Attenborough’s Ocean is the film I’ve been waiting my whole career for – now the world must act on its message

The documentary shows the damage that fishing does to our planet. So why does the industry still hold governments to ransom?

Ihave been saying this a lot recently: “At last!” At last, a mainstream film bluntly revealing the plunder of our seas. At last, a proposed ban on bottom trawling in so-called “marine protected areas” (MPAs). At last, some solid research on seabed carbon and the vast releases caused by the trawlers ploughing it up. But still I feel that almost everyone is missing the point.

David Attenborough’s Ocean film, made for National Geographic, is the one I’ve been waiting for all my working life. An epoch ago, when I worked in the BBC’s Natural History Unit in the mid-1980s, some of us lobbied repeatedly for films like this, without success. Since then, even programmes that purport to discuss marine destruction have carefully avoided the principal cause: the fishing industry. The BBC’s Blue Planet II and Blue Planet Live series exemplified the organisation’s perennial failure of courage.

You can see the results in public beliefs. While assessments have long shown that the primary reason for the destruction of marine life is overfishing, in a poll last year, people in the UK placed it fourth. Eating our fish dinners while shaking our heads at the state of the oceans, we have been systematically misled by those whose job is to inform us.

Maybe Ocean will change that. The great public enthusiasm for the film shows, yet again, that the mantra endlessly recited by broadcasters – environmental issues turn away viewers – is false. You just have to do it, as this film does, powerfully and well.

The government’s announcement that trawling and scallop dredging will be banned from half of England’s MPAs is welcome. But this should be seen as the very least it could do. Conservationists have been calling for years for these protected areas to be, well, protected from the major cause of destruction. While heralded as a great step forward, the new policy is actually a step back from the Tory position: the Conservatives planned “to protect all 54 English offshore MPAs from fishing activity by the end of 2024”.

It also falls far short of the call last week by the House of Commons environmental audit committee for full protection of MPAs, and the achievement of “good environmental status” for our seas. The statutory deadline for reaching this status was 2020, but we are still nowhere near. Nor does the new policy take us anywhere close to the promise of “30x30”: the protection of 30% of our land and sea by 2030. How will the government close this gap?

Labour keeps slicing and dicing the problem. The new measures are intended to protect particular seabed features and particular species. But the fishing industry trashes everything. A government spokesperson told me “a full ban across MPAs is not needed as some MPAs are designated solely for highly mobile species such as birds”. But what about mobile species such as fish? In fact, almost all marine animals, at some point in their life cycles, are highly mobile.

The spokesperson said protection was needed only where particular features occurred. Why might large areas of seabed possess no valuable features? Because they have been ploughed out by trawlers. Much of the bed of the North Sea, for example, was once covered with a biotic crust of oysters and beautiful sessile animals. Now it’s mostly bare mud, sand and gravel, and deemed unworthy of protection. But if boats stopped ploughing it, the crust would recover. Good environmental status requires very large areas closed to destructive fishing techniques, regardless of what currently survives there.

Some of us had long speculated that trawling and dredging must release large amounts of carbon from the seabed. But data on the issue was remarkably slow in coming. Now, at last, solid research has begun, and we find that it is indeed a major problem, adding even more to the costs that the fishing industry imposes on society and the living planet.

But in almost all public discussion of these issues, including Ocean, I feel the problem has been framed the wrong way round. Nearly everyone seems to agree that we should carve out some areas of sea from the fishing industry and other destructive forces. The implication is that the default state of the seas is exploitation, from which we should make exceptions.

But as the marine campaigner Deborah Rowan Wright has long argued, it makes more sense to reverse this presumption. The default position should be protection, from which we might exclude some places (the least fragile) where some fishing activities (the least damaging) are permitted. Such residual fishing should be concentrated in the hands of local coastal communities, rather than captured by the huge industrial combines that, as Ocean showed, are snatching food from the people who need it most.

This would cause the mother of all “spillover effects”. Spillover is what happens when fish and shellfish are allowed to breed and grow undisturbed in protected places: in many cases, as their offspring spread into surrounding waters, total fish catches increase, even though the area in which fishing is permitted has shrunk. If killing were allowed in only a minority of places, far less fishing effort would be required to catch more and bigger fish.

Even then, we should remember that fish are wildlife, not “seafood”. They are not put on Earth for our consumption. They do not exist in “stocks”, but in populations and ecosystems. There is no such thing as “underexploited” or “underfished”, though these terms have long featured in the lexicon of official bodies and compliant scientists.

The extraordinary thing is just how tiny this industry is, yet it seems to hold the world’s governments to ransom. Last month, the British government announced that it was giving £360m to the fishing industry “to drive growth and boost the sector”. Why? The government’s own figures show that fishing costs us far more than it makes: it estimates that the proposed ban on trawling in half of England’s MPAs will cost UK businesses and public bodies £7.8m, while delivering “benefits from enhanced environmental protection” of approximately £3.1bn. Why the hell should public money, withheld from public services in desperate need, be spent on fishing, the most destructive of all private industries?

I’ve watched for 40 years as governments, protected by timid broadcasters, have wasted every opportunity to prevent ecological collapse. As they assemble in France for the UN Ocean Conference, they should pledge not to waste another day.

Cover photo:  David Attenborough in his new film, Ocean. Photograph: Keith Scholey/PA