The camera plunges all at once into an ocean of gray. Seagulls peck from above as a net cuts through the water, gathering hundreds of fish into a wriggling swarm. Fins, eyes, and tails emerge out of the darkness. The camera angles up to expose a slate-colored sky. Sounds of relentless waves and slopping fish fill the senses. Disoriented, seasick, and disturbed, you emerge from the theater deeply changed.

This is what it feels like to watch the documentary Leviathan (2012.) Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, it traces the dangerous and traumatic conditions of work on a modern fishing vessel. Leviathan is a new breed of documentary that resists anthropocentric storytelling methods. It shirks movie cameras in favor of GoPro cameras attached to objects like poles, nets, and the ship’s exterior. This approach gives the viewer a uniquely intense vision of life from many perspectives at sea.

In other words, the film is fundamentally detached from any human subject. Viewers describe a sense of “being thrown in with the fish.” It goes against the rules of storytelling, and yet this experimental structure is one way that scholars seek to explore the sensory and experiential realities of being in the world. This kind of scholarship is called “more-than-humanism” and recognizes humans as just one actor in a complex entanglement of many.

For years, Earth’s coasts have become visible sites of extraction and exploitation. From vulnerable krill populations in the Southern Ocean to the violent whaling history of the Bering Strait, the site where the ocean meets the land becomes a vital place of emergence for humans’ relationship to the nonhuman world. 

Historians like Bathsheba Demuth study the lives of both people and their nonhuman counterparts who exist on the front lines of these dramatic changes. People working in ocean fishing industries are often pushed to their limits. Demuth wonders, “Who is doing [this] labor? Working in a slaughterhouse is wretched– and it’s dangerous.” Climate disasters and pandemics have exposed the fact that we’re linked to nonhumans: that their welfare is our welfare. In a global crisis that exposes inequalities, the evidence of change is vividly felt in coastal communities. 

Scholars and writers are honing in on more-than-human stories to better understand the reality of our global predicament, and how we might emerge more connected. Such stories connect history, journalism, and visual mediums to better describe life on the globe’s imperiled coasts. As humans become a geological force, this research will explore how this approach to storytelling can help us better understand issues like climate change–issues which demand a radical shift in both our relationship to, and our understanding of, a more-than-human Earth.