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Hello,

Thank you for bringing the intention to watch Seaspiracy to the Ulisses group. I watched the full documentary last week and while it was really hard to watch at times, it is important and showcases the darker side of the seafood industry.

The way I see it, we are all not at war with the oceans, there are a selected amount of people who are. The issue is usually not local fisherman, it is the large trawl industries. Yet, those people are very powerful and with lots of money, they are able to influence government and policy. I believe there is hope that with the right people being placed in government, who are driven by wanting to make the world a better place, instead of for-profit, the ocean will be able to be replenished. It is very resilient, and while it seems like we are actually destroying the oceans worse than we ever have, it was actually much worse in the 1970s and 1980s and has decreased since then after there were stricter total allowed catch regulations put in place by governments.

The power we have is that we are consumers, and we can make the option to be more plant-based and opt-out of eating seafood regularly. We can vote for candidates that have the best interest for the ocean, and we can try to eat locally caught seafood whenever possible.

Hi ULissers!

I must say that this documentary completely changed my perspective about the real ocean´s problem we will face next years. We can easily conclude that we are not only facing the plastics problem or the climate changes but also an abusive use of the resources the oceans provide. The bad new is that also the mafias are included in that (Yakuza, for example) but the good new is, like Alexandra previously said, we are the final consumers. If we promote this type of problem and reach as many people as we can, there is a chance to change this situation.

During the video, one of the main proposes is to stop eating fishing or at least reduce the consumption. I do understand that stop eating fish, and animals in general, is something hard but still not impossible. I strongly believe that we can start reducing meals based on animals and gradually educate the future and present generations. At this moment, very few percentages of people do not eat animals or sub-products because there is no education on this matter. If I decided to stop eating animals tomorrow, what should I eat?

So, from my point of view, I think we should continue to find innovative ways to remove plastics from the ocean, using our engineering and scientific skills, but at the same time, education is a strong way to fight against the mentioned problems. Like most of us that didn´t know about the SEASPIRACY mentioned problems, I´m pretty sure that other millions of people didn't as well. I hope during this course we can spot the priorities regarding the oceans and use our knowledge. As mentioned during the documentary, we just need a good idea to change the world!!!!

Hello,
I haven't watched the documentary yet, but I'm hoping to do so this weekend.
Obviously, the phrase "we are at war with the sea" is used metaphorically. Nevertheless, our (ab)use of the world's oceans and the current system in place has very real and dire consequences.

 

In my opinion, there are somewhat simple reasons that got us to our current situation. World population growing exponentially and food demands rising even more rapidly were certainly major contributors. But also, technology improvements allowed us to exploit an ecosystem until its collapse, which sometimes happened before we even had realized that we held the power to do so. Another factor very much related to this, is the concept of “the tragedy of the commons”. Essentially, if you do not take advantage of the ocean’s resources, someone else will. Sure, this might come with a cost (e.g., fisheries collapsed or degradation of habitats), but everyone will suffer the consequences, so you might as well get the benefits (and thus you continue to exploit the system).

There is no way we are going to solve overfishing without a global effort and some “radical measures”. I think it is urgent to have video cameras and fishery observers on every industrial ship. Without this type of close monitoring, there almost no point in making laws. An example of a well intentional law that has proven to be not only ineffective but actually had counterproductive results is the so-called “landing obligation”. Introduced in 2015 by the Common Fisheries Policy (EU), this measure originally aimed to reduce bycatch. To ease the transition to this system most of EU total allowable catches were raised to account for the additional part of the catch that was previously discarded and should now be landed. Now we are seeing that at-sea practices were not changed, thus this has only resulted in an added pressure to the European stocks. You can read more about this issue @https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/researchers-say-europe-s-ban-throwing-unwanted-fish-overboard-backfiring or check the original paper @https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article-abstract/78/1/134/6026103. Other researchers argued for the creation a new global institution that would, for instance, set the rules regarding the amount of total fishing industry capacity (see Barkin & DeSombre, 2013; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13412-013-0112-5).

I agree with Joana and Bruno that consumers should take responsibility over their choices (although I believe we should demand companies to improve their practices). Everyone can at least reduce their consumption of animal products. It still blows my mind how much meat Portuguese people eat – around 119 kg of meat per person per year!! As much uncomfortable as it can be to talk about these problems amongst our family members, we need to raise as much awareness as we can. A small change is always better than no change at all!

Hello ULissers,

I watched the documentary yesterday and I must admit that was really hard to watch certain parts! It gave me a new point of view about the fishing industry that I didn't know about until now. All I'm going to say is nothing that we all don't already know, but I still want to share my opinion and support what was said earlier by my colleges.

Like Sofia, I think that the exponential growth of the World population is the major reason for our problem! It has led us to need more and more food with time, which influenced the development of equipment and the introduction of techniques that allowed better efficiency in catching fish.

With Seaspiracy, I could understand that overfishing is a huge problem that needs to be solved soon as possible, but if not even the ocean can adapt to the changes we caused how can we in such a small period? Unfortunately, we cannot solve this problem overnight!

