Sanctuary

In 2009, one small island nation did something no country had ever done: it made its entire ocean a complete sanctuary for sharks. Sixteen more countries and territories followed.

Sharks are slow-growing, late-maturing, and disappearing - taken for their fins, caught as bycatch, and losing the mangrove nurseries their young depend on. A shark sanctuary answers with a single, sweeping law: no commercial shark fishing, no trade in shark products, across a whole nation's waters. But is a sanctuary a real shield - or just a line on a map?

Sanctuary takes you inside the world's shark sanctuaries and great marine reserves, from Palau to the Bahamas: how each one was won, how it is enforced, what lives there, what it proves - and where it honestly falls short.

Inside you'll discover

Palau, 2009 - the world's first complete shark sanctuary, and the one-patrol-boat problem of guarding an ocean the size of France

The Marshall Islands - the largest sanctuary of its day, and the satellite-tag study that found suspected poachers breaking it

The Bahamas - the sanctuary that proved the money, where sharks and rays contributed more than a hundred million dollars to the economy in a single studied year (2014)

French Polynesia and the Cook Islands - two neighbours who together closed some 2.6 million square miles to shark fishing

The Galapagos, Cocos, and Malpelo - oceanic refuges, hammerhead highways, and the swimway that connects them

Enforcement, honestly - patrol boats, port controls, satellite eyes, and why some sanctuaries are still paper parks

The playbook - how a sanctuary is won, funded, watched, and proved, and where the next forty places should be

Who this book is for

The diver who fell for sharks and wants to know where they are truly safe; the ocean reader who is tired of doom and suspicious of greenwash; the student, practitioner, or coastal citizen who wants the receipts - sizes, dates, laws, and enforcement - not the press release.

Maren Solberg writes narrative marine conservation for general readers: place by place, law by law, shark by shark.

Seventeen sanctuaries. More than nineteen million square kilometres of protected ocean. This is what saving sharks actually looks like - begin the tour in Palau.