The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

Name: The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
SKU: 75146
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4.5 | 1,120 ratings

Price: 19.69

Last update: 07-28-2024

Top reviews from the United States

Mark Stevens

Come Sail Away

Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2022

“For centuries, humanity has viewed the ocean as a metaphor for infinity. The assumption was –and frankly still is for many people—that the enormity of the sea came with a limitless ability to absorb and metabolize all. This vastness is what lends the ocean deity-like potential. And more narrowly, it is also what has provided us over the years with the license to dump virtually anything offshore. Oil, sewage, corpses, chemical effluvium, garbage, military ordinance, and even at-sea superstructures like oil rigs could disappear into the ocean, as if swallowed up by a black hole, never to be seen again.”

That’s the opening paragraph from a chapter called “Waste Away,” about halfway through Oultaw Ocean, Ian Urbina’s relentless reporting about all the way the oceans are being abused, ignored, trashed, and widely and wildly exploited.

Overfishing. Illegal fishing. Illegal whaling. Boat (giant ship) thefts. Slavery. Child labor. Forced labor. Weapons trafficking. Illegal dumping. Cruise ship polluters and cruise ship cheaters. And murder. Drawn from his reporting for The New York Times (Urbina had a regular series called The Outlaw Ocean), the book is a harrowing portrait of miserable working conditions, inhumane treatment of ship crews, and the hundred or so reasons why there is no way for law enforcement to make a difference.

Outlaw Ocean looks at seafood supply chains, the lack of transparency in holding shipping firms accountable for their catches or nefarious business practices, and into the murky waters of trying to crack down. (Spoiler alert: it ain’t happening.)

Urbina’s sea legs are as strong as his reporting. Of the five years’ work represented in these pages, he spent three at sea. Outlaw Ocean’s last 100 pages are notes on his sources. Urbina crisscrosses the oceans to illustrate the issues, beginning with the cat-and-mouse chase of the Thunder, a notorious Nigerian-flagged ship that was pursued for 110 days by, among others, the Sea Shepherd fleet. The Thunder had earned a spot on a list of offenders known as the “Bandit 6” and was the subject of a “Purple Notice” arrest warrant from Interpol for repeated overfishing of toothfish, a.k.a. “Chilean sea bass” after a Los Angeles wholesaler gave the fish a more palatable image.

The scale of the poaching is mind-boggling.

“Typically, the Thunder set out on two fishing expeditions on the Antarctic for six months each. A catch of 100 tons per trip was enough to break even. Some years it caught more than seven times that amount, according to port records where it off-loaded its ill-gotten gains. For most of the 1990s, the Thunder's seafood piracy put the ship on several blacklists run by marine conservation groups and various governments, and it was banned from fishing in Antarctica in 2006. And yet surveillance planes, satellite firms, and fishing boats often reported spotting it tooth fishing in the Southern Ocean. Among the Bandit 6, the Thunder stood out because of the size of its illicit profits: Interpol estimated that its owners had earned more than the others—over $76 million in illicit fish sales in the prior decade.”

Yeah, one ship.

Throughout the accounts, Urbina underscores how technology has helped fishing boats boost the size of their hauls. He makes a strong case that our attitude about the sea’s bounty—that it’s endless—leads to the global equivalent of shrugged shoulders when it comes to enforcing what laws exist. And he repeatedly illustrates the relatively easy methods for ship owners to dodge being caught, let alone prosecuted.

Urbina’s reporting on the ways in which fish stocks are abused, including the “research” guise that Japan uses to illegally harvest whales, is alarming. His reporting on the labor conditions for workers is horrifying.

But it’s the murder case that is, frankly, the most mind-blowing. The case started with a mobile phone found in the back seat of a taxi in Fiji. A video on the phone showed four men in the ocean amid the wreckage of an overturned wooden boat. While other boats float nearby, nobody helps them. On camera, in fact, the men are shot one at a time. The water around each man turns bloody.

