First off, there is a documentary out, Seaspiracy, that Hakai Magazine takes a look at:
Seaspiracy Harms More Than It Educates
The appeal of the Netflix hit is that it suggests there’s one solution to the ocean’s woes. That’s not true. A marine ecologist explains.
The new Netflix documentary Seaspiracy opens with suspenseful music as a fishing boat chugs along. Quick cuts. Guns. Tuna. Danger. Life or death stakes. We’re introduced to filmmaker and main character Ali Tabrizi. Tabrizi is a Brit in his 20s driven by curiosity, passion, and a yearning to discover the one crucial reason the ocean he loves is in trouble.
And therein lies the crux of why this film has angered so many people.
In his search around the world for the one villain behind all of the ocean’s ills, Tabrizi reduces a complex tangle of social, political, and environmental factors to a simple narrative. His villain changes at alarming speed from plastic to illegal whaling to tuna fishing to shark fishing to overfishing to plastic from overfishing to disingenuous seafood sustainability certifications. He finally decides that, yes, fishing is the principal villain (with a left turn toward aquaculture at the end).
As he cues ominous music and tells stories in generalities, Tabrizi glosses over nuance. In the filmmaker’s dichotomous world, everything can be categorized as black or white, good or bad, helping or hurting. And in his quest to save the ocean, he lays blame and resorts to othering.
Though the film misleads viewers with oversimplified science, its real harm is that it ignores the history, culture, and systemic inequities that are entwined with ocean conservation. Tabrizi suggests that all of the ocean’s environmental issues can be resolved with a single solution—stop all seafood consumption—without any recognition of what that would mean to people. That proposed solution is not only imperfect, it can cause real damage.
A fisheries consultant summed up the film’s tendency to generalize when he tweeted, “I’m over the set up where the ‘bad guys’ are predominantly Asian, the ‘victims’ predominantly black/brown, and the ‘good guys’ talking about it and saving the ocean are predominantly white.”....
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And from CANADALAND (the news site, not the country):
The Salmon-Farm Industry’s Propagandistic “News Site”
SeaWestNews, founded by a former Vancouver Province editor, champions the industry and attacks its critics
If you google Alexandra Morton today, the first hit is her own site, on which she explains that she’s “been called ‘the Jane Goodall of Canada’ because of her passionate 30-year fight to save British Columbia’s wild salmon.” A little further down, you’ll see recent headlines from the Vancouver Sun (“Whales drew scientist to B.C. waters, but salmon turned her into an activist”) and The Tyee (“Alexandra Morton’s Book Should Galvanize Action on Salmon”).
But just a little below those, you’ll find another, from last summer, published on something called “SeaWestNews” — “Apocalyptic ‘nonsense’ from an anti-fish farm activist.” Follow the “Alexandra Morton” tag on that site, and you’ll find post after post calling her a “discredited” activist who, through her “conspiracy-laden rants…reminiscent of Donald Trump’s desperate attempts to overturn the US elections” pushes “an agenda that will likely kill thousands of jobs.”....
....MUCH MORE
I sure hope it's not like the time I was duped by "Big Raisin"
