Transcriber: Andrew Joseph Reviewer: David DeRuwe
About 100 miles off the coast of Thailand,
three dozen Cambodian boys and men worked barefoot all day and into the night
on the deck of a purse seiner fishing ship.
15-foot swells climbed the sides of this vessel,
clipping the crew below the knees.
Ocean spray and fish innards made the floor skating-rink slippery.
Seesawing erratically from the rough seas and gale winds,
the deck was an obstacle course of jagged tackle,
spinning winches, and tall stacks of 500-pound nets.
Rain or shine, ships ran 18 to 20 hours a day.
At night, the crew cast their nets when the smaller silver fish they target,
mostly jack mackerel and herring,
were more reflective and easier to spot in the darker waters.
This is a brutal place,
one that I’ve spent the past several years exploring.
Fishing boats on the South China Sea, especially in the Thai fleet,
have for years been notorious for using so-called sea slaves,
mostly migrants forced offshore by debt or duress.
My name is Ian Urbina, and I'm a journalist.
I’m also the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project.
Two thirds of the planet is covered by water,
and much of that space is ungoverned.
Human rights, labor, and environmental crimes occur often and with impunity
because the oceans are sprawling.
What laws exist are difficult to enforce.
Arguably the most important factor, though,
is that the global public is woefully unaware of what happens offshore;
journalism about and from this realm is rare.
As a result, landlubbers have little idea of how reliant they are on the sea
or the people who work out there.
Forced labor on fishing ships is not the only human rights concern.
Hundreds of stowaways and migrants are killed at sea annually.
A $20 billion private security force operates at sea,
and when these mercenaries kill,
governments rarely respond
because no country holds jurisdiction in international waters.
Somewhere in the world, at least one ship sinks every three days,
which is part of the reason that fishing is routinely ranked
as among the deadliest professions.
And then there’s the environmental crisis.
Oil spills aren't the worst of it.
Every three years, ships intentionally dump more oil and sludge into the oceans
than the Exxon Valdez and the BP spills combined.
Acidification is decimating the world’s coral reefs.
Most of the world’s fishing grounds are depleted.
By 2050, some research predicts
that the sea will contain more plastic than fish.
Overfishing, often boosted by government subsidies,
means smaller catches closer to shore and an industry becoming more desperate.
One out of every five fish on American plates comes from pirate fishing vessels.
Recent events have reminded the world of its dependence on maritime commerce.
In the Port of L.A.,
a COVID-induced bottleneck of dozens of cargo ships
has left consumers with shipping delays,
and deckhands idling, unable to reach shore.
In the Suez Canal, one sideways-turned ship
has led to a $10-billion traffic jam.
In the port of Beirut, a blast last August,
caused by thousands of tons of volatile chemical left abandoned dockside,
killed more than 190 people
and highlighted the public safety risks and commercial costs of ship owners
who routinely discard and walk away from their responsibilities.
Despite occasional news coverage, when calamity strikes,
journalism from this untamed frontier is scarce.
Many news outlets have pulled back from international reporting
because it's time consuming and expensive.
The stories about the oceans or seafarers that do get published
tend to be reported not at sea but written from land,
often repackaging academic research and relying on telephone-based reporting,
which limits their narrative and evocative potential,
and thus their impact.
Whether it’s covering the oceans or anything else,
traditional news outlets are also struggling to reach younger people
who increasingly are turning to alternate sources of information
like Comedy Central and online platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
One innovative experiment to bolster the coverage
of these urgent topics at sea
and to reach a wider and younger global audience
is the Outlaw Ocean Project,
which is a journalism non-profit organization based in Washington D.C.
The stories we produce are about lawlessness at sea,
and they’re at the intersection
of human rights, labor, and environmental concerns.
Last year, for example, we broke a major story with NBC News
revealing the largest illegal fishing fleet ever discovered:
more than 800 Chinese fishing boats operating in North Korean waters
in violation of U.N. sanctions.
These ships were accelerating the collapse of the squid stock
and violently displacing local and smaller North Korean ships,
with deadly consequences
as those North Koreans were washing up dead on Japanese shores.
There are also innovative ways to reach younger audiences,
and this brings me to the Outlaw Ocean Music Project.
The music project is a clever way to commandeer music platforms
like Spotify or Apple and Amazon and turn them into news outlets.
This allows the project to relate ocean issues
to people like my now 17-year-old son,
who might not otherwise read the New York Times or the L.A. Times,
but nonetheless, they still consume a lot of information.
So here’s how the music project works:
We do the original story. We go out to sea.
We produce a 5000-word piece for a magazine, let’s say.
We then reach out to musicians around the world,
be they hip-hop or electronic or classical.
We provide them with the story.
We also provide them with an archive of sounds that they can use
from the reporting to make it more evocative.
They're essentially scoring the story,
much like a soundtrack to a movie might do.
To texture their songs with emotion and a gritty sense of place,
the musicians use the audio samples from the video footage
captured during the reporting, so they’re integrating sound clips
like machine gunfire off the coast of Somalia
or chanting captive deckhands on the South China Sea.
So far, more than 450 musicians from over 80 countries -
in a variety of genres, you know, classical, jazz, electronic, hip hop -
have made five track albums based on the stories.
And in recruiting artists from around the world,
the project conscripted an army of cultural diplomats, if you will,
who are talking in their own language of music
about the weighty concerns facing this offshore realm
and the millions of people who work or depend on it.
Published on more than 200 digital platforms,
including Apple Play, YouTube, Amazon,
the music has a combined reach of over 90 million people,
many of whom it on-ramps from the songs to the videos and to the written stories.
The digital music also helps cover
the costs of this distinctly expensive type of international journalism,
as the streaming revenue from the songs goes toward funding more reporting.
The high seas are existentially important for humankind.
They are the circulatory system of global commerce;
more than 70 percent of the products we consume comes by way of ship.
But as recent events have shown, clogs are common and costly.
The oceans are also the temperature stabilizer of the planet
and the lungs of the globe, producing half the oxygen we breathe.
So clearly the seas are essential.
And for all its breathtaking beauty,
the sea is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanity.
Too big to police and under no clear international authority,
immense regions of treacherous water
play host to rampant criminality and exploitation.
The only way to better govern this offshore frontier
and to counter the human rights
and environmental concerns occurring out there
is to shine intense and continuous light on them,
and toward that end, journalism and music have a vital role to play.