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Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

95 points by bananapear 6y ago

youngtaff 6y ago
If 46% of the Pacific garbage patch is fishing nets doesn't that make it easier to clean up? Some of the nets will have disintegrated but surely some must have large pieces of them intact? All the photos of the patch I've seen tend to be individual plastic items - bottles, cups etc. – so wondering if anyone's seen different EDIT: Found this https://mymodernmet.com/ocean-voyages-institute-great-pacific-garbage-patch-cleanup/ https://mymodernmet.com/ocean-voyages-institute-great-pacifi... the majority of 103 tons dredged up were fishing nets etc.
- marliechiller 6y ago
  the problem is - where do you put it and who takes on that burden?
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    While ocean pollution is a problem, a big one, the article above says '103 tonnes' of garbage was hauled up. And this, over 48 days, and a large section of sea?! That's literally nothing. How much garbage do you think a small city collects from residents daily? Google shows variety here, but that garbage trucks can handle between 10 to 20 tonnes per load. Again, not saying it's good. There's clearly a lot more down there. But I dislike stats/info in articles which seems like a lot (eg tonnes, They dredged up tonnes!! Over a large, massive section of sea, over more than a month.). Worse, they talk as if they actually did something: we are continuing to help restore the health of our ocean, which influences our own health and the health of the planet. No, they're doing nothing. It's like I walked to a garbage dump, picked up a can, then took it home and recycled it. "I created a cleaner world!", uh, yeah, sure.. good job? It's just a meaningless tiny bit of nothing.
- ORioN63 6y ago
  How do we account for selection bias though? I think it's likely that nets are easy to catch. Floaty, big surface area, lots of anchor points.
- t0mbstone 6y ago
  I think one of the biggest problems is that the fishing nets are made out of thin plastic wire which then degrades over time and ultimately fragments into microscopic pieces of plastic that fish and other sea life end up eating. The reason they eat is is because the microscopic particles floats in the water column like "snow", just like all of the other tiny things that fish eat while they swim around.
Salamat 6y ago
There has been a swift resonse to deny it by the "industry" with a little help from Nytimes and all.Yet,as a journalist, the guy asked the questions yet no one has given him in the documentary any comment.Now they are responding to public opinion.BBC's Reality Check team looked into some of the main claims in the Seaspiracy film on Netflix and most of them are somewhat accurate. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/440156/fact-check-on-netflix-s-seaspiracy-film-about-fishing-damaging-oceans https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/440156/fact-check-on-netfli...
- sjg007 6y ago
  You did not cite the bytimes?
mnadkvlb 6y ago
Discrediting has been a great way to shut down people. Professors posting about research on tobacco were also discredited by big tobacco. This wouldnt be the first time !!
- cute_boi 6y ago
  also people should remember sugar industry ......
kgc 6y ago
Is anything preventing us from just getting a line of cargo ships and loading up the patch to be processed on-shore? Currently many ships are being sent empty due to supply issues.
- Tistron 6y ago
  I think it's probably hard to just pick it up from the ocean. These people are developing tech for it: https://theoceancleanup.com/ https://theoceancleanup.com/
  - scotty79 6y ago
    We are picking small fish from the depths of sea that don't want to be picked. I don't imagine this would be way harder. We just need someone willing to pay for it. Maybe we should not allow companies to sell another fishing net unless customer brings the damage one back for exchange? Maybe soft drinks should be sold this way as well? If you are packaging something, you can't sell a packaged good unless you take in used package back. You could start it gradually. To be allowed to sell 100 bottles of Coca Cola, you need to take in at least 10 used plastic bottles of the same volume. There is something like that for car batteries. If I want to buy a car battery I have to bring back my old one. If I don't I have to pay very large fee that I can recover only after I bring back old battery.
    - Tistron 6y ago
      Maybe we are picking small fish, but not with cargo ships. I'd be all for a system with deposits like you describe. Most coke bottle here in Scandinavia at least do have a deposit fee, but it's not significant enough for anyone except children and the homeless to care.
      - scotty79 6y ago
        My idea is that bottling company should be required to buy used bottles off the recycling market to be able to be allowed to sell new bottles. And we should let them figure out what to do with the used bottles. Initially they'll probably resell the used bottles immediately and pass the price onto the consumers. But this will provide solid income stream to recycling companies and some innovative solutions might emerge how to reduce waste or make it more managable.
williesleg 6y ago
All the cargo ships from china is killing the oceans, they dump exhaust in the ocean.
cute_boi 6y ago
"Others have argued it oversimplifies a complex issue - many communities depend on fishing for their livelihoods and for food, and are in fact practising sustainable catching methods." I guess this pretty much answers the question whether seaspiracy film is correct or not. People are trying to justify as if industry care about sustainable catching methods? Really? And there is common practise "The Solution to Pollution is Dilution" and there is no easy way to find how much industry is damaging ocean I bet its more than what Netflix Seaspiracy shows. Imho Industry is more about earning $ rather than sustainable thing and most of the time the sustainable things are marketing PR strategy. Remember Sugar Industry? Tobacco Industry? Looks like similar strategy this time too.
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  I wonder if in 10-20 years we will be writing "Remember Vaccine Industry?"
  - ghthor 6y ago
    We most certainly will be.
pytlicek 6y ago
I think this is really good documentary. An eye-opening one that changed my view about eating fish (also i will try avoid it). Anyone should watch this and make an opinion on sea fishing, plastic waste and so on.. Highly recommend :)
thewarrior 6y ago
