How Taboos Can Help Protect the Oceans
In 1777—after whipping local people for trivial offenses, spreading venereal disease, and clumsily avoiding a plot to kill him—the English explorer James Cook left the shores of Tonga laden with treasures. Not least among them was a word scrawled in his ship’s logbook: tabu, which he defined as “a thing that is forbidden,” like a fish that could only be eaten by kings or a lagoon where fishing was prohibited. Cook died not long after, but his crew brought the word back to Europe, where it gave rise to the English word taboo.
Yet while Cook may have been the first to write it down, tabu had traveled before. Thousands of years earlier, the ancestors of modern Pacific Islanders had carried the concept with them as they sailed dugout canoes to the specks of land that became their homes: the island groups of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, constellations in a universe of ocean. As a result, nearly every culture in Oceania has its own version of tabu. In the Marshall Islands, the practice is known as mo. Palauans call it bul. In New Zealand, it’s tapu. “It’s similar to what a western scientist might call a protected area, or a protected species,” says Angelo Villagomez, a senior officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts and a native Chamorro from the Mariana Islands. “You can pick an island and ask someone what their concept of a protected area is, and they’ll be able to give you the word in their own language.”
Taboos weren’t chosen at random. In pre-colonial Hawai’i, for instance, it was taboo for anyone but chiefs to eat a delectable silver fish called , or Pacific are born male and later become female, so if you overfish them before they reach their female breeding stage, the population won’t recover. This kind of sophisticated ecological understanding let Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders use taboos as social controls to protect species that were particularly vulnerable, or valuable to people’s survival. And because ancient islanders regularly voyaged across vast distances and shared similar cultural values, they often acted in concert to protect the same species. The effect was a network of marine protections that spanned the Pacific, safeguarding both local fish and migratory species like sharks.
