Ocean with David Attenborough: Why There’s Still Hope for the Sea

1:00:00 I just came back from watching the movie Ocean narrated by Sir David Attenborough and I have to admit I loved it I'm not usually a huge fan of documentaries that are this size Although everything Sir David Attenborough is a part of seems to do really well and I really like it But over the last couple of years there have been some documentaries have come out I'm not even gonna mention some of them that have been totally off. I really like this movie I'm gonna talk about what I liked why I like the message of hope and also we're gonna talk about some of the Controversies in this movie because there's always controversial there's criticism from the fishing industry We're gonna talk about the bottom trawling that was talked about in this movie as well as the marine protected areas that was talked about In this movie on this episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. Let's start the show Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast I'm your host Andrew Lewin and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean how you could speak up for The ocean and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action on today's episode We're gonna be talking about a movie that I just came back from seeing called ocean It's really tells you exactly what it's all about ocean is by Sir David Attenborough narrated by Sir David Attenborough He is 99 years old folks 99 and for the past couple of years He's been working on this movie that was released in theaters and selected theaters It was a small venue for me that I went to him usually go to these big big epic movies This is a small movie, but it was packed with great messaging some controversies I want to kind of clear up a little

1:01:30 bit and also it just opens the conversation to a lot more Let's just say that and I think it's really great that it does that it was released on purpose before the ocean decade conference In Nice France and even mentions it in the film and it's something where it's like hey, you know what? We need to really be able to protect our oceans and land But our oceans especially and we need to do that at this conference and we need to get some great results So it's calling on all the negotiators at this conference to come out with some great results I will actually be there at that conference So I'll give you the lowdown of what I experienced and what I saw at this conference I'm going to a bunch of side events not the main conference, but I'm sure there's gonna be lots to talk about So let's get into the movie of why I loved this movie It really comes out to the messaging the messaging of hope a lot of times I've seen these documentaries and they talk a lot about the destruction that's happening a lot of times they cover everything You know, you're looking at the major ones over fishing climate change plastic pollution water quality problems with other pollution like industrial pollution and so forth Development along coastal lines aquaculture and so forth. There's a lot of things that they like to cover There's you know a couple of them have covered like coral bleaching and the messaging is very depressing throughout the entire film There's no message of hope and they really talk about the conservation aspect of it in the last five minutes sometimes even in the credits These aren't great documentaries because they're good at telling you what is wrong They're not going to tell you how

1:03:01 you can do and you just leave the people with this pessimism of the ocean of what's happening Around our planet and to a point where people are just giving up. It's like well if we can't do anything who cares I'm just gonna give up It's almost like eating and getting on a diet if you don't see the results that you want right away You can get off that diet and you almost eat worse than what you did before when you restrict yourself So it's really important that messaging that comes out of these documentaries like ocean Has to be positive has to show hope we love movies with hope humans Love stories with hope hence the Star Wars trilogies have been great with messages of hope That's what it's all about and that's what ocean is all about.

1:03:44 It's about hope the movie starts off You know spoiler warning there's not much spoilers in this one But spoiler warning the movie starts off showing the beauty of the ocean what I really love about it right at the beginning It ties the connection of the deep sea to the surface right off the bat. We see a bait ball We see a bunch of sharks. We see dolphins We see whales and then we all of a sudden we see sea mounts and David Adam Brill's talking about how sea mounts play an important Role to bring up nutrients from the bottom of the ocean the deep sea to the surface to feed all of these traveling species It's really really well done and then talks a lot about the canyons that are down there and how many sea mounts are down there Where they are and they show this almost 3d image of the bottom of the ocean really giving a perspective of how?

1:04:31 Productive the ocean can be I think a lot of times when we see open ocean we see it as a barren Waterway a barren just a water column and we don't see much happening other than maybe a whale or two or maybe a shark That's you know traveling from one place to another we don't think about the connection between the deep sea and the surface was right away I think it really brings up the you know How we're messing around with the deep sea too much talking about deep sea mining and so forth really gives people perspective that it's all Connected and that we need to be careful doesn't mention deep sea mining But you kind of like somebody who covers ocean all the time I'm like this is a great way to get people to really think about the deep sea and how it's connected to the surface and how we could benefit as humans and bringing up plankton that you know bring in a third of the carbon dioxide and Absorb the third of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and how important that is just from a climate change reduction point of view and it Doesn't talk about the productive nature of upwellings Which is bringing nutrients from the deep sea to the surface so that animals can like whales and dolphins and tuna and all those animals Can feed off of especially if they're migratory species. It was a great way of depicting it I loved right off the bat just depicting it right away. I thought it was really well done I did something that I think we need to know from a perspective then it starts talking about different Habitats around the world, you know, we see areas in Africa.

