Seaspiracy's Rise Is A Threat To The Fishing Industry

     The Blackfish Effect was not a coincidence; it was and continues to be a proven result of the dramatic and shocking documentary Blackfish, released in 2013. It exposed the disgusting cruelty shown toward orcas held captive at SeaWorld as well as the maddening effect that led Tilikum to kill three people (no wild orca has been recorded killing a single person). This resulted in dozens of nations moving to ban or restrict marine mammal captivity while SeaWorld has seen a continual decline in attendance and overall revenue that has forced them to lay off thousands of employees. SeaWorld tried to take legal action against the film for a decade, and they have lost every time.

     Such has been the case with Ali Tabrizi's documentary Seaspiracy. Even before the film was released, leaked documents revealed insiders from the fishing and aquaculture industries formulated a legal and PR strategy to control the damage that might be caused. They slammed it as "false" without seeing it and brought out their own "experts," who happen to be employees of their companies. Why go to such great lengths? They saw what happened to SeaWorld, which has never and will never recover from its own exposure. They have also seen the skyrocketing market for vegan meat alternatives in the past five years especially (the seafood industry had managed to avoid this same level of public scrutiny). As it turns out, they were right to be worried.

     Seaspiracy made it into the 10 most popular releases on Netflix in more than 30 countries, essentially the entire developed world. Even worse than the documentary is the action it inspired. Several restaurants in places like the UK and Hong Kong, where seafood is popular, announced they were dropping it from their menus while searches for vegan seafood skyrocketed 2,100 percent in a few days as thousands upon thousands of people said they simply couldn't bring themselves to eat seafood. Marine conservation groups like Sea Shepherd saw membership in their Facebook groups and pages increase by as much as 50 percent. Nearly a million people have signed a petition to close huge swaths of ocean habitat to commercial fishing and there is a growing push to end the $35 billion in subsidies given to the fishing industry every year.

     Record numbers turned out in-person or online for World Oceans Day. There has been a huge amount of controversy in the media among both major outlets and every minor blogger (including the author, who has known for years the harmful effects of the fishing industry as a vegetarian striving toward veganism but was inspired by Seaspiracy to begin voicing these concerns to a larger audience). That's the entire point, though. People are talking: if you don't have almost as many people who hate you as support you, you are not fighting for a controversial change and, therefore, you are not really fighting for anything.

     In short, the rise of Seaspiracy is a threat to the fishing industry. It has not and will not shut down industrial fishing overnight, but it has laid the groundwork for a burgeoning movement aiming to do just that. As Captain Paul Watson says, "you can stop an individual, you can stop an organization, but you cannot stop a movement.