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00:00We've got a truly outstanding film for you now. It is Ocean with David Attenborough from National
00:06Geographic. We're so pleased to be joined by Keith Schooley, who is the director of this film. Thank
00:12you so much for being with us. It's a real pleasure. Good to be with you, Matt. It's such an
00:17eye-opening
00:18film about the beauty and wonder of our oceans and the threat to them, frankly. And Keith, before we
00:25get into some questions about the project, let's take a look at a sequence from the film. This is
00:33really a disturbing moment in the project where you look at the dredge, essentially dredging of the
00:40bottom of the ocean in pursuit of fish. And it's really a very, very destructive process, as we'll
00:47see. Let's go ahead and take a look at that clip. From the surface, you would have no idea that
00:55the
00:55this is happening. It has remained hidden from view until now.
01:15A modern industrial bottom trawler scours the ocean floor with a chain or metal beam, forcing
01:23anything it disturbs into the net behind. It smashes its way across the seabed, destroying nearly everything
01:42in its path. Often, on the hunt, for just a single species. Almost everything else is discarded.
02:05Over three quarters of a tallest catch may be thrown away.
02:13It's hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish.
02:27An area almost the size of the entire Amazon rainforest is trawled every year. And much of that seabed
02:38is ploughed again. Over and over. This churning of the sediment unleashes vast amounts of carbon dioxide,
03:01which, in turn, contributes to the warming of our planet.
03:15The trawlers tear the seabed with such force that their trails of destruction can be seen from space.
03:44Very few places are safe from this.
03:49The ocean with David Attenborough contains many wonders and horrors. And this was in the fall in the category of
03:57horrors.
03:58It was very upsetting to watch that, but very important to know about. And also, Keith, we learn in your
04:04film that
04:05governments are really subsidizing this industrial scale scraping of the oceans for fish, which is enormously wasteful and destructive.
04:15Yeah, it's one of the things we really wanted to expose in the film. The idea of the film was
04:22it's going to be all about marine protection.
04:26And if you're going to talk about marine protection, you've got to understand what are you protecting it from.
04:32And bottom trawling is one of the things. It's been a practice that's been going on for centuries.
04:37But it's become such an industrial scale now that it has a huge, huge impact on our ocean.
04:44And what is surprising is no one knows it's going on. It's as common as plowing a field in agricultural
04:51land.
04:53And yet people have never seen images of it before. And so I think it was a real revelation in
05:01the film that this is what industrial fishing really looks like.
05:04Well, it certainly was a revelation for me. And I think also that we're seeing so many other things that
05:11are disturbing.
05:12For instance, the industrial scale fishing for krill in Antarctica, which is really just depriving so many species of their
05:22food sources.
05:23And that's being turned into pet food and other things. Yes. And that's only recently started for years and years.
05:30We didn't have the technology to go in and fish for krill, although everyone knew there was a vast amount
05:37of it.
05:38So it became a sort of a natural food resource for Antarctic animals.
05:43And then, obviously, some clever guy worked out how to do it. And now these huge, huge trawlers go down.
05:50But, you know, the really exciting thing I've only heard yesterday is that because of those images,
05:58I think some countries are reconsidering how they fish down in Antarctica.
06:03With luck, the film was may have brought about the change that we desperately need to see.
06:08Well, that's very exciting to hear about. And I do want to talk about some of the hopeful things before
06:14we quite get to that.
06:15I also wanted to note a Washington Post story that talked about a marine heat wave in the Pacific that
06:24is about 5000 miles swath, evidently,
06:30where the waters are six to eight degrees above normal and certainly a lot of concern there.
06:36And you explore in your film ocean warming and how that's affecting corals in particular.
06:42So that's one of these enormous threats to the ocean, of course, is rising sea temperatures.
06:47It is. And as you rightly say, as we speak, there's this big El Nino event building, another one which
06:56I think a lot of the meteorologists are saying is going to be one of the most intense the world
07:02has ever experienced.