Generally we believe that Malthusianism is now in the trash heap of mistaken ideas. A lot of people miss that even today close to a billion people are starving and close to half the world population doesn’t get all the nutrients they need for a normal life expectancy. And ecology is already at the brink of collapse. As people around the world adopt more “first world” eating habits I doubt much of the earth will be left. We may have to manage the entire ecosystem at some point and use robots to pollinate our plants. The earth will go from being an ecosystem to being a hotel for humans.
- lm28469 6y ago
  > We may have to manage the entire ecosystem at some point and use robots to pollinate our plants. The earth will go from being an ecosystem to being a hotel for humans. I bet we don't understand even one fifth of every interactions going on between animals and plants, deep ocean currents, high altitude winds, &c. everything is interconnected, we might be the smartest apes on earth but we're faaaaar away from being able to use our tech to counter balance the damage we already dealt. All we're able to detect are visible symptoms far too late to even act on them, we might be missing deep changes and we won't know before it's too late This book kinda touches the subject: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/26/the-hidden-life-of-trees-peter-wohlleben/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/26/the-hidden-life-of-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
s_dev 6y ago
My single biggest takeaway from watching it was that there is no "sustainable industrial fishing" despite every political advocacy group stating that as a bullet point "eat sustainable fish" to helping biodiversity and fish stocks. Basically unless the a dude has a fishing rod and is catching his own dinner it's unsustainable. Those boys over at impossbile burger better be whipping up some fish substitutes because I think the future of the fishing industry will look like what the British fishing industry is going through with Brexit right now -- a sudden collapse.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Fish raised in a fish farm is reasonably sustainable, especially those raised in lakes.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    It's not so simple - farmed fish produce a lot of waste in a very small area, which pollutes the water. There are also serious welfare issues with fish farming - for example, horrible mechanical and chemical treatments of salmon to remove lice, high use of antibiotics, terrible life expectancy of feeder-fish (which are introduced to eat lice off of salmon), poor environmental conditions for the fish (largely because so many fish are packed into such a small area), high rates of disease (again largely because of high stocking density).
    - GordonS 6y ago
      I don't want to be all doom and gloom, and should add that some of these problems are potentially solvable, even if the solutions themselves have trade-offs. For example, aquaculture can be moved offshore to large farm, mobile farm vessels, so the pollution is spread about instead of being concentrated at a small section of coastline. These vessels are new though, and an accident or freak weather even could result in millions of farmed fish being released to the wild - farmed fish are not the same, genetically, as wild fish, so the effects on wild stocks from that many escapes could be significant. Another new solution is closed-containment aquaculture, where the fish are placed inside a sealed sphere in the ocean. This approach allows all waste to be collected at the bottom of the vessel, and then turned into fertiliser. There are welfare concerns around increased stocking densities, and shutting hundreds of thousands of fish off from the outside world. Another solution that is (inexplicably, IMO) seeing huge investment are land-based, RAS (Recirculating aquaculture system) farms. These too can collect all fish waste, and it's touted as a way to prevent disease. There are concerns here too though - using arable land for fish farming doesn't seem like a very good idea, RAS farmers use horribly high stocking densities (they must, to be profitable), and there have been several incidents where disease has been inadvertently introduced from the outside (in such close quarters, the effects are of course disastrous). OK, so that still all sounds pretty gloomy - realistically the only way for things to get much better is through regulation. But better welfare increases farming costs, and like anything, there is always going to be a race to the bottom (e.g. if Norway increases costs too much for farmers, more move to Chile etc).
exoque 6y ago
Are we destroying the biggest ecosystem on the planet or are we not? That's the only question that matters everything else is just nitpicking.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  It's almost like this is a complex issue that gotcha journalism by it's very nature doesn't try to answer. Why present serious evidence when you can simply harass your local chippy about what kind of forks they sell?
- cies 6y ago
  Exactly. Answer is yes. But some still make money from it and have lobbyists running in circles around politicians. So prolly not much will happen. In the mean while: just eat plants directly.
  - dsincl12 6y ago
    This doesn't really fly unfortunately. Eat vegan/vegetarian and you will have a minimal impact, that is what you see/hear everywhere. But in the meanwhile these new vegan/vegetarian companies are a huge cause of the deforestation of the Amazon [1]. The amount of vegan/vegetarian food necessary to actually get the same amount of nutrients are on a different planet and simple math shows that it wouldn't even work if we used the entire planet. What I'm getting at is that is that it isn't all black and white and what we need is something sustainable that works and that it isn't really an easily solved problem. [1] https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/finance/media-bites-4-dec-amazon-deforestation-quorn-argos/600063.article https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/finance/media-bites-4-dec-amazon...
    - cies 6y ago
      > Eat vegan/vegetarian and you will have a minimal impact This is mostly true. You could maybe have a "mostly rice + meat once a month diet" that has less impact than a vegan diet rich in Impossible/Beyond meat and avocados. But apart from comparisons of "outliers" this statement true. > But in the meanwhile these new vegan/vegetarian companies are a huge cause of the deforestation of the Amazon [1] Might be so, but nothing close to what is needed for real beef. They say some forest is cut for soy, so soy is bad, and vegans (plant eaters) eat soy, so vegans are bad. Well, beef was a cow, and cows eat by far most of the soy on this planet. So "fake meat" is not compared to the alternative "meat" (they just point out something unsustainable about fake meat in isolation). Just an example: to produce one beef meat burger patty enough water is used that one could shower for 3 months 24/7. When it comes to "impact" (as you call it) it does not get much worse than red meat. A big fallacy in your argument is that all vegans would eat massive amounts of "new vegan/vegetarian company" products: they dont. We (yes im vegan) eat a lot of lentils, soy (tofu/tempeh), sweat potatoes, veggies, etc. As a group we are MUCH less impact for for the environment, simply because it is so inefficient to feed plants to animals only to have a less shelf stable product (meat), and lots of waste (bones, feathers, some organs, consciousness of sentient beings, etc). Please be vegan while we bring this wasteful industry to its knees. It's time.
