Poachers! Seasteaders! Smugglers! Medical ships! This week we got into some of the more ambitious exploitations of international sea law, and the people who exploit those hole, with good intentions or ill intentions.
Next week, read up to page 201, or the end of Chapter 8. There’s still plenty of time to get your hands on the book, and we’ll be reading it for a while so no hurry if you haven’t managed yet.
What did you think about Sealand? How did your perspective on the poachers in Palau’s water change once you got a peek below deck? How do you feel about the book so far?
I am loving this book. It is so interesting to read these stories from a world I know so little about. It is easy to label the poachers as evil, but the more I read the more I feel the need to check my privalege. It seems like a lot of these people are trapped in a rough world and are just trying to survive. The coorporate owners pushing them seem to be the real bad guys. The world I live in (Midwest United States) is so different from the settings in this book that I almost don't know how to morally digest all of the actions being described. One thing is for sure though, I definitely want to keep on reading.
The whole book is making my relationship with seafood more complicated. I have long avoided farmed salmon, blue fin tuna and Chilean sea bass, but now they're coming for my calamari! It just feels so hopeless ...
I agree with you. It's particularly challenging when even some of the legal fishing is those bottom-fishing nets that destroy everything in their paths. At this point I think I'm ready to just give up all the meat and eat green beans.
I hear ya, but I was in the market today and looked at five fish and said four of these were caught legally and got one. I wish had those odds at the track. I would practically kill to choose between five horses knowing that four would be winners!
Chapter 2 ended up being my favorite of this past week's reading. I really enjoyed Bjorn Bergman policing the world from space in a one story office of all places Shepherdstown, West Virginia and the justice-seeking adventures of The Lone Patrol.
Susan, I am agreeing with you on the comparison with the Panama Papers. I recently saw the documentary "The Laundromat" with Meryl Streep, and learned a great deal about how that whole operation worked. Amorality abounds.
Still can't believe one out of five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and that the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion.
The one out of five illegal plates is really astonishing. As someone who grew up in Florida and absolutely loves seafood, it's difficult to fathom how much of our food is illegally sourced. I wonder to a certain extent if we would lessen this by returning to more locally sourced food overall, or would it just change the point of contact. In other words, I'm sure there could still be illegal fishing even at the micro-level, but would it be enough to offset the numbers?
I wanna go to Sealand way more than say Disney (though I do love Disney+). Forget moving to Canada if the election again doesn't work out (that Electoral College Vote looking super close) I want to get a passport for Sealand!!
I too am finding this book fascinating but also depressing. I knew the world had much evil in it, but the author brings systemic cruelty and destruction to life in a very personal way. He travels in the ships and talks with the actual people involved. Which brings me to what is perhaps a naive question, how does he afford all this travel? Last minute tickets, especially to out of the way places are very expensive. Then there are the added expenses of bringing a photographer along, and paying local guides (and local bribes). Does the NYT really pay that well?
By the way, there is an excellent review of The Meritocracy Trap, our book for late December, in the Sunday Times Book Review, written by Thomas Frank.
I haven't eaten fish for years, and this book is really opening my eyes to the fact that the problem is much worse than I thought. The idea of a net, hundreds of miles wide, dragging in anything it wants and just leaving destruction is heart-breaking. What is the point in building wealth but destroying what's around you to do it?
The exploitation of the poor is another theme, with the harsh reality of being so remote hitting home. There is no way to change your experience 2000 miles away from home in the middle of the ocean. If you're being treated like a slave, what are your options?
What about those poor Indonesians on the Korean fishing ships? It sounds like the tactics used to trick them into the nefarious sea life is completely land-based. Surely there's something that can be done about those indentured servants
I definitely feel like this an issue that needs to be addressed, but I get the sense that without a global will to want to achieve it, it will be very difficult to implement. For example, let's say the Indonesian government started cracking down on the manning agents and successfully eradicated the indentured servitude, more likely than not, it was just move to another country who is less regulated. But then let's be oversimplistic and optimistic and say the whole word agreed to treat fishers better, then I think the labor market would shrink, and it would just be some other industry that would swoop in and start doing the same. So I'm not sure that I have a solution for it, or that anybody does, but it's going to take a lot more than we can even imagine in order to make truly effective change.
One last though, its interesting that there hasn’t been a discussion yet on Women on Waves. It is an interesting contrast to the other stories (using legal loopholes vs avoiding the law). You don’t have to be pro-choice to appreciate the ingenuity. Even if you are pro-life, I imagine, it feels no different than the beat-and-avoid-the-system tactics of the illegal fishers.
I think this was a great way to show that no matter how much we want to regulate something there will always be someone out there looking for a loophole. While in this particular instance, I'm very supportive of that effort, it does make me wonder how things might get exploited in more nefarious ways in the future.
The connection between Sealand and the Panama Papers fascinated me. So a philosophical desire to live under "true" liberty creates an opportunity for exploitation by grifters and law breakers. If Sealand had been set up as a way to circumvent finance laws of nations, would it have been more successful, or quashed quickly as a threat to the established hubs for tax evasion?
Interesting topic but I’m feeling the author embellishes too much and makes what could be a short story very long. Would be better if it were more succinct IMO.
Hmm ... I get the point. If this was a newspaper article I do feel like would be looking for a TL;DR. Here though, I am almost looking for more. In comparison to a classic novel - Moby Dick, example - or some of the more modern novels, the level of embellishment is very low. I think I would enjoy more details, but there is a lot of book to go.
The author makes me feel like I'm point blank right on the ocean or sea with these people and him (which I'm loving) so I'm not sure how else he would write these stories.
Crazy but I found both these author's stories so far to be equally enjoyable and exciting at parts but just in different ways. Which I never thought would have been the case before reading either book.
