Shani Bennett/Stuff
A catch of orange roughy and some bycatch species are hauled aboard a trawler in international waters in the Tasman Sea. Globally, we need better-informed decisions about how much fish we take.
OPINION: One of the top 10 most viewed shows on Netflix in New Zealand over the last couple of weeks was the documentary
Seaspiracy. It sees young English filmmaker Ali Tabrizi wandering the globe with a video camera, examining the parlous state of our marine ecosystems and humanity’s insatiable appetite for food from the sea. From shark-finning and Japan’s fetish for whaling and dolphin hunting, to illegal fishing fleets and increasingly mechanised techniques to scoop larger hauls of fish from our oceans,
And some experts believe that’s what we’re at risk of right now: that a giddy sense of self-satisfaction is blinding us to the fact we are in mortal danger; that we could be caught flat-footed, just as the promised land of a virus-vanquishing vaccine appears. And this is not just about the slumped rates of QR code scanning. It goes to the top, and seeps throughout the whole system, warns one senior doctor. “There s just been this reluctance to engage with anybody else with ideas,” says Professor Des Gorman. “What underpins this reticence? Political risk has driven a culture of ‘best in show’, ‘we re the envy of the world’. It s a very pervasive culture, and it s the wrong culture. The culture we should have is: how do we do better tomorrow than we did yesterday?”