elias94 6y ago
Both cowspiracy and seaspiracy, received a lot of critics and fact check by prominence professors. "oversimplifies a complex issue", so why don't try to explain it to us? Instead of criticizing and discrediting real issues that we're going to face in a few years. Ah, they're quoting multiple times professor X and study Y without links or reference... I'm not a Netflix fan/users, but I saw those documentaries and I really appreciate the effort they're doing to open the eyes of a lot of people.
- fireattack 6y ago
  I can see both sides. I appreciate these documentaries for raising awareness as you said. The reason why experts don't "try to explain it to us" probably is exactly because they think it's complex and nuanced. They probably don't even think there is an "issue" that need to be explained to begin with. Think it this way: you're in a field, and you know its pros and cons. You are not going to randomly speak anything about it because that's just.. like everything else in the world. Now, suddenly someone, likely an "outsider", wrote an article to describe the field/area in a certain one-sided way (good or bad). Of course you now suddenly have a strong opinion on it. Note: above is about the common question I saw "why these experts only appear to refute others but never explain the thing themselves", not about Seaspiracy in particular.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    I can see both sides but the side of the experts can clearly do better here. “It’s too complex to explain to all you people” or “this isn’t really a problem, the documentary makes a mountain of a mole hill” aren’t good approaches. If you are an expert in a field you should have at least some ability to simplify the issue or point out the mitigating factors that the documentary missed. The much more likely explanation here is that experts have a vested interest in looking smarter than some guy with a camera so they furrow their brows and talk about the complexities of the issue. As an analogy, BitCoin is complex. Between its usage of a blockchain and energy usage and murky origin story with who knows who owning a large chunk from the get go. Yet you could probably explain the power consumption problem to someone pretty easily.
arrayjumper 6y ago
The answer as usual is, "it's complicated".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jacknews 6y ago
Hunting wild animals for food at the scale we do is not sustainable. That seems intuitive to me. We should be farming fish on land in controlled environments, and again, not feeding them caught wildlife.
knuthsat 6y ago
It's quite easy to see a pattern. Same pattern appeared for Cowspiracy [0] and a similar one for The Game Changers [1]. The same pattern can be seen with regards to pandemic warnings before this one. There's a very strong tendency to do business-as-usual and it's my non-optimistic belief that we will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. These events are white swans (just like the pandemic) and it's quite clear that our tendency for response towards white swans is inaction with "educated" dismissal. Ok, they mention empty oceans by 2048, yes the study is applying a linear estimate (as oceans empty there might be some regulation to slow down the curve and the linear estimate is incorrect) but they are just discrediting the study without confirming the trend. What should I believe, that oceans are emptying or flourishing? Should I expect empty oceans in my lifetime or should I leave this worry to other generations? Also, I'd say that linear estimate is a wrong one because depletion can happen exponentially and regulation is just a small damp to an exponential collapse. 0: https://www.cowspiracy.com/ https://www.cowspiracy.com/ 1: https://gamechangersmovie.com/ https://gamechangersmovie.com/
- ricardo81 6y ago
  > will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. This made me feel very uneasy. I believe this is the most important topic of our lifetime, as much as climate change is a major issue, retaining and preserving biodiversity and its 4 billion years of knowledge is surely just as important.
  - stemlord 6y ago
    Same, I don't want to spread negativity but I literally have nowhere else in my life to express the fact that I'm seriously considering how I'm going to kill myself when societies begin to starve en masse
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  China and Japan both view fish as their cultural birthright. Other countries do too, but they’re not vacuuming up the worlds fish. I agree we’re likely to see empty oceans before then — climate change will cause famine in a lot of places, increasing the demand for food (and particularly meat, given how resource-intensive it is). Sure, there are things like lab-grown meat but those aren’t going to be realistic on any scale outside of wealthy western nations. The other ~6 billion people in the world are gonna be totally screwed and that’s going to have consequences to our ecosystems. It’s a nasty feedback loop.
CynicusRex 6y ago
Even if only 1% of Seaspiracy is true, or if the numbers are off by 99%, the fact remains that we can live perfectly healthily without animal based foodstuff. The only moral and simplest solution is for privileged Westerners to go vegan.
- kylebyproxy 6y ago
  Morality is relative; please don't inflict yours on others. Animal consumption can be made sustainable. The main offenders are beef, lamb, and mutton, and their associated dairy[1]. Cutting just those out would put us back in the ballpark of responsible agriculture. Between pork, poultry, fish & other aquatics, and insects, there's room for sustainable meat farming. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - CynicusRex 6y ago
    >Morality is relative, please don't inflict yours on others. Suffering is not relative. “It just isn't possible to mass produce meat without torturing animals. In fact, raising animals specifically for consumption, i.e., “humane slaughter” is an oxymoron.” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cynic.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cynic.html
