Review - The High Seas, by Olive Heffernan

High crimes on the High Seas – a review of The High Seas; Ambition, Power and Greed on the Unclaimed Ocean by Olive Heffernan, Profile Books

More than two-thirds of our oceans are beyond national boundaries. Olive Heffernan, an experienced ocean scientist turned campaigning writer, explains in this powerful and detailed book, that the world out there on the High Seas is lawless and dangerous.

She describes a free-for-all, with pirate fishing, indiscriminate seabed mining for rare metals, batty ideas to tow icebergs to Arabia, the shipping industry dumping its waste at sea, vast gyres of our plastic trash, even space junk being allowed to crash into an isolated zone of the Pacific without any regulation.

The madness of the current ocean exploitation is epitomised by the fact that the vast majority of high-seas fisheries are profitless. Long-lining for high-value catch such as tuna and sharks still makes a buck, but bottom trawling and squid jigging are no longer cost-positive and are only kept going by vast government subsidies.

The logic to this results in even more absurd behaviour. To keep the fishing industry going and justify all the subsidies and investment, we are now targeting the abundance of the twilight zone, which is believed to contain a staggering 95 per cent of all ocean fish, if measured by weight alone.

Norway is leading this charge into the dark, with extensive investment into experimental deep-water fishing, funded by the vast profits it has accrued from oil and gas drilling. However, there is one obvious problem – the slow-growing, long-living target species such as lanternfish and pearlsides, once caught, do not quickly replenish. This will not be a sustainable fishery, rather an extermination programme similar to the slaughter of the buffaloes of America’s great plains.

Many of the experts on the conservation of the High Seas actually describe the current oversight of our oceans as the Wild West – a lawless rush to exploit whatever natural resources can be grabbed. Not surprisingly, this attracts criminals. It is estimated that one in every five fish we now eat is caught illegally and ‘pirate fishing’ generates illicit profits of more than $25 billion a year.

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This is by far the biggest wildlife crime on the planet. It is not only the fish that are victims. According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, 85 per cent of Indonesian workers on Chinese off-shore fishing fleets have experienced abusive working and living conditions, with most witnessing or experiencing physical violence.

There are many reasons why we should care about our oceans. One of the most pressing is that they currently soak up about a quarter of all fossil fuel
emissions, store 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, and hold around 20 times more CO2 than all terrestrial plants and soil.

As Heffernan points out, the deep ocean is now considered our best bet when it comes to finding a place for storing the CO2 we are going to have to extract from our atmosphere.

Not only do we need a healthy ocean to regulate our atmosphere, it is vital for human survival on our planet. Our health is dependent on the health of our seas. But how do we regulate and then police this vast global commons?

Heffernan is not a despondent pessimist. While she details the scale of the problems we face, she argues that positive change is possible. There are relentless efforts to push through a High Seas treaty. Conservation does work – our oceans have an impressive power to bounce back.

In a generation, we managed to virtually eliminate whaling. Drift nets longer than 2.5km have been banned since 1993. Technology is getting better at tracking and monitoring rogue fishing fleets.

The existential question this important book asks is, can we do all that is needed, in time? As the ever-hopeful Sylvia Earle insists, and this important book confirms, we know what the problems are, and we know what we need to do.