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| Empty Oceans, Empty Nets: About the Program |
Throughout the ages, the world has enjoyed a vast and unlimited ocean, yielding abundant seafood. But increasing demand, new technologies, and burgeoning coastal populations are straining the limits of the ocean’s ability to sustain healthy fish populations.
Narrated by Peter Coyote, Empty Oceans, Empty Nets is a powerful documentary on the rapidly declining fish harvests of the world. These harvests are important not only for the more than 200 million people worldwide who hold fishing-related jobs, but for many of the world's populations, including over a billion people in Asia, who depend on seafood as their main source of protein.
Using vivid images of sweeping nets full of fish unloading their contents onto commercial fishing boats, Empty Oceans, Empty Nets highlights the overwhelming magnitude of the annual worldwide harvest of more than 100 million metric tons of seafood. It also transports the viewers to bustling and exotic international fish markets, where tons of fresh and frozen fish are sold each day to supply an insistent global demand.
In the race to meet the growing demand for seafood, new technology has given the edge to the fishers. Empty Oceans, Empty Nets goes along on several fishing expeditions to watch while crews on long-distance vessels store fish in warehouse-sized walk-in coolers, or flash freeze them for long-range transport; while on deck, schools of fish are located with the aid of underwater sonar and radar. With these new technologies, even in vast oceans, fish have nowhere to hide.
But wasteful, indiscriminate fishing practices share the blame for declining fish stocks. In addition to the 100 million tons of seafood brought to market each year, fishers also catch and discard about 27 million tons of fish and other sea life. Practices such as dynamiting coral reefs to harvest aquarium fish and trawling across the ocean floor to scoop up bottom-dwelling fish destroy fish habitats, making it more difficult for the reproductive cycle to continue.
Empty Oceans, Empty Nets goes to Indonesia, Boston, the coast of Senegal, and other parts of the world to talk to local fishers and scientists who have been associated with the fishing industry over the last few decades. Interviews with these individuals reveal that "more boats are chasing fewer fish" and that scores of fish stocks are on a trajectory toward collapse. The program showcases the collapse of the cod fisheries in the North Atlantic and points out other fish that appear to be heading for the same fate.
Consumers, whose insatiable demand for fish is the real catalyst behind the race for the catch, are often unaware that many fish stocks are near collapse. Shoppers rarely face empty seafood cases in supermarkets. Those interviewed for Empty Oceans, Empty Nets revealed that it is just as rare for them to ask where the fish for sale was caught. Yet, much of the fish sold today in the United States is imported, often from areas without controls to ensure that overfishing doesn’t occur.
Empty Oceans, Empty Nets concludes by showing consumers how they can use readily available resources to help them make decisions about the seafood they eat. Many organizations issue pocket-sized listings or maintain updated Web sites listing fish that are overfished and those still available in abundance. Others use independent standards to label ocean-friendly fish and fish products. Consumer awareness and changes in consumer demand appear to be the keys to preventing irreversible damage to a fragile ecological balance between fish and humans that was millions of years in the making.
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