1:05:51 We see areas in the northern UK We see areas into the Channel Islands and we see a lot of different areas a lot of different like kelp forests And then we see these scallop beds we get to see these coral reefs like in the Indo-Pacific and so forth It's just a really good depiction of the different types of environments that are around talks about you know The discovery of this massive seagrass bed that we discovered a couple of years ago That was discovered by work done by dr Austin Gallagher friend of the podcast in his team of beneath the waves It was great to see all these depicted wasn't just coral reefs that showed benefit It was all these different habitats that had beautiful colors and fish from all over and people talking about How important it is for them to fish talked a lot about?

1:06:35 artisanal fishers so local fishers that are really just Benefiting themselves by fishing and want to fish for generations and generations generations are looking to be more sustainable Working with probably scientists and governments and so forth to be more sustainable And I think that's a really important message Especially as they get more and more into the movie because when they get into the movie they talk about Industrial fishing in this movie they're focusing on industrial trawling and they even have cameras that are hooked up to the trolls multiple angle cameras that are hooked up to a trial to show how Devastating a trawl could be a trawl that comes through I've talked about this a number of times We'll go over quickly It has these doors that sink and open up the net it has a chain that connects the doors at the beginning the entrance of The nets a massive net that trails behind and then it just scrapes the bottom With that chain and it takes everything every fish and critter that's in there and it'll put it up now We're gonna talk a little bit more in a bit about trawling and how they could be changed and how it's optimized to be A little better we're gonna talk about that in a bit, but that's what it shows It shows kind of the devastation that it leaves You know in its path as this wide opening say 10 foot may 20 foot wide opening net Just destroys everything in its path and it goes for a certain amount of kilometers and then it pans out to a drone It shows the different paths which are very narrow paths, you know, just to look at it from that perspective But we're gonna talk a little bit about why they're showing these trolls because they're talking about how trolls are Allowed to go and pretty much

1:08:05 anywhere in certain countries in the UK. There was a study that was released I think I covered it on the podcast 90% of the MPAs in the UK allow bottom trawling now if you think about an MPa Which it talks about in the episode as one of those hopeful things It says look here's this fishing this devastating fish in that if you use trawling over and over and over again the same area It's gonna destroy the habitat and we'll get into that a little bit, but we could get away from it It talks a lot about this depressing stuff and you get depressing I was watching with my daughter my daughter says she even cried in certain situations there because it was so depressing to see these animals suffering like invertebrates and so forth and just a barren sea after seeing such a productive area But then it goes into some hope it says hey You know what the ocean can recover really quickly when it recovers really quickly is once we start telling people that you can't fish In certain areas certain areas are known to be productive and once those areas are productive and fish are allowed to come back and regulate The habitat then they start to have a spillover effect outside the boundaries of the marine protected area And then that could spill effect can go for kilometers depending on the species and its larval dispersal rates and everything like that And it has such a benefit. I want you to watch the movie. So I'm not gonna say the whole explanation I want you to watch the movie because the imagery and the videography is just Phenomenal, you know seeing the different colors of the shallows and different colors of the deep sea It's just amazing. So you have to watch it, but that was part of the message was this hope I was like, oh, okay So they're talking about a lot of depressing stuff. They didn't spend the whole movie on it But they talked a lot about the hope and MPAs

1:09:36 then they started talking about the problem with some MPAs in the way they're managed Which is great. They could have gone into a little bit more detail But I know what they were trying to do and then they started to come back and they say hey, you know what? We've actually had some great things the Channel Islands off the coast of California in the USA The Channel Islands came back and they had a marine protected area and people said oh, you know after a while We started to see changes happening and then we started to get record numbers of catches in this case It was lobsters finally, so you started to see this and you're like, okay, so this is actually working We've seen this before in the literature We've seen marine protected areas that if done properly and managed properly and enforced properly You can see a change back to the system that was productive and a change in the habitat So that was really great the messaging overall was like we have hope the ocean can recover There are people that can do some really great things They talked also about Antarctica and some of the trawling that's happening Antarctica for krill and how the whales are using that Area at the Southern Ocean to get krill and now they're running out of food So what's gonna happen with the whales they even talked about the recovery near the end especially which I thought was really interesting They talked about how we've done this before We've taken animals to the brink of extinction ie whales when we used to hunt whales back in the 1800s Almost to extinction because we used to hunt whales for fuel. That's how we got fuel That's how we burnt all the lights and everything like that and how the lights stay on they would burn slower That was our energy and so we hunted whales to the brink until we said, you know What we discovered oil and gas oil and gas became the main producer of energy People want to

