Original subtitles

Thank you.

Do you know where the Ross Sea is?

Ross Sea? R-A-W?

Ross. R-O-S-S? Ross Sea?

Ross Sea? I've never heard of it.

R-O-S-S? Ross?

Yeah. No.

Is it a sea?

Like a swimming sea?

No, I don't think. I don't know what it is.

What's that?

Any idea where it is?

Australia? I don't know.

Maybe it's in Europe.

I have no idea. Maybe it's in Asia. Is it man-made?

Is it the east side, west side of New York City?

Why, what's going on in the Ross Sea?

The Ross Sea is the southernmost stretch of ocean on the planet.

It's about 3,000 kilometers below New Zealand, lapping at the icy shores of

Antarctica.

This vast expanse of land, sea and ice is known intimately by this man, US

ecologist Dr. David Ainley.

Dave Ainley lives in San Francisco, and like some migratory animal himself,

every Antarctic summer he packs his bags and heads south.

Back down the ice again, Dave?

Yep.

I would say I'm pretty used to it, although it's always a little bit hard.

This year is better because he's only going for two months instead of three.

Dave Ainley has been flying down to Antarctica for more than 40 years to

study the wildlife.

He's contributed so much to our understanding of the continent, he's had

a mountain named after him.

The thing that brings him back is the opportunity to study in what is widely

regarded as the most pristine marine ecosystem on Earth.

Hi-ho, here we are.

The Great White South.

It's just a really moving experience to be there and survive being there. I'm

just feeling the energy there.

It's a pretty amazing place.

It does have a profound impact on you when you get to see an area like that.

It's incredibly beautiful and incredibly special.

It's sort of like these stories you hear about old times in the American West

when the sky was darkened by the number of birds flying over during migration.

No one who's alive has seen this, but in the Ross Sea you can still see these

kinds of amazing natural events.

there's always something different to see. There's always something happening,

whether it's orcas passing by or whether it's snow petrels coming unexpectedly in

a gale.

White inside the weather, white shadow, white shine,

low and high, white all the time.

Nothing patching the sky might be slow bite of the beginning

or something nearing the end.

Always the weather.

At each expedition entering weather, always the one event of the wind.

I have never seen anywhere underwater as special as diving underneath the ice in

the Ross Sea.

When you're down there under the ice, you have the seals swimming around,

you've got all these wonderful invertebrates. It's truly a special

place.

It might be one of the coldest places on the planet, but the Ross Sea teems with

life.

It's home to the southernmost mammal, the Weddell seal.

40% of the world's Adelie penguins.

A quarter of the emperor penguins.

A species of killer whale found nowhere else on the planet.

and a seldom seen deep-dwelling fish, the Antarctic toothfish.

Very few understand this ancient ecosystem better than Dave Ainley.

We have a very intensive project that's been going on for over 10 years and

trying to understand daily penguins, what these penguins are doing and trying

to ask questions, and find the answers.

It's just a lot of fun to find stuff out.

He doesn't just look at penguins. He has a view as an ecologist of the whole

system that is unparalleled.

His science is correct, his assessments are correct, and the way he synthesizes

it all together is absolutely correct.

In 1961, the entire continent was turned into the world's largest nature reserve

through the signing of the Antarctic Treaty.

Today, the flags that fly there come from nations all around the world,

brought together in a cooperative spirit of peace and science.

This unprecedented agreement, signed at the height of the Cold War, banned

military activity and banned nuclear weapons.

It's a shining example of how humanity can work together for the betterment of

all.

The Antarctic Treaty is generally considered one of the most successful

diplomatic efforts that have taken place in modern time.

It's the governments of the world agreeing, governments of the world are

very good at fighting with each other, very good at arguing, agreeing, this is

a place that is so special, we're going to set it aside for peace.

Over the years, the Antarctic Treaty has welcomed scientists from all over the

world, and they've relished the opportunity to study in the Ross Sea's

unique, undamaged environment.

I need to know how many eggs it has, so I'm going to go closer and see if he'll

stand up and show me.

This tag is in pretty good shape.

You can still read it.

So I'll just very carefully brush it off and go over the numbers so

that we know it's this year's nest.