07:03And so we're going to get another pulse of this very hot water coming around the globe and corals bleach
07:12and can die.
07:14The good news story of that, though, is actually if coral reefs are protected, so they have all the fish
07:20community, everything they can bleach, but then they can recover.
07:24So it's a real if you want to give the ocean, let's give the ocean resilience against what's coming our
07:32way, protect it.
07:34Yes. And you explore in the film through this wondrous and wonderful narration and participation of David Attenborough,
07:44some of these hopeful signs which include protecting right now relatively small areas of the ocean.
07:51But we see the oceans rebound in very exciting ways.
07:54And there's a quote from David Attenborough where he tells us, if we just let nature take its course, the
08:02oceans will recover.
08:04So that is very hopeful.
08:05It's a great good news story. And it really does happen.
08:08You can just take any piece of the ocean and, you know, off California, we use the sort of Channel
08:15Islands as a great example.
08:17And they just made it a no take zone. In five years, you see change. In 10 years, you see
08:24massive change.
08:26And the really, really good thing is that, OK, that's wonderful for conservationists who want to see lots of animals
08:32in the sea and what have you.
08:34But the fisheries of those places rebound because there's this wonderful thing called spillover.
08:39In the protected area, you get lots and lots of big animals, whether they be crayfish or fish.
08:44They produce huge amounts of eggs, huge amounts of babies that then flood into the ocean around the protected area.
08:54And so you see fisheries recover as well. And marine protection is a win win for everyone.
08:59That's why I think it's such a good news story.
09:03Yes, it's a very exciting part of the film. And it really, I think, makes very clear the point that
09:09conservation helps everyone.
09:11It helps the fish and marine species, of course, but it does seed the whole ocean or large parts of
09:19it.
09:19Exactly. And that's such an important message we want to get across is that for humanity per se, if you
09:29protect the ocean, you get more productivity.
09:31So you get, you do, your fisheries do rebound, but also the ocean is a huge climate sump.
09:38It takes more CO2 out than anything else. You're, you know, I'm all for protecting the Amazon.
09:43But I tell you, the ocean takes out so much more carbon than trees can ever do, because once things
09:51die in the ocean, they sink to the bottom and they're taken out of the system.
09:56And so it is for all of us on the planet. And the wonderful thing about the ocean, it belongs
10:02to us all.
10:02Well, coastal waters belong to the nations, but they belong to the people of those nations and the international waters
10:12belong to us all.
10:13So I hope, you know, the way forward is to be for them to be managed for all of us.
10:20And I think the film makes quite clear that the ocean is the guarantor of life on land.
10:28We've had this attitude that the oceans are out there and, you know, OK, if you're living on the coast,
10:34you experience them.
10:35But this makes so clear that there is no life on land without a healthy ocean.
10:40It controls all our weather systems. And so so obviously we know, like the El Nino event we started talking
10:46about at the start.
10:47OK, it's generated in the ocean, but the impacts of El Nino, you know, we feel right across our continents.
10:56You in the States are particularly heavily affected, but it's across South America, Africa, Asia.
11:06Yeah, everyone is impacted by these massive changes that are happening in the ocean.
11:12And the more we can protect it, we can dampen those changes down.
11:17And there is this international treaty and treaty is quite the right word or certainly goal of protecting 30 percent
11:24of the oceans by 2030, which is very soon.
11:28Are we on track to reach that? What's your sense about that?
11:33Well, the whole reason we made this film was to try to obviously to show people the wonders of the
11:40ocean, everything.
11:40But it was also try to influence the leadership that went to the UN Ocean Conference last June in France.
11:46And there was a great decision made there that what they call the High Seas Treaty was ratified by enough
11:54nations.
11:54So there is a UN agreement to protect 30 percent of what they call the high seas, the open ocean
12:00that belongs to us all.
12:01We're in a so much better place because there never had been any agreement on protecting the open ocean until
12:07last year.
12:08So, yeah, we're going in the right direction.
