Ian Urbina

Outlaw Ocean Podcast: Intentional Dumping May Be Worse Than Oil Spills
When a ship inadvertently spills oil, it’s big news. But according to an investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-pr...
Outlaw Ocean Podcast: How One Third of All Fish Caught Become Fishmeal
The oceans are running out of fish. To slow down that problem environmentalists pushed for fish farming, or aquaculture. This was...
Outlaw Ocean Podcast: How the High Seas Became a Metaphor for Freedom
The lawlessness of the oceans provides space to absurd and remarkable stories of renegades and mavericks of all sorts seeking to e...
The Outlaw Ocean Episode 3: Slavery Is Not Gone - It's At Sea
While forced labor exists throughout the world, one place where it’s especially pervasive is the South China Sea, and especi...
The Outlaw Ocean Episode 2: The World's Largest Illegal Fishing Fleet
If you look at the taxonomy of crime that plays out offshore, it's both diverse and acute. And yet illegal fishing sits at the...
The Outlaw Ocean Episode 1: The Mystery of a Massacre at Sea
Crimes like this don't often happen on land. A 10-minute slow-motion slaughter captured by a cell-phone camera shows a group o...
How Europe's Border Agency Works With Libya to Turn Back Migrants
Around 5 p.m. on Feb. 4, roughly 70 miles north of Libya, a white reconnaissance plane with a camera on its underside circled a ra...
The Real Consequences of Europe's Deal With the Libyan Coast Guard
In May of 2021, I traveled to Libya to explore the troubling story of the country’s prisons for migrants captured trying to...
China's Illicit Squid Fishery Has Deadly Impact on North Korea
[This article originally appeared on NBC News and appears here courtesy of The Outlaw Ocean Project] The battered wooden &...
Part II: Fish Farming is Feeding the World, But at What Cost?
[Part I of this article may be found here. This piece appeared first in The New Yorker and is reproduced here courtesy of The Outl...