Old Men and the Sea
PARIS — A headline in Le Monde over a chilling photo spread stopped me cold. It read: "We're buying time, but we won't win the fight; Senegal's Saint-Louis faces the inexorable rise of the sea." Oh lord, I thought, déjà vu all over again.
I am not much of a Hemingway fan, but his tale of old Santiago finally wrestling in a giant marlin and then struggling back to port with only a skeleton savaged by sharks turns out to be the perfect metaphor for what we hapless humans are now up against.
For me, it hits home hard. After 40 years of trying to report on what now threatens to be the most crucial global story ever, I've come up with bare bones. Overfishing and sea change are vastly complex issues. Yet few people care about what they can't see.
Reporting focuses mostly on shipboard slavery, brutality and crime. All are important, but they miss the main point. The ocean that sustains us all is rising and dying.
In 2014, The New York Times Magazine sent me to do a cover story from Senegal, already a stark vignette of the big picture. The editor liked my draft and asked for more. But a staff shakeup replaced him. Younger editors wanted more human drama and less fish.
By the time my story was spiked many months later, it was too outdated to take elsewhere. I kept at it in other ways, including a book proposal and an attempt to form a small cluster of specialized reporters. A generous foundation grant helped a lot.
Finally, I decided that old men and the sea are also an endangered species. I'm only a parttime piker with a small hook. Yet even Sir David Attenborough's spectacular new film, "Ocean," his swan song at age 99, sank beneath the waves after its flurry of acclaim.
It includes some of the most sickening footage I've ever seen. Submerged cameras follow trawler nets on steel cables that scrape the ocean floor at high speed, ripping away breeding grounds, rich ancient coral beds and every sea creature in their path.
“It’s hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish,” Attenborough says. “Over three quarters of a trawler’s catch may be thrown away.” Large fleets heavily subsidized by governments are destroying Earth's most valuable common resource.
This is a saga of many parts, and I'll tell it as it unfolded, Papa Hemingway-style. But first, the backdrop.
Heads of state gathered here in Paris a decade ago to stop Earth's surface from drying up and blowing away while flooding under rising seas. They set a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) as the target tipping point.
I followed the debate and backroom bargaining, which resulted in pious iffy pledges. Then big black limousines raced to the airport so jumbo jetliners could fly hefty delegations back to all parts of the globe.
That was the 21st U.N. climate summit in a series known as COP — Convention of the Parties — which began in 1995. Afterward, I began calling the process COP-out.
Donald Trump rejected the Paris accords in 2017, prompting other major polluters to renege on promises. Joe Biden brought America back into the climate fight. Ex-Sen. John Kerry pushed hard to rally united global action without much success.
Our planet passed the 1.5-degree threshold last year, fast headed in the wrong direction. Yet Trump scornfully copped out again in his first week back in office. He insists climate change is a Chinese hoax to disrupt the West's fossil-fuel profits.
COP-30 is now underway in Belem at the edge of Brazil's Amazon rainforest. Heads of state need to work out final accords by Nov. 21, but few plan to show up. The total will be likely less than the number who came to Paris in 2015.
Climate collapse is more than freak storms, wildfires and sweltering heat. The ocean — there is only one — covers four-fifths of the planet. Fish feed two-thirds of the world. Rapidly declining stocks impact on migration surge, poverty, crime, terrorism and much else.
As heat saps moisture from the ground, increased pumping depletes aquifers. Wasted water ends up in the ocean to account for 44 percent of sea-level rise, more than twice the impact of melting Antarctic ice.
Meantime, carbon acidifies, plastic pollutes, seabed mining wreaks havoc, monster garbage floes kill off links in the marine food chain. We have already lost more than 90 percent of the ocean's pre-industrial bounty. This is a fish story to take seriously.
In the early 1980s, I met a far-sighted Croatian ocean expert with the U.N. Environment Program. He was worried. Sea change is not incremental, he said. One year you might notice little. The next, Sydney Opera House could be awash at high tide.
At the time, he was exaggerating for effect. But after so much irrevocable damage since then, that is the consensus of oceanographers and climatologists I have learned to trust over the decades.
The Associated Press had just given me a dream job as "special correspondent" with the freedom and funds to explore major global stories that escaped notice. But my AP editors laughed off threats to an ocean that seemed too vast to fret over.
I tried to enlist support from Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post's fabled top editor. He said he would run environmental stories on the front page when the water was up to his ankles in the newsroom. That was on the third floor.
During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, I found the opera house to be in no danger. But up on the Great Barrier Reef, much of its spectacular coral was already bleached white. Links were dropping out of an elaborate food chain.
