For thousands of years, men went down to the sea in fishing boats. In the past 50 years, the boats became bigger and bigger as corporations, which increasingly dominated commercial ocean fishing, implemented industrial strategies. Nowadays trawlers scrape the seabed with nets the size of airline hangers, destroying the environments that nurtures many species. As a result of such shortsighted malevolence, the industry is destroying itself as well as the oceans and the creatures living there. By 2050, we may be reduced to transforming jellyfish into food product.
That’s the message of The End of the Line, a Sundance selection out now on DVD. The compelling documentary by Rupert Murray takes its direction from British journalist Charles Clover, whose book on the worldwide decline of fisheries called attention to the problem. The End of the Line also investigates other problems associated with industrial fishing, including the destruction of local fish-based economies unable to compete with the giant trawlers. Africans who have lived off the sea for generations have been forced to immigrate to the very countries whose lax policies have ruined their livelihood, moving against a rising tide of anti-immigrant politics.
Alaska is showing the way to a better future, not through state initiatives but the rigorous enforcement by the U.S. Coast Guard of fishing quotas. Governments have a positive role to play, as do consumers who—for one example—should tell the Japanese to halt the blue fin tuna’s slide to extinction by not fishing for endangered species.
