Creative Commons
The new Netflix documentary Seaspiracy provides a timely and necessary corrective to a mass of misinformation about the most dangerous threats facing the world’s oceans. The movie makes a strong argument that regulating personal consumption is not an adequate solution to large-scale environmental crises. But, unfortunately, the oceans’ plight often comes off as secondary to the personal quest, and personal morality, of the filmmaker.
By centering himself and his journey in the documentary, Tabrizi ends up emphasizing individual responses to what is a huge systemic problem.
Director Ali Tabrizi’s starting point is the eight million tons of plastic that humans are dumping into the ocean each year. The film includes wrenching footage of whales beached on the southeast coast of England with hundreds of pounds of plastic in their stomachs. In line with the recommendations of environmental organizations, he tries to use less plastic.
But when Tabrizi starts to do serious research for the film, he discovers that consumer plastics are far from the main culprit in wildlife degradation. On the contrary, plastic straws make up only 0.025 percent of the ocean’s plastic. (And though Tabrizi doesn’t mention it, banning them can be harmful to people with disabilities.)
The real motherlode of plastic junk isn’t from personal use; it’s from commercial fishing. About 46 percent of the 79,000 tons of garbage in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of fishing nets. Fishing tackle and gear were the main component of the garbage in the bellies of Tabrizi’s beached whales, too.
But as bad as fishing waste is, it’s only a small part of the ecological nightmare that is commercial fishing. Fishing vessels use thirty-mile lines with thousands of baited hooks. Forty percent of their catch consists of species that aren’t commercial; those are just “bycatch” to be thrown back, dead, into the sea. With so much waste, fish populations have cratered; there has been a 71 percent decrease in the population of oceanic sharks and rays since 1970, as just one example.
Some leading environmental organizations downplay the environmental impact of commercial fishing, in part perhaps because they receive funding from the same fishing conglomerates that are creating the pollution. In particular, Tabrizi points out that the Marine Stewardship Council’s sustainable fishery label, appended to tuna and other seafood, is worthless.
The label is supposed to guarantee that catching these fish did not result in harm to any sea mammals or other marine wildlife. But given the number of fishing boats and the opacity of supply chains, there’s no way to really be sure of how the fish were caught.
Worse, the Marine Stewardship Council makes most of its money from licensing its sustainability label. In other words, the fishing industry pays the council to say its products are sustainable, a huge conflict of interest.
The fishing industry isn’t just a threat to sea mammals. It has ugly humanitarian consequences as well. Observers on fishing boats who try to blow the whistle and who won’t accept bribes have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Some suspect they were murdered. In West Africa, overfishing by foreign trawlers has disrupted local economies, leaving communities unable to feed themselves.
In Thailand, the demand for cheap labor has inspired a brutal system of slave labor. Kidnapped men, often immigrants to Thailand, can spend years on fishing boats, beaten, starved, working in unsafe conditions, with no way to escape.
Tabrizi goes to Thailand to interview some crew members who did manage to get away. They emphasize that making the documentary is dangerous, and that it may make him a target of organized crime, or of the complicit police. No doubt there is a risk, but the use of the most ominous clips at the beginning of the film to tease the movie and build suspense seems manipulative. So does the dramatic action-film-like music, which plays in the background when Tabrizi tags along on a raid of illegal foreign fishing boats off the coast of Somalia.
Clearly, Tabrizi hopes that adding these Hollywood touches and framing the documentary as a personal hard-hitting investigation will make the narrative more exciting and engaging. A bit of drama means more people will see Seaspiracy. That, in turn, means people will be swayed by it to work for change.
But there’s a risk in this method, too. By centering himself and his journey in the documentary, Tabrizi ends up emphasizing individual responses to what is a huge systemic problem. He doesn’t conclude the film with policy proposals, but with a change in his own habits. Just as he started by deciding to cut down on his plastic consumption, he ends by vowing not to eat fish.
Indeed, many interviewees argue that a global political response is vital. Currently, less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans are set aside as preserves in which fishing is banned. Interviewees in the film argue that we need to increase that to 30 percent if we want fisheries to recover.
Not buying plastics or not eating seafood can be a valid ethical decision. But it can’t be a substitute for political change. At its best, Seaspiracy recognizes that saving the oceans is a global project. In its weaker moments, it shows why, even for the best-intentioned humans, that global view can be hard to sustain.
Seaspiracy is now available on Netflix.