Life Support
Iceland resumed killing fin whales this summer for a market that no longer exists. Follow the money and the mystery deepens — but the money is not the real story. It is what the money keeps missing.
A weekly essay from the editors. A bigger question every week — one we think the news isn't asking.
Iceland resumed killing fin whales this summer for a market that no longer exists. Follow the money and the mystery deepens — but the money is not the real story. It is what the money keeps missing.
The reef the Exumas made famous is going under a plant you can lift off the coral with one hand. The science is settled and the fix is sixty years old. What's missing isn't knowledge — it's attention.
A grey triangle of rock lifting out of the rain, exactly where the arithmetic said it would be — my first ocean passage, at fourteen, sixteen days from Saldanha Bay to a speck found with a sextant and a pencil. The island is still there. The distance that was its whole meaning is not.
The world has lashed itself to a single signal — one that can be faked, jammed, or undone by the sun. In the Strait of Hormuz this spring, the bill came due. And the oldest craft at sea has quietly begun to come back — not in our hands, but as a machine.
Two empires are carving up the one part of the ocean that was meant to belong to everyone — and to everyone not yet born. The seafloor cannot be watched, which is exactly why it is being taken.
A closing argument. The worst of industrial fishing is not a free market but a publicly funded extraction of a shared resource — and reining it in is now the only way to keep fish within reach of the billions who depend on it.
What two sailors remember of the ocean before the counting began — and what the Indian Ocean's vanishing tuna reveal about how much we have already agreed to forget.
How the world banned the "walls of death" — and let a bigger problem take their place, out of sight, on the high seas
We departed Saldanha Bay, South Africa on the morning of 22 September 1987 — the southern spring equinox — aboard a 39-foot Bongers sloop my stepfather Gary had built in our
We handed the formation of our children’s minds to advertising systems. That is the defining act of negligence of our era.