I am loving this book. It is so interesting to read these stories from a world I know so little about. It is easy to label the poachers as evil, but the more I read the more I feel the need to check my privalege. It seems like a lot of these people are trapped in a rough world and are just trying to survive. The coorporate owners pushing them seem to be the real bad guys. The world I live in (Midwest United States) is so different from the settings in this book that I almost don't know how to morally digest all of the actions being described. One thing is for sure though, I definitely want to keep on reading.
The whole book is making my relationship with seafood more complicated. I have long avoided farmed salmon, blue fin tuna and Chilean sea bass, but now they're coming for my calamari! It just feels so hopeless ...
I agree with you. It's particularly challenging when even some of the legal fishing is those bottom-fishing nets that destroy everything in their paths. At this point I think I'm ready to just give up all the meat and eat green beans.
I hear ya, but I was in the market today and looked at five fish and said four of these were caught legally and got one. I wish had those odds at the track. I would practically kill to choose between five horses knowing that four would be winners!
Chapter 2 ended up being my favorite of this past week's reading. I really enjoyed Bjorn Bergman policing the world from space in a one story office of all places Shepherdstown, West Virginia and the justice-seeking adventures of The Lone Patrol.
Susan, I am agreeing with you on the comparison with the Panama Papers. I recently saw the documentary "The Laundromat" with Meryl Streep, and learned a great deal about how that whole operation worked. Amorality abounds.
Still can't believe one out of five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and that the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion.
The one out of five illegal plates is really astonishing. As someone who grew up in Florida and absolutely loves seafood, it's difficult to fathom how much of our food is illegally sourced. I wonder to a certain extent if we would lessen this by returning to more locally sourced food overall, or would it just change the point of contact. In other words, I'm sure there could still be illegal fishing even at the micro-level, but would it be enough to offset the numbers?
I wanna go to Sealand way more than say Disney (though I do love Disney+). Forget moving to Canada if the election again doesn't work out (that Electoral College Vote looking super close) I want to get a passport for Sealand!!
I too am finding this book fascinating but also depressing. I knew the world had much evil in it, but the author brings systemic cruelty and destruction to life in a very personal way. He travels in the ships and talks with the actual people involved. Which brings me to what is perhaps a naive question, how does he afford all this travel? Last minute tickets, especially to out of the way places are very expensive. Then there are the added expenses of bringing a photographer along, and paying local guides (and local bribes). Does the NYT really pay that well?
Imagine 1 in 5 dollars is from the black market; maybe it is ? Re: laundromat comment
I was about to write a comment and I realized that most points were well articulated by previous ones. Love it.
By the way, there is an excellent review of The Meritocracy Trap, our book for late December, in the Sunday Times Book Review, written by Thomas Frank.
I haven't eaten fish for years, and this book is really opening my eyes to the fact that the problem is much worse than I thought. The idea of a net, hundreds of miles wide, dragging in anything it wants and just leaving destruction is heart-breaking. What is the point in building wealth but destroying what's around you to do it?
The exploitation of the poor is another theme, with the harsh reality of being so remote hitting home. There is no way to change your experience 2000 miles away from home in the middle of the ocean. If you're being treated like a slave, what are your options?
What about those poor Indonesians on the Korean fishing ships? It sounds like the tactics used to trick them into the nefarious sea life is completely land-based. Surely there's something that can be done about those indentured servants
I definitely feel like this an issue that needs to be addressed, but I get the sense that without a global will to want to achieve it, it will be very difficult to implement. For example, let's say the Indonesian government started cracking down on the manning agents and successfully eradicated the indentured servitude, more likely than not, it was just move to another country who is less regulated. But then let's be oversimplistic and optimistic and say the whole word agreed to treat fishers better, then I think the labor market would shrink, and it would just be some other industry that would swoop in and start doing the same. So I'm not sure that I have a solution for it, or that anybody does, but it's going to take a lot more than we can even imagine in order to make truly effective change.
One last though, its interesting that there hasn’t been a discussion yet on Women on Waves. It is an interesting contrast to the other stories (using legal loopholes vs avoiding the law). You don’t have to be pro-choice to appreciate the ingenuity. Even if you are pro-life, I imagine, it feels no different than the beat-and-avoid-the-system tactics of the illegal fishers.
I think this was a great way to show that no matter how much we want to regulate something there will always be someone out there looking for a loophole. While in this particular instance, I'm very supportive of that effort, it does make me wonder how things might get exploited in more nefarious ways in the future.
I am feeling fairly dismal about the ocean five chapters in. Lots of bad (morally ambiguous?) acts so far. How much worse can it get.
I know we don’t live in a perfect world where all are treated with just kindness, but this does raise a lot of questions for me.
The connection between Sealand and the Panama Papers fascinated me. So a philosophical desire to live under "true" liberty creates an opportunity for exploitation by grifters and law breakers. If Sealand had been set up as a way to circumvent finance laws of nations, would it have been more successful, or quashed quickly as a threat to the established hubs for tax evasion?
Interesting topic but I’m feeling the author embellishes too much and makes what could be a short story very long. Would be better if it were more succinct IMO.
Hmm ... I get the point. If this was a newspaper article I do feel like would be looking for a TL;DR. Here though, I am almost looking for more. In comparison to a classic novel - Moby Dick, example - or some of the more modern novels, the level of embellishment is very low. I think I would enjoy more details, but there is a lot of book to go.
The author makes me feel like I'm point blank right on the ocean or sea with these people and him (which I'm loving) so I'm not sure how else he would write these stories.
Crazy but I found both these author's stories so far to be equally enjoyable and exciting at parts but just in different ways. Which I never thought would have been the case before reading either book.