Why we need to think about the oceans differently

Two-thirds of the planet is covered by water, and much of that space is ungoverned. Human rights and environmental crimes occur often and with impunity because the oceans are sprawling and the laws governing them are difficult to enforce.

The global public is woefully unaware of what happens at sea. Journalism about this realm is rare. The result: Most landlubbers have little idea of how reliant we are on the people who work the water. Fully half of the world’s population now lives within 100 miles of the sea. And yet most people, with sedentary occupations and landlocked lifestyles, conceive of this space as a liquid desert that we occasionally fly over, a canvas of lighter and darker blues.

Part of the problem is in our heads. The oceans are typically and correctly viewed as a marine habitat. But they are, in fact, also much more. The oceans are a workplace, a metaphor, an escape, a prison, a grocery store, a trash can, a cemetery, a bonanza, a tinderbox, an organ, a highway, a depot, a window, an emergency and, above all, an opportunity. Unless we reckon with this truth, unless we reimagine this domain more broadly, we will continue to fall short in governing, protecting and understanding it.

1. The oceans are a workplace. More than 50 million people work offshore, and these workers make up a fascinating demographic. A transient tribe of people, they have their own lingo, etiquette, superstitions, social hierarchy, codes of discipline and catalog of crimes. Theirs is a world where lore holds as much sway as law. Many of these people work in fishing, which is the world’s most dangerous profession, causing more than 100,000 fatalities per year, or more than 300 a day. Conditions on many distant-water fishing boats are notorious; violence, trafficking and neglect are common. The intensity, injuries, long hours and dirtiness of the work are extreme. In rough weather, sea swells climb the sides of the ship, clipping the crew below the knees. Ocean spray and fish innards make the floor skating-rink slippery. Seesawing erratically from the rough seas and gale winds, the deck is often an obstacle course of jagged tackle, spinning winches and tall stacks of 500-pound nets. Infections are a constant problem. While antibiotics for rancid wounds are rare, captains often stock plenty of amphetamines to help the crews work longer.

2. The oceans are a metaphor. This place offshore has long connoted infinity, self-replenishing abundance, endless plenty. Author Henry Schultes captured this notion in 1813 when he wrote, “In addition to a highly productive soil, the seas which surround us afford an inexhaustible mine of wealth — a harvest, ripe for gathering at every time of the year — without the labour of tillage, without the expense of seed or manure, without the payment of rent or taxes.” A 1954 book, “The Inexhaustible Sea,” by Hawthorne Daniel and Francis Minot, also promoted this view: “We are already beginning to understand that what it has to offer extends beyond the limits of our imagination — that someday men will learn that in its bounty the sea is inexhaustible.” The intellectual history of the concept of oceans reveals part of why the space has been taken for granted for so long. If the sea is so vast and indestructible, if it can replenish itself so boundlessly, why bother checking ourselves over the pace of what we take from it or dump into it?

3. The oceans are an escape. For centuries, life at sea has been romanticized as the ultimate expression of freedom — a refuge from landlocked life, far removed from government meddling, a chance to explore, to reinvent. This narrative has been locked deep within our DNA for eons, starting with stories of daring adventurers setting off to discover new lands. Full of devouring storms, doomed expeditions, shipwrecked sailors and maniacal hunters, the canon of sea literature offers a vibrant picture of a watery wilderness and its untamed rogues. Like birds on the Galapagos Islands, these men, over millennia, had done mostly as they pleased, evolving largely without predators. The surprising fact is that they still do. At least since 1870, the year Jules Verne published “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” people have dreamed of using this freedom to create permanent colonies on or under the ocean. This tradition continues. Today a small set of libertarians who call themselves “seasteaders,” named after the homesteads of the American West, still chase the dream of founding independent nations in international waters in the form of self-sufficient, self-governing, sea-bound communities.