And then we'll leave him alone.

The Roth Sea is a place where you don't need to guess about how things should

be.

You can just go there and measure them.

I love the fact that half a century ago, nations were wise enough to come to

agreement to forestall exploiting the land around Antarctica.

You weren't wise enough to do the same thing for the ocean.

So here I was on a cliff above the Ross Sea at Cape Crozier on Ross Island, as

far south as you could go on the ocean.

Along comes this blue fishing vessel and begins to deploy a long line.

We were just in disbelief that, first of all, anyone would be bold enough to fish

that far south. I mean, there's a lot of ice and it's very, very windy. To see a

fishing boat in the middle of this, it seemed crazy to me.

That was just such a foreign feeling to have the industrial

world invading this pristine place.

The ship that Dave Ainley saw was exploring potential fishing grounds for

Antarctic toothfish.

It came from a country that ironically has been seen as a leader in

conservation in the Ross Sea, New Zealand.

Our approach was we will make the case for fishing in the Ross Sea, but only

on the most strict precautionary basis.

We saw that there was pressure.

for fishing for toothfish and that this was going to happen regardless of

anything New Zealand did.

We needed to accumulate information.

We needed to work with the New Zealand fishing industry to have maximum control

and to have the maximum potential for sanction.

Really it was a new frontier which wasn't a long way from home and

somewhere where we felt it was a greenfields opportunity.

we should take the opportunity while it was available.

These people are just going to show up and they think the fish belong to them

and they just take them away and so, you know, I don't know, it's very kind of

arrogant and has no regard for anything.

When the treaty was drawn up, it protected the land but not the waters

surrounding Antarctica.

They remain part of the high seas or the global commons.

When those waters began to be exploited, the treaty nations formed an

international organisation to manage them.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or

CAMLR, based in Australia.

It is my pleasure to welcome you to Tasmania and to Hobart for the 26th

meeting of the Commission.

Kamlar allows fishing in the Ross Sea because it defines conservation as

including rational use of a marine living resource.

It was Kamlar that gave New Zealand approval for its exploratory fishery in

1996.

a gold rush mentality.

We then found that things got a bit out of control.

And I think it was because we didn't manage it, frankly.

We got it wrong.

We didn't manage with the sophistication we should have done.

There's elements of economic self-interest.

There's elements of political strategic self-interest.

There's an element of, if I'm not at the table during the party, I'm not going to

get as fast of a cake.

In less than 10 years, it grew from one boat to near on 20 from a dozen

different nations, and they were permitted to take around 3,000 tonnes of

toothfish out of the Ross Sea ecosystem every year.

I mean, it never crossed my mind. When I first went to Antarctica, and I mean,

the idea that there would be commercial fishing in the Ross Sea, I would not

have believed it.

I mean, I just would not have believed it.

I know there are a lot of arguments regarding if we don't go and fish them,

we won't have any chance of regulating the fishery.

But I felt that we might have been able to have a...

a better attitude to that as New Zealanders.

I thought that the Antarctic was set aside for international collaboration

and peaceful uses, but really that's kind of smoke and mirrors.

Antarctica, where a single footprint lasts a thousand years.

And here we are, with our thousand footsteps, etc.

The heart of the Antarctic toothfish can beat as little as once every 10 seconds.

And that's one of the few things we do know about this remarkable fish.

They've adapted to the Ross Sea's minus 1.9 degree waters by producing an

antifreeze which stops their blood turning to ice.

This and other discoveries were made by a handful of scientists studying the

Antarctic toothfish.

Among them, Clive Evans.

As soon as an ice crystal breaks through the skin, this antifreeze just docks

straight onto it and the fish is kind of saved, as it were.

Most of our time is spent right in the southern extreme in McMurdo Sound, where

we get on with our fishing.

Between 1971 and about 2003, we caught about 4,000 of these fishes and tagged

and released them.

Turns out they're very slow growers.

Some of the large ones, say in the 300-pound range, must be between 35 and

40 years old.

Well, the toothfish would be the top fish predator in the Ross Sea.

You could say it would be a shark equivalent.

