11 April 23
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Tennessee offers a chilling example
I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which — notwithstanding a few glaring counter-examples such as what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie in 2016 — is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. Okay, fascism.
What occurred in Nashville last week is a frightening reminder of the fragility of American democracy when Republicans obtain supermajorities and no longer need to work with Democratic lawmakers.
The two Tennessee Democrats expelled from the Tennessee House were not accused of criminal wrongdoing or even immoral conduct. Their putative offense was to protest Tennessee’s failure to enact stronger gun controls after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville left three 9-year-old students and three adults dead.
They were technically in violation of House rules, but the state legislature has never before imposed so severe a penalty for rules violations. In fact, over the past few years, a number of Tennessee legislators have kept their posts even after being charged with serious sexual misconduct. And the two who were expelled last week are Black people, while a third legislator who demonstrated in the same manner but was not expelled is white.
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We are witnessing the logical culmination of win-at-any-cost Trump Republican politics — scorched-earth tactics used by Republicans to entrench their power, with no justification other than that they can.
Democracy is about means. Under it, citizens don’t have to agree on ends (abortion, health care, guns, or whatever else we disagree about) as long as we agree on democratic means for handling our disagreements.
But for Trump Republicans, the ends justify whatever means they choose —including expelling lawmakers, rigging elections through gerrymandering, refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and denying the outcome of a legitimate presidential election.
My friends, the Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. It is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.
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Wisconsin may soon offer an even more chilling example. While liberals celebrated the election on Tuesday of Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court because she’ll tip the court against the state’s extreme gerrymandering (the most extreme in the nation) and its fierce laws against abortion (among the most stringent in America), something else occurred in Wisconsin on election day that may well negate Protasiewicz’s victory. Voters in Wisconsin’s 8th senatorial district decided (by a small margin) to send Republican Dan Knodl to the state Senate.
This gives the Wisconsin Republican Party a supermajority — and with it, the power to remove key state officials, including judges, through impeachment. Several weeks ago, Knodl said he would “certainly consider” impeaching Protasiewicz. Although he was then talking about her role as a county judge, his interest in impeaching her presumably has increased now that she’s able to tip the state’s highest court.
As in Tennessee, this could be done without any necessity for a public justification. Under Republican authoritarianism, power is its own justification. Recall that in 2018, after Wisconsin voters elected a Democratic governor and attorney general, the Republican legislature and the lame duck Republican governor responded by significantly cutting back the power of both offices.
North Carolina is another state where a supermajority of GOP legislators has cut deeply into the power of the executive branch, after Democrats won those posts. The GOP now has veto-proof majorities in both of the state’s legislative chambers, which enable Republicans to enact conservative policies over the opposition of Gov. Roy Cooper, including even more extreme gerrymandered districts. Although North Carolina’s constitution bans mid-decade legislative redistricting absent a court order, Republicans just announced they plan to do it anyway.
Meanwhile, a newly installed Republican supermajority in Florida has given Ron DeSantis unbridled control over the state — granting him total authority of the board governing Disney, the theme park giant he has fought over his anti-LGBTQ+ “don’t say gay” law; permission to fly migrants from anywhere in the U.S. to destinations of his own choosing, for political purposes, and then send the bill to Florida’s taxpayers; and unprecedented prosecutorial power in the form of his newly created, hand-picked office of election “integrity,” pursuing supposed cases of voter fraud.
Florida has now effectively silenced even Florida residents from speaking out in opposition to Republican proposals. A new rule prohibits rallies at the state house. Those testifying against Republican bills are often allowed to speak for no more than 30 seconds.
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Without two parties committed to democratic means to resolve differences in ends, the one remaining (small-d) democratic party is at a disadvantage in seeking ends it deems worthy. The inevitable result: Eventually it, too, sacrifices democratic means to its own ends.
When a political party sacrifices democratic means to its own ends, partisanship turns to enmity, and political divisions morph into hatred. In warfare there are no principles, only wins and losses. One hundred sixty years ago, our system of self government fell apart because Southern states refused to recognize the inherent equality of Black people. What occurred in Tennessee last week is a throwback to that shameful era.
