria bringing about a myriad of partial views, not wholly tailored to governance needs. If this approach is overcome by adopting methodologies able to deal with natural and social changes jointly, it is not only the new issues, such as the changing web of ocean uses resulting from global change and globalisation processes, that will have to be dealt with; new logical backgrounds will have to be experimented with as well. Conventional approaches to the ocean have been sustained by Cartesian logic; in particular they have been consistent with the principles of reduction and exhaustiveness. In contrast, novel approaches, encouraged by new scientific trends and the demands of Agenda 21, require constructivist logical backgrounds, where the principle of reduction is replaced by that of holism, and the principle of exhaustiveness is replaced by that of aggregation. Changing the logical basis implies a fundamental change in the way we view the world; it paves the way towards a post-modern vision of society, and the ocean provides us
with a unique opportunity to experiment with new ways of perceiving the world, and imagining the future.