4. The oceans are a prison. Far from escape or recourse, ships at sea are for many workers a jail without bars. Through debt bondage, trickery or, in some instances, shackling, tens of thousands of men and boys, typically on distant-water fishing ships, are bought and sold like chattel, stuck sometimes for years in bondage. There is a growing sense that cellphones have become a kind of police force to counter such abuses in almost all aspects of life. If something bad is happening, the theory goes, it will likely be captured and posted online. But that rarely occurs at sea, where indentured servitude is common. With rising fuel prices and fewer fish close to shore, maritime labor researchers predict that more ships will resort to venturing farther out to sea, staying offshore longer, making this type of mistreatment more likely. At-sea captivity comes in other forms too. Hundreds of seafarers are abandoned annually in a watery purgatory. The backstory follows a standard pattern: Having stretched their resources to the limit, cash-strapped shipowners declare bankruptcy. Cutting their losses, they disavow their ships, stranding crew members who are usually still on board, far off at sea or anchored in a foreign port. These men are left to roam or sit and wait. Usually they lack immigration papers to come ashore, the resources to get home or the means to get word to their families. Every year there are thousands of these men languishing at sea, slowly falling apart, physically and mentally.

5. The oceans are a grocery store. Clearly, the oceans offer a vital form of sustenance. More than 50% of the animal protein people consume in some parts of the developing world comes from seafood, which happens also to be a highly valuable product. Seafood is the largest globally traded food commodity by value in the world, at roughly $151 billion in 2020. But, as writer Paul Greenberg has pointed out, the treatment and conception of the oceans is partly influenced by how we think about fish. Aquatic creatures represent a lower order of life. In German, French, Spanish and most other Western European languages, the word “seafood” translates to “sea fruit.” An entire ecosystem that encompasses millions of species of creatures is lumped together in the popular consciousness, consisting not of distinct animals but as things we consume. Meanwhile, we are taking way too much from this grocery store. During the past 50 years, global seafood consumption has risen more than fivefold, and the industry, led by China, has satisfied that appetite through technological advances in refrigeration, engine efficiency, hull strength and radar. Satellite navigation has also revolutionized the length of time that fishing vessels can stay at sea and the distances they travel. Industrial fishing has advanced technologically so much that it has become less an art than a science, more a harvest than a hunt. The consequence is that more than a third of the world’s stocks are overfished.

6. The oceans are a trash can. For centuries, humanity has seen the seas as so vast as to have a limitless ability to absorb and metabolize all. This perception has provided us over the years with the license to dump virtually anything offshore. Oil, sewage, corpses, chemical effluvium, garbage, military ordnance and even at-sea superstructures like oil rigs could disappear into the ocean, as if swallowed up by a black hole. The real crime of ocean dumping, though, is that for most of history, it was not even seen as a crime. The law has since changed, but habits persist. Accidents like spills evoke much greater outrage. But for all the attention paid to oil spills, far more oil is dumped in the water on purpose. Every three years, ships intentionally dump more oil and sludge at sea than the Exxon Valdez and BP spills combined. Other sources of dumping come from above: The ocean’s levels of dissolved oxygen have skyrocketed, not to mention the amount of carbon that gets dissolved. And as rainfall crosses land, it picks up sewage, fertilizers, detergents and microplastics and carries them straight into the world’s oceans. This nutrient runoff feeds excessive algal and microbial growth that creates “dead zones,” some the size of Scotland.

7. The oceans are a cemetery. On land, police can dig up graves to investigate murders. Offshore, “the dead stay gone,” as one maritime researcher put it. Not only are the oceans a burying ground, but they also usually bring the added benefit of impunity. Murderers on a ship can film themselves in the act, pose for celebratory selfies at the end of bloodletting, and quite possibly get away with the crime since few governments have the motivation or jurisdiction to do anything about it. No evidence, no autopsy, no crime scene, no prosecution. In some places in the world, such as the Mediterranean Sea, thousands of migrants annually cross desperately from launching points in Libya, Morocco and Tunisia to Europe. When rough seas or human traffickers or the Libyan Coast Guard overturn these crowded rafts, their passengers don’t just drown. Their bodies disappear into a blackness that conceals world notice. And so the sinister cycle continues.

8. The oceans are a bonanza. Is it thievery to take unchecked amounts of something from an area that belongs to everyone? No, it’s called unregulated fishing, which happens to be the norm in international waters. And yet there is far more on offer at sea than food. Oil and gas drillers, seabed miners, treasure hunters, wreck thieves and biomedical prospectors know this all too well. Notwithstanding the “oversight” of various anemic and often corrupt oversight bodies, the high seas generally represent a free-for-all.

