A Blue New Deal is a 2022 book by Chris Armstrong, a professor of political theory at the University of Southampton (not the former Tottenham striker). In the book Armstrong argues that for centuries the world’s seas and oceans have been mismanaged and overexploited, leading to their current diminished state. Armstrong outlines his plans, some of which are radical, to restore the health and abundance of the world’s oceans. However, Armstrong combines this with the idea of “ocean justice” and wants the restored oceans to be used to transform the world, redistribute wealth and reduce inequality on a global scale.
Armstrong begins the book by saying that the ocean (the shorthand term he uses throughout the book for the entire planet’s marine environment) is mostly ignored by politicians, pointing out that South Korea and Canada are two of the few countries in the world which have a dedicated minister for marine affairs. The vastness of the ocean is such that it is easy to think that it will always be there for humans to exploit, but Armstrong warns that this is not the case – the ocean is not too big to fail. Indeed, Armstrong warns that it is impossible to have a healthy earth without also having a healthy ocean.
The book argues that the way the ocean is currently used and exploited is deeply unfair and leads to a widening of global inequality. For example, developed nations across the world use highly industrialised fisheries to catch large numbers of fish to feed their already rich populations. This leads to people from poorer nations having reduced fish stocks, depriving them of an essential source of food and entrenching their poverty. Similarly, if seabed mining is allowed to take place it will cause immense damage to global marine ecosystems but only rich countries will see the benefit of the cobalt, lithium and nickel it produces, as these metals are used in electronic devices and electric car batteries which are only used in the developed world. Issues such as these will only get worse due to the “blue acceleration”, a term that describes how economies are shifting toward the ocean. Armstrong says that with oceanic gas and oil exploration, wind power and the potential mining of seabed rare earth metals the ocean economy is set to double to £3 trillion by 2030.
Instead of the damaging and wasteful way the ocean is currently exploited, Armstrong believes that the ocean could instead be used to reduce global inequalities and improve the lives of millions of people in the poorest parts of the world (he uses the geographically confusing terms of Global South for the world’s poorer and less developed nations and Global North for the richer developed nations). Armstrong states that ocean justice will only be achieved with “a new ocean politics” and a “radical new vision” of how the ocean is managed on a global level.
Armstrong goes back through history to explain how the current way of managing the ocean developed. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that everyone had the right to freely access the sea, and the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius wrote The Freedom of the Seas in 1609, a book which argued that no one person or company has the right to control the seas. However, this was underpinned by the belief that the resources of the sea were limitless. As it was realised that the fish stocks and other marine resources were exhaustible, calls for individual nations to control their own waters grew louder. Over the centuries countries began to control increasing areas of their own marine territory. This reached its culmination in 1982 when the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) came into force. This gave every country in the world a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) stretching from the nation’s coastline to 200 nautical miles out to sea. While nations had to allow free and peaceful passage of other nations’ vessels within this zone, only the nation to which the EEZ belonged could exploit the natural resources such as fish stocks, oil and gas within their EEZ. Armstrong refers to this as the “enclosure of the oceans” and he believes it has been a driver of inequality on a global scale.
Armstrong argues that “moderately sized” countries such as Britain and France have oversized EEZs because of their geography and the fact that they can claim the EEZs of their former colonial possessions elsewhere in the world. He points out that the tiny Pitcairn Islands, which has a population of around seventy people, has an EEZ which is approximately the same size as China’s, a nation of some 1.4 billion people. Having huge EEZs allows nations to fish and exploit oil and gas reserves and grow richer than landlocked countries. Furthermore, EU nations which have overfished their own EEZs are able to travel to African waters to fish, paying on average 5 per cent of the value of their catch to the poor nation in whose EEZ they are fishing. This stops the local fisheries of poorer nations from developing, badly affects local employment and deprives people of fish in many parts of the world where this is an essential food source.
Further chapters look at the rights of people working at sea with Armstrong explaining that in many parts of the world people are forced to work in the fishing industry through slavery and bonded labour. He points out that many of the imported fish products people eat in the UK could well have been caught and produced through such practices, but this is an issue that receives very little publicity. Other chapters consider animal rights and the impact of climate change and the issue of “climate exiles” – people who have had to leave their own country and find somewhere else to live due to rising sea levels.
While Armstrong has highlighted the many issues across the world’s seas and oceans he also puts forward answers, although some of these may seem extreme and in some cases deeply unrealistic (something he is aware of, saying that people may “baulk” at some of the solutions he suggests in the final chapters of the book). Armstrong believes that nations should only control the waters to twelve miles from their coastline. Beyond this, their EEZs and the high seas should be controlled by a World Ocean Authority which would be responsible for restoring the world’s fish stocks and marine ecosystems and sharing resources more equally to ensure that poorer and landlocked countries do not miss out on the wealth generated by the oceans. His acceptance that this would be “highly divisive” is something of an understatement. He also states that countries that have historically generated higher carbon emissions should take in more climate exiles and is a strong believer that countries with a “bountiful coastline” have an obligation to share this with landlocked and poorer countries. This would be achieved by creating “land bridges” which would allow landlocked countries access to the ocean. These ideas certainly are radical, although some readers may be frustrated by Armstrong’s tendency to put forward such bold ideas and then spend very little, if any, time discussing the political, practical and logistical challenges to actually implementing them. There are scant details about how a World Ocean Authority would actually operate and little acknowledgement that existing evidence of large-scale bureaucratic attempts to manage fisheries (such as the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy) has been heavily criticized and has achieved few of their overall aims. With unfortunate timing for Armstrong, a summit between UN member nations to trash out an international agreement on protecting the high seas collapsed without reaching an agreement just weeks after the publication of this book, highlighting the difficulty in securing any kind of international cooperation on the oceans.
Armstrong takes a very left-wing political view on all of the major issues discussed in this book, meaning few of his opinions contain any surprises. When it comes to climate exiles, he sees no downsides to rich countries taking in large amounts of new immigrants and does not consider the impact this may have on infrastructure, employment or social cohesion. Similarly, when it comes to paying for the Blue New Deal he sees no issues with spending large amounts of taxpayer’s money as reinvigorating the ocean would boost the economy and, according to Armstrong, pay for itself. There is no consideration that his Panglossian plan to reinvigorate the ocean may not play out in the way he envisions and leave future generations having to deal with high levels of debt. When it comes to green technology Armstrong is upbeat to the point of utopianism. He claims that renewable wind and wave technology could replace existing carbon-emitting energy and that seaweed farming could replace much of the current land-based farming. When discussing this Armstrong fails to acknowledge that many of the green technologies he promotes are in their infancy and may never reach a level where they will completely replace ways of generating energy that uses fossil fuels.
Interesting, thought-provoking and very left-wing, A Blue New Deal is a book that covers a wide range of issues relating to the planet’s seas and oceans. Armstrong is not afraid to think big, and many of his ideas are as radical as he promises in the opening pages. Some readers may see this as an inspiring vision to reach for, whereas others may be somewhat frustrated with the deeply unrealistic nature of some of the solutions put forward. Despite this, A Blue New Deal is a highly interesting book that brings a new (radical) perspective to restoring the world’s marine environment.
A Blue New Deal can be purchased from Amazon by clicking here.