Dispatches from the South China Sea: Raising awareness for marine biodiversity conservation

The Hanoi Times is honored to present the author’s comments on his book which has been newly translated into Vietnamese by First News in Ho Chi Minh City.

“Dispatches from the South China Sea: Navigating to Common Ground” by renowned American author James Borton in English and Vietnamese.

This book explains how conflict and cooperation can co-exist and that competing nations can, through environmental collaboration, adopt trust and science-driven peacebuilding measures that can influence and guide policy. Since the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development formally began in 2021 and calls for a new stakeholder process that will be inclusive, participatory, and global to deliver the science required for meeting sustainable development goals, this writing effort offers recommendations on how we can possibly build new relationships with non-science stakeholders and to embrace a new era of innovation, data sharing, and scientific co-creation. The argument is simple: The South China Sea can become a body of water that unites; rather than divides.

Marine biologists and fishermen, share a common language that cuts across political, economic, and social differences. They both recognize that the structure of a coral reef strewn with the detritus of perpetual conflict represents one of nature’s cruel battlefields.

My book places faith in science and examines the role of science cooperation and the implementation of science diplomacy as a strategy amid tensions associated with contested sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. 

“Dispatches from the South China Sea: Navigating to Common Ground” is translated and published by First News.

What distinguishes this book from others on the South China Sea is a hybrid of participatory research and field reportage. Since 2014, I have been a panelist and have organized a half dozen programs and podcasts with themes related to environmental security in the South China Sea with informed marine scientists and policy experts in attendance. Furthermore, I have been engaged as an in-the-field reporter for more than two decades in Southeast Asia and traveled aboard fishing boats and Vietnamese Coast Guard ships in the South China Sea.

This background establishes my credibility to ask and answer central questions surrounding the patterns of environmental cooperation occurring in the highly disputed rich ecologically diverse South China Sea. The claimant nations' actions pose the natural question of how these patterns either are fostered or constrained by domestic, regional, or international environmental politics? 

The book is now on shelves in Vietnamese.

The book pulls readers immediately into a sustainable narrative by offering extensive anecdotes, field notes, and unvarnished conversations with Vietnamese fishermen and marine scientists about their responses to the resources in the South China Sea, living and non-living. As a non-scientist, I have always possessed a reporter’s curiosity and have sought some modeled imitation of the observed reality. Fortunately, many generous biologists have allowed me the opportunity to see their seascape through a scientific lens. There’s marine scientist, Dr. Chu Manh Trinh, a 61-year-old Danang University biology professor, who is responsible for mapping out protected areas off of Vietnam’s central coast and for educating local fishermen about conservation and how sustainable practices improve livelihoods in coastal and island communities.

It’s generally acknowledged that overfishing now threatens the South China Sea fisheries. Vietnamese marine scientists have also documented how the competition for natural resources, especially fish. But for these scientists, the observance of the gradual dismantling of life, beauty, and diversity in the South China Sea is a harrowing experience. For them, and through their collective knowledge, the message is clear and certain: we are all in this together and the body of ecological science reminds us that life is interconnected.

The voices of these marine scientists and the fishermen remind us that we must protect all the parts of the systems on which we depend –from the smallest ecosystem to the hermit crabs I have seen on Cu Lao Cham. The American biologist and writer, Rachel Carson in her seminal book, The Sea Around Us, reminds us that we must be faithful stewards of the sea. The scientist’s poignant and prescient words spill over into our consciousness.

She wrote. “The little crab alone with the sea became a symbol that stood for life itself—for the delicate, destructive, yet incredibly vital force that somehow holds its place amid the harsh realities of the inorganic world…Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance.”

The facts are disturbing for all: in the last fifty years half of the coral reefs have disappeared, only 10% of large fish remain and many species are on the brink of collapse. Unsustainable fishing practices, pollution—including 20 million tons of plastic entering the oceans yearly—and rising temperatures are continued threats. 

Renowned American author James Borton paddles in Quang Nam, Vietnam.

It was in the early morning with a red sky on the horizon, that a 33-year-old Quang Ngai province fisherman said his goodbye to his family and set sail with his crew to earn their livelihood near the Paracel Islands. It’s a scene played out every day as these sentinels of the sea raise and lower their nets.

There are an increasing number of challenges facing the sea and its inhabitants, but fish form the backbone of the powerful stories shared in my book. The book’s narrative brings to life the challenges of food security from the perspectives of fishers, and marine scientists where the decline of fish is fast becoming a hardscrabble reality for more than just fishermen. In my conversations and reporting among all of them, I have learned about the dwindling fisheries in the region’s coastal areas, fishing state subsidies, overlapping exclusive economic zone (EEZ) claims, and mega-commercial fishing trawlers competing in a multi-billion-dollar industry.

The sea offers very few natural partitions. My stories from the Mekong Delta to Ly Son Island, emphasize the interdependence of ocean and coastal land, life and water, atmospheric and oceanic circulation. For the Vietnamese, their identity is closely interwoven with their relationship to the East Sea and especially towards their fishermen. It holds them in a net of community, culture and heritage.

What have I learned and what do I intend to share with readers? It’s that the sea’s complex and interconnected ecosystems need the voices of not only marine scientists but the families and fishers to quell the degradation wrought by such island reclamation, as well as the harvesting of critical species. What I ask you to take away is that it’s not too late to chart a navigable policy shift for a sustainable and peaceful future.