IAN URBINA is the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project and an
investigative reporter who writes regularly for The New York Times,
The Atlantic, National Geographic and other venues. He has won a
Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, a George Polk Award for Foreign
Reporting, and the Chris Dickey Award from the Academy of Motion
Picture Art and Sciences. Several of his stories have been
developed into major feature films and one was nominated for an
Emmy Award. He has degrees in history and cultural anthropology
from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. Before
being on staff at the Times for nearly two decades, he wrote about
the Middle East and Africa for various outlets, including the Los
Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Harper's Magazine. He lives in
Washington D.C., with his family.
www.theoutlawocean.com
"The Outlaw Ocean brings the reader up close to an overwhelming
truth... An impressive feat of reporting... Urbina deftly reveals
complicated ideas through his stories."
—The Washington Post
"This body of work is a devastating look at the corruption,
exploitation, and trafficking that thrive on the open
ocean... The writing is straightforward but clever... Eerie
and beautiful."
—Outside
"The Outlaw Ocean is enriched by Urbina’s gifted storytelling about
the destruction of marine life and the murder, crime, and piracy
that make the seas so dangerous for those who make their living on
them."
—The National Book Review
"What we learn from Urbina’s journeys is nothing less than the
deepest aspects of humanity itself. Dropped into a world without
terra firma’s systems and foibles, our darkest impulses emerge. But
our most noble intentions—to save, to protect, to establish fair
rule of law—appear as well."
—Paste
“In The Outlaw Ocean, Urbina focuses that eye on understanding his
characters and their context to show why these crimes get committed
and why the culprits rarely get prosecuted. Urbina goes further
than most to do this. He shows you a problem from the front lines,
by talking to the people there.”
—Vice
"New York Times journalist Ian Urbina explores a parallel world,
spanning two thirds of the Earth’s surface but almost entirely
hidden from public scrutiny... With the world’s seafood stocks in
crisis, Urbina lifts the thick veil on a global criminal culture,
at just the moment when the damage inflicted on the oceans is
becoming terminal."
—The Guardian
"The most valuable contribution of The Outlaw Ocean may be to the
literature, unfortunately quite extensive by now, of pessimism
about human nature…in aggregate his stories reveal that something
like a Hobbesian state of nature still exists and is available to
anyone willing to float a few dozen miles offshore.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The Outlaw Ocean is an outstanding example of investigative
journalism, illuminating some of the darkest corners of a world we
often don't think about… what he found ranges from horrible to
shocking and from unfair to unbelievable… a magnificent read… proof
that outstanding writing is still one of the best tools we have to
get to know the world we live in.”
—Gabino Iglesias, NPR
“These chapters are vibrant as individual stories, but as a
collection they’re transcendent, rendering a complex portrait of an
unseen and disturbing world. Urbina pursues a depth of reportage
that’s rare because of the guts and diligence it requires… The
result is not just a fascinating read, but a truly important
document… It is a master class in journalism.”
—Blair Braverman, The New York Times Book Review
"A fast-paced read, both riveting and harrowing."
—Civil Eats
"The scope of reporting in The Outlaw Ocean is remarkable. Urbina
covers a wide swath of oceangoing banditry and mayhem, and delivers
his findings in clear, transparent prose that brings this sordid
activity to life."
—Lee Polevoi, Highbrow Magazine
"A riveting, terrifying, thrilling story of a netherworld that few
people know about, and fewer will ever see . . . The soul of this
book is as wild as the ocean itself."
—Susan Casey, best-selling author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the
Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
“Not just a stunning read, this book is a gripping chronicle of the
watery wild west and it shows us—frankly unlike anything I've read
before—how global indifference can trap innocent people in endless
cycles of exploitation, how the vast ocean has become a danger
zone, and ultimately how we all pay a price for this mayhem and
mistreatment."
—John Kerry, former Secretary of State and founder of the Our Ocean
Conference
“Imagine a fantasy movie in which an explorer from Earth arrives on
the surface of a living planet, to discover a lawless place where
brutality is the only order and greed and fear the only motivators.
Welcome to The Outlaw Ocean. In this utterly groundbreaking, often
disturbing book, Ian Urbina has put his life on the line to lay
bare the stunning inhumanity that reigns unchecked over two-thirds
of Earth’s surface. This constantly astonishing book is seasoned
with rare heroes—the author himself among them—who at great risk
have weaponized their lifelong quest to shine righteous light and
apply justice to the cruel anarchy that reigns over the majority of
the planet.”
