2025 / National Geographic Society and Altitude Film Distribution / 1h 35m
In Ocean with David Attenborough, the legendary naturalist (who turned 99 in May) takes the viewer on a breathtaking tour of Earth’s marine ecosystems, from the coastal seas and kelp forests to sea grass meadows, sea mounts, and the open ocean. The documentary is full of interesting facts (e.g., around 2,000 new marine species are discovered every year) as it addresses multiple important themes and delivers several timely messages.
A primary theme of the film involves the interplay between fisheries and ocean health. Approximately 3 billion people rely on the ocean for food, yet large fleets from a few wealthy nations are overfishing to the detriment of coastal communities. Today, residents of “small island developing states” are often pulling plastic from the seas rather than fish—the food source they have relied on for millennia. Attenborough dubs this “modern colonialism at sea” and notes that, while we used to fish in just a few nearshore locations to feed nearby communities, now we fish everywhere, all the time.
Every year, bottom trawlers dragging enormous nets anchored to chains or metal beams scour an area of the seabed almost the size of the entire Amazon rainforest. They indiscriminately scoop up whatever crosses their path and leave behind a trail of utter destruction. Typically, the trawlers are after a single species, and over 75 percent of what is hauled aboard is discarded as bycatch.
Attenborough clearly conveys the message that protecting our oceans does not require being against fishing. Healthy fisheries and conservation can coexist—in fact, fisheries depend on conservation to remain viable. This concept leads to a second theme: the importance of balanced ecosystems. As we have seen following the overhunting of apex predators such as sharks and sea otters, when you remove a significant element of an ecosystem, it can fall out of balance and collapse. Conversely, when left alone, ocean ecosystems rebound and thrive. However, despite nearly every country having agreed to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030, currently less than 3 percent of it is fully protected.
A third theme covers just how vital our oceans are to the fight against climate change. While bottom trawling releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, marine plant life does just the opposite. Ocean jungles and meadows remove far more carbon from the atmosphere than equivalent areas of rainforest on land. Phytoplankton, which flourish in coastal waters, absorb almost one-third of global carbon emissions and produce more oxygen than all the trees on Earth combined, equating to half of the air we breathe. All in all, the key takeaway from the film is this: “if we save the sea, we save our world.”