Review: Ocean (2025)

 Watching "Ocean" (2025), the latest documentary from Sir David Attenborough, feels like bearing witness to a planetary emergency. 

With haunting underwater footage, the film reveals the brutal reality of bottom trawling—industrial fishing vessels dragging weighted nets across the seafloor, reducing centuries-old coral forests to deserts of broken skeletons. If you haven't watched it yet, it's time...

Every time we choose seafood, we're voting for this destruction. Bottom trawling causes more damage to seafloor habitats than any other human activity, affecting an area twice the size of the continental United States every year. When massive nets are dragged across the ocean floor, they obliterate everything in their path—coral reefs, nursery habitats, and complex ecosystems that took decades to establish, are destroyed in minutes.

The carbon implications are staggering. Bottom trawling releases as much carbon annually as the entire aviation industry, literally destroying one of our most important carbon sinks when every fraction of a degree matters in our fight against climate change.

Deep-sea corals that have grown for centuries are reduced to rubble. Fish populations lose their breeding and feeding grounds. The ripple effects travel up the entire food web, creating a biodiversity crisis that mirrors rainforest destruction, except it happens where we cannot see it.

The persistence of bottom trawling comes down to economics—it's currently cheaper to destroy habitats than to fish sustainably. But this is exactly why we must stop supporting these industries entirely. When we purchase any seafood caught through these methods, we're funding the continued devastation of ocean ecosystems.

The solution is clear: plant-based eating. The same consciousness that drives us to choose organic, locally-sourced foods on land must extend to rejecting all products that come from destroying the sea. Our oceans are not resources to be strip-mined—they're complex, vital ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

But here's the hope that *Ocean (2025)* also reveals: marine protected areas where sea-floors have regenerated beyond expectations, and fish populations rebounding at rates that surprise scientists. The ocean is remarkably resilient when we stop harming it.

The anger we feel when learning about bottom trawling is justified. Channel that anger into action. Choose plants, not fish. Our oceans have sustained life for millennia. The least we can do is stop destroying them for food we don't need.

The choice is ours. The time is now. And when we choose plants over destruction, we might just have a future on this planet.