Given the flooding risks emerging from climate change, the chapter explores the amphibious transformation through counterproposals to terra-centric urbanization. It addresses how and why cybernetics-based designs for Tokyo Bay in the 1960s experienced long-lasting marginalization but shaped the present ecomodernist approach to climate-resilient sea surface urbanization, like the United Nations’ “sustainable floating city” project. Ecomodernism is an environmentalist “school” and focuses on technologically decoupling socio-economic development from resource use and environmental degradation. The chapter argues that these 1960s’ cybernetic designs were counterproposals to the “tools of terrestrialization,” like dams, seawalls, and industrial-scale land reclamation, which the Age of Coal’s access to affordable energy had globally enabled. Architect Tange Kenzō’s and designer Buckminster Fuller’s teams devised artificial communication systems that replicated biological processes, returning urbanization’s attention to the adaption to aquatic conditions. The cybernetic designs sought to decouple urban growth from pressure on ecosystems, turning them into forms of proto-ecomodernism.

The chapter analyzes the conflict between nascent bright green environmentalism and well-established fossil fuel-based developmentalisms, set against a backdrop of global population growth and resource concerns in the 1970s. It addresses the questions of how and why fossil fuel-based developmentalism contributed to the prolonged marginalization of bright green environmentalist ideas about zero-carbon offshore energy generation. Intellectually, architect Kikutake Kiyonori and engineer John P. Craven faced the spatial constraints inherent in island contexts, in this case Hawai’i and Japan. They focused on employing technology to decouple socio-economic development from ecosystem service and resource overexploitation to enable continuous industrial growth. Applying an oceanic-vertical perspective to island ecosystems and their littoral marine regions gives insights in some of the origins of zero-carbon energy technologies like offshore wind, floating solar photovoltaics, and floating nuclear plants. US and Japanese governmental support for already feasible offshore oil and gas exploitation and terrestrial energy generation nevertheless marginalized these ideas for decades.

This chapter focuses on the connections between sea surfaces, the atmosphere, and outer space. Its upward-oriented perspective to oceanic history traces these connections from early 20th-century visions like the failed idea of floating airports (seadromes), whose horizontal runways were impractical in aquatic conditions, to later orientation changes. Artificial islands served horizontal helicopter take-off and landing, or offshore rocket launches. The chapter argues that these energy-intensive built environments, enabled by the Age of Oil, spatially and sensually marked the emergence of the oceanic Anthropocene. Platform illumination for helicopters operations, rocket launches, and the flares of oil platforms whose radiation is visible from outer space, created massive “light islands” in marine regions, manifesting carbon emissions. Simultaneously, the light island effect turned into a form of placemaking. Light islands became regular offshore destinations and departure points for other vehicles, creating new oceanic equivalents to terrestrial ports, airports, and spaceports. They also indicated the extension of the human habitat to sea surfaces.

The chapter investigates the conflict between emerging “schools” of environmental thought in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on Buckminster Fuller’s techno-optimist, libertarian environmentalism and its influence on today’s floating city concepts, like the UN-backed project in Busan. It addresses the questions of why and how Buckminster Fuller’s bright green environmentalism—blending ecological design with market-driven innovation—clashed with the technocritical, governmental reform-oriented dark green environmentalism of US officials and public intellectuals. Analyzing three cases, the chapter argues that these conflicts with dark green environmentalists demonstrated a lack of social acceptance for floating urban structures in US society due to Fuller’s libertarian views, aesthetic issues, pollution concerns, and limited governmental control over oceanic space. The chapter also highlights the lasting impact of Fuller’s ideas through the Whole Earth network and countercultural movements. The chapter contends that governmental and intergovernmental support for floating settlement ideas has grown since the 2010s, shaped by reemerging bright green environmentalist ideas.

