Parley: So tell us about Palau, and what they’re up against. Before joining The New York Times, Ian was a Fulbright Fellow in Cuba and he also wrote about the Middle East and Africa for various outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s and Vanity Fair. He has degrees in history and cultural anthropology from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. In 2014, his article The Secret Life of Passwords was nominated for an Emmy Award. Ian has won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News and a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. The reporting, which is ongoing, was also bought by Leonardo DiCaprio and Netflix who are working presently on a feature film and a 7-part documentary series. It resulted in 8 front-page stories in the Times and a forthcoming book published by Knopf Doubleday. The Outlaw Ocean reporting, almost all done offshore, took Ian across 5 seas and 14 countries in Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean, South America, and the Middle East. Criminal enterprise has flourished in the breach.”

Beyond driving the current mass extinction of oceans species, these rogue fleets are responsible for modern slavery, deliberate fuel and garbage dumping, appalling working conditions and even outright murder.Īs Ian neatly summed it up in one piece, “More than two-thirds of the planet is covered by water, and much of that liquid expanse is ungoverned and potentially ungovernable. Published in The New York Times in 2015, journalist Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean series exposed the shocking practices at the heart of the global illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing industry.

The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina