Seaspiracy Review: conspiring against seaspiracy’s conspiracy
- Marielle Wik
- Nov 2, 2021
- 6 min read
In my opinion, Seaspiracy is a vegan-propagandic and Eurocentric documentary addressing the negative consequences of the commercial fishing industry. The documentary starts in Japan where the directors shed light on the capture of dolphins for entertainment at marine parks, the mass slaughtering of dolphins (which, in the eyes of fishermen, threaten local fish population stocks), and the large fishing port which where the endangered Blue-Fin Tuna and Shark-fins enter the market. The documentary really takes a turn as they delve into the bureaucratic issues of defining “sustainability” and question the legitimacy of food labels, such as the MSC blue tick or the dolphin safe tuna. This leads to a series of interviews with Dolphin Safe Tuna/Earth Island Institute, Plastic Pollution Coalition, Oceana, and the European Parliament, concluding that there is no such thing as “sustainable” seafood. The documentary raises many issues relating to the fishing-industry and seeks to convince the audience that stopping (or heavily reducing) the consumption of fish is the (only) solution.
By virtue of being an incredibly influential whistleblower documentary, Seaspiracy is a strong attempt at raising awareness of serious issues affecting the ocean, such as overfishing, plastic pollution, by-catch, trawler practices, meat quality, food-insecurity, slavery, human-trafficking, and deforestation. Its best contribution is perhaps its attention on the overuse (and misuse) of the term “sustainability” and the lack of accountability and enforceability facing ocean laws and management.
“Seaspiracy” does present some pieces of reporting — including an inquiry into dolphin-safe tuna can labels — that are surprising and memorable. But even the film’s notable points seem to emerge only briefly before sinking beneath the surface, lost in a sea of murky conspiratorial thinking -
- Natalia Winkelman,New York Times.
In this Seaspiracy Review, I share a personal critique of the documentary, addressing the issues I have in the way the directors acquire and frame their information. Before moving on to the rest of this review, I strongly recommend first reading the Vox article, “What Netflix’s Seaspiracy gets wrong about fishing, explained by a marine biologist”. Written by Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist who specialises on the human impact of global fisheries, lecturer at the University of British Columbia, and project leader of Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, I could not have made these points better myself. This article argues how the documentary misrepresents factual information, ignores the need for policies and shifts blame onto countries in the Global South. I came across this article after Ayana Elizabeth Johnson shared it on her social media. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, conservation strategist, and podcast host for How to Save a Planet.
The Issue of Framing the Information:
Seaspiracy is infamously known for being vegan-propaganda. Its director, Ali Tabrizi, was also the director of the 2018 documentary Vegan, while its producer, Kip Andersen, was the director of the 2014 documentary Cowspiracy. The documentary also effectively promotes Sea Shepherd, a vegan non-governmental organisation dedicated to ocean conservation that has so far been an effective solution to ocean law enforceability issues. Veganism is an important and respectable movement that addresses the underlying issues of industrial food production. A vegan diet is generally beneficial to the environment, people’s health, and animal welfare. Becoming vegan is increasingly easier as more, and better, meat and seafood alternatives enter the market. The movement faces many obstacles and critiques, however, including that of issues of accessibility, relating to how it is easier for more privileged individuals and families to adopt a vegan diet due to spare time and greater disposable incomes. With the exception of some radicals (as in any movement), the vegan movement is generally an emancipatory cause for the greater good.
Seaspiracy, however, has a peculiar way of contributing to this vegan discourse: that of fear- and guilt-inducing. While this can sometimes be effective, I think that Seaspiracy dismisses important policy changes aimed at dismantling oppressive systems and environmental degradation by pushing a diet that eliminates (or heavily reduces fish) and thus effectively framing veganism as the superior (and perhaps only true) solution.