I don’t believe Trump alone is responsible for the birth of modern Republican fascism, but he has legitimized and encouraged the vicious rancor that has led much of the GOP into election-denying authoritarianism.
What do you think?
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Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Ginni Thomas. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
ProPublica reported last week that Thomas accepted luxury trips for more than two decades from a prominent Republican donor without disclosing them
The revelations were made in a report last week from nonprofit news outlet ProPublica. The article detailed an array of trips — including travel on a superyacht and private jet — Thomas took that were funded by Harlan Crow, a Dallas business executive. The publication said Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
In a letter Monday to Roberts, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other Democrats on the panel urged the chief justice to investigate the claims made in the ProPublica report. The Democrats also announced that the committee will hold a hearing on the “need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.”
The ProPublica report prompted fury among Democrats, some of whom called for Thomas — the court’s senior justice — to resign. It also fueled Democrats’ demands that the court adopt an enforceable code of conduct.
Democrats on the committee noted that in 2012 they urged Roberts to adopt a resolution that would bind justices to the same code of conduct to which all other federal judges are sworn. That request came after a 2011 report from the New York Times said Thomas had accepted favors from Crow.
The Democrats said it is “troubling” that back then Roberts dismissed the call for justices to adopt a code of conduct. They said the dismissal has led to a “crisis of public confidence” in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.
“If the Court does not resolve this issue on its own, the Committee will consider legislation to resolve it,” the Democrats wrote. “But you do not need to wait for Congress to act to undertake your own investigation into the reported conduct and to ensure that it cannot happen again.”
In the letter to Roberts, the Democrats said their panel has the responsibility to ensure that the Supreme Court “does not have the federal judiciary’s lowest ethical standards.”
“You have a role to play as well, both in investigating how such conduct could take place at the Court under your watch, and in ensuring that such conduct does not happen again,” they wrote. “We urge you to immediately open such an investigation and take all needed action to prevent further misconduct.”
Thomas on Friday defended his actions, saying he had been advised “by colleagues and others in the judiciary” that the luxury trips gifted by Crow were considered “personal hospitality” and, thus, did not have to be disclosed.
In the statement issued through the court’s public information office, Thomas said Crow and his wife, Kathy, were among the “dearest friends” of the justice and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas.
“As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them,” Thomas said in the statement. “Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”
Federal law mandates that top officials from the three branches of government, including the Supreme Court, file annual forms detailing their finances, outside income and spouses’ sources of income, with each branch determining its own reporting standards.
Judges are prohibited from accepting gifts from anyone with business before the court. Until recently, however, the judicial branch had not clearly defined an exemption for gifts considered “personal hospitality.”
Thomas noted that just last month, a committee of the Judicial Conference, the courts’ policymaking body, revised those rules to be more specific.
“And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Democrats’ letter to Roberts.
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Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones were expelled for violating decorum on the floor of the Tennessee House of Representatives. (photo: ABC)
ALSO SEE: Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones Returns to Capitol After
Nashville Council Reinstates Him
How Republican super-majorities in state legislatures are undermining the democratic process.
It was thoughts and prayers, though, that had been offered by the Republican governor, Bill Lee, in a pre-recorded video the day after the shooting. “I am calling on the people of Tennessee to pray,” he said. “Prayer is the first thing we should do, but it’s not the only thing.” He added, “Clearly there’s more work to do,” but that “the struggle is against evil itself.” The students, who are all members of the shooter-drill generation, were incensed. In early April, March for Our Lives, a student-led gun-reform group, called for a nationwide student walkout. In Nashville, crowding into the capitol, students chanted, “You ban books, you ban drag—kids are still in body bags!” David Hogg, one of the founders of March For Our Lives, wrote on Twitter, where he posted a video of the students in Tennessee, “If voting didn’t work, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop us. We are going to win, and they know it.”
