ABSTRACT
In August 2015, Svenska Dagbladet, one of two large daily newspapers in Sweden, published two editorials in which water experts discussed eutrophication in the Baltic Sea. Popular narratives about collapse assert that environmental catastrophe precipitates societal collapse, which has led to a healthy discussion and debate. Fears about shifts in humans’ economic relationship with the sea, though often cloaked in “ecological” terms, often underpin collapse narratives. 50 Satt att Rädda Ostersjon, Dirty Waters, Dead Zones, and Sea Sick evoke collapse in the loss of economically productive fish, meaning that a reduction in these fish species promotes the growth of dead zones and thereby threatens the entire marine system. In collapse discourse, information from natural science influences narratives in popular media to negotiate the extent a dead zone and the sea in which it is found are collapsing or collapsed. Such interplay leads to a great deal of uncertainty around collapse and what it means.