1:11:06 stop hunting the whales eventually stopped there's certain countries that still do but for the most part We've seen a recovery of humpback whales of bowhead was of a lot of different whales out there blue whales that you know We're hunted to almost extinction and now we've seen like they're great conservation stories if we put together Conservation winds we can really do a good job now Here's what they talked about right at the end before the credits They basically wrote on text on the screen basically saying that the ocean decade conference coming up in Nice France where countries are gonna be Negotiating and trying to sign and talk about what the work that they've been doing to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 and 30% Of their control like exclusive economic zone, you know They'd call for those countries to do a better job to get more protection Faster because there's only globally there's less than 3% of the ocean protected But we're seeing a lot of productivity come from that 3% and we're also seeing others now There's a lot of issues surrounding MPAs and designated MPAs one I mean, it's not really an issue, but it takes a long time It takes a long time because it's conflict management You are telling people who used to be able to fish or do anything in a certain area that they're gonna be restricted from doing That activity in that area. It's not just fishing.

1:12:13 It's any kind of extractive type. So it could be oil and gas It could be mining it could be development. It could be even recreational activities depending on how bad that area is So you have to do a lot of conflict management You have to do a lot of compromising a lot of negotiation to get an area protected And once you get that area protected which could take anywhere from a year to like 10 years even longer to get protected Then you have to enforce and you have to manage and you have to go through adaptive management process to change the management with You know different types of changes that are going on in the world a lot of stuff going on there That was really interesting to see they didn't mention that in Antarctica There is the eastern part of the ocean in Antarctica the southern ocean that they want to protect they've been trying to get it protected for over 10 years and Antarctica is managed by 24 25 countries including China and Russia who keep you know Blocking the vote to get this area protected. They did protect the Ross MPa or the Ross sea which was great But now they want to protect this other area to not only protect krill But other fish like what they call the Chilean sea bass, which is different fish I think it's called Patagonia and tooth fish and so people are trying to protect but it's hard to protect these areas So there's a lot of different issues and then we talked about the enforcement the UK allows bottom trolley and 90% of its marine protected areas That's got to change because you can't protect an area. You're not just protecting species You can't protect an area because that's where they live. That's where they eat.

1:13:32 That's where they interact You have to protect that area You can't let bottom trolley a destructive fishing practice that will come through and destroy a particular part of the habitat If that continues to happen over and over and over again, you know Even it starts off as narrow bands that can increase and increase as bottom trolley continues to happen So there's got to be some restriction of extractive processes in marine protected areas In fact, it was argued that you don't really have a marine protected area if you allow extractive processes like fish bottom trolley in marine protected Areas, so there are a lot of things that happen that have to be stopped now Let's talk a little bit about trawling Trawling is a destructive practice like I talked about before it scrapes the bottom. There are different types of trawlers bottom trawling There's like mid water column trawling where basically the trawl goes through the water column It doesn't actually hit the bottom and it takes anything in the area I think the krill are going through like the mid column trawling, but it doesn't destroy the bottom But it does take a lot depending on how big the net it does and in the oceans It shows that they're pretty big nets and a lot of processing going on at sea before it gets taken to shore And so there's obviously problems with it, but does take a narrow band So if managed properly, maybe you can say hey, yeah, we can actually do this But you can't you know, there's certain times you're be able to trawl if you take a narrow band in a productive area And you don't fish beyond that that band will fill in with other organisms as succession happens in ecology But you know, you have to be careful and manage that It's very difficult to manage at sea when you're not there all the time and then you know

1:15:02 People can just go they'll beg for forgiveness instead of asking for permission at sea and they'll just keep Trawling so you do have to be careful with that. There have been advancements in trawling in terms of net size in terms of exclusive devices such as sea turtle exclusion devices I think there are also for some like dolphins as well where it allows these animals to get out of the net and be able to survive there's mesh sizes which allow to be more selective in terms of the type of fish so they'll have larger mesh sizes for larger fish so the smaller fish can go through the mesh and they won't get caught trying to reduce bycatch but I did look up some statistics on it and so according to some sources bottom trawling accounts for approximately 25% of the world's wild caught seafood and when you include mid-water trawling it contributes just over one-third So just over 30% of global fish catches in Canada. I want to get something specific in Canada It's about 6.5% of the national fish catch is obtained through trawling methods The bycatch concern is that the bycatch is estimated at 23% indicating a significant portion of non-target species caught and discarded In the US the trawl percentage accounts for approximately 4% of the catch from trawling activities And then the bycatch is nearly 50% now UK As I mentioned 90% of the MPAs have permitted to have bottom trawling But the trawling stands for approximately 3.7% of the fish catch the nation's fish catch So maybe it's not actually happening even though 90% of the MPAs allow