I think one important thing to do is reduce fish consumption but not eliminate it, at least not for now. As Bruno said, we need to start reducing meals based on animals and gradually educate the future and present generations. We can and we are already developing other "ways of eating"! If we all think about it, 10 years ago, there were fewer vegetarian stores or dishes at restaurants, but now we can see more vegetarian food available and more people trying to improve their food habits. Like we started using the more advanced ways for fishing, we can also start implementing the most advanced "ways of eating". And for that, we need time to learn how to do it. While we are learning we can try, for example, to reduce the money we give to fishing industries and use it to support organizations like Sea Shepherd and start monitoring the fishing industry the best way we can to make it less cruel. But at the same time not forget about the rest of the problem causes! In Seaspiracy they said that plastic straws are only 0.03% of the plastic on the sea like it was something small, but that doesn't mean that we should stop worrying about that and care only about the overfishing problem now. While we are trying to solve the overfishing problem and focusing all our attention on it, other problems keep growing. Everything is important to solve in this situation, so I think measures should be made to make more people aware of what is happening globally and incentivise them to make something about it. As Sofia said, a small change is always better than no change at all! Even if we do small things for our oceans that don't seem to be enough (like replacing plastic bottles/dishes/cutlery with metallic or glass ones), we must continue to do and improve them, at the same time we encourage more people to do it too.

Hi Ulissers!

I also watched the documentary yesterday and I was very surprised about how huge the impact of commercial fishing is on the ocean, especially in terms of the accumulating plastic waste. For years, everything I heard and read about the plastics-in-oceans problem has thematised the plastic waste produced by us, consumers. In my opinion an additional problem we face is the lack of profound and objective journalism, which should not only address certain target groups, but the broad audience. If we take ‘Seaspiracy’ as example, it can only be seen by people having access to Netflix. And even then, only certain amount of people will watch it – people of certain age and with particular interest in documentaries. I think one way of approaching this problem would be to drag media attention to it, and by doing so, to educate as many people from different age groups, economic backgrounds, etc. instead of certain target groups for whom the information are prepared and aimed. It is only then, that the respective governments will take this matter seriously. In the end, that is what media should do – inform and educate, right?

In general, I also agree with Sofias opinion on the growth of the world population as reason for highest demand for food than ever before. However, if we compare the world regions with the highest number of annual births (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-births-by-world-region)
and the highest population (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-by-world-regions-post-1820)
with the seafood consumption (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumption-per-capita)
it becomes obvious that the growth of the world population is not the only problem in this context. If we take China as example, it has reduced its birth rate over the last 70 years by roughly 40% (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-births-by-world-region?tab=table),
but it still has one of the highest fish and seafood consumption values with 38kg per person per year (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fish-and-seafood-consumption-per-capita?tab=table).
In my opinion, a much bigger problem we are facing here is the fact that the population of wealthier countries in this world is used to have everything they (we) desire available at any time, including food which is neither seasonal nor regional. And since it is additionally a bit difficult to control the global birth and death rates, a change of the general opinion considering availability and necessity for certain food, would be the better way to encounter overfishing. In conclusion, I think that education and information of the general public is the way to go - again.

Considering the phrase from the documentary I personally do not feel like there is a war against the ocean, since the ocean has almost no chances to encounter human attacks. It is just humans destroying a natural ecosystem which is completely incapable of defending itself against our technologies. So until we find technologies to obtain fish and seafood without the destroying of marine life in general, our possibilities are unfortunately limited.

Hello Ulissers!

I believe that this concept started from a time when we still have obsolete and primitive tools as well as vessels to make a living at sea. Back then we had to find ways to get a good catch and at the same time to survive the rough sea. This kind of thought does not exist solely in fishing industry but every other fields where we once had to struggle with the harsh nature to earn our living. It became an obsess to continuously modernize our equipments and catching methods and maximize our profit, to “win” or to outweigh the difficulties we have to face in the ocean that we forget there are a whole other ecology existing at the sea. By trying too hard to triumph the hardship, we are destroying our own nurturer - the ocean and we will lose it all - our food, our breath and our ecology. And once the hardship is over, the efficiency increases, we tend to take more just because we can.

This reminds me of the Jevons paradox – the breakthrough of technologies to improve efficiency and effectiveness will lead to an increase in consumption. I believe that the problem lies not in the fishing or getting food from the ocean, the problem is that we can't keep this relationship healthy and balance and we cannot draw a line to stop ourselves from killing the ecologies, especially when our population is growing exponentially.

I watched the Seaspiracy and I don't like the narrative, but in the end, it highlights many dark issues of abusive commercial fishing. However, I believe that it is the way we do it, the practices we apply, not the fishing itself. The same thing applies to plastic problem or agriculture or cottons and textiles. We need food to live, we need cotton to make clothes, we need plastics to make container and protective packaging to prevent spoilage, they are our basic needs. Food production, cotton production or plastics are not evil by themselves, some are useful and necessary even, but the way we grow our food, the way we destroy forests and soils to make our cotton and the way we use and dispose of plastics are the problem. If we don't learn and know better in adjusting our need in respect of our ecology, we will also find way to destroy our environment by alternative ways of living (the emerging of plant-based diet and biobased resources and biodegradable materials, if sustainable practices are not well considered, could also lead to the collapse of the ecology due to high demand).

I believe that the best solution to our environmental problems, overfishing or plastics, are not to boycott anything or totally eliminate anything, but to learn to recognize which practices are acceptable and which practices are not, to learn to live within our ecological boundaries by conscious consumption (know when and how much is enough) and increase our capability to monitor and prevent bad practices at sea. I’d say a good monitor system, e.g. wireless cameras at sea floor combined with radar/radio information, at hot spots for overfishing and trawling should be able to help (just a suggestion, forgive me for such oversimplication :D). Good legal measurements should be studied and implemented to encourage good practices also. And appreciate the efforts of many teams out there and give them the support they need is a good starting point, since that’s what lacks from Seaspiracy – the team is undermining the effort of many organizations in protecting the sea.