They're not capable of taking a bite out of anything like a shark, but they just

swallow it whole. They create a vacuum by quickly opening their mouth. They

just inhale what's in front of them.

For the fishery to be sustainable, one would like to know the life cycle, the

complete life cycle, and there's really still more unknown about the mossini or

toothfish life cycle than is known.

We don't know where the juvenile toothfish are. We don't know what

they're feeding on. We're not really sure of how often these fish breed.

Nobody's found a larval toothfish that I know of. We don't know for sure where it

spawns. The life cycle is hypothetical.

You take all the sides together and it still comes out the same. There's only

one answer. We haven't got enough data.

The lead scientist advising the New Zealand government on Antarctic

toothfish is Stuart Hanchett. I'd say that it probably is premature to go into

there, but I think at the same time you'd probably make the same argument

for every fishery in the world.

We have very, very little understanding, really, and I think the...

You know, the move over the last five to ten years has been trying to develop the

modelling and also the baseline data on which to be able to base the management

decisions.

To help estimate the size of the Ross Sea toothfish population, Kamla oversees

a fish tagging program run by the fishing industry itself, a system

fraught with problems.

When you catch a fish that lives, you know, 1,500 metres deep and you pull it

up on a long line and it's a really heavy fish, These big fish just don't

survive as well. So you end up having the smaller fish survive better. And so

that can really end up inflating your overall estimates of biomass because

you're not getting a representative sample of the population.

If you go through the process, basically, you're required to tag one

fish every ton.

You're required to report every tag you get back.

But if you don't report every tag you get back, that just inflates the size of

the biomass.

There's a huge incentive on...

companies not to report tags.

There are issues, you know, that we've identified within the last year or two

that some countries down there are not tagging the fish. We're getting very,

very low recapture rates from some countries' vessels.

People who do stock assessments, they do a lot of modelling and so they put a lot

of, they put the information they have into the model but they also, when they

don't... no information say for toothfish based on other fish we're just

going to assume that toothfish spawn every single year and so they make that

assumption and while they'd say this is the best we can do it is largely

guesswork i would describe it more of an art form rather than a science you're

actually looking at it making big assumptions and hoping you're right the

fishermen own the ocean they fish first and ask questions later and we've got

another example of that in the ross sea yeah

Despite all these uncertainties, Kamlar decides to reduce the adult toothfish

stock by 50% over the next 35 years.

50% is huge. If you eliminated 50% of the humans on the planet, that would

have a huge impact. So if you're going to eliminate 50% of the fish, you're

going to have a huge impact.

It just seems way too much, way too early.

These are big fish, profitable.

They're long-lived, so they are exploited the way you would exploit a

seam of coal.

Why else would anybody want to go to Antarctic waters, to the Ross Sea?

If they already had plenty of fish around their home turf, there'd be no

incentive. But the fact that we've lost so much everywhere else, the fishing

fleets are going further and further.

Finally to the last wild place, the last ocean.

Just how much we've lost from our oceans is now well recorded.

A map has been created from a worldwide study where leading scientists measured

human impact on the world's oceans.

We began what turned into a four-year process of pulling together data on all

of the different marine ecosystems on the planet and as many of the human uses

of the oceans and human impacts on the oceans that we could find.

Once we produced our maps, we were able to look for those areas that are least

impacted or most pristine.

And we found the Roth Sea was the most pristine area.

of anywhere on the planet.

The fishing industry is really hard up for places to fish these days.

So they're not going to give up the Ross Sea very easily.

Before they were protected by distance, ice, cold and everything.

But now we have the technical mean of going there and we have this insatiable

market that can eat anything.

The big change that has happened over the last hundred years, let's say, and

increasingly, is that...

Mechanized fishing boats are able to go to any part of the world's oceans and

begin to take as many fish as they want.

We've been using the ocean now for our entire human history, and particularly

in the last 60 years with industrialized fishing.

We've actually used it.

almost in some areas, and I would say categorically in others, to exhaustion.

The changes that have taken place globally, when you think about having

managed to do in, to eliminate, basically 90% of the big fish.

Mine it out and move on has been what we did to fisheries and what we're doing

now.

