Who Rules the Waves?: Piracy, Overfishing and Mining the Oceans

by Denise Russell

With piracy raging in the Indian Ocean, international disputes over undersea oil and gas, and chronic overfishing, the oceans have rarely been subject to such varied and environmentally damaging conflict outside a world war. In Who Rules the Waves? Denise Russell gives us a rare insight into these issues and how they could be resolved. International law states that a coastal country has territorial rights for 12 miles into the sea beyond its coastline, and economic rights for 200 miles, but in practice many countries have virtually no control over their own waters, and there is no international agency powerful enough to settle disputes. Russell provides a thorough examination of the politics of the sea, showing that without a radical change in ocean governance, accelerating climate change and overuse of the sea's resources is likely to have catastrophic effects.

Genres: History

208 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2010

Reviews

[rafael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reminds me of that episode on The Good Place where--spoiler alert?--Simone tells Eleanor that humans still haven't dealt with that very tribal, protectionist us-versus-them mentality.

So yeah, the more I read books like this and engage in development-related research, the more it becomes clear to me that if business-as-usual, global capitalism doesn't kill us, humanity's penchant for nationalism and factionalism will. The two are, of course, intimately related.

Regulating and caring for the ocean--the second largest commons on earth after the atmosphere--is made incredibly difficult by the (current) sociopolitical reality that humans are sorted into discrete groups based on their affiliation with a particular nation-state. Phrased less pedantically, I see no end in sight for the squabbling that occurs between countries for control of territory and resources, like fish or seabed oil and gas deposits.

Anyway, chapters 2 (on ocean acidification and the sea's role as a carbon sink) and 8 (on challenging Western conceptions of ownership and property) were very enlightening. Definitely focus on those two chapters, especially if you don't have time to read the whole thing.