Two thirds of the planet is covered in water and much of that space is ungoverned.
Human rights and environmental crimes
in this area
are often committed with impunity because the oceans are vast and the laws are difficult to enforce.
World public opinion ignores what happens at sea.
Little journalism is done
about the oceans
and from the oceans.
As a consequence, most people outside the sea have no idea how much they are dependent on those who work at sea.
Half of the world's population lives less than 150 kilometers from the sea, but most conceive this space as a liquid desert that they fly over from time to time;
a canvas of light and dark blue tones.
Part of the problem lies in our imagination.
The oceans are commonly, and rightly, viewed as a marine habitat.
However, they are much more than that.
They are a workplace, a metaphor, an escape route, a prison, a grocery store, a garbage can, a cemetery, a vein, a powder keg, an organ, a highway, a warehouse, a window, an emergency. and, above all, an opportunity
.
Unless we recognize this truth, unless we reimagine this domain more broadly, we will continue to fall short of managing, protecting, and understanding the oceans.
The oceans are a workplace.
More than
50 million people work at sea
.
From an anthropological point of view, these workers make up a fascinating demographic.
They are a transient and diaspora tribe, with their own jargon, protocols, superstitions, social hierarchies, disciplinary codes and their own catalog of crimes.
Theirs is a world in which tradition carries as much weight as the law.
Many of them work in
fishing, the world's most dangerous profession, which claims more than 100,000 lives a year
.
More than 300 a day.
Conditions on many deep-sea fishing boats are very harsh.
Violence, traffic and abandonment are common.
The intensity, the injuries, the hours and the dirt of the job are Dickensian.
When the sea is rough, the swell rises up the sides of the ship and hits the crew below the knees.
The surf and the viscera of the fish turn the ground into a slippery skating rink.
Swaying erratically in rough seas and gale-force winds, the deck is often an obstacle course made up of jagged rigging, spinning capstans and tall stacks of 400-pound netting.
The infections are constant.
On these ships, antibiotics for infected wounds are in short supply.
Instead, captains are often well
stocked with amphetamines so the crew can work longer hours.
The oceans are a metaphor.
The deep sea has long connoted infinity, abundance in its purest form;
inexhaustible abundance.
Henry Schultes captured this insight in 1813 when he wrote: "Besides a highly productive soil, the seas around us offer an inexhaustible mine of wealth - a ripe crop to be gathered at any time of the year - without the labor of tillage, without the expense of seeds or fertilizer, without the payment of rents or taxes".
Crimes in the oceans.
The book
The Inexhaustible Sea
(The inexhaustible sea), written in 1954 by Hawthorne Daniel and Francis Minot, took up this idea: "
We are already beginning to understand that what it has to offer goes beyond the limits of our imagination: that one day men will learn that in its generosity the sea is inexhaustible
".
This perception has prevailed for centuries.
If the oceans are so vast and indestructible, if they can be replenished so limitlessly, why bother limiting what we take in or put into them?
The oceans are an escape route.
For centuries, life at sea has been romanticized as the ultimate expression of freedom: a refuge from life on land, clearly removed from government meddling, a chance to explore, to reinvent.
This narrative has been embedded deep in our DNA for thousands of years, beginning with stories of daring adventurers setting out to discover new lands.
Filled with all-consuming storms, doomed expeditions, shipwrecked sailors, and mad hunters, the canon of maritime literature offers a vibrant image of a watery wilderness and its untamed rogues.
And at least since Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
was first published
in 1870, people have dreamed of using this freedom to create permanent colonies above or under the ocean.
This tradition continues.
Today, a small group of libertarians who call themselves "seasteaders", after the farms of the American West, continue to pursue the dream of founding independent nations in international waters in the form of self-sufficient and autonomous maritime communities.
The oceans are a prison.
Far from offering an escape or a resource, ships on the high seas are for many workers a prison without bars.
Each year, tens of
thousands of men and boys are bought and sold as merchandise
and then trapped in slave-like conditions – even in shackles – on distant-water fishing boats, sometimes for years.
There is a feeling that mobile phones have become a kind of police force to counter these abuses in almost all aspects of life.
If something bad happens, it will most likely be recorded and posted on YouTube for the whole world to see, or at least that's the logic.
But that rarely happens at sea, where crews often work in bondage and don't have access to their phones.