We've just got to break that cycle. We've got to set aside a large area

where nothing happens because we don't know enough to protect biodiversity any

other way.

Jellyfish have taken over many places, like the East China Sea, the Baltic, the

Black Sea, the Banguela Current, and the North Sea.

Jellyfish are becoming one of the main species.

The center of the world fisheries move south because essentially the the stocks

in the north are depleted the boats are going south

the

rossi is the most remote fishery on the planet there's nowhere else we can go

there's no further south that we can go to get fish

So it's quite a contrast between the Ross Sea and these other areas. And the

Ross Sea is the way these areas used to be.

In this pristine environment, it's not just the loss of the toothfish that's at

stake.

It's the intricate balance of one of the last outposts of the natural world.

The penguins and the whales have a very sensitive interaction, so that when the

whales come into an area and start foraging, the penguins have to change

their foraging patterns.

By removing the toothfish, in a way you're removing, possibly you're

removing a penguin competitor.

But on the other hand, by removing this competitor of the penguins, you're

removing prey of the killer whale.

The treaty that governs the amount of fish that we are legally able to take

out of that area is already recognising that this place is a little different,

and I think it's also recognising the uniqueness of the fish, the toothfish,

and perhaps that we don't know as much about the toothfish as we know about

other species, therefore it's being incredibly conservative.

We know from...

multiple studies of what happens when you remove top predators from marine

ecosystems. The whole thing just falls apart.

It goes both directions, too. You think about all the things that eat toothfish,

so that's the seals and the whales, orcas in particular.

And then you think about all the things that the toothfish eats, so all of the

ice fishes, for example, that the toothfish are eating. Those are the two

populations that are going to be directly impacted if you take that link,

that toothfish link, out.

It's like dropping a pebble in a pond and having the waves just kind of

continue out. And they don't just stay the same amplitude. They actually grow

as they move further out and out through the ecosystem.

In the winter, powerful winds blast down from the continent, pushing seasonal ice

away, creating large pools of open water.

When the sun finally rises, bringing light and warmth, the phytoplankton in

these pools bloom.

The bloom is so large and dense, it can be seen from space.

And you get this amazing plankton bloom, which happens over a matter of a few

weeks. The water goes from very clear to literally pea soup.

And that plankton is the basis of the food chain.

Every summer there is this remarkable pulse of life.

The creatures of the Ross Sea make the most of the short summer to raise their

young.

Beneath the chaos is a highly intricate and ordered system, closely observed and

enjoyed by scientists.

I studied penguins in Antarctica for about 26 years.

I think that penguins appeal to people because they're a caricature of a human

in many respects.

They've just got an attitude.

They are really tough animals.

They have predators, leopard seals and other animals that want to eat them, and

they are very good at avoiding that.

When they come onto the land, they go through this transformation of

personality.

They become very aggressive to one another.

This is the nest that somebody went to see.

As soon as he left, everybody else is coming and getting his rocks.

That's why you need to have a pair of penguins, because one penguin has to

always be there to defend the pile.

Otherwise, this is what happens.

It took another hour. There won't be any rocks left in that scoop.

After each Antarctic summer, Dave returns to California where his real

work begins, analysing his findings and trying to assess what's happening in the

Ross Sea.

With each passing year, his fears deepen.

He's already seen the impact of fishing in his own backyard.

It's the middle of the day and 30 years ago there wouldn't be any boats here

because they're all out at sea catching fish.

But these days these boats don't go anywhere.

Every once in a while go out and check their crab pots.

There used to be as many salmon in the California current as there are stars in

the sky.

And now there's none.

I used to catch salmon, you know, fishing off the beach, surf casting.

But now, you know, all you catch is seaweed.

Fearing its demise and knowing the full weight of that loss, Dave does what he

knows best.

He writes a series of scientific papers on the Ross Sea.

For the first time, people hear that this is our last wild ocean.

A place that could teach us about all marine ecosystems.

And they hear what we stand to lose if we let the natural balance of the Ross

Sea slip away.

Those papers found their way into the hands of Colorado nature photographer

John Weller.

It just absolutely blew me away.

In the entire world's oceans, there's just this one little pocket of water

left that we haven't damaged in some way.