The killings, however, go unreported. It’s as if there’s an unspoken pact of silence among the onlookers (and shooters). It’s a parallel universe of amorality. In fact, had there been no video in the backseat of the taxi, the crime would have never surfaced. The video prompts the Fijian police to go through the motions of appearing to investigate, which they do. But it’s Urbina and others who get to the story behind the video—an encounter in 2012 on the Indian Ocean between Taiwanese-owned tuna ships and young Pakistani fishermen who came too close. The Taiwanese claimed the Pakistanis were pirates, which of course still does not justify the cold-blooded murders. Urbina follows the long trail of governmental indifference toward the crime.

Urbina profiles maritime “repo” men, tells the story of a non-profit organization that performs abortions in international waters to help women avoid prosecution in their home country (Mexico), and he chronicles the efforts of tiny Palau to protect their waters from poachers. Urbina’s approach is all-encompassing.

“I began my explorations of the sea with investigations of the exploitation of men and how life and work at sea damage them,” he writes. “Overtime, I realized the abused fisherman I talked to and the illegal fishing vessels they worked on were just one tiny part of a vast ecosystem. Looking at exploitation of the ocean required looking at the ocean itself dash not as a passive backdrop, a canvas for bad behavior, but as a living Organism in its own right, a creature that men and women skate across the surface of, like the sea lice that cling to the skin of a whale. It wasn't enough for me to study the lice; I needed to understand the whale as well and how its parasitic passengers were making it sick.”

The oceans will not “absorb and metabolize” all the ways in which we abuse them today—that much is very clear. Urbina closes with a chapter “Reining in The Outlaw Ocean” with small steps individuals can take to support the right organizations and buy the right fish.

Think your grocery store salmon or frozen “Chilean sea bass” is expensive? It’s hard to imagine the price of retail fish if it was supplied by businesses, from catch to delivery, that paid a living wage and operated in an ethical manner.

Outlaw Ocean goes deep. Highly recommended.

S. Bassin

A useful, but dispiriting story

Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2020

This book makes clear what might have been suspected—that bad things happen at sea and there are few consequences for the perpetrators. The stories are horrific. What can be done about it is a difficult question. Establishing civilized norms outside of healthy, enlightened states has proven difficult on land. At sea is even harder. There will always be self-interested reasons for people to behave very badly and there is rarely anyone or any government willing to tackle this behavior. Especially, when it occurs iat sea

Alice Friedemann

Really interesting book about overfishing, piracy, enslaved crews, and much more

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2020

This is such a depressing post, on the other hand, if you are upset by fisheries disappearing and the enslaved fishermen trapped for years on scuzzy boats doing the work, peak oil will cheer you up. Only then will the slaughter be forced to stop, and the sooner the better, because warming oceans, acidification, declining oxygenation from eutrophication, and toxins favor jellyfish and threaten a tipping point where they’ll take over the oceans and fish grow even scarcer. Globally, so many fish have been caught that fishing boats have to venture farther just to break even. Fuel costs typically eat up at least 60% of a long-haul vessel’s earnings, double what it did two decades ago.

This book is about much more than overfishing. It’s also about the hard life and culture of the poor men on fishing boats, the corruption and bribery at ports, stolen ships and those who try to find and take them back, the many ways cruise lines pollute oceans, and massive amounts of nuclear and other toxic wastes are secretly dumped. How whales are now outsmarting fishing boats and taking fish off of their long-lines, while ships take so much krill it is decimating their populations and the food whales eat. And much more.

Some material I found interesting:

Ocean boundaries are not clear, which is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion. Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing.

Scientists estimate that more than ninety million sharks are killed every year for their fins. By 2017, roughly a third of all shark species were nearing extinction. Sharks are keystone species: a reduction in their population can collapse an entire food web all the way down to reef habitats. Without the apex predator, too many smaller fish survive and eat too many of the microorganisms that sustain the reefs. Enforcing rules against shark poaching doesn’t just protect the sharks; it gives the reefs a fighting chance at survival.

