Chile Chose to Leave Its Ocean Alone

What's happening

On March 10, 2026, Chilean President Gabriel Boric signed a decree establishing a 130,000-square-mile marine protected area around the Juan Fernandez Islands, a remote archipelago 415 miles off the country's central coast. The new zone prohibits all extraction, including fishing and mining. Combined with protections established between 2016 and 2018, Chile now safeguards more than half of its exclusive economic zone, covering over 356,000 square miles of ocean. Fewer than 1,000 people live in the Juan Fernandez region. Ninety percent of them supported the protections. "For generations, our community has lived in harmony with the sea, relying on it for food, livelihoods, and identity," said Julio Chamorro Solis, president of a local community organization. The Pew Charitable Trusts called the move a model of conservation "led by island communities." The waters shelter endemic species including the Juan Fernandez fur seal, native lobsters, and octopuses found nowhere else on Earth.

What the text says

Psalm 24:1-21The earth is Yahweh's, with its fullness; the world, and those who dwell therein.2For he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the floods.

The psalm opens with a claim so sweeping it is easy to miss its force: the earth does not belong to the people who live on it. The Hebrew word mel'oah, translated "its fullness," includes everything the earth contains. The mineral deposits, the fish stocks, the seabed. The psalm does not present this as a restriction. It presents it as a fact of ownership. God founded the earth on the seas and established it on the rivers. The relationship described is that of a maker to what has been made. In ancient Israel, this theology had direct economic consequences. The land could not be sold permanently because it was not yours to sell. Leviticus 25:23 states the principle plainly: "The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine." Chile's decree echoes this logic. The nation chose to leave wealth in the ground and fish in the water, treating the ocean as something held in trust rather than something owned outright.

The reflection

Protection is rarely a popular use of power. The instinct of governance is to extract, develop, and distribute. What Chile did with the Juan Fernandez waters is the opposite: it decided that the most productive thing to do with a piece of the ocean was to leave it alone. The residents who supported the decree were not wealthy conservationists. They were fishermen. They understood something that industrial economies often forget: that restraint can be a form of provision. That leaving the nets out of the water this season is what makes next season possible. The psalm calls it belonging to God. The fishermen call it survival. The outcome is the same: some things are not ours to take.