The Nashville massacre was a rare case in which the supposed solutions that committed Second Amendment supporters usually propose were in place: the school’s doors were locked, there were armed staff members in the building, and the shooter was under mental-health care. Nonetheless, in response to the shooting, Senator Marsha Blackburn, who has received more than a million dollars from the N.R.A., along with the state’s junior senator, Bill Hagerty (who has received around sixteen thousand dollars from the group after two years in office) proposed federal legislation to create a nine-million-dollar grant program that, in part, could be used to train veterans and former law-enforcement officers to serve as school security guards. In other words, Tennessee’s senators would like to see more guns in schools. And it was Governor Lee who, two years ago, pushed for N.R.A.-sponsored legislation to allow most people over twenty-one to carry a handgun in public without a permit. The Tennessee House is now poised to lower that age to eighteen.
On March 30th, three Democratic members—Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson—now known as the Tennessee Three, stepped into the well of the chamber without being formally recognized and led the student protesters sitting in the gallery in the chant “No action, no peace,” demanding that lawmakers pass gun-reform legislation. Jones and Pearson used a megaphone. On April 6th, their Republican colleagues voted to expel both members for having violated the decorum of the chamber. When Johnson was asked why they, and not she, had been kicked out, she was blunt, saying, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.” (A representative who voted to expel Jones and Pearson but not Johnson said that he did so because she “did not participate to the extent that Jones and Pearson did”—she did not use the megaphone.) Van Turner, the president of the Memphis chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., called the expulsion, which happened in a statehouse located on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, two days after the fifty-fifth anniversary of King’s assassination, a “political lynching.” Together, Pearson and Jones represent more than a hundred and thirty thousand constituents.
After the vote, Johnson, a former special-education teacher who, in 2008, lived through a school shooting in Knoxville, said, “To the nation, keep watching. We are losing our democracy. We need to make sure we stamp out this march to fascism. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Though she was quoting the nineteenth-century British historian and politician Lord Acton, the absolute power she was referring to is the Republican super-majority that controls the Tennessee legislature. Republicans also control both the executive and judicial branches of the state government. This has created a formidable bulwark against sensible gun reform in Tennessee.
In a crucial way, the outcome of the April 6th expulsion vote was preordained in 2010. That year, Republican lawmakers used the redistricting provision that follows every census to gerrymander the state in such a way that it packed Democrats into a smaller number of districts. Not surprisingly, the election of 2012 delivered the Republicans their super-majority in both houses of the legislature. This essentially gives them the power to do as they please, such as expelling duly elected legislators and, in 2020, passing a criminal-justice-reform bill that, among other things, makes it a felony to pitch a tent outside the capitol overnight, punishable by up to six years in prison. (That bill was passed in response to weeks-long demonstrations by racial-justice activists, who were protesting police overreach and advocating the removal from the capitol of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early member of the Ku Klux Klan. Justin Jones was an organizer of those protests.)
Less than twenty-four hours after the expulsions, the Tennessee Republican Party was using the event as a fundraising opportunity. “Actions have consequences, and we applaud House Republicans for having the conviction to protect the rules, the laws, and the prestige of the State of Tennessee,” an appeal read. Meanwhile, Democrats, led by Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, raised nearly half a million dollars for reëlection campaigns for Jones and Pearson in a special election, which can take place anytime within the next hundred days or so, at the discretion of the governor. Both Jones and Pearson are expected to be reinstated this week for the interim—Jones was voted back in on Monday, by the Nashville Metropolitan Council, and Pearson is due to be voted back in on Wednesday, by the Democrats who control the Shelby County Board of Commissioners—but G.O.P. leaders have threatened to withhold funds for projects in the Memphis area if Pearson is reinstated, according to a Shelby County commissioner.
The assault on democracy in Tennessee is also a reminder of how quickly the swirl of politics can overtake grief. I asked a friend, David Dark, a progressive evangelical and an assistant professor of religion and the arts at Belmont University, a private Christian institution in Nashville, what was not being reported. He told me that Dick Koonce—the husband of Katherine Koonce, the head of the Covenant School, who was killed in the shooting—who is the executive director of Charis Ministries, a social-services agency, “is grieving and challenging his own friends, family, and co-congregants” to think of the shooter’s family, too; as Koonce wrote in a statement, “honoring Katherine compels us to remember a seventh family, equally wounded in the loss of someone dear to them.” Dark himself is concerned about what he termed “for-profit transphobia,” adding, “That story needs to surface, but I fear it’s already sunk to the bottom of the Internet.” (The Nashville police said that the shooter, Audrey Hale, apparently identified as transgender, a detail that has led much right-wing coverage of the tragedy.)
