The Secret Life of Groceries was a disturbing wake-up call for me last year, exposing as it did how slavery is a core part of the fishing industry that supplies seafood the world around — in which men are trapped on boats and denied an avenue for escape, because their ships never go into port, instead receiving supplies and offloading goods to other ships that frequently service the big trawlers. The Outlaw Ocean takes that kind of exposure and runs with it, diving into the murky spectrum of human behavior that flourishes in the wide open spaces of the great oceans, where the law strains to reach and enforcement of it is difficult in the extreme. Here we find environmental vigilantes chasing poachers, luxury cruise liners dumping trash into the ocean, repo men commandeering boats, slave-based fishing ships operating with impunity, and armed ships fighting for fishing rights in the South China Sea. Here, amid the hardships of life at sea made worse by the cruelties that men inflict on one another, we aslo find little dashes of heroism — men who document sights they could be killed for sharing, and others who sabotage poachers’ equipment and hound them on the high seas. Ian Urbina is crazy, admirable, and tough. Working on the high seas is dangerous and wrenching work by itself, given the sheer force of wind and wave that assails ships and seamen, but in chasing stories, Urbina embedded himself for weeks at a time aboard various ships and sometimes made himself a target through his inquiries, and Outlaw Ocean records a few harrowing moments when he was very possibly the target of some bad actor’s plans. Illegal activity abounds on the high seas for a multitude of reasons: incentive, for one, as there’s always money to be made….and that applies closer to land, as Urbina encounters evidence of gangs/alleged governments/gang-state entities overlooking their own ‘laws’ to reap profit in the form of bribes. The sheer size of the ocean also makes enforcement difficult, as ne’er do wells sometimes turn off their transponders: one of Sea Shepherd’s vessels had to patrol an area the size of Australia while trying to find a Japanese fishing trawler operating illegally in international waters. This was definitely an eye-opener into the complexities of marine law and the debasement its weaknesses allow for.

Related:
“The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat“, recent New Yorker article by Urbina.
“The Secret Life of Passwords”, Ian Urbina. Same author. He’s an interesting journalist.