With fuel prices rising and nearshore fishing declining, maritime labor researchers predict that more and more ships will venture out to sea, staying longer at sea, facilitating such abuses.
Captivity at sea also takes other forms.
Hundreds of seafarers are trapped annually in an aquatic purgatory.
The story follows a standard pattern.
Once their resources are exhausted, shipowners declare bankruptcy.
Cutting their losses, they abandon their ships, stranding crew members, who are often still on board, far out to sea or anchored in a foreign port.
Like the crew of the ghost ship legend The Flying Dutchman, these men are
left to fend for themselves or sit and wait
.
They generally lack the papers that allow them to disembark, the resources to return home, or the means to notify their families.
Every year thousands of these men languish at sea, breaking down physically and mentally.
The oceans are a supermarket.
The oceans offer global humanity a fundamental form of livelihood.
More than 50% of the animal protein consumed by people in some parts of the
developing world comes from fish and shellfish, the largest globally traded food product.
In 2020 its trade amounted to about 151,000 million dollars (140,000 million euros).
As fisheries historian Paul Greenberg has pointed out, treatment and conception of the oceans are influenced in part by how we think about fish.
Aquatic creatures have normally been considered a lower order of life.
In German, French, Spanish, and most Western European languages, shellfish is "fruit of the sea."
An entire ecosystem encompassing millions of species of creatures is grouped together in the popular consciousness, not as distinct animals, but as things we consume.
Meanwhile, we are taking too many things from this supermarket.
In the last 50 years, global seafood consumption has more than increased fivefold and the industry, led by China, has satisfied that appetite thanks to technological advances in refrigeration, engine efficiency, hull strength and radar.
Satellite navigation has also revolutionized the time that fishing boats can stay at sea and the distances they cover.
Industrial fishing has become so technologically advanced that it has become less of an art than a science, more of a gathering than a hunt.
The consequence is that more than a third of the world's reserves are overexploited.
The oceans are a dump
.
For centuries, humanity has believed that the seas are so vast that they have an unlimited capacity to absorb and metabolize everything, a perception that has given us license to dump almost anything into the sea.
Oil, sewage, corpses, chemical effluvia, garbage, military artillery, and even marine superstructures like oil rigs disappear into the ocean, as if swallowed by a black hole, never to be seen again.
The real crime of ocean dumping, though, is that for most of history it wasn't even considered a crime.
The law has changed, but customs persist.
Oil spills cause outrage, but they amount to far less than the amount of oil that is deliberately dumped into the water each year.
Every three years, ships intentionally dump more oil and mud into the sea than Exxon Valdez and BP combined.
Other sources of discharges come from above: Dissolved oxygen levels in the ocean have skyrocketed, not to mention the amount of carbon being dissolved.
And when rainwater passes over land, it picks up wastewater, fertilizer, detergent and microplastics and transports it directly to the world's oceans.
The oceans are a graveyard.
On land, the police can exhume a body to investigate murders.
On the high seas, as one maritime researcher put it, "the dead disappear forever."
The oceans are not only a graveyard, but also often offer the added benefit of impunity.
The killers on a ship can film themselves in the act, pose for celebratory selfies at the end of the bloodshed, and quite possibly get away with the crime, because few governments have the motivation or jurisdiction to do anything about it.
No evidence, no autopsy, no crime scene, no prosecution.
Thousands of migrants disappear at sea every year, many of them in the Mediterranean, for example, when they desperately try to cross into Europe from departure points in Libya, Morocco and Tunisia.
When the seas are rough or when people smugglers or Libyan coast guards capsize these crowded rafts, their passengers not only drown, but their bodies disappear into a blackness that the world does not know.
And so this sinister cycle continues.
The oceans are an economic reef.
Despite the "surveillance" of various anemic and often corrupt control agencies, the sea offers humanity a gold mine: a "every man for himself".
Unregulated fishing is the norm in international waters.
And the sea offers much more than food.
Oil and gas drillers, deep-sea miners, treasure hunters, wreck thieves, and biomedical seekers know this all too well.
The oceans are full of riches that much of the world believes are there to be exploited.
The oceans are a powder keg.
Since the oceans are a liminal space, where jurisdiction is less clear than on land and borders are drawn on water, this realm is also a border where clashes are more likely.
At sea, confrontations by delegation frequently take place, which usually consist of the detention by one country of a fishing vessel of another, alleging an incursion into its territory.
Geopolitical tests of sovereignty, power, and daring take place on these outer edges.
For this reason, the oceans are a tinderbox, the place where some political scientists predict the spark of the next great military conflict could occur.
The oceans are an organ.
Lungs of the planet, the oceans produce half of the oxygen we breathe.
But as we burn more fossil fuels and release more carbon into the air, much of it dissolves and suffocates the water, thus killing the planet.
Furthermore, the ocean has already absorbed 90% of the excess heat from global warming and is today 30% more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution.
The oceans are a highway.
The high seas are the highway of world trade.
At the center of modern maritime culture is the 17th-century belief in non-interventionism and a legal principle known as mare liberum, Latin for freedom of the sea, according to which in waters beyond the range of a gunshot canyon to shore, seafarers should be free to trade as they please, unencumbered by states, pirates, or anyone else.
The doctrine, which is a prerequisite for free trade, is regularly invoked to block tougher rules and increased law enforcement on the high seas.
In today's globalized economy, part of the reason that more than 70% of the products we consume travel by ship is that the high seas are clearly less encumbered with borders and bureaucracies.
The oceans are a weapons depot.
With more ships sailing than ever before, the oceans are also more heavily armed and dangerous.
Starting in 2008, when pirates began to operate in wider swaths of the ocean, many merchant ships hired private security, and their forces soon outpaced the police capabilities of governments.
Today a private security force valued at 20 billion dollars (18.4 billion euros) operates at sea, and when its members kill, governments rarely respond, because no country has jurisdiction in international waters.
The arms race at sea has intensified to the point where guns and guards are so ubiquitous that a specialized industry of floating armories has sprung up.
Part storage depots and part barracks, these vessels, located in high-risk areas of international waters, house hundreds of assault rifles, small arms and ammunition, along with guards who sometimes wait for months in decrepit conditions for their next deployment. .
The oceans are a window.
The high seas offer a glimpse of human nature.
They allow us to see the line between the existence of civilization and the absence of it.
They show us how thin that line is and what lies on the other side.
Largely out of the reach of governments and law enforcement, the oceans demonstrate how people behave when they can do as they please and get away with it.
It's not always bad.
Sometimes it's heroic.
But it's almost always illegal.
The high seas is a lawless ocean.
The oceans are an emergency.
Despite its importance and breathtaking beauty, the sea is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities.
Too big to police and without clear international authority, the vast regions of treacherous waters are home to rampant criminality and exploitation.
Acidification is decimating most of the world's coral reefs.
Most of the world's fishing grounds are depleted.
Overfishing, often fueled by government subsidies, means smaller catches near shore and an increasingly desperate industry.
One in five fish comes from pirate fishing boats.
Hundreds of stowaways and emigrants die each year at sea.
Every three days at least one ship sinks somewhere in the world.
The oceans are an opportunity.
The oceans are not just a sandy underworld, but a place of impossible beauty and wonder.
They represent an opportunity for salvation.
Can governments put the common good above self-interest and cooperate to manage the high seas?
The recent UN treaty on biodiversity has represented a step in this direction.
Could the oceans offer opportunities to mitigate the climate crisis?
Protecting and restoring ocean habitats such as seagrass beds, salt marshes, and mangroves, along with their associated food webs, for example, can sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at up to four times the rate of terrestrial forests.
Offshore wind has the potential to contribute more than 7.
000 terawatt hours per year of clean energy in the United States alone, nearly double the amount of electricity used in the United States in 2014. Cargo ships and passenger ferries emit nearly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions greenhouse, including black carbon;
a particularly dirty type of smoke.
Decarbonizing the world's maritime fleet would be roughly equivalent to cutting all of Germany's carbon emissions.
An essential first step in countering these many problems is to broaden our view of the oceans.
Dispatches from the Outlaw Ocean is a documentary series that offers a sober tour of this untamed frontier.
A colorful cast of characters navigates these chronicles, from traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, to vigilant conservationists and elusive poachers, to clandestine oil dumps and chained slaves.
The goal of journalism is to stoke the urgency and help the global public reimagine the oceans not as something taken for granted, a bottomless garbage can, an eternally self-sufficient resource that we use to fill our bellies or fill our wallets. , but as a vast habitat that we should respect,
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