Dark also told me, in an e-mail, “The prophetic task is to dramatize the moral contradictions we are otherwise compelled to abide as normal. During Holy Week, they tried to deny the Tennessee Three, but they ended up magnifying them. Our local beloved community is now international news, just as it was when Rev. James Lawson, Diane Nash, John Lewis … others staged the lunch-counter sit-ins. A friend messaged me to say that Tennessee is going off the rails. No, I say a select number of white people in Tennessee are going off the rails loudly and publicly. Millions of others are waking up. Just watch. We live in hope.”
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Russian police officers watching military aircraft fly over the Kremlin. Moscow could decide it is finally safe to unleash its prized fighter jets and bombers if Ukraine's air defense systems are depleted. (photo: Sergey Ponomarev/NYT)
A huge influx of munitions is needed to keep Russia’s air force from changing the course of the war, according to U.S. officials and newly leaked Pentagon documents.
But without a huge influx of munitions, Ukraine’s entire air defense network, weakened by repeated barrages from Russian drones and missiles, could fracture, according to U.S. officials and newly leaked Pentagon documents, potentially allowing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to unleash his lethal fighter jets in ways that could change the course of the war.
In the early days of the invasion, Russian aircraft flew hundreds of combat flights to bomb targets in Ukraine. But a combination of quick thinking by Ukrainian commanders and poor intelligence and bad aim by Russian pilots left many of Ukraine’s warplanes and air defenses intact, preventing Moscow from gaining control of the skies above the battlefield and forcing Russia to keep much of its air force out of the fight.
Now Pentagon officials are worried that Moscow’s barrage of attacks from afar is draining Ukraine’s stores of the missiles it uses to defend itself. And a Pentagon assessment from late February contained in the trove of leaked documents that were discovered circulating online last week paints an even grimmer picture.
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A teenage girl in detention. (photo: Juvenile-In-Justice.com)
How Sexually Abused Girls Are Still Ending Up in Jails and Prisons
Jessica Contrera, The Washington Post
Contrera writes: "In 2015, researchers coined a phrase to describe a little-discussed cycle they said was destroying the lives of American girls: the 'sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline.'"
A new report on the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline says victims continue to be punished for the violence they endure
Their report argued that victimized girls, especially girls of color, were being unjustly punished. Girls running away from abusive homes: arrested for truancy. Girls being sold by traffickers: locked up for prostitution. Again and again, the researchers at Georgetown University and the nonprofit Rights4Girls argued, the systems that were supposed to be helping abuse survivors were actually harming them.
Before long, their report was everywhere they had hoped it would be. In training sessions for social workers and jail employees. In bills proposed to change state and federal law. It was even cited in a speech by President Barack Obama.
But eight years later, despite the attention paid to their research, despite the #MeToo movement, despite the nationwide reckoning over systemic racism, the researchers say abused girls are still facing a crisis. A report unveiled Monday, titled “Criminalized Survivors: Today’s Abuse to Prison Pipeline for Girls,” details the failing laws, stubborn policies and lack of reforms keeping a vicious cycle at work.
“What messages are we sending when it’s the survivor of sexual abuse who is the one who gets locked up?” said report co-author Rebecca Epstein, the executive director of Georgetown Law School’s Center on Gender Justice and Opportunity.
The new report focuses on the specific charges being faced by girls, who are considered more likely than boys to be arrested on low-level offenses.
The number of girls arrested on charges of prostitution or “commercialized vice” has greatly decreased since the previous report, with the most recent arrest data, from 2020, showing at least 110 minors being charged with that offense. But the report’s authors say they think that statistic is highly inaccurate, in part because of the very reforms for which they advocated.
In states where lawmakers successfully banned the arrest of minors for prostitution, police and prosecutors often take teenagers into custody anyway. But instead of charges of prostitution, their paperwork lists “proxy” or “masking” charges, such as loitering, drug possession or disorderly conduct.
