Donald Trump’s celebration of ‘Gulf of America’ hides dead zone the size of Wales

"What's in a name?” Shakespeare's famous line from Romeo and Juliet came to mind after US President Donald Trump controversially announced he had renamed the Gulf of Mexico, as the Gulf of America.

Juliet argued that a name is just a label and doesn’t define the true essence of what it refers to. Trump clearly disagrees, citing the Gulf’s importance to US security and prosperity as reasons for the relabel.

Yet this headline-grabbing body of water holds a dark secret – it harbours the world’s second-largest marine dead zone, an area of sea the size of Wales where nothing lives. An expanse of water so polluted that nearly all the oxygen is gone. It’s a potent symbol of what happens when environmental efforts fail. A worst-case scenario. A marine ‘end of days’.

Donald Trump with a map showing the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico (Picture: Roberto Schmidt) | AFP via Getty Images

‘Vibrant American fisheries’

Ironically, President Trump’s aim with executive order 14172 was to restore names that honour American greatness. “The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning nation and has remained an indelible part of America,” the order states.

The Gulf is “home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species, and it is recognised as one of the most productive fisheries in the world,” it explains.

I got to explore the surrealness of the Gulf and its dead zone first-hand. About 15 miles out to sea off the Louisiana coast, the Gulf resembled a construction site. Oil rigs were all around. Huge tangles of scaffolding and metal beams, some resembling small cities.

The sea was eerily quiet, like another world. I was in a 12-metre catamaran rocking gently. Every few seconds, a foghorn blasted, jolting the senses. It felt like being on a film set of another world.

Impatient to experience the dead zone for myself, I dived out of the catamaran and slipped below the surface. Submerged, I peered into the gloom. A few metres beneath the surface, everything changed. The water was cooler, saltier, murkier. The dead zone itself was way below me, coating the bottom half of the water in a suffocating blanket.

A dead sea turtle lies on a beach near Waveland, Mississippi (Picture: Joe Raedle) | Getty Images

Fragile balance disrupted

The Gulf is a major fishery and provides about a sixth of the total US seafood catch. Nutrients in the ocean feed the microscopic phytoplankton eaten by fish and other marine life. Yet this ancient food chain is now being severely disrupted; the fragile balance of nutrients that makes the area so productive is now way out of whack.

Recent decades have seen levels of nutrients in the Gulf rising, causing phytoplankton to ‘bloom’ – to multiply and die in such vast quantities that their decay sucks the oxygen out of the water.

Every year from February to October, the dead zone emerges stretching all the way from Louisiana to the upper Texan coast as the gathering body of oxygen-depleted ‘hypoxic’ water expands, rendering the bottom layer of the ocean lifeless. As it spreads, bottom-dwelling fish are forced to the surface where they are vulnerable to predators; some flee, the rest perish.

In human terms, it would be like a city of high-rise apartment blocks where every year the oxygen is sucked out of the bottom, killing everyone that couldn’t escape in time.

With a big section of the Gulf now a fishing no-go zone, the environmental onslaught is hitting the fishery industry where it hurts. Trawlers have to travel further, and catches are declining, with fisherfolk having been forced out of business.

As things stand, the dead zone costs the US seafood and tourism industries $82 million a year, a significant blow to the Gulf Coast economy.

Huge, prairie-like monocultures

And the main culprit? Agricultural fertiliser. The American Midwest is a massive industrial corn and soyabean growing area, much of it destined as feed for animal agriculture.

During my time there, I saw the huge, prairie-like monocultures of intensive crop production, a practice that drives out much of the nature that should be found in our farmland countryside, effectively creating wildlife dead zones on land. It involves using huge amounts of nitrogen fertiliser to feed growing crops, leading to large quantities washing into rivers and out to the Gulf.

Around the time of my visit, some 104,000 metric tons of nitrate and 19,300 metric tons of phosphorus flowed down the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers into the Gulf of Mexico in just one month. That’s equivalent to a flotilla of more than 4,000 shipping containers fully loaded with pollution.

Dead zones are now emerging around the world. Since the 1960s, the number of them worldwide has almost doubled every decade. There are now more than 500 dead zones globally, affecting a total area of some 95,000 square miles – an area about the size of New Zealand.

The economic costs to fisheries, tourism and other coastal livelihoods are already in the many tens of billions of dollars annually.

A stark contrast

The Gulf dead zone tells a tale of devastation that is firmly rooted in the increasingly questionable practices of industrialised agriculture, which add to climate change, biodiversity loss and the build-up of pollution.

For now, at least, they are reversible if policymakers can be persuaded to stem the flow of pollutants – and that’s a sizeable if. As the Gulf illustrates, when there are powerful agricultural interests involved, it’s often a case out of sight, out of mind.

Trump's renaming of the Gulf highlights a stark contrast: a symbol of national pride masking an ecological disaster. Beneath its surface lies a dire warning about environmental neglect and the urgent need for action.

Philip Lymbery is chief executive of Compassion in World Farming, president of EuroGroup for Animals, and a UN Food Systems Advisory Board member. His latest book is Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future. Philip is on X/Twitter @philip_ciwf