Who Actually Owns the Ocean?

0:00 Almost half of the planet belongs to no country at all, and for decades, much of it had been treated like a resource free-for-all. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your weekly ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on the ocean every single weekday, Monday to Friday, hit that follow button on your favorite podcast app now, so you don't miss tomorrow's story. Today, we're answering a deceptively simple question. Who actually owns the ocean? Look, the ocean covers 71% of the planet. Every country manages about 200 nautical miles off of their coastline, so what happens to the rest of it? Because when we hear terms like high seas or international waters, most people picture open ocean far from shore and assume someone has to be in charge.

0:44 But the reality is much more complicated. And that complexity is one of the biggest reasons ocean conservation has struggled for decades. So the definition of the high seas is basically open areas outside of any country's borders. So every coastal nation controls waters close to shore through what's called the exclusive economic zone, or EEZ. It generally stretches out for about two hundred nautical miles from the country's coastline. Inside those waters, countries control fishing rights, oil exploration, shipping regulations, and conservation measures. But once you move beyond those boundaries, you enter the high seas. And to be honest, they're massive. And I've covered a number of episodes on the high seas over the years, but I want to reset today and just really talk about, you know, the high seas and who owns it, especially today.

1:32 And this week, we're gonna be talking all about the high seas. We have a really great episode at the end of the week where we do an interview with the director of the High Seas Alliance. We talk all about what's coming up this year, why is this is such a big year in 2026 for the high seas. So we're talking nearly half of the surface of the Earth for the high seas. Like, just the high seas. Like, taking out the exclusive economic zones, just the high seas. That means the largest ecosystem on the planet exists mostly outside any direct national control. That's a pretty big amount. It's a lot of responsibility for nobody. That's a hard thing to wrap around your head. Imagine if half the Amazon rainforest belonged to nobody. Imagine if there were almost no enforceable protections around that.

2:14 Imagine if countries, corporations, and industries could operate there with limited oversight. That's essentially what the world has allowed to happen in large parts of the ocean. Historically, the high seas were built around the concept of freedom. Freedom to navigate, freedom to fish, freedom to conduct commerce. And for centuries, that made sense because people believed the ocean was too large to damage. It's so big. Like, it's this massive empty space. We can't do any damage to it. But industrial technology changed everything. The Industrial Revolution just changed absolutely everything. Now, massive fishing fleets can operate thousands of kilometers from shore.

2:55 Deep sea mining companies want access to untouched ecosystems. And cargo shipping crosses nearly every ocean basin. And climate change is stressing marine life everywhere at the same time. The ocean may feel endless, but it's no longer beyond human impact. In fact, every part of the ocean has been impacted by humans. And it's really shown when you go to the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, and you actually see plastic pollution in the Mariana Trench. And here's why this matters to everyday people like yourself. The high seas help regulate the climate. I'm gonna say that one more time. The high seas help regulate the climate. And this is huge because when we talk about climate change, we rarely talk about the ocean, unless you're on this podcast and you're talking to a marine biologist.

3:43 Climate change has to do with ocean, and ocean has to do with climate change. They are interchangeable. But these high seas, they support migratory species like tuna, sharks, whales, and sea turtles. They connect ecosystems across entire ocean basins. And they help support global food systems. So what happens in the high seas does not stay in the high seas. It's not like Vegas. It's not like Vegas one bit. If tuna populations collapse offshore, coastal fisheries suffer too. If biodiversity disappears in deep ocean ecosystems, we may lose species before we even discover them. And one of the biggest problems is visibility. Most people never see what happens far offshore.

4:26 We'll see the plastic on beaches. We may see the coral bleaching. But industrial activity in the open ocean often happens out of sight. That makes accountability harder. And this is what, to be honest, not that I'm a huge fan of what they've done in the past, but Sea Shepherd has done for decades, is they've actually gone out into the high seas, even though nobody can really stop them from doing anything, and they've gotten in the way of Japanese whalers. They've chased down illegal fishing boats from all over the world. They've been able to do this because it works on the high seas. There's nobody to stop the Sea Shepherd from doing anything, and there's nobody to stop the illegal fishers and the illegal whalers from doing the damage that they wanna do to the ocean. So it makes accountability harder, even if you're trying to do conservation or if you're not trying to do conservation, or you're trying to protect conservation.