Some argue that in the absence of residential programs to provide victims of trafficking the support they need, putting them in detention — where they can at least spend time away from their abusers, drugs and other dangers — is the next best thing.
The authors strongly disagree.
“The regular conditions of confinement are traumatic for any child,” said co-author Yasmin Vafa, the executive director of Rights4Girls. But for victims of sexual abuse, and especially victims of trafficking, she said, “things like strip searches, the use of isolation or solitary confinement, basically being told when and where to go at all times and the use of restraints” can be exponentially harmful.
Low-level offenses are far from the only charges victims of abuse face, the report concludes.
Victims of child sex trafficking are being charged with recruiting other victims, leading to long prison sentences and registration as sex offenders.
“This practice, which holds child victims liable as traffickers themselves, fails to recognize the broader circumstances: that is, the violence, coercion, threats, manipulation, and other forms of control that traffickers use to force their victims to exploit other children,” Vafa and Epstein wrote.
Then there are the victims of sexual abuse who try to escape abuse and end up facing life in prison.
The report examines six cases of abuse victims, all girls of color, charged with murder. Some of the cases have attracted the attention of celebrities and social media masses in recent years.
Among them is Chrystul Kizer, who was 17 years old when she was charged with murder in the killing of a man who filmed his repeated sexual abuse of her and other Black girls. Kizer told The Washington Post in 2019 that she had acted in self-defense. Wisconsin prosecutors argue that she premeditated the killing to steal the man’s car.
Last year, the state’s Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking ruling that will allow Kizer to argue in court that the crime she committed was a “direct result” of the trafficking she experienced. If a judge and then a jury agree, she may have the chance to be acquitted of some or all of the charges against her.
Other victims charged with similar crimes in the past had no such opportunity. In 2004, 16-year-old Cyntoia Brown was imprisoned for killing a man who paid to abuse her. She spent 15 years in prison before the governor of Tennessee, under pressure from activists and celebrities, granted her clemency.
Brown and other formerly incarcerated survivors of abuse now advocate for victims like Kizer. Sara Kruzan, who spent nearly two decades in prison for killing her abuser at 16, is the namesake of a congressional bill that would allow federal judges to deviate from mandatory minimums when sentencing minors.
Until such laws are a reality, Vafa and Epstein say they hope that their report and its recommendations can serve as a warning sign and study guide for defense lawyers, prosecutors and others who play a role in determining the fate of abuse victims.
If they read the report’s introduction, the first words they come across are those of a teenage survivor of sexual abuse, Pieper Lewis. Like Kizer, Brown and Kruzan, Lewis was charged with killing her abuser. But after two years in a juvenile detention facility, she was sentenced to probation instead of prison time — a sign, for many, of progress.
“My spirit has been burned but still glows through the flames,” Lewis said in court last year. “Hear me roar, see me glow, and watch me grow.”
In November, after five weeks in a court-ordered transition program, Lewis cut off her GPS ankle monitor and fled the facility. She later told the Des Moines Register that she felt unsafe and re-traumatized by her experiences in the adult facility.
As the researchers prepared to release their report, citing Lewis’s story as another example of the abuse-to-prison pipeline, Lewis herself was back in a jail uniform, pleading guilty to new criminal charges for running away.
A judge is expected to decide next month how she will be punished.
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Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (photo: EPA)
Dismissal of Yoav Gallant triggered unprecedented surge of protest against plan to disempower judiciary
In a televised speech late on Monday, Netanyahu said Gallant would stay in his position, two weeks after he dismissed the minister.
“I decided to put the differences we had behind us,” he said. “Gallant remains in his position and we will continue to work together for the security of the citizens of Israel.”
Gallant welcomed Netanyahu’s move, posting on social media a picture of him with the premier and the message: “We continue together with full power for Israel.”
Gallant’s removal triggered an unprecedented surge of protest against the already unpopular plan to disempower the judiciary as many Israelis reached the conclusion that even their security could be sacrificed for Netanyahu’s personal interests.
