Red herring

Seaspiracy is righteous rather than right

- Sam Llewellyn

The world has been talking about Seaspiracy. This is a film which claims that thanks to the greed-crazed behaviour of fishing boats and their owners the oceans will be empty of fish by 2048. The thing ends with a plea to viewers from the narrator, a half-shaved snowflake in a beanie with a powerful sense of his own intrepidity, to renounce once and for all the eating of fish, by which means the oceans will be saved.

The film has been extremely popular, and makes some interesting and alarming points, some of which are true; others not. The learned article on which it bases its contention that the seas will be empty of fish by 2048 did not claim that the seas would be empty, only that fish populations would be reduced by 90%, bad enough to be sure, but a level from which recovery is possible. The film’s claim that 40% of plastic pollution comes from fishing gear rather than land-derived plastic dates from the 1980s, and is specific to the Pacific Garbage Patch; the current more-or-less global figure, alarming enough in all conscience, is 20%. And the constant dissing of conservation organisations is both wearisome and inaccurate – you can prove anything by crafty editing, but that doesn’t make it true.