By Captain Paul Watson

The corporate industrialized fishing interests as expected are working overtime in their attempts to discredit Seaspiracy. They are cherry picking the science and trying to suggest that industrial fishing is both sustainable and necessary. It’s not.Commercial industrialized fishing is not sustainable. It exists because of billions of dollars of government subsidies to prop it up. Remove the subsidies and the entire industry, an industry based on short term profit for short term gain will collapse.This film Seaspiracy is not directed at artisanal or indigenous fishing. In fact artisanal and indigenous fishing communities are being diminished and destroyed by corporate fishing. There are some positives. Kudos to Alaska for banning fish farms and for the hatcheries that support the wild salmon runs but this is an exception to the norm.For the most part the sea is being strangled of life by the super trawlers, the bottom trawlers, the huge seiners, the long-liners, the gill netters and by aquaculture.The situation is serious. It involves slavery, it promotes high seas piracy, it scours the sea bottom, it pollutes the marine environment with millions of tons of discarded plastic fishing debris.Corporate fishing is a global scheme of short term investment for short term gain and the fact is that coral reefs are dying, plastic is choking the depths, fish populations are being dangerously depleted and phytoplankton populations have been diminished by 40% since 1950 and phytoplankton produces more oxygen and sequesters more CO2 than all the trees and plants on land.How can it be justified for an endangered fish (Antarctic toothfish) to be caught and transported across the globe to be sold as Chilean sea bass in restaurants in Denver, Paris or a hundred other different cities? How can it be justified to feed millions of fish every year to pigs, chickens, farm raised salmon, cats and fur farms? How can it be justified to wipe out the herring runs off British Columbia to feed salmon in cages or to destroy seals in Canada or dolphins in Japan as scapegoats for the excessive greed of the fishing industry. I was raised in an Eastern Canadian fishing village in the Fifties and I have witnessed this steady diminishment of life in the sea and the astonishing ability of humanity to adapt and accept this diminishment. I have spent more than a half a century at sea in all the world’s oceans and I have seen the death, the destruction, the pollution and the greed.I don’t care what propaganda the industry and its enablers spread or how many biostitutes they hire to justify their greed. The fact is that a super trawler is an abomination against nature, a 100-mile long gill net or longliner is a weapon of mass ecological destruction and government subsidies are the evidence that worldwide, many governments are willingly complicit in the extermination of marine life and the collapse of marine eco-systems.I have seen with my own eyes the heart-breaking devastation of the Great Barrier Reef. We pulled one gill net from one ship (Thunder) from the depth of 2 kilometers off the coast of Antarctica that was 72 kilometers long and weighed 70 tons. We seized a drift net in the North Pacific that was over 100 miles in length and I’ve seen and smelt the bodies of a quarter of a million salmon rotting on the beach in Chile. Sustainable fishing is a myth and slapping the word onto a can of tuna claiming that no dolphins died is a blatant lie. And what about the tuna? 90% of Bluefin tuna populations have been eradicated? We massacre 70 million sharks a year primarily for their fins for a soup that has zero nutrition and then we complain when an average of five people die from shark attacks per year, a number lower than that of 40 people on average that die each year from falling from a skateboard. The fishing industry is driven by the politics and the economics of extinction. The more scarce the fish, the greater the demand and thus the greater the profit and there is almost a universal lack of economic or political will to police the high seas and to crack down on the poachers, the quota exceeders, the by-catch wasters and the corporate cartels that finance and control them. Predictably the industry trots out images of traditional fishermen, usually artisanal fishing communities implying that it is these hard-working individuals that we are seeking to shut down when it is the industrialized fishing operations that have been devastating artisanal and indigenous fishing communities around the world. After a long lifetime of voyages and campaigns and tens of thousands of sea miles, I have realized a truth and a reality that the industry works hard to ignore, discredit and deny. That truth is that life in the Ocean is being diminished and the very fact that we have lost 40% of our oxygen producing phytoplankton bodes darkly ill for the future of humanity. This is the reality. When the Ocean dies, we die with it.Note: For those who will surely try to claim that I am exaggerating about phytoplankton diminishment, here is a source for reference: (1) Source: Scientific American. Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 percent Since 1950 by Lauren Morello 2010.