    - reedf1 6y ago
      I'm sympathetic to your point of view - but suffering must be relative or you would be concerned about the worms in a construction site or the bacteria you kill with bleach. There must be a spectrum of consciousness and perhaps there is a line where suffering begins, and is that not anything but relative?
    - NeutronStar 6y ago
      Should we let all carnivorous animal die so that their prey can live a 'suffering free' life?
627467 6y ago
Cowspiracy, seaspiracy, social dilemma... Are examples of `guiltsploitation` genre of entertainment. I'm less concerned on whether their "storytelling" is being fair or an oversimplification, and more concerned on whether it leads to constructive atitudes by those influenced by them. Given the lengths they seem to go at shocking people I see little depth in their work at actually wanting the enact constructive change on behaviours.
- ORioN63 6y ago
  Do you have a suggestion on top of your critic? What would be the proper way to enact constructive change on behaviors?
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    https://asemic-horizon.com/2021/02/10/we-have-never-been-asemic/ https://asemic-horizon.com/2021/02/10/we-have-never-been-ase...
eptcyka 6y ago
Aside from the overfishing study, it doesn't really seem like the documentary was deceptive. In my own opinion, the producer(s) were naive or at least appeared to be - I can see that being detrimental to their message. On the whole, I think the documentary is a net benefit.
supernova87a 6y ago
Would any of you say it's definitely worth watching, to someone debating whether to spend the 90 min? Some of the reviews are pretty mixed, saying that the film's message is confused by conspiratorial threads and off-putting journalistic style. Or, if you're already aware of the problems with industrial fishing, is it a pass/not much of an eye opener and not mandatory watching? Watching episodes of David Attenborough's Blue Planet might have done more for me already to appreciate the value of sea life than what I imagine is lots of footage of industrial fish markets, processing facilities, etc. But maybe knowing the ugly side is important.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  I tried and had to turn it off after 20 minutes. By that point the interviewer had attempted two ambush interviews, made a lot of statements without backing them up (Japanese fleets overfishing tuna, they might well do but I'd like to see numbers), made false statements around the value of caught tuna (just because the first fish sold at auction in Japan sells for millions does not mean every fish sells for anywhere near that much) and acted surprised about something I thought was common knowledge when I was 6 years old (dolphins are bycatch in tuna fishing operations).
  - RHSman2 6y ago
    Maybe you should have watched to the end then your comments may have been very different
    - iamacyborg 6y ago
      Why would I when the first 20 minutes were so painfully bad?
      - RHSman2 6y ago
        So you could make a valid comment on HN instead of ‘I didn’t watch it but here is my opinion’?
dcwca 6y ago
I watched that documentary and had a good laugh at how poorly made it was. The filmmaker starts out by revealing that he just loves the ocean and wanted to make a film about it but didn’t know what the topic should be. The arc of the film is him googling for things, gaining the most basic perspective on an issue, pivoting his film toward it, and then failing to get any good interviews or original footage. So funny. He goes through ocean plastics, dolphins, shark fins, fishing net pollution, and one or two more with about as much depth as you would get from a tweet. Also why would you name your film Seaspiracy when Conspirasea is right there. 10/10 if taken as a mocumentary. The issues are real and I appreciate raising awareness but wow. Not good work.
- l-lousy 6y ago
  Naming - because the same guy also made cowspiracy. Quality - I would say it was pretty illuminating on a lot of issues that almost nobody here will get to see first hand.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- peraspera 6y ago
  Not good work at all. Tabrizi's approach is to tackle a bunch of different subjects with the same attention span of a child on Xmas morning. Each new subject is treated as 'the' most important one, but he drops it unceremoniously after ten minutes. Then there's the cherry picking of interviewees and their arguments, which is a disservice to the cause – and completely unethical. Even environmentalists interviewed as 'the good guys' complained about this[0]. If Tabrizi is genuinely a fan of the likes of Cousteau and Attenborough, he should watch and listen a lot more before making another documentary. [0] https://twitter.com/christinachicks/status/1375390177913372673?lang=en https://twitter.com/christinachicks/status/13753901779133726...
valaryuvalaryu 6y ago
We just really, really, really need those manufactured meat to work if we are going to survive as 7 billion and growing people. I wonder what are _those_ made of? Its not like they comes out of thin air. I guess its _waaaay_ more efficient?
RHSman2 6y ago
Even if it’s only 50% accurate it’s still terrible. Like watching a real life horror movie. I have despair for the earth my children will inhabit
elif 6y ago
Hyperbole is counterproductive in the realm of science, but in the realm of public opinion and policy-making on catastrophic unaddressed problems, I would argue it is a necessity.
JackPoach 6y ago
I wasn't able to finish the documentary. Not only it seemed to be poorly researched, I have hard time with the fact that a twentysome year old is pretending to be an expert on a very complex subject, explaining what is wrong with this world and what needs to be one. That has really put me off.
DennisP 6y ago
> many communities depend on fishing for their livelihoods and for food The film was pretty sympathetic to those communities. In particular, coastal Africans, who depended on local fish for food, and now are in trouble because industrial fishing operations are vacuuming up those fish. The main point of disagreement in the article is the study about 2048. It's good news that the future might not be quite so imminently grim, but the film doesn't lean on the study all that much. For the other claims mentioned in the article, it says the film was pretty accurate. So contrary to Betteridge's law, it appears the answer to the question is "mostly yes."
khimaros 6y ago
older but worth a watch. Dan Barber, "How I fell in love with a fish" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUAMe2ixCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUAMe2ixCI
jalcazar 6y ago
Save Philippine Seas is organizing a live Facebook Q&A "Seaspiracy VS Reality"

