Environmental Intuition and Cultivated Attention Support Coastal Resilience among Women Divers in East Asia

For decades, scientists and policymakers have searched for ways to help coastal communities survive the rising tides, warming oceans, and unpredictable storms brought on by climate change. A central idea in this effort is "resilience," which describes a community's ability to absorb a shock and keep functioning, rather than simply bouncing back to how things were before. In recent years, researchers have increasingly recognized that local people who live and work on the water possess deep, practical knowledge about their environment. This knowledge, often called local ecological knowledge, includes details about fish behavior, seasonal currents, and weather patterns that official science might miss. However, most studies have focused on collecting this knowledge as a list of facts—data that can be written down, categorized, and used in government plans. This approach assumes that knowing the facts is the same as being able to act on them. But it leaves out a crucial question: how do people actually learn to notice that something is wrong before it becomes obvious to everyone else? Before a community can adapt to a changing sea, its members must first perceive the change. This paper explores the gap between having information and having the trained ability to see it.

Niki J. P. Alsford, a researcher from the University of Lancashire, spent years working alongside the haenyeo, the female free-divers of Jeju Island in South Korea. These women, who dive without breathing apparatus to harvest seafood, have spent their lives in the ocean, and their daily decisions depend on reading the water. The researcher wanted to understand how these women know when the sea is safe to enter and when it is not. She found that their ability to judge the ocean is not based on a checklist of rules or a sudden flash of instinct. Instead, it is a cultivated skill, a form of environmental intuition that grows slowly over a lifetime of being in the water. This intuition is the result of "cultivated attention," a way of paying close, continuous notice to the sea until the boundary between the diver and the water blurs. The paper argues that this capacity to perceive subtle shifts in the environment is a vital, yet overlooked, part of coastal resilience.

The research began with long periods of fieldwork between 2018 and 2026. The researcher did not just interview the divers; she lived with them, watched them prepare for dives, and observed how they made decisions in real time. She found that when experienced divers decided not to go into the water, they often could not explain exactly why. They might say the water felt "rotten" or "wrong," but they could not point to a single broken thermometer or a specific wave height. To an outsider, this might sound like a vague feeling or a mystical sense. But the researcher observed that these judgments were the result of years of practice. The women had spent decades watching the color of the water, feeling the temperature, listening to the sound of the waves, and noticing how fish moved. Over time, these separate observations merged into a single, unified way of seeing. They learned to read the ocean not as a collection of separate facts, but as a living, changing partner.

This process of learning is different from how most people learn about nature. Usually, we learn by being told facts: the water is cold, the current is strong, the tide is high. For the haenyeo, learning happens by being in the water. They learn by doing, by making mistakes, and by watching older divers. A young diver learns by seeing where an older woman chooses to enter the water and by feeling the consequences of her own choices. If a diver makes a poor decision, the sea corrects her immediately through the physical experience of a strong current or poor visibility. There is no need for a teacher to explain the theory; the water itself teaches the lesson. This constant, physical engagement trains the body and the mind to notice tiny changes that would be invisible to someone who only looks at the sea from the shore.

The paper suggests that this kind of intuition allows divers to anticipate change before it is fully visible. While scientific instruments might take time to detect a shift in water temperature or a change in a fish population, the divers often sense these changes the moment they begin to happen. They might shorten a dive, change their location, or stay on the shore entirely based on a feeling that the conditions are not right. This ability to act before a crisis is fully formed is a powerful form of resilience. It means the community is not just reacting to disasters but is constantly adjusting to the environment as it evolves. The researcher notes that this is not a mysterious sixth sense. It is a skill built on thousands of hours of observation, memory, and social learning. It is the result of a relationship with the sea that is so deep that the diver and the water become part of the same system.

The study also reveals that this relationship is not just about survival or economics; it is deeply moral. The divers often speak of the sea in terms of respect, patience, and responsibility. They believe the sea rewards those who are attentive and humble, and punishes those who are careless. When the divers say the water is "rotten," they are sometimes describing a moral unease about the community itself, using the language of the sea to talk about trust and social harmony. This shows that for these women, the ocean is not just a resource to be used. It is an active participant in their lives that shapes how they think, how they judge, and how they treat one another. The paper argues that understanding this connection is essential for any effort to protect coastal communities.

While the research focuses on the haenyeo of Jeju, the author suggests that similar patterns exist among other female diving traditions in East Asia, such as the hainü in Taiwan and the ama in Japan. Together, these groups form what the author calls the "Blue Triangle," a region where women have developed unique ways of perceiving the ocean through long-term engagement. The paper does not claim that all these groups are identical, but it proposes that they share a common way of learning: through a deep, embodied relationship with the water. This perspective challenges the idea that resilience is just about having the right data or the best technology. Instead, it suggests that resilience is also about how a community learns to pay attention.

The findings offer a new way to think about how science and local knowledge can work together. Scientific monitoring is excellent at measuring changes over time and explaining the causes of those changes. But it often misses the subtle, early signs of change that local people feel in their daily lives. The researcher argues that these two ways of knowing are not opposites; they are complementary. Science can tell us what is happening to the ocean, while ethnography can show us how people learn to notice it while living within it. By recognizing the value of this cultivated attention, coastal management can become more adaptive and inclusive. It acknowledges that the ability to perceive change is just as important as the ability to respond to it.

Ultimately, this paper shifts the focus from what people know to how they learn to know. It shows that environmental intuition is not a magical gift or a simple instinct. It is a skill that is grown over a lifetime of being in the water, where the body, the mind, and the sea become inseparable. For coastal communities facing an uncertain future, this capacity to perceive change while it is still unfolding may be their most valuable asset. The study concludes that true resilience depends not only on the facts we can measure but on the relationships we build with the world around us. It is a reminder that to survive the changing sea, we must first learn to see it clearly.