Book in the news… we need a blue transformation

A Blue New Deal Why We Need a New Politics for the Ocean Chris Armstrong Yale University Press, £20

The oceans regulate the climate, provide us with food and produce at least half the world’s oxygen, says Simon Ings in New Scientist. We repay them by overharvesting their limited resources and polluting them with oil, plastics and noise. In A Blue New Deal, political theorist Chris Armstrong argues that the problem lies in the fact that “the institutions and laws that govern our oceans are too fragmented, too weak and too amenable to vested interests to protect the marine environment from further destruction”. They should be replaced by a new framework that governs our oceans “along principles of common management, benefit sharing and even technology transfer between rich and poor nations”.

The book “provides a fascinating history of how different civilisations have viewed the sea”, says Kate Green in Country Life, and gives an “impressive” amount of historical detail on “everything from the moral interests of sea creatures to the management of the Dutch East India Company”. And rather than just providing the usual litany of woe typical of most environmentalist tracts, it “offers hope”, arguing that, with correct structures and institutions in place, “emerging ocean industries”, such as those in renewable energy and “aquaculture”, could “save the world”. Devoting just 5% of the American coast to seaweed farming could, for example, absorb as much carbon as is emitted by 30 million cars.

As well as promoting “seaweed farming, shellfish aquaculture, greening ports and planting mangroves”, Armstrong wants countries to “outlaw harmful fishing subsidies and destructive fishing practices”, as well as “create better legal protections for whales and dolphins”, says Phoebe Weston in The Guardian. All of this will need to be done quickly – there are “early indications”, such as the slowing of the Gulf Stream, that critical “tipping points” – after which the failure of the oceans dooms the planet – “might not be far off”. It is hard to disagree with the book’s message that “there can be no green transformation without a blue one”.