95 points by bananapear 6y ago

If 46% of the Pacific garbage patch is fishing nets doesn't that make it easier to clean up? Some of the nets will have disintegrated but surely some must have large pieces of them intact? All the photos of the patch I've seen tend to be individual plastic items - bottles, cups etc. – so wondering if anyone's seen different EDIT: Found this https://mymodernmet.com/ocean-voyages-institute-great-pacific-garbage-patch-cleanup/ https://mymodernmet.com/ocean-voyages-institute-great-pacifi... the majority of 103 tons dredged up were fishing nets etc.

marliechiller 6y ago
the problem is - where do you put it and who takes on that burden?
- bbarnett 6y ago
  While ocean pollution is a problem, a big one, the article above says '103 tonnes' of garbage was hauled up. And this, over 48 days, and a large section of sea?! That's literally nothing. How much garbage do you think a small city collects from residents daily? Google shows variety here, but that garbage trucks can handle between 10 to 20 tonnes per load. Again, not saying it's good. There's clearly a lot more down there. But I dislike stats/info in articles which seems like a lot (eg tonnes, They dredged up tonnes!! Over a large, massive section of sea, over more than a month.). Worse, they talk as if they actually did something: we are continuing to help restore the health of our ocean, which influences our own health and the health of the planet. No, they're doing nothing. It's like I walked to a garbage dump, picked up a can, then took it home and recycled it. "I created a cleaner world!", uh, yeah, sure.. good job? It's just a meaningless tiny bit of nothing.
ORioN63 6y ago
How do we account for selection bias though? I think it's likely that nets are easy to catch. Floaty, big surface area, lots of anchor points.
t0mbstone 6y ago
I think one of the biggest problems is that the fishing nets are made out of thin plastic wire which then degrades over time and ultimately fragments into microscopic pieces of plastic that fish and other sea life end up eating. The reason they eat is is because the microscopic particles floats in the water column like "snow", just like all of the other tiny things that fish eat while they swim around.

Salamat 6y ago

There has been a swift resonse to deny it by the "industry" with a little help from Nytimes and all.Yet,as a journalist, the guy asked the questions yet no one has given him in the documentary any comment.Now they are responding to public opinion.BBC's Reality Check team looked into some of the main claims in the Seaspiracy film on Netflix and most of them are somewhat accurate. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/440156/fact-check-on-netflix-s-seaspiracy-film-about-fishing-damaging-oceans https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/440156/fact-check-on-netfli...

sjg007 6y ago
You did not cite the bytimes?

mnadkvlb 6y ago

Discrediting has been a great way to shut down people. Professors posting about research on tobacco were also discredited by big tobacco. This wouldnt be the first time !!

cute_boi 6y ago
also people should remember sugar industry ......

kgc 6y ago

Is anything preventing us from just getting a line of cargo ships and loading up the patch to be processed on-shore? Currently many ships are being sent empty due to supply issues.

Tistron 6y ago
I think it's probably hard to just pick it up from the ocean. These people are developing tech for it: https://theoceancleanup.com/ https://theoceancleanup.com/
- scotty79 6y ago
  We are picking small fish from the depths of sea that don't want to be picked. I don't imagine this would be way harder. We just need someone willing to pay for it. Maybe we should not allow companies to sell another fishing net unless customer brings the damage one back for exchange? Maybe soft drinks should be sold this way as well? If you are packaging something, you can't sell a packaged good unless you take in used package back. You could start it gradually. To be allowed to sell 100 bottles of Coca Cola, you need to take in at least 10 used plastic bottles of the same volume. There is something like that for car batteries. If I want to buy a car battery I have to bring back my old one. If I don't I have to pay very large fee that I can recover only after I bring back old battery.
  - Tistron 6y ago
    Maybe we are picking small fish, but not with cargo ships. I'd be all for a system with deposits like you describe. Most coke bottle here in Scandinavia at least do have a deposit fee, but it's not significant enough for anyone except children and the homeless to care.
    - scotty79 6y ago
      My idea is that bottling company should be required to buy used bottles off the recycling market to be able to be allowed to sell new bottles. And we should let them figure out what to do with the used bottles. Initially they'll probably resell the used bottles immediately and pass the price onto the consumers. But this will provide solid income stream to recycling companies and some innovative solutions might emerge how to reduce waste or make it more managable.

williesleg 6y ago

All the cargo ships from china is killing the oceans, they dump exhaust in the ocean.

cute_boi 6y ago

"Others have argued it oversimplifies a complex issue - many communities depend on fishing for their livelihoods and for food, and are in fact practising sustainable catching methods." I guess this pretty much answers the question whether seaspiracy film is correct or not. People are trying to justify as if industry care about sustainable catching methods? Really? And there is common practise "The Solution to Pollution is Dilution" and there is no easy way to find how much industry is damaging ocean I bet its more than what Netflix Seaspiracy shows. Imho Industry is more about earning $ rather than sustainable thing and most of the time the sustainable things are marketing PR strategy. Remember Sugar Industry? Tobacco Industry? Looks like similar strategy this time too.

skocznymroczny 6y ago
I wonder if in 10-20 years we will be writing "Remember Vaccine Industry?"
- ghthor 6y ago
  We most certainly will be.

