Protect Our Ocean

Protect Our Ocean

Our future is tied to the ocean. Its shared seas connect us through food, culture and sport. Home to amazing, abundant life, the ocean is also a powerful climate solution. Yet the practice of bottom trawling threatens to destroy this precious resource.

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Bottom trawling is one of the most damaging practices that humans inflict on our oceans, destroying seabed ecosystems, overfishing and indiscriminately killing everything from turtles and rays to sharks. It has an enormous climate impact too. Dragging nets along the seabed uses more fuel and produces four times more emissions than other types of fishing. It disturbs carbon-absorbing sediment and eradicates the marine plants and animals that take in carbon from the atmosphere. Oceans absorb a quarter of all the carbon dioxide that we produce, yet the practice of bottom trawling threatens to destroy this precious resource.

We must protect our ocean so it can protect us.

Over the last 40 years, commercial overfishing and bottom trawling have turned Scotland’s once-thriving west coast waters into sparse, lifeless deserts. Patagonia Films’ The Custodians follows the work of four locals from the Isle of Skye who are reclaiming their natural coastlines. They’re restoring wildlife, creating sustainable industries and showing us how we can work with, not against, our ocean.

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