12:12Conservation is always a little bit forward, a little bit back.
12:15But I think the direction of travel now is the correct direction.
12:19As I said, there are such splendid wonders in this film.
12:24Beautiful photography.
12:26And as David Attenborough notes, we're living in the greatest age of ocean discovery.
12:33Perhaps you can explain why that is.
12:35Partly it's technological and relates to photography and to scuba gear,
12:41where we could look beneath the waves and that wasn't possible 100 or so years ago.
12:46I mean, this was the amazing arc of the film because we had David joined us on this journey.
12:52And he's going to be 100 in a few days time.
12:56So he's about to hit the 100 mark.
12:59But when David was born, we knew nothing about the ocean.
13:03And the irony is that most of the laws governing fishery and how we exploit the ocean became into law
13:13soon after he was born in the 20s and 30s.
13:16Since then, we've discovered everything.
13:19And that's because, you know, obviously, yes, scuba and science submersibles and a general pioneering interest of humanity to discover
13:29how the ocean works.
13:30And we now do know, as David comes to the end of his life, we know how it works.
13:36The big question is, can we put that knowledge into how we manage it?
13:40David Attenborough, of course, is an Emmy winner for his narration.
13:44We all know and savour that voice.
13:49It's also pretty astounding to me that he's not simply narrating, which would be pretty impressive.
13:55He's very much in it on camera in a number of locations.
14:00So he's very much robust, really, and engaged passionately with these issues, as he always has been.
14:09Do you know, nearly all the scenes that we shot in that film, he was 98 when we shot them.
14:15So you're seeing a 98-year-old man.
14:17And actually, just purely by chance, at an event last night, and I saw him last night, and he was
14:25as bouncy as ever.
14:26And as I say, probably in a couple of weeks' time, he'll be 100.
14:30A remarkable man.
14:31And you've known him and worked with him for about 40 years or so.
14:35Yes.
14:36Yes.
14:36When I first met David, I was just starting my television career.
14:41I was a young researcher in my early 20s.
14:44And David would have been in his early 50s.
14:48And he'd just finished his first career, which was transforming the BBC, inventing schedules.
14:55I mean, David created the foundation stones of television in the BBC, but that translated internationally.
15:03So he'd just all done all that.
15:05And then he'd stepped back into doing his wildlife stuff.
15:08And so what I've happened to me in my life is that, you know, he seems to have stayed the
15:14same age that when I met him.
15:16I've just got older.
15:17And suddenly I'm thinking, heavens.
15:20I mean, the fact that, you know, when I think I met him in 81, and if someone had said
15:27in 1981, you guys are still making films together in 2026.
15:31I thought, really?
15:33It's wonderful.
15:35Actually, it's wonderful.
15:35Well, that's certainly inspiring of how full of life that he is.
15:41In terms of what we see in the film, and David Attenborough notes that the ocean is really the last
15:50great wilderness on Earth.
15:52Is there something that truly just astounded you in what you say?
15:57One of them for me was learning about these sort of towering structures in the oceans, 40,000 of them
16:06that I wasn't aware of.
16:09That was amazing.
16:10But for you, is there something that really stood out to you that was eye opening?
16:14I knew if you protect the ocean, it would recover.
16:17I really didn't understand that it happened so quickly.
16:22When we did the research into this film and filmed so many of the examples, it was that that is
16:31so surprising.
16:32You know, when you protect a place on land, you often have to wait, you know, grow trees.
16:37You probably might have to sit around for 100 years to really see the benefit of your work.
16:41Let's say in the ocean in a decade, you just see massive transitions.
16:46And I hadn't fully comprehended that.
16:52It's an exciting film. It's a beautiful film.
16:55There are moments that are rightly disturbing as we've explored.
17:00It is Ocean with David Attenborough from National Geographic.
17:03We've been joined by the director, Keith Schooley.
17:06Thank you so much for being with us and congratulations on this film.
17:11It's a huge pleasure. Thank you so much.
17:12Thank you so much.
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