pytlicek 6y ago

I think this is really good documentary. An eye-opening one that changed my view about eating fish (also i will try avoid it). Anyone should watch this and make an opinion on sea fishing, plastic waste and so on.. Highly recommend :)

thewarrior 6y ago

Generally we believe that Malthusianism is now in the trash heap of mistaken ideas. A lot of people miss that even today close to a billion people are starving and close to half the world population doesn’t get all the nutrients they need for a normal life expectancy. And ecology is already at the brink of collapse. As people around the world adopt more “first world” eating habits I doubt much of the earth will be left. We may have to manage the entire ecosystem at some point and use robots to pollinate our plants. The earth will go from being an ecosystem to being a hotel for humans.

lm28469 6y ago
> We may have to manage the entire ecosystem at some point and use robots to pollinate our plants. The earth will go from being an ecosystem to being a hotel for humans. I bet we don't understand even one fifth of every interactions going on between animals and plants, deep ocean currents, high altitude winds, &c. everything is interconnected, we might be the smartest apes on earth but we're faaaaar away from being able to use our tech to counter balance the damage we already dealt. All we're able to detect are visible symptoms far too late to even act on them, we might be missing deep changes and we won't know before it's too late This book kinda touches the subject: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/26/the-hidden-life-of-trees-peter-wohlleben/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/26/the-hidden-life-of-...
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s_dev 6y ago

My single biggest takeaway from watching it was that there is no "sustainable industrial fishing" despite every political advocacy group stating that as a bullet point "eat sustainable fish" to helping biodiversity and fish stocks. Basically unless the a dude has a fishing rod and is catching his own dinner it's unsustainable. Those boys over at impossbile burger better be whipping up some fish substitutes because I think the future of the fishing industry will look like what the British fishing industry is going through with Brexit right now -- a sudden collapse.

wongarsu 6y ago
Fish raised in a fish farm is reasonably sustainable, especially those raised in lakes.
- GordonS 6y ago
  It's not so simple - farmed fish produce a lot of waste in a very small area, which pollutes the water. There are also serious welfare issues with fish farming - for example, horrible mechanical and chemical treatments of salmon to remove lice, high use of antibiotics, terrible life expectancy of feeder-fish (which are introduced to eat lice off of salmon), poor environmental conditions for the fish (largely because so many fish are packed into such a small area), high rates of disease (again largely because of high stocking density).
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I don't want to be all doom and gloom, and should add that some of these problems are potentially solvable, even if the solutions themselves have trade-offs. For example, aquaculture can be moved offshore to large farm, mobile farm vessels, so the pollution is spread about instead of being concentrated at a small section of coastline. These vessels are new though, and an accident or freak weather even could result in millions of farmed fish being released to the wild - farmed fish are not the same, genetically, as wild fish, so the effects on wild stocks from that many escapes could be significant. Another new solution is closed-containment aquaculture, where the fish are placed inside a sealed sphere in the ocean. This approach allows all waste to be collected at the bottom of the vessel, and then turned into fertiliser. There are welfare concerns around increased stocking densities, and shutting hundreds of thousands of fish off from the outside world. Another solution that is (inexplicably, IMO) seeing huge investment are land-based, RAS (Recirculating aquaculture system) farms. These too can collect all fish waste, and it's touted as a way to prevent disease. There are concerns here too though - using arable land for fish farming doesn't seem like a very good idea, RAS farmers use horribly high stocking densities (they must, to be profitable), and there have been several incidents where disease has been inadvertently introduced from the outside (in such close quarters, the effects are of course disastrous). OK, so that still all sounds pretty gloomy - realistically the only way for things to get much better is through regulation. But better welfare increases farming costs, and like anything, there is always going to be a race to the bottom (e.g. if Norway increases costs too much for farmers, more move to Chile etc).

exoque 6y ago

Are we destroying the biggest ecosystem on the planet or are we not? That's the only question that matters everything else is just nitpicking.

iamacyborg 6y ago
It's almost like this is a complex issue that gotcha journalism by it's very nature doesn't try to answer. Why present serious evidence when you can simply harass your local chippy about what kind of forks they sell?
cies 6y ago
Exactly. Answer is yes. But some still make money from it and have lobbyists running in circles around politicians. So prolly not much will happen. In the mean while: just eat plants directly.
- dsincl12 6y ago
  This doesn't really fly unfortunately. Eat vegan/vegetarian and you will have a minimal impact, that is what you see/hear everywhere. But in the meanwhile these new vegan/vegetarian companies are a huge cause of the deforestation of the Amazon [1]. The amount of vegan/vegetarian food necessary to actually get the same amount of nutrients are on a different planet and simple math shows that it wouldn't even work if we used the entire planet. What I'm getting at is that is that it isn't all black and white and what we need is something sustainable that works and that it isn't really an easily solved problem. [1] https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/finance/media-bites-4-dec-amazon-deforestation-quorn-argos/600063.article https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/finance/media-bites-4-dec-amazon...
  - cies 6y ago
    > Eat vegan/vegetarian and you will have a minimal impact This is mostly true. You could maybe have a "mostly rice + meat once a month diet" that has less impact than a vegan diet rich in Impossible/Beyond meat and avocados. But apart from comparisons of "outliers" this statement true. > But in the meanwhile these new vegan/vegetarian companies are a huge cause of the deforestation of the Amazon [1] Might be so, but nothing close to what is needed for real beef. They say some forest is cut for soy, so soy is bad, and vegans (plant eaters) eat soy, so vegans are bad. Well, beef was a cow, and cows eat by far most of the soy on this planet. So "fake meat" is not compared to the alternative "meat" (they just point out something unsustainable about fake meat in isolation). Just an example: to produce one beef meat burger patty enough water is used that one could shower for 3 months 24/7. When it comes to "impact" (as you call it) it does not get much worse than red meat. A big fallacy in your argument is that all vegans would eat massive amounts of "new vegan/vegetarian company" products: they dont. We (yes im vegan) eat a lot of lentils, soy (tofu/tempeh), sweat potatoes, veggies, etc. As a group we are MUCH less impact for for the environment, simply because it is so inefficient to feed plants to animals only to have a less shelf stable product (meat), and lots of waste (bones, feathers, some organs, consciousness of sentient beings, etc). Please be vegan while we bring this wasteful industry to its knees. It's time.