Seaspiracy is also heavily criticised for failing to include marginalised voices. While including some anonymous interviews of men who where victims to slavery and human-trafficking in Thailand, the majority of the voices and perspectives are from interviewees from the Global North. The Common Sense Review also raised the concern that Ali Tabrizi was framed as a “main character or protagonist” and this is a valid point considering how the documentary started off with the overused, memoir-like introduction using “how we got here” and “My name is this is x, my story” movie tropes. In this process, the viewers see that Tabrizi is learning and narrating about these issues as he goes along. As such, the viewers are implicitly told they know as much as the protagonist. This tells me that the narrator is unqualified in the topic, and may be why the documentary is so surface-level with many of the raised issues. The Common Sense Review effectively argues how “He’s there to humanly hold the viewer's hands through this alarming predicament. Without Tabrizi's or any human perspective to witness all this with, the film might have been too much to stomach...” while still acknowledging that “all the information, interviews, data, and discovery could still have been presented” without this structure.
The Issue of Acquiring the Information:
Seaspiracy is also heavily criticised for cutting interviews and taking them out of context.
“But it has been the target of criticism by marine conservationists, as well as the NGOs it condemns, for being misleading and failing to provide the full context to viewers.”
- Emma Gatten, The Telegraph
I attempted to address this concern on 18th of May 2021 when Sea Shepherd held a live “Exclusive Documentary Premiere and Q&A with Seaspiracy Director” on YouTube by asking the following in the live chat: “You interviewed/criticised organisations for their ambiguous definition/approach to sustainability. What were your biggest challenges in these interviews + what would you do differently if repeated?”.
This question was raised at 21:32-21:52 in the video, however, there was a technical difficulty at the live-stream, so you cannot hear the moderator ask the question, but you can see it if you turn on the YouTube subtitles. The responses were as follows:
Luzi Tabrizi, at 21:50 to 22:19 said:
“I don’t think we could have done anything differently. The things that we asked were pretty straight forward. We didn’t go in there trying to illicit the responses that we got. So I don’t think we could have gone back and done anything differently, to be honest. I think that the posed question was pretty straightforward, why isn’t fishing part of your website? Why isn’t the fishing industry addressed in these plastic campaigns?”.
Ali Tabrizi at 22:19 - 22:57 added:
“I think, if anything, we are not trying to make enemies. We’re really trying to under under an actual narrative that makes sense to the public and we’re facing an incredibly complicated global issue and thankfully, the solutions are really quite simple and you just write them down and so we just like organisations to unite under under a narrative that actually acknowledges the leading killer of our oceans as the fishing industry and we have an open invitation to anyone who we may have challenged in the film, if they come forward and start acknowledging these issues, we’d gladly applaud them as well, so know I think we did what we could in the film”.
I thought these responses were unsatisfactory. In my opinion, Luzi and Ali Tabrizi sound defensive, as if they are really responding to criticisms about their interviewing techniques rather than the question I posed. In many ways, I felt as if this, particularly the comment “we are not trying to make enemies” emphasised the aforementioned protagonist vs. antagonist implications of the film’s structure.
More importantly, it is shocking to hear that they thought they had no areas of improvement or couldn’t have done anything differently. I think any professional would acknowledge the limitations of their interviews and, especially, acknowledge how their own positionality affects their research.
As I was dissatisfied with their response and still strongly believe the interview clips in the film were taken out of context, I posed a second question asking them if they had any publicly available transcripts of the interviews. This question was ignored. Yes this is understandable, considering how many people were contributing to the live chat during the Q&A, and sure, they probably do not have these transcripts because it is not really an expected standard to keep and make transcripts available. However, in the context where they are going out of their way to question conservation groups and other NGOs with a mission to uncover the deep corruption of the fishing industry, I would say that they should be more transparent with their research. Otherwise, I consider them hypocritical. They criticise these organisations for not being transparent, yet they are not transparent themselves. To further emphasise my point, this documentary has received a lot of allegations for taking the interviewees out of context and, therefore, it would be in their best interest to release transcripts or unedited clips to the public (that is, as long as they didn’t take their findings out of context).
Bryce Stewart is a marine ecologist, fisheries biologist and lecturer at the University of York.
Stream it or Skip it?
The best thing to do is to see it for yourself. At this point, there is no reason why you shouldn’t watch it. It should be noted, however, that Seaspiracy was intentionally created to shock and influence people, so it is encouraged to go into it informed and take the claims it makes with a grain of salt.
Written by: Marielle Wik (2021)
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