—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words and Song for the Blue
Ocean
“Our planet is 70% ocean and yet to watch the tv or read the papers
you'd have little idea humans ever ventured offshore. Thanks to Ian
Urbina for beginning to close the reporting gap, and for showing
the high drama to be found on the high seas."
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play
Itself Out?
"A swift-moving, often surprising account of the dangers that face
sailors and nations alike on the lawless tide."
—Kirkus Reviews
“In The Outlaw Ocean, Ian Urbina offers a gripping series of
portraits of scofflaws, renegades, con men, vigilantes and
activists whose combat on the open seas has profound effect on our
everyday lives and the world we inhabit. It’s a wild adventure
story and terrifying cautionary tale, that should not be
missed.”
— Sam Walker, former deputy enterprise editor of The Wall Street
Journal and author of The Captain Class
"This is just incredible investigative work."
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything
Outlook Review
How lawlessness and ignorance are harming our oceans
Add to list
By Alyssa Rosenberg
Opinion writer September 12
Alyssa Rosenberg writes about culture and politics for The
Washington Post’s Opinions section.
Fish swim in a reef near La Ciotat, France. Ian Urbina argues that
most of us don’t know much about what takes place in and around the
oceans, from overfishing to slavery. (BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty
Images)The remote is now very near: Mount Everest has traffic jams,
and Instagram influencers are posing at Chernobyl. The Google Car
maps where we live, photographing our homes usually when the lawn
is unkempt. The world has never felt smaller or more known, for
good and ill.Into that world comes Ian Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean”
bearing an unsettling idea: There is still much we don’t know about
our world, and the consequences of our ignorance are likely to
arrive onshore not in a gentle swell but with crashing force.
Urbina argues that the vast oceans and their borders with land are
changing more quickly than we can imagine. The wide expanses of the
sea are ungoverned, if not ungovernable, because it benefits too
many powerful people to let them stay that way. The result is a
book that leaves behind the unnerving feeling that we’re becalmed
and can move in no positive direction: “The Outlaw Ocean” brings
the reader up close to an overwhelming truth, but the magnitude of
the revelation is paralyzing.
(Knopf)The book grew out of Urbina’s reporting about the sea for
the New York Times, and as a result, it is constructed as a series
of seafaring yarns. The installments vary wildly in tone, as you
might expect in the nautical genre of storytelling. Max Hardberger,
a raffish oceanic repo man, stars in Urbina’s heist story. Offshore
abortionist Rebecca Gomperts helps women in an outlaw feminist
fable. Captains Adam Meyerson and Wyanda Lublink are the book’s
environmentalist Ahabs, chasing down not a fearsome whale but a
Japanese ship that slaughters whales in exceptionally brutal
fashion. And men like Lang Long, a Cambodian who was trafficked and
sold into the Thai fishing industry, are modern-day Billy Budds in
a system that lacks even the rough justice of a drumhead
court-martial.
That Urbina has been able to pluck these people out of the vast
blue expanse that surrounds them and locate them, both on the map
and in our minds, at least for a moment, is an impressive feat of
reporting. (It’s also to his credit that Urbina knows how to serve
as a gangway between his reader and his subject material without
making himself the story.) While all nonfiction books presumably
exist to tell readers something they didn’t already know, “The
Outlaw Ocean” uses our lack of knowledge to bolster his argument:
If we don’t know much about sea slavery or the battles between
environmentalists and the fishing industry, it’s because it’s hard
for us landlubbers to know what happens so far from shore.This
isn’t the only sense in which Urbina has constructed his book as a
kind of inexorable current, circling around and around again.
Though it certainly has its lighter segments, especially Urbina’s
visit to the Principality of Sealand, a micronation founded in 1967
on an abandoned offshore platform, his stories keep converging on a
grim point: that the vastness of the ocean has served the purposes
of governments and businesses that prefer to operate in a realm
without rules.There are exceptions, like the tiny island nation of
Palau, which is trying to curb illegal fishing through quirks of
maritime law that give it dominion over 230,000 square miles of
ocean. But apparently, there are plenty of powerful people who
stand to benefit from the lawless state of the ocean — and plenty
more of us who so badly want to believe that we can have cheap,
ethically harvested seafood that we’re willing to let them keep it
that way. That may be difficult to do after reading “The Outlaw
Ocean.” Urbina’s chronicles of man’s inhumanity to man, as well as
to fish — some of which leave the creature in “Jaws” looking less
like a monster and more like a justified revolutionary — had me
considering giving up seafood.
Urbina is so successful at communicating the scale of the ocean,
and the cruelty and neglect above and below its waters, that
reading his book sometimes feels like gasping for a breath of air
before slipping under the waves again.
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