The chapter explores multi-species interactions between humans and marine life. Mariculture (marine organism farming) has experienced a gigantic global production increase since the mid-twentieth century. The chapter addresses the questions of why and how mariculture-related coevolution between humans and marine species has aimed to reorient coastal marine food webs towards human consumption. The argument of the chapter is that the construction of floating mariculture structures—or new dual-habitat structures for marine species and humans—facilitated human access to submerged habitats, enabling large biomass concentration. The new plastic structures of the Age of Oil were designed to vertically integrate two habitats, each located on one side of the sea surface. They intentionally simplified and localized the previously complex interactions within marine ecosystems. The process of Japanese mariculture pioneers designing these new dual-habitat structures after WWII was also encouraged and inhibited by multiple social and environmental problems, including food security, land reclamation destroying nursery grounds, petrochemical pollution, overfertilization, and coastal overfishing.

The chapter continues to focus on multispecies interactions. Dual-habitat built environments remain central to the analysis, but with an emphasis on species translocations and their impacts on biosphere integrity. The chapter addresses the questions of how and why hard surface structures made from steel or concrete, particularly offshore oil and gas platforms, became new and important vectors for marine bioinvasions in the oceanic Anthropocene. In such bioinvasion cases, a species multiplies exponentially in a new ecosystem, dominating it in terms of biomass or density. Slowly moving or stationary structures opened entirely new marine regions to marine bioinvasions and created novel material conditions for them. The use of new hard surface floating structures along coastlines or further offshore supplanted wooden structures and their previous habitat conditions. New bioinvasion pathways emerged through convergence with coastal urbanization and industrialization during the second half of the twentieth century, adding more hard surfaces such as water intake tunnels, piping systems, and seawalls—and now also interacting with offshore wind turbines, floating buildings, and others.

The chapter explores the phenomenon of ocean-to-land globalization, a shift in global production that increasingly relocates industrial activities to aquatic surfaces while consumption remains land-based. It argues that advances in radiocommunication and radionavigation technologies since the mid-twentieth century were critical enablers of this transformation. By dramatically reducing communication and transport costs, these technologies removed the geo-ontological association of marine regions as remote peripheries to terrestrial centers of production. From a cybernetic viewpoint, extending human audiovisual senses through radiocommunication and radionavigation technologies—including radio telegraphs, radiophones, communication satellites, Decca, or GPS—enabled offshore production sites—such as oil rigs, salmon farms, and rocket launch platforms—to function similarly to terrestrial centers. The post-WWII civilian proliferation of such technologies was the essential enabler for reconceptualizing industrialized marine regions and their artificial islands as inhabited spaces and as new production centers in ocean-to-land globalization.

A paradigm shift is necessary to understand the ocean’s role in the Anthropocene. Rather than viewing the ocean through terra-centric frameworks as biased as, for example, the Eurocentric views of former “Orientalist” scholarship, it urges us to “think through water.” Doing so requires us to vertically explore Earth’s different spatial layers, from subsoil to outer space, that artificial islands gave access to. A paradigm shift also requires a focus on people who sought realistic, sustainable solutions when marine regions were profoundly reshaped. It demands an analysis of the Ages of Coal and Oil in view of oceanic energy transitions and their impacts. The coevolution between humans and other species also must be reexamined regarding the extension of the human habitat, marine biomass concentrations, and invasive species translocations. Exploring the clashes between various environmentalist and developmentalist “schools” of thought is essential, as is understanding the spatial competition among users of marine regions. Finally, the terrestrial mindset must be shed, ranging from climate adaptation thought to geo-ontological views of global production centers and peripheries.

This chapter introduces an oceanic-vertical perspective on Asia’s Anthropocene, focusing downward from offshore oil platforms to oil fields beneath the seabed. It emphasizes the overlooked role of marine regions in Asia’s contribution to global carbon emissions. It highlights how Asian political elites, particularly after decolonization, played a central role in developing offshore oil fields, synchronizing terrestrial and oceanic energy transitions by the mid-twentieth century. Unlike land-based infrastructures constrained by colonial legacies, marine regions offered greater autonomy, allowing Asian political elites to assert judicial control. The chapter spans from the 1880s to the 1970s, tracing offshore oil’s rise first across Japanese and US waters, later followed by various Asian marine regions. It argues for recognizing Asia’s marine regions as critical sites of environmental transformation and Asian political agency. By foregrounding offshore fossil fuel development, the chapter reframes the Asian Anthropocene within global histories of energy, development, and technology—beyond terrestrial confines and explanations focused on Western colonial and capitalist elites.