ABSTRACT
One of the weaknesses of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, especially from a geographer's perspective, is its failure to treat the sea as “an indivisible ecological whole.” 1 Instead, the world ocean, the global sea, has been partitioned — horizontally, vertically and functionally — into innumerable international, regional, national and private jurisdictions with no centralized control over them, and no overall plan for preserving its integrity. Only once in the Convention is the word “ecosystem” used (in Art. 194(5)), referring to measures “necessary to protect and preserve rare or fragile ecosystems as well as the habitat of depleted, threatened or endangered species and other forms of marine life”). And there is no reference at all to ecology, the interaction of living things with their natural environments.