9. The oceans are a geopolitical tinderbox. Because 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 frontier where clashes are more likely. Proxy fights happen frequently at sea, typically with one country arresting the fishing ship of another country, claiming an incursion into its territory. Geopolitical tests of sovereignty, might and daring happen on these outer edges. For this reason, the oceans are a powder keg and the place where some political scientists predict that the spark of a next big military explosion might occur.

10. The oceans are an organ. The lungs of the globe, the oceans produce half of the oxygen we breathe. But our smoking habit has caught up with us in the form of the climate crisis. And as fossil fuels dump more carbon into the air, much of it dissolves and suffocates the water, thus killing the planet. The ocean has also already absorbed 90% of the excess heat from global warming, and it has become 30% more acidic since the Industrial Revolution.

11. The oceans are a highway. The high seas are the expressway of world commerce. At the core of modern maritime culture is a 17th century belief in noninterventionism and a legal concept known as “mare liberum,” Latin for “freedom of the sea.” The idea is that in the waters beyond the range of a cannon shot to shore, mariners should be unfettered by governments, pirates or anyone else to pursue commerce. A prerequisite to free trade, mare liberum is regularly invoked to block stricter rules and more 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 much less constricted by borders and bureaucracies.

12. The oceans are a military depot. Plied by more ships than ever before, the oceans are also more armed and dangerous. Many merchant vessels hired private security starting in 2008 as pirates began operating across larger swaths of the ocean, outstripping governments’ policing abilities. A $20 billion private security force operates at sea, and when these mercenaries kill, governments rarely respond because no country holds jurisdiction in international waters. The arms race at sea has escalated to the point that guns and guards are so ubiquitous that a niche industry of floating armories has emerged. Part storage depot and part bunkhouse, these vessels, positioned in high-risk areas of international waters, house hundreds of assault rifles, small arms and ammunition, along with guards who wait sometimes for months in decrepit conditions for their next deployment.

13. The oceans are a window. The high seas offer a glimpse into human nature. They let us look at the line between civilization and the lack of it. They show us how thin that line is and what’s on the other side. Since so much of the high seas is beyond 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. This is not always bad. Sometimes it’s heroic. But almost always, it’s extralegal — thus, “The Outlaw Ocean.”

14. The oceans are an emergency. For all its breathtaking beauty, the sea is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. Too big to police and under no clear international authority, immense regions of treacherous water play host 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 boosted by government subsidies, means smaller catches closer to shore and an industry becoming more desperate. One out of every five fish comes from pirate fishing vessels. Hundreds of stowaways and migrants are killed at sea annually. Somewhere in the world, at least one ship sinks every three days.

15. The oceans are an opportunity. Not just a gritty netherworld, the oceans are a place of impossible beauty and marvel. They represent a chance for salvation. Can governments find common good above self-interest and cooperate toward managing the high seas? The recent U.N. treaty on biodiversity was a step in this direction. Might the oceans next offer opportunities to mitigate the climate crisis? For example, protecting and restoring ocean habitats such as seagrasses, salt marshes and mangroves, as well as their associated food webs, can sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at rates up to four times higher than terrestrial forests can. Offshore wind energy has the potential to contribute more than 7,000 terawatt hours per year of clean energy in the United States alone — roughly double the amount of electricity used in the U.S. in 2014. Cargo vessels and passenger ferries produce nearly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, including black carbon. Decarbonizing the global shipping fleet would be roughly equivalent to cutting all of Germany’s carbon emissions.

A first and essential step is to broaden our thinking about the oceans. “Dispatches From the Outlaw Ocean” is a documentary series that offers an intimate tour through this untamed frontier. It chronicles a colorful cast of characters, from traffickers and mercenaries to conservationists and oil dumpers to shackled slaves. A key goal of journalism is to stoke a sense of urgency and help the public reimagine the oceans as something other than a bottomless trash can. It’s a vast habitat that we should leave alone, not a workplace needing regulation; it’s less a grocery store than a library or a cathedral, a precious, protected common.