IT'S TIME TO END BOTTOM TRAWLING

At the age of 99, the documentary film-maker David Attenborough has achieved his greatest triumph. With a single film clip, he has signed the death warrant for one of the world's most destructive industries: bottom trawling. The companies and countries that do it will go down fighting and it will take time, but they will go down.

- Gwynne Dyer

His film Ocean, got a simultaneous global release last month to build pressure for a ban on bottom trawling before the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC-3) this week in the French city of Nice. The ban won't happen this week and it won’t happen everywhere at once, but it is inevitable once enough people have seen that clip. You can’t forget it.

It's long shots from underwater cameras at the mouth of an enormous net (you can’t see the sides or the top). The bottom of the net, weighed down so it scrapes along the seabed, swallows up everything in its path — fish, crustaceans, plants, mud — as it advances inexorably, faster than a walking pace, throwing up a plume of muck in its wake.

These bottom trawlers have been working at sea for more than a century, but nobody had ever seen this scene before. No diver would survive where the cameras were, presumably fixed to the net's mouth by some rig that let them see the whole process.