People cannot stop ocean plunder by shunning vulnerable species in markets and restaurants. That helps raise consciousness. But it is like turning off the tap while brushing teeth to protect water resources. Concerted government action is essential.
After writing a best-seller on olives for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I proposed another on coral loss. If Mort wants me to pay for his skindiving vacations, my editor told my agent, he's nuts.
I left AP in 2004 and happened upon the gig of a lifetime. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists asked me to lead a global team to see why fish were declining precipitously most everywhere, focusing on the Pacific off Peru and Chile.
The multifaceted answer came down to three letters: IUU. Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing. U.N. law of the sea conventions adopted in 1982 impose strict controls. But when the law is not enforced, rapacious fleets plunder as if there were no tomorrow.
RFMOs, regional fisheries management organizations, set quotas to protect stocks. They are dominated by fishing industries and complacent governments bent on harvesting all they can while there is still something to catch. And all decisions must be unanimous.
China, the biggest culprit, is far from alone. Trawlers target lucrative species and toss the rest overboard. Longliners trail miles of hooks that leave dead fish behind. Lines ensnarl and break, killing large tuna and smaller noble species for years, if not decades.
Until this year, America championed protected areas. U.S. Coast Guard patrols that ranged widely, monitoring fishing vessels by satellite and radio, now focus on small suspected drug smugglers. Trump now enables the plunder in his jihad on regulations and environmental protection.
Our ICIJ investigation made a splash in The New York Times, Le Monde and major international media. Then it soon sank behind the waves.
In 2012, I saw Le Pirogue, a Senegalese film about desperate fishermen trying to reach Spain in a frail open boat. The Times commissioned my story and assigned Andrea Frazzetta, a masterful Italian photographer, to come along.
We headed for Saint-Louis, France's first foothold in Africa, a picturesque 18th century colonial relic collapsing from neglect. So many Russian and European vessels invaded Senegalese waters you could see long rows of their lights on the horizon at night.
Higher tides ate away the narrow beach. Fishermen spent days at sea to bring back less than they once did in a few hours. Today, Le Monde reports, thousands live in a stifling dormitory near the water-lapped cathedral, plotting ways to emigrate.
When the Times editor asked me for more, I hung out with Alex Rogers at Oxford University, an unofficial godfather of ocean scientists, who sketched a bleak picture. When quotas limit fleet numbers, old vessels are replaced by high-tech behemoths.
My scheduled piece was replaced by a takeout on Megyn Kelly, the rising Fox News star it profiled as the next big deal in television news. The new editor wanted a rewrite without boring science or quotes from experts.
After several rewrites, it died mysteriously. Soon after, a staff reporter produced an outlaw-oceans series. He focused on piracy, criminality and shipboard slavery but with some familiar material on fishing. Go figure; shit happens.
I then wrote an elaborate book proposal. Publishers demurred. Didn't some guy already write a novel about a big white whale? Maybe it was just me. Some very good books were already out there.
But this was up-close reporting from South America, Europe, the United States, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia and islands in between. I had rock-solid data sets by ICIJ beavers, carefully cross-checked to reveal massive corruption and broken laws.
The knock-on effects add up to a big picture that wiser leaders need to consider. For instance, Somali pirates who seized freighters and tankers began as fishermen. Foreign fleets depleted stocks, so they got faster boats and firepower to go after bigger catch.
Today, many are al-Shabaab terrorists bedeviling the Horn of Africa and points south. Some collaborate with Yemeni Houthis. Others again attack commercial shipping in the Indian Ocean.
My attempt to work with other reporters fell flat. With so many facets in play, each has his or her own take on the key issues. I got as far as making t-shirts showing an odd prehistoric-looking fish under my intended group's name: The Slimeheads.
Left with their original name, slimeheads would still be thriving deep in the southern ocean, where they take 70 years to mature and can live another 150 if unperturbed. But marketers call them orange roughy, an appetizing name on menus and at fish counters.
A single fleet with weighted nets can destroy slimehead habitats in a few seasons. Similarly, the Patagonian toothfish was doing fine until it was labeled Chilean sea bass, though it is neither from Chile nor a bass.
There are hopeful glimmers. James Barnes, a much-beloved environmental lawyer, founded the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition in 1978 with other nonprofits to push for official action. His "retirement" in 2014 is a misnomer. Jimbo is still at it.
ASOC recently won the Portuguese Gulbenkian Humanity Prize of one million euros. In Lisbon, Angela Merkel presented it to him and the new director, Claire Christian, with a firm message: human survival depends on protecting the ocean.
Big organizations like the Pew Charitable Trust and Oceana work with countless smaller ones across the globe. But their challenge is enormous.
