Bottom Trawling is Killing Us, UNOC 2025
17.06.2025
Watch the unfurling of the World’s largest screen print in super quick time. Its length represents the 150 metre width of a bottom trawling nets mouth. A net so big 10 jumbo jets fit inside.
The net was ‘banned’ from Nice during UNOC 2024, we don’t why, we can only guess.
Perhaps it was because Macron and the EU Parliament are embarrassed, after all they subsidise bottom trawling and allow it in almost all Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)? Or perhaps there’s a misguided notion of loads of jobs in bottom trawling, when in fact small-scale and low-impact fishers account for 80% of the active European fleet and 50% of jobs in the sector? Or maybe they didn’t like it because it was a labour of love created and unfurled by many hands? Whatever the reason we ‘exhibited’ it anyway, thank you to everyone who stopped it from being ‘arrested’ by the Police (the net will return) ❤️ ⬇️
Bottom trawling is among the most damaging fishing methods, so damaging it destroys and catches everything in its path, resulting in irreversible ecosystem loss and the release of massive amounts of carbon stored in the seabed. Banning it would avoid 93% of all EU fish discards and bycatch (marine life that is co-incidentally caught and discarded dead or dying into the sea or non-target marine life which is also discarded dead or dying overboard).
There is no reason to use bottom trawling to catch fish.
And should we be subsidising the destruction of coastal waters, not just our own but the coastal waters of communities who depend on the sea to survive?
No of course not, especially when it’s destroying the seabed, costing jobs, livelihoods and condemning communities to starvation.
The only thing bottom trawling provides is profits for already rich mega-trawler owners. Owners who currently have the ear of EU politicians.
EU Politicians stop representing industry and start representing your citizens before there’s no seabed (or coastal communities) left to represent.
And when that happens it’s ‘bye bye’ to all of us.
AS THE SEA DIES WE DIE
⬆️ Come sit with us on the Net, we’ll announce when and where in the near future, photo by João Daniel Pereira.
The fate of the Ocean depends on us all.
Our interventions depend on your support.