THE LAW OF THE SEA

Surabhi Ranganathan

 
Coagulating Islands

The dynamic topography of the Earth owes as much to human processes as it does to natural ones. While volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, or just quotidian processes of wind- and water-driven sedimentation and erosion can make land appear and disappear, surface changes also result from blasting, dredging, reclamation, and the like – as they do from the melting ice and the rising seas.  

The law addresses such changes in various ways. The doctrines of accretion and avulsion, among others, provide guidance on who has sovereignty over land emerging via natural processes; while the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea sets out states’ rights and obligations with respect to the construction of artificial islands. Of course these are matters that give rise to frequent and complex disputes, but the law provides the framework through which the claims may be articulated and adjudicated.

The same cannot be said for a new species of accumulating mass, the so called trash islands. The ocean is today clotted with areas of concentrated plastic wastes that, released from all over the world, collect at ocean gyres. The Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans all have large swirling garbage patches – a recent study suggests that the size of the Pacific patch is about 1.6 million sq. km, close to three times the size of France. The waste is not compacted into a solid body: a part of it is broken down into minute particles, though larger objects also abound; the garbage patches resemble ‘cloudy soup’ -- of enormous proportion (the study estimates a figure of 79000 tonnes for the Pacific patch).

Albatross Remains: NOAA Office of Response and Restoration, “‘The remains of dead baby albatrosses reveal the far-reaches of plastic pollution on Midway Atoll, 2000 miles from any mainland. Credit: Chris Jordan, from his series ‘Midway: Message from the Gyre.’ Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License,” updated 7 February 2013, https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/how-big-great-pacific-garbage-patch-science-vs-myth.html.The environmental harms that result from all this plastic are hard to overestimate: 100,000 marine animals are killed or injured by plastics every year; marine animals mistake smaller pieces of plastic for food – harmful to them, and also contaminating to the food chain; larger plastics too disrupt the food chain by blocking sunlight from plankton and other autotrophs. Plastics also leach out toxic substances into the ocean.

Despite a clutch of legal instruments, such as the London Dumping Convention, the MARPOL Convention, the regional OSPAR Convention, and the like, it is difficult to pinpoint responsibility either for creating this mess or for cleaning it up. The plastic comes from everywhere, if more from some places than others, and it collects in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The enormous costs of any clean-up operation deter even states with strong environmental lobbies from taking action in the collective interest. In effect, the garbage patches are a tragedy of the commons.

 In September 2017, British media group LADbible and the Plastic Oceans Foundation started an unusual campaign: asking the United Nations to recognise the Pacific garbage patch as an independent country, named the Trash Isles. They have designed a flag, a passport, currency and stamps, and encourage people to register as citizens (nearly 250,000 people have signed up, including David Attenborough and Al Gore). The campaign website states that the Trash Isles can fulfil all legal criteria for statehood, including territory, people, government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states; and that legal recognition of its statehood will entitle the new country to demand cooperation for its clean up from other states.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Caryl Sue, “Great Pacific Garbage Patch/Pacific Trash Vortex,” National Geographic Society, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/.

 The arguments are satirical of course; a brilliant pin-pointing of the scale (country-sized!) and social embeddedness of the problem (if we don’t act now, sooner or later, we will all become involuntary citizens of trash islands), as well as the difficulties in finding a solution within the framework of a state-centric international legal system.

In the wonderful Seven-Tenths, James Hamilton Patterson writes of imaginary lands as the product of desire, of the horror vacui generated by the open ocean in the minds of both mariners and mapmakers; one such island, Mayda, appeared on maps from 1400 to 1906, changing locations, but indubitably present. LADbible’s Trash Isles are also imagined, but in fearful anticipation of the real thing, a desertified ocean.            

 

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