elias94 6y ago

Both cowspiracy and seaspiracy, received a lot of critics and fact check by prominence professors. "oversimplifies a complex issue", so why don't try to explain it to us? Instead of criticizing and discrediting real issues that we're going to face in a few years. Ah, they're quoting multiple times professor X and study Y without links or reference... I'm not a Netflix fan/users, but I saw those documentaries and I really appreciate the effort they're doing to open the eyes of a lot of people.

fireattack 6y ago
I can see both sides. I appreciate these documentaries for raising awareness as you said. The reason why experts don't "try to explain it to us" probably is exactly because they think it's complex and nuanced. They probably don't even think there is an "issue" that need to be explained to begin with. Think it this way: you're in a field, and you know its pros and cons. You are not going to randomly speak anything about it because that's just.. like everything else in the world. Now, suddenly someone, likely an "outsider", wrote an article to describe the field/area in a certain one-sided way (good or bad). Of course you now suddenly have a strong opinion on it. Note: above is about the common question I saw "why these experts only appear to refute others but never explain the thing themselves", not about Seaspiracy in particular.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  I can see both sides but the side of the experts can clearly do better here. “It’s too complex to explain to all you people” or “this isn’t really a problem, the documentary makes a mountain of a mole hill” aren’t good approaches. If you are an expert in a field you should have at least some ability to simplify the issue or point out the mitigating factors that the documentary missed. The much more likely explanation here is that experts have a vested interest in looking smarter than some guy with a camera so they furrow their brows and talk about the complexities of the issue. As an analogy, BitCoin is complex. Between its usage of a blockchain and energy usage and murky origin story with who knows who owning a large chunk from the get go. Yet you could probably explain the power consumption problem to someone pretty easily.

arrayjumper 6y ago

The answer as usual is, "it's complicated".

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jacknews 6y ago

Hunting wild animals for food at the scale we do is not sustainable. That seems intuitive to me. We should be farming fish on land in controlled environments, and again, not feeding them caught wildlife.

knuthsat 6y ago

It's quite easy to see a pattern. Same pattern appeared for Cowspiracy [0] and a similar one for The Game Changers [1]. The same pattern can be seen with regards to pandemic warnings before this one. There's a very strong tendency to do business-as-usual and it's my non-optimistic belief that we will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. These events are white swans (just like the pandemic) and it's quite clear that our tendency for response towards white swans is inaction with "educated" dismissal. Ok, they mention empty oceans by 2048, yes the study is applying a linear estimate (as oceans empty there might be some regulation to slow down the curve and the linear estimate is incorrect) but they are just discrediting the study without confirming the trend. What should I believe, that oceans are emptying or flourishing? Should I expect empty oceans in my lifetime or should I leave this worry to other generations? Also, I'd say that linear estimate is a wrong one because depletion can happen exponentially and regulation is just a small damp to an exponential collapse. 0: https://www.cowspiracy.com/ https://www.cowspiracy.com/ 1: https://gamechangersmovie.com/ https://gamechangersmovie.com/

ricardo81 6y ago
> will experience empty oceans and complete ecosystem collapse in our lifetime. This made me feel very uneasy. I believe this is the most important topic of our lifetime, as much as climate change is a major issue, retaining and preserving biodiversity and its 4 billion years of knowledge is surely just as important.
- stemlord 6y ago
  Same, I don't want to spread negativity but I literally have nowhere else in my life to express the fact that I'm seriously considering how I'm going to kill myself when societies begin to starve en masse
wayoutthere 6y ago
China and Japan both view fish as their cultural birthright. Other countries do too, but they’re not vacuuming up the worlds fish. I agree we’re likely to see empty oceans before then — climate change will cause famine in a lot of places, increasing the demand for food (and particularly meat, given how resource-intensive it is). Sure, there are things like lab-grown meat but those aren’t going to be realistic on any scale outside of wealthy western nations. The other ~6 billion people in the world are gonna be totally screwed and that’s going to have consequences to our ecosystems. It’s a nasty feedback loop.

CynicusRex 6y ago

Even if only 1% of Seaspiracy is true, or if the numbers are off by 99%, the fact remains that we can live perfectly healthily without animal based foodstuff. The only moral and simplest solution is for privileged Westerners to go vegan.

kylebyproxy 6y ago
Morality is relative; please don't inflict yours on others. Animal consumption can be made sustainable. The main offenders are beef, lamb, and mutton, and their associated dairy[1]. Cutting just those out would put us back in the ballpark of responsible agriculture. Between pork, poultry, fish & other aquatics, and insects, there's room for sustainable meat farming. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
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- CynicusRex 6y ago
  >Morality is relative, please don't inflict yours on others. Suffering is not relative. “It just isn't possible to mass produce meat without torturing animals. In fact, raising animals specifically for consumption, i.e., “humane slaughter” is an oxymoron.” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cynic.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cynic.html
  - reedf1 6y ago
    I'm sympathetic to your point of view - but suffering must be relative or you would be concerned about the worms in a construction site or the bacteria you kill with bleach. There must be a spectrum of consciousness and perhaps there is a line where suffering begins, and is that not anything but relative?
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    Should we let all carnivorous animal die so that their prey can live a 'suffering free' life?