But Gallant, seen abroad as a key interlocutor in a government where extremists wield considerable power, never received a formal dismissal letter, remaining in office amid a surge of violence triggered by Israeli police raids on Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque.
In the last week, citizens of the country have been rattled by rocket fire from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, a roadside shooting that killed three British-Israeli women in the West Bank, and a car ramming in Tel Aviv that killed an Italian tourist and wounded seven other people.
The security crisis has further shaken Netanyahu’s popularity with a poll taken on Sunday showing that only 27% of respondents “rely on the government to handle the wave of terror”.
In his televised address, Netanyahu tried to dispel doubts about his leadership, saying the Israeli air force had struck back hard and that troops would “reach and settle accounts with all the terrorists”.
“I am working with determination and responsibility,” he said. “We will repel the dangers and prevail over our enemies.”
The premier said he was “restoring deterrence” that had allegedly been weakened by the previous government.
Referring to the growing number of army and air force reservists who had joined the protest movement, Netanyahu implied they too were responsible for emboldening Israel’s foes. “Our enemies interpreted the calls to refuse service as weakness,” he said. In fact the reservists had made clear they would still take active combat roles when needed.
According to the poll, only a fifth of the Israeli public approved of the premier’s performance.
The survey of 699 Israelis by a respected pollster, Camil Fuchs, for Channel 13 showed that the Likud party-led coalition would be trounced today by the parties that held power before last November’s elections by a 64 to 46 margin, with 10 mostly Arab legislators not falling in either camp.
The poll pointed to a surge in popularity for former defence minister Benny Gantz and his centre-right National Unity party. National Unity would win 29 seats, Yesh Atid, a centrist party currently heading the opposition, would gain 21 seats and Netanyahu’s Likud party would crash from 32 to 20 seats.
The current coalition has 64 seats, including 14 held by two rightwing extremist parties, Religious Zionism and Jewish Power. Their popularity is also declining, with the poll giving them a combined 11 seats. Polls in late March had also shown the coalition losing power, but the new poll results amounted to an all-out “collapse” for the coalition in the words of Israeli analysts.
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Humpback whales are among the many kinds of marine animals that depend on the high seas and will benefit from a new UN treaty to protect them. (photo: Live Science)
A new global treaty to conserve the high seas is a giant win for the ocean and its most dazzling creatures.
It’s not the Amazon rainforest or the African savanna. It’s not even the Great Barrier Reef.
It’s the high seas — a.k.a. the open ocean.
The high seas start 200 nautical miles offshore (about 230 miles), beyond any country’s national jurisdiction. This region is truly massive. The high seas cover nearly half of the planet’s surface, make up about two-thirds of the entire ocean, and represent an estimated 95 percent of all occupied habitat on Earth. 95 percent! All of the world’s forests and grasslands and lakes and rivers make up just a tiny fraction of Earth’s space for wildlife.
This gargantuan ocean habitat isn’t just some big, empty pool. It’s full of life — of whales and octopuses, albatrosses and turtles, and schools of fish that end up in restaurants and grocery stores. Plus, the high seas are teeming with microscopic critters called phytoplankton, which supply about half of the oxygen we breathe. The Amazon isn’t the lungs of the Earth. The high seas are.
Nonetheless, the high seas are nearly entirely undefended. Protected areas cover only about 1 percent of the open ocean, leaving this habitat vulnerable to overexploitation, plastic pollution, and commercial shipping — all of which harm wildlife and threaten to upend entire ecosystems on which many of us depend.
But big changes are coming, and they could help shield the high seas from many of these threats. In early March, after nearly 20 years of planning and heated negotiations, more than 190 countries agreed on a global treaty to conserve the high seas. It’s a big deal: The treaty marks the first time in history that the world has a cohesive strategy to sustain this enormous, life-supporting region.
The centerpiece of this groundbreaking treaty is a plan to establish new protected areas. These are basically big parks in the open ocean — like Yellowstone or Yosemite, but out at sea — that prohibit certain human activities that harm ecosystems and their inhabitants. As countries create more and more of them, these protected areas will count toward a big target, known as 30 by 30, to conserve at least 30 percent of all land and water by 2030. (Today, 3 to 8 percent of the ocean is protected.)
A key question now is what these protected areas will actually look like, and whether they’ll work. In some ways, parks make less sense in the open ocean than they do on land. Sharks and whales and other marine animals are highly mobile; to them, park borders are meaningless. Climate change, meanwhile, is shifting the distribution of all kinds of ocean creatures, potentially undermining the value of any protected area that’s stuck in place.
The open ocean is far from empty
From the bow of a ship, much of the open ocean looks the same. It’s blue. There are often waves. It’s overwhelmingly vast. It looks like ... the ocean. But dip below the surface and a whole other world appears. Underwater in the high seas, no two locations are the same, though many of them are spectacular.
Consider a region about 1,500 miles east of Miami, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Known as the Lost City, it’s a field of hydrothermal vents — towers formed around what are essentially hot springs in the seafloor that expel mineral-rich water. Some of the structures are nearly 200 feet tall, stretching as high as a 15-story building.
“It looks like an underwater metropolis,” said Nichola Clark, a high seas expert at the Pew Charitable Trusts who was involved in the treaty negotiations.
Hydrothermal vents like these may hold secrets to how life on Earth began. They also support a wide array of life forms today. There are microorganisms that can turn chemicals released by the vents into energy but also larger creatures like crabs, shrimp, and octopuses, many of which are unique to this region. Remarkably, more than half of the species here may live nowhere else on Earth.
More than 1,000 miles west of the Lost City is another extraordinary site called the Sargasso Sea. It’s the only sea on Earth that has no land borders; the sea is bounded instead by ocean currents, which form a soft barrier between the sea and the rest of the ocean.
The Sargasso Sea is calm and clear and blanketed by thick, green mats of Sargassum seaweed that provide shelter to frogfish, seahorses, and other marine animals. The sea is also the only known place on Earth where American and European eels spawn (until recently, the origin of eels has been something of a scientific mystery).
The high seas have many incredible spots like these, and together they’re home to millions of species — many of which are still unknown to science. They also sustain the increasing number of people who eat seafood, such as yellowfin and skipjack tuna. While a small percentage of the fish we eat are caught in the open ocean (most of which is destined for wealthy nations), ecosystems in these regions support fisheries near shore, too.
“Our ocean is connected,” said Sheena Talma, a marine biologist in the Seychelles who was also involved in the treaty negotiations. The Seychelles and many other island nations rely on tuna in coastal waters, Talma said, which often travel in and out of one country’s national jurisdiction (also known as its exclusive economic zone, or EEZ). “A lot of things that happen on the high seas will affect our EEZ,” Talma said.
But while island nations and many scientists have long recognized the importance of the high seas, this region has largely been overlooked by global conservation efforts. Fewer than a dozen marine parks dot the open ocean, covering just a tiny fraction of its habitat. Plus, some of them provide little in the way of protection, Clark said. And while there are many existing organizations involved in governing different activities in the high seas, including seabed mining and fishing, they don’t work coherently. Existing governance is “a hot mess,” said Sara Maxwell, an associate professor of marine science at the University of Washington.
How to protect the high seas
Without protection, the high seas have sustained damage. A 2010 study examined 48 different fish stocks in the high seas and found that two-thirds of them were “depleted or being overfished.” A more recent assessment indicates that fishing companies have overexploited more than a third of the ocean’s fish stocks (though it does not distinguish between fisheries in the high seas and those within national jurisdictions).
Commercial shipping is a problem, too. As vessels carrying our TVs, cookware, and other goods travel through the high seas, they inadvertently kill whales and other marine animals, including the world’s largest fish.
Indirect threats, such as climate change, only make these problems worse. Rising temperatures are causing some marine animals to shrink, which can disrupt ecosystems that have been carefully calibrated over thousands of years. Carbon dioxide emitted by our power plants and cars, meanwhile, is making the sea more acidic, putting corals and shell-building creatures at risk.
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are one solution. Research shows that protected areas in the ocean tend to benefit resident fish and other animals if they restrict all or most destructive activities, such as bottom trawling. And that’s where the new treaty comes in: It provides a way for countries to create new marine parks in the high seas that will be recognized under one international organization.
How do you put a park in the open ocean? It’s a little different from creating one on land. Forests, wetlands, and other terrestrial ecosystems often have somewhat clear borders, hemmed in by highways and other human developments. The open ocean, however, is fluid (literally) and unbounded. Many of its inhabitants are also long-distance travelers like whales and sharks.
“It is a little bit wonky that we’re trying to apply something that works really well on land in the ocean,” Maxwell said of marine parks. “The habitat is fluid, the animals are fluid, and the users — including humans in a boat — are fluid.”
But the idea of parks in the open ocean makes more sense when you consider, again, those unique underwater features. The high seas are full of submerged canyons, valleys and hills, and different currents and temperatures. These features create somewhat discrete ecosystems with assemblages of marine animals, not unlike what you find on land. While parks in the US protect, say, the Rocky Mountains, there are also mountain ranges underwater, such as the Salas y Gómez and Nazca ridges off the west coast of South America.
“How cool is that?” Clark said of these ridges. “It’s an underwater mountain range, and the diversity of life there is overwhelming.”
It’s these kinds of unique spots with identifiable features that the new treaty seeks to conserve. Marine scientists have actually already pinpointed several potential locations for protection, including the Salas y Gómez and Nazca ridges as well as the Lost City and the Sargasso Sea. These lists take into account things like the diversity of species in the area and how unique they are.
There are still some questions about how well these parks will work. MPAs are only as effective as the rules that govern them and how well those rules are enforced. While MPAs are by definition protected, many of them — including a number of those in the US — allow for destructive activities, like commercial fishing, said Kristina Gjerde, an expert in marine law who was also involved in the treaty negotiations.
“We call the US marine protected areas ‘sanctuaries,’ and yet the only thing that’s actually prohibited is maybe oil and gas [drilling],” Gjerde said. “There’s still bottom trawling; there’s still pollution coming in from coastal regions.”
Climate change creates other challenges. Rising temperatures are reshaping the range of species and, in some cases, pushing them towards the poles, where it’s colder. Ocean plants and animals have, for example, moved poleward by an average of about 59 kilometers (37 miles) per decade, according to a 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, making static park boundaries less relevant.
That’s one reason some scientists have floated the idea of “mobile MPAs” — essentially, parks with flexible boundaries that can move along with the shifting range of species. This concept is largely untested but doable, said Maxwell, who co-authored a 2020 study (linked above) that advocates for this approach. “It’s a really promising way to keep up with animals,” she said.
We know how to protect the planet
The treaty itself is mostly final, but it will likely be a few years before new parks in the high seas are established, according to experts. The UN has yet to formally adopt the agreement — that could happen in June, Clark said — at which point nations will have to ratify it through their own governments.
Once 60 nations ratify the treaty, known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty, or BBNJ, the agreement will enter into force. (It’s not clear whether the US will sign on. Ratification requires a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate, and conservative lawmakers infamously do not like signing on to global treaties. Some US senators apparently do not even know what the High Seas Treaty is.)
But even then, conserving the high seas won’t be smooth sailing.
“The implementation part of the framework still needs an awful lot of work,” said Lance Morgan, president of the nonprofit Marine Conservation Institute, who also helped negotiate the treaty. “There are a lot of pitfalls potentially.”
The process for designating new parks in the high seas is meant to be inclusive, allowing a wide range of groups — including those who advocate for fisheries — to weigh in on how these areas are managed, Morgan said. That process could ultimately weaken the regulations governing them. There’s also still a lack of data showing the range of marine species and how climate change will affect them. In short: All of the existing issues with MPAs could also affect parks in the high seas.
Still, many environmental advocates are hopeful — more hopeful than they’ve been in years. The treaty is just one tool the world now has to protect nature. Just a few months ago, nearly every country signed on to a historic plan to safeguard wildlife and ecosystems globally by, among other things, conserving at least 30 percent of the planet. “We have all of the tools we need,” Clark said. Now it just comes down to whether the world will use them.
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