ABSTRACT
Alas, man is still marking the earth with ruin, but his control no longer stops with the shore. One of the justifications advanced by proponents of a 200-mile EEZ was that the high seas beyond a narrow belt of territorial waters had been polluted and overfished because it was treated as common property, and therefore subjected to “the tragedy of the commons.” Therefore, the solution to the problem was to let individual States undertake the management of the most valuable parts of the sea. The fallacy in that argument was clear from the beginning: If, in fact, the sea had been res communis, the property of all, then every State, every seaman, every fisherman owned a share of it and should have striven to protect that share by cooperating with all other owners in the management of the entire commons. But the sea was not treated as a commons; it was treated as res nullius, the property of no one, and thus open to be raped and ravaged at will.
