Word: oceaneering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Whether an international organization should be created to settle ocean disputes and parcel out dividends from development of the sea's resources...
Fishermen in modern, mechanized trawlers can easily draw bottom fish off the ocean floor with a kind of vacuum cleaner or haul in whole finny schools in a single huge seine net. Industrialized nations, like runners poised in their starting blocks, are awaiting only one thing before the race for the sea resources begins in earnest. They have to know who has legal title to all that wealth...
...invite was Taiwan (so that China would agree to come), and the only one that refused to participate was North Viet Nam (which was peeved because the Viet Cong were not asked to attend). The stated purpose of the Caracas meeting seems unremarkable enough: to update ocean law to accommodate advancing technology. But what has really drawn delegates from all over the world to Caracas is the biggest land (or water) grab in history...
...period like the opening of the American West," says Marine Biologist John Teal at the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution. "Everybody is trampling over everybody else to stake a claim in the oceans." That signals an end to a view that has prevailed for 350 years: the fundamental freedom of the seas. It was first stitched into international law by Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist who wrote in 1609 that the ocean "is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become the possession of anyone." The seas, he concluded, "can be neither seized nor enclosed...
...other wealthy nations worry that if progress is not made at Caracas, no new law will come out of a follow-up meeting scheduled for Vienna next year. Without some sort of law, most nations will form bilateral agreements on ocean use, creating a jumble of jurisdictions that could make rational development of ocean resources almost impossible. Or they will make unilateral decisions that could lead...