With the current issues arising in our ecosystem today, it’s safe to claim that a majority of the human population doesn’t focus much on the detrimental impacts they’ve had on the ocean. Within our society today, not many people are cognizant that fishing, a pretty standard activity, leaves a vast amount of species endangered in our seas. With it being such a widespread activity, thousands of people from all around the globe highly enjoy fishing, even to professional and commercial extents. However, when fishing reaches these great lengths, the demand for fish becomes stronger and they turn into our prey, soon steering us to a sudden collapse in the ocean’s population. 

There appear to be several organizations and charities located worldwide that are dedicated to lessening the spread of plastic pollution in our ecosystem. But since these organizations haven’t been too successful in gaining much global attention, a 27-year-old filmmaker, Ali Tabrizi, decided that he wanted to embrace that role instead. By releasing his documentary, Seaspiracy, on such a colossal platform like Netflix, he was able to reach the number one spot in trending films. However, although it seems as if he is knowledgeable about this topic, he starts to contradict himself about the risks in our ocean, thus inciting the question on whether he’s wasted an hour of your time or not. 

When diving halfway through this film, it becomes evident that Ali’s predominant goal is to share with his viewers the reasons as to why he wants to halt the worldwide consumption of fish. Therefore, he starts to bash against sustainable fishing, by saying that it does not exist. With those chances being low, experts reveal that Ali has been misrepresenting sustainable fisheries all along, and that they actually do prevail. In recent events, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization finalized that around 65.8% of global fish stocks were being harvested and garnered sustainably. The organization also disclosed that a rough estimate of 78.7% of the harbors from marine fisheries are currently being transported from sustainable fishing stocks. With Ali misinterpreting the prevalence of sustainable fisheries, we start to question whether the other details he provides are true or not.

One of the only things that Ali gets right about sustainable fishing, is that it ignites the issues of overfishing, thus impacting the biodiversity in our oceans. When substantial amounts of fish are taken out of the ocean, the marine food web becomes disproportionate, which then affects the populations of several species. “As someone who consumes a lot of fish, after watching Seaspiracy, I’ve finally realized the risks that I could’ve possibly put on the ocean animals” an anonymous interviewee stated, “So thanks to this documentary, I’ve realized that progress can only be made through one step at a time, and therefore, I have decided that it’s best to hold off on eating fish ever since.” After watching this documentary, the actions that people are beginning to take, whether it’s stopping their consumption of fish or donating to ocean organizations, are ones that are definitely crucial to helping our ocean’s population. However, these actions are ones that can be taken with or without watching the documentary itself. Therefore, with Ali already giving a false idea of the overall foundation of his documentary, it seems as though this information would be more easily found through a simple Google search online.