Taking advantage . . .

Taking advantage of Somalia's lack of a government, foreign fleets descended on the Somalian coast, often within the territorial limit, and began overfishing stocks that coastal communities had recently begun to harvest for themselves. With no coast guard to protect their interests and no voice in the international community, local fishermen began seizing and ransoming foreign fishing vessels and their crews. This retributive privateering quickly attracted the interest of local warlords, terrorists, and others who expanded the scope of their operations to seize piratically and indiscriminately anything from container ships and tankers to cruise ships and private yachts regardless of flag. While this has become an obvious criminal problem, the underlying cause, namely illegal fishing, is a more disturbing threat to the global commons.

Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 595.

One can live by dogma . . .

One can live by dogma or by discovery. Dogmas (from the Greek for received opinions that “seem good") may seem to unify people (as is the implied intent of religious dogma, religio being Latin for “binding together") but insofar as dogma must be taken on faith it winds up bifurcating humanity into a faithful us and a suspect other. Scientific discovery might have divided the world, but instead has found that all human beings are kin---to one another and to all other living things---in a universe where stars and starfish alike obey the same physical laws. So as we humans move from dogma toward discovery, we increasingly find ourselves inhabiting one world.

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 261.

It may take many years . . .

It may take many years to achieve such an addition to the body of world law. In the meantime, much could be done through a change in the policies of the great nations. During recent years insurrections and civil wars in small countries have been instigated and aggravated by the great powers, which have moreover provided weapons and military advisers, increasing the savagery of the wars and the suffering of the people. In four countries during 1963 and several others during preceding years, democratically elected governments, with policies in the direction of social and economic reform, have been overthrown and replaced by military dictatorship, with the approval, if not at the instigation of one or more of the great powers. These actions of the great powers are associated with policies of militarism and national economic interest that are now antiquated. I hope that the pressure of world opinion will soon cause them to be abandoned and to be replaced by policies that are compatible with the principles of morality, justice, and world brotherhood.

Linus Pauling,  Nobel Lecture. December 11, 1963. URL: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1962/pauling-lecture.html