5:11 And enforcement becomes incredibly difficult when vessels are operating days or weeks away from land. This is part of the reason ocean advocates pushed so hard for the High Seas Treaty, which we're gonna be talking about tomorrow and the rest of the week, to be honest, and to be honest, for a long, long time. Because the ocean can't function effectively as disconnected pieces. Marine life, it does not recognize political borders. They don't recognize the exclusive economic zone. Ocean currents do not stop at exclusive economic lines, and that's where like fisheries will be huge part. I've talked about this before on the podcast. There is a squid fishery that starts within the exclusive economic zone of Argentina along the coast, but then eventually that fishery was gonna go over that border where there are a long line of distant water fleets, like Chinese fleets and other countries' fleets, who are waiting for those squids a certain time of year 'cause they know they go over the exclusive economic zone, and they'll fish them, and they'll try and grab as many possible 'cause there's nobody to hold them accountable.

6:09 The ocean is connected, but governance has remained fragmented. And that's an important piece, right? It's an important piece to talk about how these governance system gets fragmented because you can't hold people accountable in the high seas. It's pretty much the Wild Wild West if you think about it in that way. But we can provide the information, and now with the High Seas Treaty, which we're gonna talk about tomorrow, we can provide that information, and we can give you the answers so that you can make responsible decisions on what is coming from the high seas, whether it's seafood, whatever goes to the high seas like plastic pollution. You can make those decisions. And that's what we try to do here on the podcast, and if you're getting value from that on this podcast and you're getting that information so you can make a better decision, I'd love for you to hit that follow button right now on your favorite podcast app so that you don't miss any of the other episodes that we're gonna be doing, not only this week, but later on in the future.

6:59 That's what we really wanna do. Now, what happens next? So now the big question becomes, can the world actually govern the high seas effectively. We know that nobody really owns it, but can we do that? And that's where the High Seas Treaty enters the story. The treaty claims to create a framework for protecting biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction. In simpler terms, it creates a pathway for marine protected areas in international waters. That's a huge shift and a huge challenge to come forward because until recently, creating meaningful protections in those areas was incredibly difficult politically because just nobody was there to manage it. You couldn't even enforce it because there's no jurisdiction. So anybody who went in there to fish, if, say, fishing was gonna be blocked for that marine protected area, anybody that went in there, well, it doesn't matter.

7:44 They can get away with whatever they want because nobody has jurisdiction. But this is where it gets really complicated. A treaty alone does not automatically protect the ocean. Countries still need to ratify it, and they need to agree on enforcement. They need funding, they need monitoring systems, and they need political will. This is the part that Rebecca Hubbard emphasized repeatedly in conversations around the treaty, which we're gonna be talking about on Friday. From now until Thursday, this is the setup for our Friday interview. And the agreement for the treaty creates this type of opportunity, but implementation determines success, and that's true for almost every conservation effort that we've seen. Protection only works when it becomes real in the water, not just on paper.

8:28 We've talked about that for a long time about marine protected areas. So the high seas are not just some like distant place disconnected from our lives. We know that we affect change that happens, whether good or bad, among the ocean basins, across the ocean basins, everywhere in the ocean, because we have that effect. We're humans. We have this ability to do that. But the high seas, they help stabilize the planet. They support marine life, and they influence the future of the ocean itself. And for the first time in history, the world is trying to build a system to protect them collectively. And that matters because the ocean story is really a shared responsibility. That's what it is.

9:09 It's a shared responsibility story. And this story is what we're gonna be talking about for the rest of this week. The High Seas Treaty, which we'll talk about, focus on tomorrow, was just ratified finally by 60 countries. Now I think we're up to 89 countries the last time I checked. That will kinda tell who is involved. So we're at about just over half of the countries in the world, and we can see that things are starting to collectively get really great, and we're gonna start to see some really great things that are happening in the future. We just need more countries to ratify, including my own Canada has not ratified yet. We hope that they'll ratify within the year. Not sure what's really happening there. They haven't really spoken about it. There's some other things that are distracting them, I think, that are happening in the world, but that is no excuse because we just do not have the time to wait to protect the ocean.

9:54 That has to happen as soon as possible, like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. So that's it for today's episode. I just wanna say, if you are interested in learning more and you haven't followed the podcast yet, follow that podcast. The more people that follow the podcast, the higher we get in the charts, and then that means the more people that get access to it. They get to see it. They get to visualize it. There are a lot of podcasts in these podcast stores, whether it's Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, wherever you get your podcasts. There's a lot of competition out there, and there's some great podcasts that have some amazing information. However, for us to kinda get in front of other people's faces, we like to get up into those charts. And the more you follow, the higher we get.

10:35 And plus you don't miss any other episodes. So just from a selfish reason, for yourself, like let's do it. If you wanna learn more about the ocean, this is the podcast to do it with. All right. That's it for today's episode. I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. If you wanna get ahold of me, just check the show notes. Until next time, have a great day. We'll talk to you tomorrow, and happy conservation.