Pacem in Maribus

Within the next decade, food production from the seas should quadruple. By 1980, deep wells in the seabeds may supply more than a third of the world's oil. Some day the oceans will provide most of man's metals. Yet all this raises troubling questions: How can the coming rush to grab the watery wealth be controlled? To whom do the oceans' riches legally belong? Most important, can the seas be developed peacefully?

Seeking answers to such problems, the Santa Barbara-based Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions recently sponsored an international conference in Malta. Appropriately named Pacem in Maribus (Peace in the Oceans), it drew 250 delegates from 45 nations. As the conferees headed home last week, TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn cabled his report:

Serenely set on a hilltop in the village of San Anton, the deluxe Corinthia Palace Hotel is four miles inland from the Mediterranean. Still, the scene within the hotel's gleaming white walls was as diverse as any beneath that calm, bright sea. Delegates scampered through the hotel lobby in bathing trunks just in time to change for the morning sessions. Thomas Mann's erudite daughter, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, who originated the conference, chatted with Cameroon's U.N. Minister Paul Bamela Engo, resplendent in red fez and flowing blue robe. Justice William O. Douglas, chairman of the conference, strode through the bar with his miniskirted blonde wife in tow. The place was jammed with students in opentoed sandals, bearded scientists, well-tailored businessmen, lawyers and politicians. A star of the meeting turned out to be Arvid Pardo, a sort of superdiplomat who serves as Malta's delegate to the U.N. and the Maltese Ambassador to Washington and Moscow. Three years ago, Pardo introduced a U.N. resolution calling for an international authority to administer the oceans and ensure that the seabeds would be used for peaceful purposes. Result: appointment of a permanent U.N. Seabed Committee.

Buoyant Gesture. One of the main subjects of conversation was a similar proposal by President Nixon. On May 23, he called for an international treaty that would renounce all national claims to ocean resources below a depth of 200 meters (218.8 yards). This marine wealth, he said, should be treated as "the common heritage of mankind." He proposed that individual nations be named by an international agency to act as trustees of the riches. Royalties from exploitation of the oceans' resources should be paid to the international agency, which in turn could use the income for economic assistance to developing nations.

Though Nixon's plan was a buoyant --and unprecedented--gesture by a major world power, it came in for surprisingly heavy criticism at the Malta conference. Third World delegates heard ominous colonial overtones in the term trusteeship. Britain's Lord Ritchie-Calder wanted faster action t(R) keep the arms race out of the seabed. It is now so easy to detect land-based military sites, he said, that the big powers will soon look to the "opaque depths of the seas" for concealment.

Last Frontier. Dour environmentalists with dire predictions also had their say. Some argued that the oceans will be as "dead" as Lake Erie by the end of the century unless remedial action on an international scale is taken to halt pollution. If present trends to use the Mediterranean as the ultimate receptacle of noxious waste continue, Arvid Pardo said, its fishing industry will disappear in a few years. Swedish Ecologist Bengt Lundholm reported that only 14% of Italy's seacoast is now free of pollution. Dr. Jerold M. Lowenstein, a physician specializing in nuclear medicine, warned that radioactive wastes from an ever increasing number of nuclear power plants might endanger all life in and around the oceans.

"It's nonsense to talk about halting nuclear-energy production," said Joachim Joseph, a bearded German who works with the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency. Chiding the ecology-minded for naivete, he continued: "Let's remember that if we are to expect governments to spend money to prevent pollution, we must be practical and realistic. Do you think you can get governments interested in constructive action by just holding up a dead seabird?'' The pessimism of the ecologists was tempered by a rosy view of the oceans' potential. Scientist John P. Craven, lately of M.I.T., predicted that there will be airports floating on the seas by 1980. "and eventually these airports would become cities that would summer off Cape Cod and winter off Florida." Pardo went one step farther: "In future generations, a big percentage of the world's population will live in cities under the seas."

The conference reached no formal decisions, but as it ended, there was an air of optimism that somehow an international agency would be devised to monitor the exploitation of all that underwater wealth. Pardo predicted that the U.N. would start setting up such a regime next year, though he conceded that a binding treaty could not be completed until 1973 at the earliest. Other delegates thought that an independent agency could do the job more efficiently than the bureaucracy-ridden U.N. Lord Ritchie-Calder likened the process to "the opening up of the last frontier. First, adventurers go into virgin-territories to stake their claims and repel interlopers," he said. 'Then the federal marshal comes along to represent the" law, followed by the elected sheriff and a regime of law and order." What the suntanned conferees took home with them was a conviction that the law of the sea urgently needs a speedy updating.

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