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In Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, artisanal fishing families and staff of Loreto Bay National Park face an array of choices as tourism, environmental concerns, and economic precarity challenge livelihoods and natural resource availability. In Net Values, Nicole D. Peterson offers a critical examination of how the idea of “choice” is understood, and what it means for policies, planning, and programs to ignore the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts surrounding these choices.

Anchored by more than twenty years of research, Peterson provides insight into the fishing community of Loreto and reveals an important role in decision-making that diverges from previous studies. She argues that decisions about fishing, natural resource management, and other aspects of life are influenced by context, values, and expectations in ways that go beyond the typical psychological or cognitive theories of choice. Instead, Net Values highlights the ways that choices are constrained and enabled by values and expectations of cultures, histories, relationships, and experiences, both personal and shared. Peterson answers questions such as “why do the fishermen fish?” or “what is the marine park staff doing?” These decisions and choices are related to the larger implication addressed by this book: that in order to make effective policies around natural resource management and other issues, we must understand how those potential policies interact with the decision processes already underway.

Divided into five chapters, Net Values is rich in ethnographic detail, drawing from real people to inform the narratives, chapters, and theoretical elaboration. Peterson’s interactions with fishers such as Don Javier and his family and friends support the ideas offered around choice, values, and strategies, connecting ideas to real experiences.

The world is at a critical moment, when humans must grapple with thinking about the planet’s oceans from ecological, physical, social, and legal perspectives. Warming ocean temperatures, changing currents, cultural displacement, Indigenous resilience, melting polar ice, habitat loss, are but a few of the global issues reflected in the planetary ocean as a front line in the unfolding drama of climate change. Re-envisioning the Anthropocene Ocean brings together leading scientists, lawyers, humanists, and Indigenous voices to tell of the ocean’s precarious position in the twenty-first century. The contributors affirm that the planetary ocean is crucial to our well-being and overdue for a positive change in public action to enhance the world’s resilience to climate change, ocean acidification, and other stressors. These essays engage that important work of positively re-imagining the ocean in the Anthropocene.

This volume brings diverse perspectives to the planet’s ocean future. New essays are contextualized with narratives woven by earlier ocean writers, showing readers how past perceptions of the ocean have led us to where we are today in terms of both problems and potential new visions. In this one volume, readers experience both the history of humanity’s multi- and interdisciplinary interactions with the ocean, find new perspectives on that history, and discover ideas for looking forward.