Ep. 26 – Ian Urbina on the Outlaw Ocean

Ian Urbina aboard an Indonesian patrol ship called the Macan as it chases several Vietnamese fishing ships in a contested area of the South China Sea. Fishing boats in the South China Sea are notorious for using “sea slaves,” migrants forced offshore by debt or other illicit means. 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats. Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.

Over 40 percent of the Earth’s surface is open ocean that is over 200 miles from the nearest shore. These international waters exist outside national jurisdiction and almost entirely free of rule of law. World-renowned investigative journalist Ian Urbina spent five years reporting about what life is like for the humans who roam these seas and about the astonishing array of extra-legal activity that goes on there. Urbina travelled to every continent and every ocean — often hundreds of miles offshore — to report stories from this vast legal void. These narratives are compiled in his best-selling book, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.

On the high seas, environmental crimes — such as overfishing and illegal dumping — are closely linked to human rights abuses on vessels around the world. Video by The Outlaw Ocean Project.

In his years of non-stop voyages, Urbina risked his life to bear witness to the inhumanity faced by humans in these waters. He witnessed shackled slaves on fishing boats, joined high-speed chases by vigilante conservationists, rode out violent storms, and observed near mutinies. He lived on a Thai vessel where Cambodian boys worked 20-hour days processing fish on a slippery deck, shadowed a Tanzanian stowaway who was cast overboard and left to die by an angry crew, and met men who had been drugged, kidnapped and forced to cast nets for catch that would become pet food and livestock feed. These stories and many others together make The Outlaw Ocean, a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a riveting portrait of a sprawling and often dystopian world where humans, animals and the environment are regularly treated with depravity. 

Urbina is transferred up the coast by local, armed Somali police forces. “For all its breathtaking beauty,” Urbina writes, “the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law — often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes — is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.” Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.

Few people know much about life on the high seas, and fewer people witness it firsthand. Yet we all depend on the fishing, oil and shipping industries from which these dark tales of human behavior at sea emerge. Our complicity makes The Outlaw Ocean all the more important and urgent. Urbina has worked as an investigative reporter for The New York Times for over two decades, and is a contributing writer to The Atlantic. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News and a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Several of his stories have been adapted into major feature films, and one was nominated for an Emmy Award. In this episode, we speak with him about the sprawling and dystopian world he chronicles in his acclaimed book, The Outlaw Ocean. 

Urbina recently launched The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit organization solely dedicated to raising awareness of what happens at sea by publishing more of these stories. Investigative reporting of offshore crimes is rare, expensive and critically important. Donations to support The Outlaw Ocean Project can be made online here.

“My biggest fear on fishing ships, in Thailand and elsewhere, was falling overboard,” Urbina writes. To heighten his chances of survival if he ended up in the water, Urbina spent a week embedded with the U.S. Coast Guard in search-and-rescue team in Clearwater, Florida. Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.
Urbina sits in front of Greko 2, a Greek-owned trawler that persistently poached fish in Somali waters using fake licenses. The Greko 1 and Greko 2 were not only not supposed to be fishing in Somalia. These ships were not supposed to exist at all. Urbina reported that the E.U. paid the equivalent of $1.6 million to the ship’s owner to disassemble the ships, and yet, here they were. Illegal fishing is rarely policed, making the arrest of Greko 1 and Greko 2 a rare success story. “These ships with massive mechanized nets [are] stunning in their efficiency and, to some degree, the biggest explanation as to why the ocean is running out of fish,” Urbina says. Photo by Fabio Nascimento, courtesy of Ian Urbina.

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