Seaspiracy Review Shea Watts
The documentary Seaspiracy is widely popular. Since its release on March 24, 2021, it has been in the Top 10 on Netflix. However, the film has been criticized for misleading claims, erroneous statistics, and out-of-context interviews. This letter seeks to review and critique the popular film, Seaspiracy, raising some concerns about the approach and content of the film. While the film brings attention to urgent crises caused by animal agriculture and the overfishing of the oceans through commercial fishing, it does so in problematic ways. In what follows, I will highlight some of the key parts of the film and why the film is so problematic.
Ali Tabrizi discloses that his passion for animal rights stems from his childhood connection to dolphins, which correlated to his understanding of dolphins’ ability to intuit and communicate. Thus, he makes the case that the entirety of his animal advocacy is built on a speciesist framework that goes as follows: Smart animals deserve to be protected by virtue of their abilities. This thought, however, creates a hierarchy of animal concern across a spectrum of intelligence.
It is important to note that filmmaker Ali Tabrizi’s methods can come across as “gotcha” journalism in his framing of the film and interview strategies; but at other times, his approach gives the film a conspiratorial feel. What doesn’t help his case is that one of his main and most significant claims—that if practices don’t change the ocean will be empty by 2048—has been deemed likely false by scientists and experts.1 Of course, the thrust of the science does lead in this direction, but the timeline is far from clear. His efforts to shock and awe his audience undermine and eschew the scientific legitimacy of his arguments. Furthermore, using traumatic images and arguments to galvanize viewers is not sustainable.
The first and most glaring problem with the film is the caricature of Japanese peoples because of their fishing practices. Tabrizi, an Englishman, journeys to Japan with his girlfriend to record and expose what he considers brutal fishing practices, such as the trapping and killing of dolphins. As he talks about those living in Japan, his rhetoric takes on a racialized tone, but he is seemingly ignorant to the inappropriate, insensitive, and pejorative connotations of his arguments. It does not help his case that all the ecological leaders he interviews are white. This is an instance of environmental racism. For example, consider the rise of anti-Asian propaganda and violence in a time of a global pandemic of COVID-19, a zoonotic disease that has emerged under the pressures of capitalism in China. All the talk of “Kung-Flu” or “China-virus” are sentiments that stoke the fires of environmental racism.
African American civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis coined the term “environmental racism” in 1982, which is defined it as “racial discrimination in environmental policymaking and the unequal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. It is the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities and the official sanctioning of a life- threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in people of color communities.”2 What Ali
1 Mario Aguilera, “New Hope for Fisheries,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, July 30, 2009, accessed May 10, 2021, https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/new-hope-fisheries. 2 Charles Lee, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio- Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, United Church of Christ’s Commission on Tabrizi may want to consider, therefore, is how industrial fishing affects his own country (England), or how English colonialism and capitalism have contributed to the problems of commercial fishing. Perhaps starting locally would give him more insight and influence into how his own food practices are unsustainable and unjust. One doesn’t have to venture too far in England to find fish ‘n chips! My work as a CreatureKind fellow has taught me about how issues intersect, that is, how racism connects with speciesism, ableism, etc. I’ve also been given theological tools to respond to such intersectional issues. In Seaspiracy, speciesism intersects with and perpetuates other injustices, such as environmental racism.
Consider the following. All of Ali Tabrizi’s ecological activists are white. The film represents no local Japanese ecological activists’ work or voices. Are we to believe that there are no animal advocates and activists in Japan? What about indigenous practices? To respond to the problems, the film could learn from an ecowomanist approach. Dr. Melanie L. Harris’ work, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, argues for the importance of connection to and communing with the earth. She writes of the need for experiences with the earth to help in shaping care, such that honoring becomes healing or making-whole. This constitutes a different epistemology, a way of knowing deeply concerned with and connected to the earth. Ecowomanism, as a deep mystical connection, is a praxis and methodology shaped by African cosmologies in seven steps. Each becomes part of a spiral: 1) honoring experience and mining ecomemory; 2) critical reflection on experience and ecomemory; 3) womanist intersectional analysis; 4) critically examining African and African American history and tradition; 5) engaging transformation; 6) sharing dialogue; 7) taking action for earth justice. Tabrizi could learn by decentering himself as a European male and listening to voices such as Harris’. Womanism finds its origins in the work of Alice Walker, who learned from her mother’s garden. Many womanists have come along to learn from that wisdom and plant it in the world. There is an inherent connection to the earth, which cultivates a healthy responsibility for it. And this is where ecology and womanism meet. Many BIPOC voices have raised this connection as the starting place for a more just and sustainable relationship to/with the earth. After all, earth supports all life within it; earth’s fate is our fate.3
Returning to the problems posed by commercial fishing, as a North Carolinian, I am disappointed that there are no real protections or solutions for fishing. All I could find are regulations as to minimum the size of individual fish or maximum numbers of bags of caught fish. North Carolina is the largest poultry and eggs harvester and the second largest at raising and slaughtering pigs. Factory farming is a large industry here. The farms that populate eastern NC have poisoned the water supplies and lowered the life expectancy of people in those areas. These farms have an impact on areas that have large populations of Black and Brown peoples. Because of that, much of the vegan community is aware of how fighting factory farming connects to fighting racism. Food justice is environmental justice is social justice. Eating meat and thereby supporting factory farming, therefore, is a form of injustice, oppression, and science-denial. Thus, not eating animals is one effective and liberative way Christians can practice their faith.
Racial Justice 3 (1987) [hereinafter UCC STUDY]. Cited in John R. Kyte, “Environmental Justice: The Need for Equal Enforcement and Sound Science,” 11 Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy 253 (1995), https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1438&context=jchlp. 3 Melanie L. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-honoring Faiths, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017.
Seaspiracy is not representative of the entire vegan movement. While middle-to-upper class vegans like Ali Tabrizi are a part of a burgeoning trend, the work of grassroots organizing and food production has been done for some time by BIPOC. It was only in my fellowship with CreatureKind that I realized this. Sistah Vegan by A. Breeze Harper,4 for example, demonstrates this. Because the movement has been greatly affected by capitalism and whiteness, it seems that it is high time to decolonize veganism. If we need another example, Seaspiracy does a great job of reminding us.
4 A. Breeze Harper, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society, Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books, 2010.