Relationality and the Ocean

Ocean Hoptimism
Sep 7
4 min read

Updated: Sep 27

An Invitation to Rethink Conservation

Sometimes a piece of writing has the power to unsettle what we thought we knew and open a doorway into another way of seeing. Every so often, an article or story offers not just information but a shift in perspective: a glimpse into a different way of making sense of our world and our place within it.

This essay reflects on such a perspective: the work of Dr. Lauren Tynan, a Trawlwoolway woman from northeast Tasmania, who writes about relationality.

Relationality is not a metaphor or a poetic flourish. It is a way of knowing and being that positions relationships as the very fabric of existence: to be is to be in relation—with land, waters, kin, ancestors, and more-than-human life.

It’s important to note that what follows emerges from an Aboriginal Australian intellectual tradition, grounded in Country, law, and story. While there may be parallels in other Indigenous worldviews, each has its own distinct teachings. What we are invited into here is a particular Aboriginal perspective, generously shared through scholarship, not a universal Indigenous template.

For those of us working in conservation shaped by Western traditions, exposure to relationality can be both humbling and transformative. It is not ours to adopt or claim. But when Aboriginal scholars make these perspectives available, they open space for reflection: what would conservation look like if relationship, rather than resource management, sat at its center?

©️2025 Reuben Oates: Maugean Skate - Thylacine of the Sea

Seeing the World as Relationship

Western ecology tends to approach the ocean as a system of parts (species, habitats, processes) arranged and compared. That lens has given us invaluable data but can also reinforce separateness.

Relationality begins elsewhere: the world itself is relationship. A river and a mountain are kin, linked through flow, erosion, sediment, and story. Cree scholar Shawn Wilson (from a different Indigenous tradition) frames it this way: “relationships are reality, and reality is relationships.” In the Aboriginal context, Country itself is the connective web: storied, alive, and having agency.

For ocean conservation, this invites a shift. Reefs, currents, kelp forests, or estuaries are not simply physical or ecological units; they are kinship networks, and humans are part of that kinship, not observers standing apart.

Fire as Teacher: Cultural Burning

One powerful example of relationality in practice is cultural burning. Aboriginal peoples across Australia have long applied fire not as a blunt tool of control but as a relative and teacher. Cultural burns are small, cool, and carefully timed, designed to renew Country, promote biodiversity, and keep balance among plants, animals, and people. The goal is care, reciprocity, and long-term health of kin.

This stands in sharp contrast to Western hazard reduction burns, which are largely designed to protect human assets by removing fuel loads. Those burns often prioritize efficiency, scale, and human safety above all else. In relational practice, by contrast, fire itself is kin. Cultural burning acknowledges the agency of fire and its role in sustaining ecosystems, from grasses and soils to the birds and animals that depend on them.

The distinction illustrates the broader difference between relational and extractive conservation logics. One treats land as a resource to manage against threat; the other treats Country as a living network to which humans owe care and responsibility.

Living Relationally

Relationality is not an abstract principle but something enacted: through ceremony, kinship introductions, cultural burning, or the ethic of caring as Country.

And relationships are not always comfortable. Country may speak through storms, fires, flies, or grief at ecological loss. To work relationally is to accept that discomfort is part of being in relation.

For conservation, this underscores the need to move beyond management checklists. Relational practice asks: how are we listening to the ocean? How are we letting its rhythms, not just our project timelines, guide decisions?

Carrying Responsibility

Relationality also carries obligation. In this worldview, land and sea are not resources for human extraction but relatives who require reciprocity.

This reframes the extractive habits embedded in research and conservation: data gathered without return, knowledge published without benefit to communities, projects designed around human utility. Relational responsibility asks: Who benefits? Who is acknowledged? How are both human and more-than-human communities strengthened by this work?

In marine conservation, this means supporting coastal communities with deep ties to the sea, respecting the agency of marine kin, and ensuring conservation gives back rather than only takes.

What This Means for Non-Indigenous Conservationists

For those of us outside an Aboriginal worldview, the question is not “how do we adopt relationality?” but rather “how can exposure to it shift how we work?” We are not privy to knowing in the same way, but we can still allow ourselves to be challenged, guided, and re-oriented by what is shared.

Some ways this might take shape:

Hold space for multiple ways of knowing. Recognize that Western science is one lens among many, and value Indigenous scholarship on its own terms.
Reshape practice, not by claiming, but by re-framing. Ask not just “what does this ecosystem provide?” but also “what responsibilities flow from being in relation with it?”
Emphasize reciprocity. Ensure research, funding, or conservation projects give back to communities—human and more-than-human—rather than extract.
Practice humility and consent. Acknowledge the limits of what we can know, and never universalize one Indigenous perspective as “all Indigenous.”
Start with where you are. Cultivate deeper, more reciprocal relationships with your local bay, estuary, watershed, or coastline. Even without claiming Aboriginal knowledge, you can practice seeing these places as kin rather than objects.

In this way, non-Indigenous conservationists can benefit not by appropriating Aboriginal relationality but by letting it unsettle our assumptions and broaden the horizons of what conservation might be. The benefit lies in being changed by the encounter.

An Invitation, Not an Instruction

Relationality reminds us that:

The world is an interwoven web of kinship, not a set of discrete parts.
Conservation is a practice of relationship, not just management.
With relationship comes responsibility—to care, reciprocate, and remain accountable.

For non-Indigenous conservationists, this is not a framework to claim as our own. It is an Aboriginal way of knowing, shared in scholarship, that we may be exposed to when offered. Our role is not to appropriate but to listen, to let these insights unsettle us, and to consider how they might broaden the possibilities of conservation in respectful dialogue with those who carry them.