34 | New Scientist | 19 February 2022Views Culture
Book
A Blue New Deal:
Why we need a new
politics for the ocean
Chris Armstrong
Yale University Press (22 February)THE oceans regulate the climate,
provide us with food and produce
at least half the world’s oxygen.
And how do we repay them? By
overharvesting their limited
resources and polluting them
with oil, plastics and noise.
Chris Armstrong, a political
theorist at the University of
Southampton, UK, says that if
we are to save the seas, something
has to change. In A Blue New Deal,
he argues that the institutions and
laws that govern our oceans are
too fragmented, too weak and too
amenable to vested interests to
protect the marine environment
from further destruction. They
are also failing to address the
inequalities that exist between
rich and poor nations, he says.
He makes his case for a new
approach by exploring the messwe are in. Historically, ocean
governance has been shaped by
two contrary ideas: the freedom
of the high seas, espoused in
1609 by Dutch philosopher Hugo
Grotius in his book The Free Sea;
and the more familiar idea of
enclosure, by which a coastal state
is entitled to exclusive control
and enjoyment of its immediate
marine environment.
Grotius’s vision of an oceanic
free-for-all would allow anyone
with the wherewithal to exploit
an ocean resource to do so as
much and as often as they
desire. This was a not entirely
unreasonable position in the
17th century, given the limited
technology available at the time.
Clearly, though, it is no longer
workable given that only a
handful of rich nations can afford
the expensive technologies
required for seabed mining
and mineral extraction.
The arguments against
enclosure are perhaps best
explained by reference to a 1968
article by ecologist Garrett Hardin,
in which he said that “Freedom
in a commons brings ruin to all”,The rules exclude landlocked
nations, including nine of the
world’s 12 poorest countries,
from a share of the spoils. But
they don’t prevent richer nations
from licensing the rights to exploit
the EEZs of countries too poor to
do so themselves.
And, while the law gave every
state-owned atoll, rock and island
an exclusive patch of sea to
exploit, many belong to former
colonial powers and other
powerful nations. As a result, the
US, the UK, France, Russia and
Australia now command the
resources of more than 45 million
square kilometres of ocean.
What can be done? Perhaps
a version of the treaty that, in
1961, established Antarctica as a
place of peace and international
cooperation – a commons in
other words. Shortly after, the
UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967
did the same for the worlds
beyond our own. It isn’t beyond
our legal capacities, Armstrong
reasons, to govern our oceans
along principles of common
management, benefit sharing
and even technology transfer
between rich and poor nations.
Where Armstrong comes
unstuck is in his ideas for
enforcement. It is all very well
to dream up a “World Ocean
Authority” whose deliberations
no state would have the power
to veto or depart from. But what
omnipotent and omniscient power
will set up and drive all this selfless
sharing? Not, I would bet, the
destitute seafarers of the Gulf of
Thailand; nor the blue whales and
other non-human stakeholders of
our increasingly stressed oceans. ❚Simon Ings is a writer based in Londonusually expressed as the “tragedy
of the commons”.
The problem in applying this
to the sea, as Armstrong points
out, is that it isn’t necessarily
true. The historical record is full
of examples of resources held in
common and governed equitably
for hundreds of years. In his view,
“the real tragedy for individual
‘commoners’ was enclosure
itself, which saw them being
evicted from the land by
wealthy landowners”.Armstrong laments that the
same issue plagues the enclosure
of the seas, with rich nations
enjoying the status of wealthy
overlords. This, he blames on
the 1994 UN Convention on the
Law of the Sea, which established
exclusive economic zones (EEZs)
extending for up to 200 nautical
miles from nearly every shore.ST
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Sharing the seas
The question of who owns the oceans and who gets to enjoy their
spoils has more than a whiff of colonialism about it, finds Simon IngsWho has the right to drill
the seabed for oil, gas or
other valuable resources?“ Only a handful of rich
nations can afford the
expensive technologies
required for seabed
mining and extraction”