“..I’ve a fear of oceans.
Lakes—even the biggest ones—I don’t mind. I love them, in fact, having grown up in Chicago and attending college on the shores of Lake Superior.
But oceans, and their rip tides and undertows, have always struck me as sinister.
Ironically, just after returning from a week on a beach in Baja, where I started coming to terms with these fears, I watched The End of the Line, a newly released documentary that makes the case for why the oceans should be afraid of us.
The film, which Ted Danson narrates and Robert Murray directed, delves into the depravity we’ve brought to the world’s oceans through centuries of wanton fishing (and, obviously, consuming) fish from oceans around the world.
The film starts in Newfoundland, whose fishermen nearly fished Northern cod to extinction before the Canadian government placed a two-year moratorium on the fishery in 1992, when the once seemingly endless bounty of cod started to deteriorate.
As a result, 40,000 fishermen lost their jobs.
And, though the moratorium was extended, cod stock never recovered.
“The cod is gone, and I think within the context of cod—particularly in the Canadian perspective—is that this is a species that has been fished for centuries and centuries.
Cod was the reason that people migrated from the UK, from Europe—Northern France particularly—to Canada.
It was because of cod,†says Jeffrey Hutchings, a biology professor at Dalhousie University, who is interviewed for the film.
“The loss of the [cod] fish was basically akin to a loss of soul, and it still remains that 15 years later.â€
go to source/story>>Film Exposes Overfishing Practices, Fishes for Answers |Triple Pundit
