David Attenborough’s Ocean

I watched Attenborough’s latest blockbuster at the cinema last night with my family, and thought I’d collect some thoughts here. First off, it’s wonderfully put together. That’s hardly news with Attenborough. Of course, it’s beautifully shot, and captures marine animals doing things we haven’t seen them do before. Much of it is really entrancing.

It’s also quite a hard-hitting film. It focuses, laser-eyed, on the carnage industrial fishing is wreaking in the ocean. The middle section of the film, which follows the beam of a bottom trawler as it trashes – just demolishes! – everything on the seabed is genuinely traumatic to watch. There was an eerie silence in our cinema, which contained quite a few kids. Even though I knew intellectually what bottom trawling looked like, and the damage it does, I honestly don’t think I will ever forget those images. It is hard to imagine a more compelling visual demonstration of the harm we are doing to the planet.

I wouldn’t say I learned much from the film, but then I am a bit of an ocean conservation geek. I sincerely hope that as many people see the film as possible. I would love it to spark a kind of Rainbow Warrior moment, perhaps with regards to bottom trawling (scallop dredging, which the film also shows, is smaller in scale but hardly less destructive).

I was pleased to see explicit discussion of the colonial (fishing) practices that are still maiming the ocean, and impoverishing many coastal communities. There was also a genuine effort to learn from indigenous and non-Western perspectives, in addition to the usual North Atlantic voices.

My only reservations circle around the stories that the film does not tell.

First off, the film does not ‘do’ capitalism. It notes that High Seas fishing is hugely destructive, and hugely subsidised. There is a story to tell here, of the kind Guy Standing has told, about rentier capitalism, and the capture of policy-making by an unrepresentative economic elite. But the film does not really ‘do’ politics either – it fits comfortably with the narrative that environmental destruction is a problem we can ‘science the hell out of,’ rather than one that will require concerted political responses. (It would have been nice, in the closing sections where the UN’s goal of protecting 30 percent of the ocean (and land) by 2030 is discussed, to note that all of the UN’s previous biodiversity targets have been missed, and that this is one is very likely to be missed too, by quite some distance. The current conservation model is just not working).

Second, the approach to climate change is limited. In its more boosterish moments, the film is keen to highlight to contribution that rebounding ecosystems could make to drawing down carbon. This is an important message. Likewise, it notes the terrible contribution bottom trawling makes to the climate, by stirring up huge amounts of carbon currently contained on the seabed (by some reckonings, the climate impact of bottom trawling is as big as that of global aviation – another reason it should be banned).

But, given its laser-eyed focus on industrial fishing, the film rather gives the impression that if we could roll back industrial fishing, the ocean would rebound. For instance, the discussion of coral reefs suggests that, once industrial fishing is reduced, reef fish will come back and nibble away the algae that is enveloping many coral reefs. But the biggest threat to coral reefs is of course climate change, even if industrial fishing makes things (much) worse. If we do not cut our emissions radically and quickly, the vast majority of the tropical reefs will be dead, and soon. (For that matter, aside from a couple of obligatory gestures towards plastic, the film generally steered clear of discussing other forms of pollution, including nitrogen pollution). If this leaves viewers with impression that ending – or even seriously curtailing – industrial fishing would allow the ocean to recover, then that would be a misleading impression. The ocean faces many more threats, each of which needs concerted attention.

So: a wonderful film when it comes to alerting us to (some of) the problems, and (some of) the solutions, which does a terrific job of visually encapsulating (some of) the harms we are doing to the ocean’s ecosystems. But the next job is to try and conjure up a lively and contestatory politics of the ocean, which challenges business as usual and offers a sense of what other futures are open to us. As my comrades at Ocean Rebellion will be arguing at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice next month, “Another Ocean is Possible.” We need to know that, and we also need to recognise that getting there will involve not just more science, and more entrancing visuals, but more politics, more contestation, and more holding power to account.