The Sea Is Rising, and So Must We
Reflections from the Third UN Ocean Summit
The ocean does not scream. It doesn’t shudder like forests ablaze, or groan like glaciers calving into a warming sea. It swells. It rises. It chokes. It remembers.
And yet, at the Third United Nations Summit on Oceans the world is speaking of the ocean as if it were still a backdrop, a watery theater on which we might stage the latest drama of green capitalism. The theme is lofty, the language full of promise: “Accelerating action and mobilizing all actors to conserve and sustainably use the ocean.” But beneath the scripted diplomacy, the waves tell another story.
They tell us that only 8.6% of the ocean is protected. That less than 3% is actually safeguarded in any meaningful way. That the ambitious “30x30” target (protecting 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030) is slipping from our grip like sand through fingers already stained with oil and plastic. They tell us that $1.2 billion was all the world could cough up to protect the largest living system on Earth, while it spends trillions on weapons and subsidies for fossil fuel giants who bleed the sea dry.[i]
The oceans are being sold off, pixel by pixel, to corporations with deep-sea drills and bottom trawlers. These billionaire pirates are hawking “blue bonds” with the same reckless faith they once placed in derivatives and carbon credits.
Blue bonds. The name sounds gentle, almost poetic. But underneath lies the cold machinery of finance, repurposed, repainted in the hues of sustainability. These are not just bonds; they are IOUs written to a wounded ocean. A fragile pact between capital and the coral reefs, between profit and the plankton. They claim to fund hope: projects meant to restore what was plundered, to nurse back life where only silence now grows. At their best, they align with the grand utopia of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. At their worst, they dress up old greed in blue and call it redemption.
But the sea cannot be securitized. It cannot be coerced. It cannot be colonized by investment portfolios.
At the summit, powerful nations made beautiful promises. But promises, like plankton, dissolve quickly under too much heat.
And yet, there is something stirring. Something powerful. Not in the plenary halls, but in the margins. In the voices of activists, young and old, who refuse to be spectators to this slow drowning.
Greenpeace is attempting to bring messages from three million people calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining; a grotesque frontier in extractivism that threatens lifeforms we haven’t even named yet. Indigenous communities from the Pacific Islands, whose ancestral knowledge predates scientific oceanography by millennia, remind us that the ocean is not a resource, it is a relative.
These voices are not just ornamental. They are essential.
Activists can and must do what governments will not. We can demand that the 60-country ratification threshold for the High Seas Treaty be met immediately, not sometime in the foggy future.
We can name and shame the eleven countries still blocking the WTO agreement to end $22 billion in annual harmful fisheries subsidies. Every year governments pour $35 billion into the machinery of extraction they dare to call “fisheries.” Not aid. Not relief. Subsidies, or state-sponsored bait for an industrial hook. Of that sum, more than $22 billion is considered “harmful.”
This is not an accident. This is design. The biggest culprits are China, the European Union, the United States, South Korea, and Japan. Giants of trade, dressed up as saviors of the sea, financing fleets that chase dwindling shoals into silence.
We can blockade ships. Launch divestment campaigns. Sue governments for negligence. Occupy the headquarters of deep-sea mining corporations. But we can also dream differently. Organize locally to create community-managed marine reserves. Support fishers practicing sustainable, ancestral methods. Build solidarity between coastal communities facing the same enemies: greed, pollution, abandonment.
We need to remember that the climate crisis is not only an ecological catastrophe, it is a spiritual and political one. It reveals, with unbearable clarity, that our systems are incapable of caring for what matters most. If the ocean dies, we do not negotiate our way out. We drown.
And so, we are left with this paradox. The sea is rising. But we must rise faster. Rise with more imagination than the corporate suits and diplomatic double-speak. Rise with anger, but also with ceremony, with songs that remember the sea as a mother, not a marketplace.
The UN Ocean Summit, for all its failings, gives us a stage. Not to beg. But to disrupt. To remind the world that the ocean is not a backdrop for photo-ops or policy jargon. It is alive. And it is watching us.
Maybe it will forgive us. But we cannot count on forgiveness.
We must act as if there is no summit but the one within ourselves. No treaty but the covenant we make with the unborn. No negotiation but the urgent plea between the living and the threatened.
Sign the Greenpeace petition to Stop deep sea mining. Deep sea mining is a destructive, extractive industry that is on course to cause irreversible impacts on ecosystems.
[i] https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-ocean-conference-2025?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=7f62a8451b-Top+News%3A+Fri.+6%2F6%2F25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-c56d0ea580-601320680