627467 6y ago

Cowspiracy, seaspiracy, social dilemma... Are examples of `guiltsploitation` genre of entertainment. I'm less concerned on whether their "storytelling" is being fair or an oversimplification, and more concerned on whether it leads to constructive atitudes by those influenced by them. Given the lengths they seem to go at shocking people I see little depth in their work at actually wanting the enact constructive change on behaviours.

ORioN63 6y ago
Do you have a suggestion on top of your critic? What would be the proper way to enact constructive change on behaviors?
- prionassembly 6y ago
  https://asemic-horizon.com/2021/02/10/we-have-never-been-asemic/ https://asemic-horizon.com/2021/02/10/we-have-never-been-ase...

eptcyka 6y ago

Aside from the overfishing study, it doesn't really seem like the documentary was deceptive. In my own opinion, the producer(s) were naive or at least appeared to be - I can see that being detrimental to their message. On the whole, I think the documentary is a net benefit.

supernova87a 6y ago

Would any of you say it's definitely worth watching, to someone debating whether to spend the 90 min? Some of the reviews are pretty mixed, saying that the film's message is confused by conspiratorial threads and off-putting journalistic style. Or, if you're already aware of the problems with industrial fishing, is it a pass/not much of an eye opener and not mandatory watching? Watching episodes of David Attenborough's Blue Planet might have done more for me already to appreciate the value of sea life than what I imagine is lots of footage of industrial fish markets, processing facilities, etc. But maybe knowing the ugly side is important.

iamacyborg 6y ago
I tried and had to turn it off after 20 minutes. By that point the interviewer had attempted two ambush interviews, made a lot of statements without backing them up (Japanese fleets overfishing tuna, they might well do but I'd like to see numbers), made false statements around the value of caught tuna (just because the first fish sold at auction in Japan sells for millions does not mean every fish sells for anywhere near that much) and acted surprised about something I thought was common knowledge when I was 6 years old (dolphins are bycatch in tuna fishing operations).
- RHSman2 6y ago
  Maybe you should have watched to the end then your comments may have been very different
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    Why would I when the first 20 minutes were so painfully bad?
    - RHSman2 6y ago
      So you could make a valid comment on HN instead of ‘I didn’t watch it but here is my opinion’?

dcwca 6y ago

I watched that documentary and had a good laugh at how poorly made it was. The filmmaker starts out by revealing that he just loves the ocean and wanted to make a film about it but didn’t know what the topic should be. The arc of the film is him googling for things, gaining the most basic perspective on an issue, pivoting his film toward it, and then failing to get any good interviews or original footage. So funny. He goes through ocean plastics, dolphins, shark fins, fishing net pollution, and one or two more with about as much depth as you would get from a tweet. Also why would you name your film Seaspiracy when Conspirasea is right there. 10/10 if taken as a mocumentary. The issues are real and I appreciate raising awareness but wow. Not good work.

l-lousy 6y ago
Naming - because the same guy also made cowspiracy. Quality - I would say it was pretty illuminating on a lot of issues that almost nobody here will get to see first hand.
- deleted 6y ago
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peraspera 6y ago
Not good work at all. Tabrizi's approach is to tackle a bunch of different subjects with the same attention span of a child on Xmas morning. Each new subject is treated as 'the' most important one, but he drops it unceremoniously after ten minutes. Then there's the cherry picking of interviewees and their arguments, which is a disservice to the cause – and completely unethical. Even environmentalists interviewed as 'the good guys' complained about this[0]. If Tabrizi is genuinely a fan of the likes of Cousteau and Attenborough, he should watch and listen a lot more before making another documentary. [0] https://twitter.com/christinachicks/status/1375390177913372673?lang=en https://twitter.com/christinachicks/status/13753901779133726...

valaryuvalaryu 6y ago

We just really, really, really need those manufactured meat to work if we are going to survive as 7 billion and growing people. I wonder what are _those_ made of? Its not like they comes out of thin air. I guess its _waaaay_ more efficient?

RHSman2 6y ago

Even if it’s only 50% accurate it’s still terrible. Like watching a real life horror movie. I have despair for the earth my children will inhabit

elif 6y ago

Hyperbole is counterproductive in the realm of science, but in the realm of public opinion and policy-making on catastrophic unaddressed problems, I would argue it is a necessity.

JackPoach 6y ago

I wasn't able to finish the documentary. Not only it seemed to be poorly researched, I have hard time with the fact that a twentysome year old is pretending to be an expert on a very complex subject, explaining what is wrong with this world and what needs to be one. That has really put me off.

DennisP 6y ago

> many communities depend on fishing for their livelihoods and for food The film was pretty sympathetic to those communities. In particular, coastal Africans, who depended on local fish for food, and now are in trouble because industrial fishing operations are vacuuming up those fish. The main point of disagreement in the article is the study about 2048. It's good news that the future might not be quite so imminently grim, but the film doesn't lean on the study all that much. For the other claims mentioned in the article, it says the film was pretty accurate. So contrary to Betteridge's law, it appears the answer to the question is "mostly yes."

khimaros 6y ago

older but worth a watch. Dan Barber, "How I fell in love with a fish" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUAMe2ixCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUAMe2ixCI

jalcazar 6y ago

Save Philippine Seas is organizing a live Facebook Q&A "Seaspiracy VS Reality"