Though remote, Palau is still cursed by its location, bordered by some of the world’s largest fishing fleets and most insatiable fish markets—Japan, China, and Taiwan to its northwest, Indonesia to the southwest. And despite its stunning natural beauty, Palau is enmeshed in the larger dystopian seascape of the western Pacific Ocean. The region is teeming with super trawlers, state-subsidized poacher fleets, mile-long drift nets, and predator buoys and is being battered by mega cyclones, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, warming marine temperatures, and a Texas-sized gyre of floating
...more
