Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

1. I watched #Seaspiracy on Netflix last night. It’s a brilliant expose of the greatest threat to marine life: fishing.
This thread explores why we have so seldom heard the the truth about what’s happening to our oceans.
#TellTheTruth
@GretaThunberg
netflix.com/gb/title/81014…

2. The BBC and other broadcasters have repeatedly failed to tell the truth. Blue Planet II was a massive exercise in misdirection. It misled us about the main reasons for ecological collapse, emphasising entirely trivial issues like plastic straws instead
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

3. I don’t believe it set out to deceive us. But Blue Planet II was typical of the BBC’s cowardice and wilful ignorance when it comes to environmental destruction. Almost reflexively, it avoids conflict with powerful economic interests.

4. This cowardice is assisted by the big conservation groups, which fail dismally to tell the truth. The inability of @MSCecolabel, @earthisland @PlasticPollutes and @Oceana to engage with the issues raised by Seaspiracy was chilling. They should hang their heads in shame.

5. These conservation groups seemed not to be restraining the mass destruction of ocean life, but *collaborating* in it. Why? Again, I believe, it’s not malice, but extreme cowardice, self-interest and self-preservation.
Result? Don’t trust the labels.

6. For years, the message almost everywhere has been “we must work with industry to find solutions”. But what if the industry is structurally committed to ecocide? What if its business model is looting? If so, we shouldn’t work with it, but work to close it down.

7. But the very institutions that should be exposing and contesting the destruction of life on Earth – the media, the conservation groups, governments – instead assist it. They don’t want to rock the boat. They are craven and deferential.

8. Those of us who try to bring these issues to light have the door slammed in our faces. For 30 years, I submitted proposals to the BBC seeking to tell the real stories. They were all angrily dismissed by channel controllers, often with a tirade of foul language.

9. And the rest of us? We retreat into wilful impotence. The campaigns against plastic straws and cotton buds that people enthuse about aren’t JUST pathetic micro-consumerist-bollocks responses to massive structural problems. *They are a form of reactive denial*.

10. They allow us to say: “look, we’re doing something, we can live with ourselves”, even while somewhere in the back of our minds we know that, by eating prawns and salmon and tuna, we are devastating the living world. “We’re good people really, aren’t we?”.

11. Well, we might be good people, but we are doing bad things. Campaigns against plastic straws and cotton buds don’t stop us from doing them: THEY HELP US TO DO THEM. They allow us to keep trashing the living world, while remaining at uneasy peace with ourselves.

12. We have to start being honest and brave and true to our good natures. That’s the only way we can stop mass destruction. And I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it: this means confronting power.

13. Support @seashepherd and @Greenpeace. Build movements against industrial fishing, not plastic straws. Demand massive and meaningful marine reserves.
Tell the truth.
And stop eating fish.
Thank you.