The Outlaw Ocean Quotes

“This fantasy that it is possible to fish sustainably, legally, and using workers with contracts, making a living wage, and still deliver a five-ounce can of skipjack tuna for $2.50 that ends up on the grocery shelf only days after the fish was pulled from the water thousands of mi,es away. Prices that low and efficiencies that tight come with hidden costs, and it is the manning agencies that help in the hiding.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“According to an old sailing proverb, below latitude 40° south there is no law, and below 50° south, no God.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“Through time, humanity’s capacity, both legally and scientifically, for extracting life from the oceans has greatly surpassed our ability to protect it.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“I tried to win people over by being bluntly candid and by having done my homework beforehand so that I could impress the person from the outset that I understood at least a little about his perspective.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“But it was quickly becoming apparent that this contrast was neither as stark nor as simple as I figured. The men chasing these fish were no less to blame for the depletion of Palau’s waters, but they seemed equally, if not more, vulnerable themselves.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“This is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“A fin de cuentas, hay un motivo por el que el Gobierno estadounidense, por ejemplo, eligió las aguas internacionales para desmantelar el arsenal de armas químicas de Siria, para algunos de los encarcelamientos e interrogatorios relacionados con el terrorismo o para deshacerse del cadáver de Osama bin Laden. En paralelo, las industrias pesquera y mercante son tanto víctimas del desgobierno mar adentro como beneficiaras y responsables de él.”
― Ian Urbina, Oceanos sin ley: Viajes através de la última frontera salvaje

“un mundo en el que los saberes tradicionales tienen tanta fuerza como la ley.”
― Ian Urbina, Oceanos sin ley: Viajes através de la última frontera salvaje

“Hay más contradicciones. Ahora que tenemos un conocimiento exponencialmente mayor del mundo que nos rodea, con tanta información en la yema de los dedos y apenas a un gesto o un clic de distancia, lo que sabemos sobre los océanos es escandalosamente poco.”
― Ian Urbina, Oceanos sin ley: Viajes através de la última frontera salvaje

“Hay más contradicciones. Ahora que tenemos un conocimiento exponencialmente mayor del mundo que nos rodea,”
― Ian Urbina, Oceanos sin ley: Viajes através de la última frontera salvaje

“Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure, some have the keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others again are drawn away from the trodden paths by the “lure of little voices,” the mysterious fascination of the unknown. —Ernest Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“This is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion. Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing. By 2050, some studies predict, there will be more plastic waste in the sea than fish, measured in weight. The oceans are despoiled and depleted because most governments have neither the inclination nor the resources to protect them. It is hard enough to get the public’s attention about the dangers of global warming, even as the effects of it become clear, including hotter temperatures, rising seas, and more severe storms. But dwindling fish stocks? They hardly register.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“For all its breathtaking beauty, 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.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“The boat driver reminded me that just because it was sunk didn’t mean someone couldn’t still steal it. After all, this is why there are “sea scrappers,” he said. Of course he was quite right, I admitted. I’d learned about these underworld characters when I was reporting in Indonesia. In that country, sea scrappers came mostly from the Madurese ethnic group and were renowned for their efficiency in stripping sunken ships of their valuable metals. They paddled their wooden boats out a couple miles from shore, equipped with crowbars, hammers, hatchets, and a diesel-powered air compressor tethered to what looked like a garden hose for breathing. Diving sometimes deeper than fifty feet, the men chopped away huge chunks of metal from the wreck, attaching them to cables for hoisting. In boom times, the metal and parts from a bigger ship, though rusty and barnacled, could sell for $1 million.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“Stories of neglect usually whisper rather than scream, and where an audience looks for a clear villain, they find ghostly indifference instead.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“The ocean may be vast, blue, and deep, but it’s still being used as a junkyard.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“In this famously rough stretch of the Southern Ocean, storms gather force for tens of thousands of miles as they travel east across open water, technically called the fetch,”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“One of Palau’s biggest draws for tourist divers is its shark population. When I asked for Remengesau’s reaction to the hundreds of shark fins found in the hold of the Shin Jyi, he immediately launched into an explanation of the economic impact of killing sharks. Alive, an individual shark is worth over $170,000 annually in tourism dollars, or nearly $2 million over its lifetime, he said. Dead, each sells for $100, and usually that money goes to a foreign poacher. Even if his numbers seemed a bit overstated, there was no doubting the financial consequences of killing the sharks. More than a dozen countries, including Palau and Taiwan, had banned shark finning. But demand for the fins, especially in Asia, remained high. Served at Chinese weddings and other official banquets, shark-fin soup, which can sell for over $100 per bowl, has for centuries signified wealth.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“Slavery is a harsh reality thatmour better angels would like to think ended two centuries ago, when many countries passed laws against such bondage withing their borders. But this sort of bondage is a global blind spot, because governments, companies, and consumers either don't know it occurs or, when they do, prefer to look the other way”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“corals began turning white and dying—a process called bleaching. The planet is in the midst of one of the most severe instances of coral bleaching in human history.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“In April 2017, President Trump revoked Obama’s executive order.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. —Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

“Destroying the world is now seen as just the cost of doing business,” he said. “And defending the earth is seen as terrorism.”
― Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier