Mary Juetten CA, CPA, Esq., GCB.D, CDI.D, CCB.D reacted on this
For most of human history, the ocean seemed too vast to exhaust. Waste vanished into it. Fish seemed to return endlessly from it. The idea that humanity could destabilise the ocean itself, until remarkably recently, was essentially unimaginable.
Across cultures and millennia, people did not simply live beside the ocean, they lived in relationship to it. Societies revered it, feared it, prayed to it and filled it with gods. It fed them, carried them, drowned them, connected them, and shaped their creation stories.
The tragedy of the modern age is not that we stopped fearing the ocean, it is that we stopped respecting it. What once marked the edge of human power and understanding has been reduced to a route for commerce, a dump for waste, and a storehouse for protein on an industrial scale.
Since the industrial revolution, the ocean has both enabled our economic success and shielded us from the worst consequences of our broken economic model.
Through it all, it has asked for nothing in return. But now it is breaking its silence.
In just a few decades, we have pushed nearly half the world’s fisheries into overexploitation or collapse. Monitored marine wildlife populations have declined by nearly 50% since 1970.
For all the ocean does to protect life on Earth, it remains astonishingly unprotected by us.
We still govern it as an afterthought, protect it in fragments, and worst of all, actively subsidise its destruction.
Global fisheries subsidies total roughly US$35 billion annually. More than US$22 billion directly fuels industrial overcapacity and overfishing.
It is hard to imagine a cleaner example of economic irrationality: taxpayers underwrite the destruction of a critical shared asset, while the profits are privatised and the direct costs are carried by coastal communities, small-scale fishers and workers hidden inside supply chains often marked by illegality, coercion, and abuse.
The recent entry into force of a global High Seas Treaty is an important breakthrough, but we cannot negotiate protection during the day while subsidising destruction at night.
So what now?
The first task is simple: stop paying for the damage.
If much of high seas fishing survives only because governments subsidise it, then governments must begin by removing the public money that makes destruction profitable.
For too long, we have treated ocean protection as costly and ocean destruction as profitable. This is a dangerous fiction in the way that we measure prosperity.
A depleted ocean means weaker food security, greater climate instability, collapsing livelihoods, more migration pressure, and a poorer, more dangerous world.
Why Are We Still Paying to Destroy the Ocean?
Why Are We Still Paying to Destroy the Ocean?
Paul Polman