1:16:33 it to happen It may not be happening everywhere other notable countries that have some significant trawling Approximately 65% of its seafood in the Netherlands is caught by bottom trawling in Morocco Also reports about 65% is caught from bottom trawling and then Vietnam bottom trawling accounts for 59% of its seafood catch So now obviously when you're looking at bottom trawling, you're worried about habitat destruction You're also worried about high bycatch rates So non-targeted species including endangered marine life are caught and discarded leading to ecological imbalances And then of course carbon emissions was mentioned in the ocean as you start to dredge out the bottom Sediments starts to get moved and carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere There's some recent studies that say that it may release substantial amounts of carbon dioxide by disturbing carbon rich sediments on the ocean floor So there's a lot going on with bottom trawling not the best fishing method Obviously, there's certain countries that depend a lot on it And there's other countries that don't depend a lot on it And of course the management of MPAs varies from country to country to country The UN came out with some stipulations in terms of what a marine protected area is and they kind of follow that And then we're also seeing more conservation coming in near shore as I talked about a couple of weeks ago with Angelo Villagomez and Alia Hadiat from the center of american progress talking about how near shore protection should start to ramp up and increase Because we're doing a lot on offshore But we're not doing as much on the inshore where it's just a harder place to do it The coastal area is the harder place where we are going to be having problems

1:18:03 in conflict resolution That has to take place before we can start to protect those one of the things they talked about papahana makua kaya The marine sanctuary off the islands of hawaii or just northern islands of hawaii Which is a huge place that has a great spillover effect Obviously that was the subject matter of some controversy a couple months ago when donald trump opened it up to fishing So that's going to be a problem But there's a big focus on this in the movie They talk a lot about how the size of it's great and everything is doing well And it's increased catch rates by 54 outside the marine protected area, which is all wonderful The one thing though that we should mention is that in areas where it's overseas territories such as the hawaii islands I guess not really territory It's a state but still like in those areas where it's indigenous led It's great to have that protection because especially with indigenous led marine protected areas is usually pretty good because it's part of their culture However, a lot of the bigger marine protected areas are in areas where there's a big indigenous population There's less in the main population the non-indigenous population because it's harder to do And it becomes more conflicting and we try to do one of the sea mountain canyons in the us Just off the coast of massachusetts. I don't know if it ever got brought back, but now that donald trump is in power I'm sure it was an executive order when it first came in under the obama administration.

1:19:20 Donald trump took it away I think biden took it back. I'm sure it's got back stripped down again So these are big problems that happen not only in the us but all over the world Mpa's are not easy to designate which you know, the movie made it sound like it could be It's not an easy thing. It works when it's done properly and it's enforced and it's managed properly But when it's not or it takes a long time to get it approved, you know destruction continues to happen And there's always you know countries who are wanting to get on top The papahana makua kia got opened up because you know, the us want to be number one in the pacific for fishing Pretty much that was the reason so that's a big problem when you talk about mpa's and trying to keep mpa's intact and protected So lots of stuff going on great message of hope the fact is hey You know what?

1:20:02 There's our ways to do it. We just have to do it We just have to actually go out and execute and put in more marine protected areas get up to that 30 percent Or as close as possible by 2030 and just continue to work at it and work at it and work at it So I hope you have a chance to go see it. I don't know what's going to happen This was a release it came out a little later in canada than it did in the uk when it was first released at the Beginning of the month in may but I highly recommend you go get I hope they put it out on netflix Or on some streaming channel that everybody can get access to because I think it'll make a lot more waves No pun intended, but I hope you get to see if you've seen it and you want to let me know what you thought about it Please let me know in the comments down below if you're watching this on youtube or you can go to speakup for blue.com forward slash Contact fill out the form Let me know what you thought of the movie or if you're looking forward to seeing the movie and then of course you can always Hit me up on instagram at how to protect the ocean That's pat how to protect the ocean I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast Have a great day.

1:20:56 We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation