Recognize the rights of the ocean to do him justice – Liberation
« What is the ocean? » asked Jacques Perrin a child when filming the film Oceans. Today, we answer: the ocean is the beating heart of our planet, a living community to which we are irreducibly linked by 3.8 billion years of coevolution. It is our most precious and yet most neglected common good.
Our extractivist company only measures the ocean with its utilitarian blinders: tonnes of fish, oil barrels, ores, sailors, and even trash-loin-with-repders. We poison the ocean without worrying about its inhabitants that we massacre in regard, as if they were only anonymous and replaceable material. However, everyone is a full -fledged individual, a unique being with his personality, his singular interdependencies which offer him an essential place in the balance and resilience of life on our planet. The starfish, the shark, the Medusa, the dolphin, the sea urchin, the bryozoa, each is a knot of the « canvas of the living » of which each of us, human, is part.
However, our law does not recognize the existence of sea creatures. They are considered as res nulliusthings without master, usable at thank you. They are only visible when they become « resources ». A starfish taken in a net thus goes from the status of common good to that of property of the fisherman. But, as it is not a resource, it is rejected dead crushed and immediately falls into the anonymity of matter and in general ignorance. We have built a legal system which is based on the negation of the existence of the other living and which, thus, organizes the destruction of the ocean rather than its protection.
This invisibilization of marine ecosystems leads to their annihilation. Drilling at sea, Industrial overfishing,, the mining of large funds are carried out without consideration for those whose existence is not recognized. Worse, the laws that try to protect the living are constantly bypassed in the name of economic interests.
It is time to reverse this logic and to recognize the ocean a legal status which protects it. It is time to give a right of existence to each organization so that we, humans, be forced to adjust our activities so that they agree with their right to live. All over the world, communities are committed to recognizing the rights of ecosystems: in Ecuador, marine ecosystems have own rights, in Panama, turtles are recognized as a subject of law, in Spain, a law of 2022 recognized The rights of the lagoon Mar Menor (The Minor Sea) to protect all the inhabitants, humans and others than Humans. Why not the ocean?
This is an essential paradigm change. It is not only « useful » or charismatic species that must be protected, but the whole of the living, in all the diversity of its interdependencies. Because we are all connected.
To recognize the rights of the ocean is to guarantee its integrity and regeneration, by preventing its privatization and its blind exploitation. It is to refuse that it is reduced to a commodity and to affirm that it is a world in itself, with its own rules, of which we must be the guardians and not the executioners. It is to want to offer a livable planet to the generations that come. We do not have the right to renounce, it is time to act. But for that, we have to get out of the blindness that pushes us to self -destruction. The future of our children on a desirable planet depends on the health of the ocean. Let’s do him justice.
We launched a petition that has already gathered more than 33,000 people To request the registration of the rights of the ocean in the Nice Declaration which will be adopted at the United Nations Conference on the Ocean in June. A global coalition was built, bringing together NGOs from all over the world and supported in France by several major personalities from the scientific and militant world. We call on each person, organization and public institution to support this proposal, to share it and to join us.