Finding a single ship in the millions of square miles of open sea was hard enough. Scofflaw ships like the Thunder deftly used the tangled skein of confusing, conflicting maritime laws, difficult-to-enforce treaties, and deliberately lax national regulations to evade the law and shed their identities. With a couple of phone calls, payoffs of a few thousand dollars, and a can of paint, the ship could, as it had in the past, take a new name and register with a new flag as it steamed to its next fishing grounds. The 2,200-horsepower trawler changed names more than a dozen times in its 45-year career. During that time, it flew nearly as many flags, including the colors of the U.K., Mongolia, the Seychelles, Belize, and Togo. The Thunder’s name and port registry were not painted on its hull. Instead, they were painted on a metal sign hung from its stern, to be swapped out quickly if needed. Sailors called these signs “James Bond license plates. By keeping its locational transponder, or AIS, turned off, the Thunder could avoid being tracked. It was a simple drill. Time and again, it slipped into port, off-loaded its catch to complicit or unwitting buyers, refueled, and was on its way before anyone noticed.

Over the past century, however, technology has transformed fishing from a type of hunting into something more akin to farming. With highly mechanized ships that operate more like floating factories, the industry became brutally efficient at stripping the seas of virtually everything in them. By 2015, about 94 million tons of fish were caught each year, more than the weight of the entire human population.

Submarine combat propelled innovation in sonar, helping illuminate the dark fathoms. Finding fish became more a science of spreadsheets than an art of dead reckoning. Subzero onboard freezers freed fishermen from their race against melting refrigerator ice. Innovations in plastics and monofilaments lengthened fishing lines from feet to miles. Lightweight polymer-based nets enabled super-trawlers to rake the ocean with a mesh of steel cables strung between them.

As the size and strength of nets increased, so too did the amount of bycatch that was inadvertently killed and thrown back. More than half the global catch is now tossed overboard dead, or it is ground up and pelletized to feed pigs, poultry, and farmed fish. These technological advances, as well as the industrialization of fishing, are a big reason why catches from the high seas rose 700 percent in the last half a century. They also partly explain why many of the world’s fish stocks are at the brink of collapse.

Crews only get paid if they catch enough. This means tensions run high on the boats, and captains fear their crews as intensely as they drive them. Language and cultural barriers add further divisions; most boats have three Thai officers (the captain, the engineer, and the first mate), while the rest are foreign migrants. When shorthanded, captains sometimes took desperate measures and drug or kidnap men.
The karaoke bars in Ranong usef one type of trafficked migrant to entrap another type of trafficked migrant, smf the sex workers and their indebted clients were both, quite often, children.

In Kota Kinabalu, I met a 38-year-old Cambodian deckhand who said that during his year of captivity on a fishing boat he had been temporarily dropped off for several weeks on a “prison island,”, one of thousands of mostly uninhabited atolls in the South China Sea, where fishing captains routinely disembarked captive workers, sometimes for weeks, while their vessels were taken to port for repair. Typically, the captain would leave the crew with a guard who was equipped with water, canned goods, and means to fish. The guard ensured that the men were fed and that none of them tried to leave with another boat.

What will happen to offshore oil platforms and wind turbines? The metal on these structures corrodes and leaches dangerous pollution over time. Renewable-energy firms have started planning wind farms, wave-energy converters, and floating solar panels in international waters. Who will be responsible for cleaning up the contraptions if they do not work, if their companies go bankrupt, or when they become obsolete?

Gravity O'Monk

Varied and intense storytelling - a crazy world we never see

Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2019

Based on his earlier New York Times series, journalist Ian Urbina has brought together tales of the modern sea that capture the danger and beauty of the ocean. Focused more on people (those forced into slavery; the young, brave volunteers chasing justice; crazy freelance soldiers) than the fish and natural beauty of the ocean, Urbina has written the book that captures the biggest part of the earth we know so very little about, traveling across all of the oceans at great risk to detail the plight of the millions of people at sea. As Urbina writes about getting chased out of town, or needing to bluff his way onto a boat, you get a real sense as a reader for the lengths that he went to in order to tell the tale. This book is a sobering, but fun, read -- more like a crime novel and travelogue.

Check out Urbina on YouTube and on his site for footage from the reporting trips, which provide a great deal of context to the beauty of the ocean, and faces to the tales in the book.

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