My ICIJ project focused on jack mackerel, an oily protein-rich diet staple in Africa, once so plentiful you could almost walk across schools of them from Chile to New Zealand. Also, Peruvian anchoveta that swarmed abundantly in two seasons a year. Both end up mainly as animal feed and fertilizer.
At the outset, Daniel Pauly, the eminent global ocean guru, was blunt. Fleets moved inexorably southward toward Antarctica, he told me, catching as much as they could, then transferring fish to smaller vessels to evade quotas and duties.
"Jack mackerel are the last buffalo," he said. "When they’re gone, everything will be gone. This is the closing of the frontier.”
Stocks had dropped from 30 million tons to under three million in 20 years. The main predator was the Russian-flagged Lafayette, a factory ship two and a half football fields long, owned by a Malaysian Chinese family in Hong Kong who shunned all queries.
I managed to get the director's cellphone number, and I called from outside his Pacific Andes headquarters. After explaining what sources had told me, I suggested it would be best if I heard him out. He invited me up and poured on the charm.
Ng Joo Siang turned out to be a jovial Louisiana State University graduate. At a lavish dinner, he offered to fund my research. Not a good idea, I said. He told me his goal was to protect ocean life, as his father did, so his own sons could keep fishing sustainably.
Eventually, collapsing fish stocks and RFMO pressure pushed him into the red. He registered the renamed Lafayette in Mongolia. Finally, a bankruptcy court picked over the remains.
When we published our findings, the last word went to Duncan Currie in New Zealand, an environmental attorney in the global fight to curb ocean-floor mining. Jack mackerel school in a well-defined range pursued by relatively few fleets.
"You have to ask the obvious question," Currie said. "If we can't save this, what can we save?"
I would love to think our investigation played a key role. But it was simple economics. Even with heavy subsidies, there were too few fish to catch, and big fleets moved on. The RFMO got tougher. Stocks are recovering, now at five million tons.
But vessels push into Antarctica as ice breaks up. Each year, Norwegians alone suck out 200,000 tons of krill, tiny shrimp that feed whales. Once ignored, they are used for fishmeal and cosmetics.
Meantime, much of the ocean is plagued with destructive overfishing, blatant or surreptitious. Indian Ocean tuna is endangered. Chinese fleets catch sharks for their fins. They roam the global south to rake up crabs, shellfish and sea cucumbers.
For years, Pauly's team at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver kept a global census to keep track of depleting stocks. He scorned U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization tallies that rely on government guesswork if not blatant deceit.
The other day, I called Rashid Sumaila, Pauly's Nigerian sidekick, to check on the census. He replied with a rueful laugh. That is over. For all the port landing controls, observers and surveillance techniques, he said, you can't know what you don't know.
COP-30 may be our last chance to save what is left of marine life. Fish stocks recover remarkably fast when left to breed on their own. Yet so much has already changed with El Niño and La Niña currents adding to ecological shifts from other causes.
But more than simply ignoring U.N. efforts to protect the ocean, Trump is trying to sabotage them.
Big media should be sounding the alarm, but that old problem persists. People don't care about what they can't see.
In July, global experts gathered in Nice to find ways to protect fish stocks. CNN's Melissa Bell, who travels from Paris to big stories, skipped it. But she covered Jeff Bezos' $50 million Venice wedding, which attracted polluting superyachts and private planes.
Income disparity masks the problem. At Mario Plage, a Mediterranean beach restaurant near Sainte-Maxime, the owner scoffs at "fake news" reports of vanishing noble fish. "We see no shortage," he said. He simply jacks up the price to meet his demand.
Quiet talks with chefs rather than their bosses reveal a different reality. For one, Saint-Pierre (John Dory), a spiny fish with delicate flesh, is getting rare. For another, hardly anyone can find enough of the small fish on rocky coasts to make a proper bouillabaisse.
But there are plenty of invasive nasty jellyfish, which thrive in warming waters and feed on other species. Look around before swimming on your favorite beach.
My own obsession was fatty bluefin belly sushi, now verboten. I saw it on a San Francisco menu years ago. I asked the server if she knew how endangered it was. Yes, she said, and we have some.
In earlier days, I loved Beluga caviar, available in heaps at Moscow restaurants if you slipped the waiter a pack of Marlboros under a napkin. Today at the Maison Petrossian global headquarters, which is near my boat in Paris, an ounce of it costs 300 euros.
Occasionally, I imagine the last piece of bluefin sashimi and dollop of Beluga lying unnoticed on a Mar-a-Lago buffet, destined for the trash.
And another thought occurs. A disabled fishing boat was among the targets of Trump's senseless attacks off Venezuela. That might have been a Santiago trying to bring home a fish for his hungry family.
Like him or not, it is high time to heed Hemingway.
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