IF WE SAVE THE SEA, WE SAVE OUR WORLD

As delegates gather in Nice for the UN Ocean Conference tomorrow, Sir David Attenborough releases a powerful new documentary Ocean to expose the destructive deep-sea fishing fishing practice of bottom trawling before it destroys our marine life forever. JAMES RAMPTON reports

- JAMES RAMPTON

DON MacNEISH, a conservationist who has been diving for years off the Isle of Aran in Scotland, was truly shocked. For the first time, he was seeing the devastating effect on the once-pristine seabed of the little-known, but immensely destructive fishing practice of bottom trawling.

The technique, whereby a trawler drags a massive metal bar across the ocean floor and forces anything it disturbs into a net behind, leaves annihilation in its wake. The trails of carnage can be seen from space.

Bottom trawling is the fishing method few know about but is wreaking havoc in our oceans.

“The first time I dived over an area that a dredger had just been over it was heartbreaking,” sighs Don. “All sorts of animals were smashed to pieces. It was like swimming over the Garden of Eden during a nuclear winter.

“They were taking the future out of the sea, and the island community would be left with wreckage.

“It is difficult to try to explain to people exactly how abundant it once was here and just how much has been lost.”

Fortunately, Don now has a powerful ally in Sir David Attenborough after featuring in his potent new documentary, Ocean. Featuring the first footage of bottom trawling it airs tonight ahead of tomorrow’s UN Ocean Conference in Nice.

The bottom trawling sequences in the documentary, which the 99-year-old conservationist has called one of the most important films of his career, were shot in Turkey with the help of a co-operative government, and in Plymouth, as part of a highly controlled scientific experiment run by the Marine Biological Association.

It is genuinely upsetting to watch the dredger shatter every living creature in its path and, in so doing, churn up a toxic cloud of sediment.

Keith Scholey, the co-director and executive producer of the film, says: “I remember getting back the first rushes of bottom trawling and feeling sick.