John was determined to do something about it, so he got in touch with New

Zealand cameraman Peter Young.

It's not often that someone turns up on your doorstep asking you to go to the

Ross Sea.

I worked there 20 years before as a dishwasher and I fell in love with the

place, always wanted to return and here was John offering me that opportunity.

The pair travelled to Antarctica to film and photograph the wildlife and there

they met Dave Ainley and decided to work together to try and bring a halt to

fishing in the Ross Sea.

For David, it looks like the Ross Sea Symposium that's going to go for real.

How many scientists do you think we'll get together?

I'll be somewhere 20 to 30 from Italy and

New Zealand and the US.

For the first time ever, Ross Sea scientists gather, united by their

determination to save this last untouched ocean.

Often scientists disagree about a lot of things. You get a lot of conflicting

opinions. But in this case, a lot do agree.

We got all the scientists together and what we're trying to do is consolidate

all of their information. And we're going to use that to write a master

paper on the state of the Ross Sea and why it should be protected. Yeah, we

should do this every year.

This is not a story about fish and penguins and seals.

This is a story about people and about our effect on the world.

I just couldn't let it happen on my watch. I couldn't just sit there and

pretend that it wasn't happening.

The website's coming along, yeah. We're just trying to make sure that

everything's accurate and we have the right science in there.

A website is built. The Last Ocean Trust is formed.

And the Ross Sea story hits the road.

Up and down New Zealand, right across America, from small community halls to

the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.

We had a really clear message. We wanted to stop fishing in the Ross Sea.

We're putting together a display of photographs and film.

But the first thing we had to do was explain to people where it was.

The Ross Sea.

I don't know, I feel like I've seen it on the map, but I've looked at it in a

bathroom wall and maybe it was somewhere near the bottom of the map.

Which is the bit you look at, right?

It sounds familiar, but I don't know anything about it.

Oh, Ross is on the left hand side going up that

corner. She doesn't know about Rossi, and she cannot imagine where Rossi is.

Is it around the corner?

Maybe somewhere in the Antarctic?

We're just seeing if people know where it is at all. And how many have you

found the dude?

Not many.

That's kind of what I thought.

It is protected from mining and exploration, I understand, at this

stage, but the fishing is a different matter.

They talk about wise use of resources as a definition of conservation, but in the

case of the Ross Sea, there's nothing wise about it.

Humanity should have places that it leaves alone, like the Serengeti,

because this is the only reason we have giraffe, and somehow... It makes me feel

good that I know giraffes exist, even though lots of people cannot see them.

The Ross Sea.

You know where it is? Couldn't tell you.

Couldn't tell you. Do you know?

R-O-S-S.

Do you know? The Ross Sea?

Yes. Antarctic.

Well done.

What do you know about it?

The Ross Sea?

No, but the Ross Ice Barrier.

Lowest temperature ever recorded.

Minus 127.6 Fahrenheit.

And if you dropped a steel spanner on concrete, it would shatter.

That is good, isn't it?

Sitting here on the North Sea, which is the most affected place on Earth,

we're thinking about how much work we have to do here to try and put all the

parts back together again.

And we still have those parts in the Ross Sea. And we need to keep places

like that together so that we know how to put back these ecosystems that were

disturbing to such a great extent.

There are places that have a magnified impact on the way the world works, on

the way the entire system functions, that we should do everything in our

power.

to protect them as if our lives depend on them, because our lives do depend on

keeping them intact and healthy.

Marine protected areas work.

We need to have a very large area that's protected so that not only the little

things that I study that live on the seafloor, but the big things that depend

on those and the large animals have enough space and enough room to forage

and to complete their life cycles.

You have to think in terms of literally hundreds of miles just for one whale,

and there's thousands of whales.

Even for an animal as relatively small as an Adelie penguin.

They can cover 150 miles on their regular daily sort of commute. That's

what they do just to feed their chicks.

And there's millions of penguins.

In terms of marine protected areas, we don't believe as an industry that they

do anything more than what good fisheries management is already doing.

Fish are all stored as naked carcasses like this, in this form on the boat.

When they come ashore here, they'll just be sorted into different stillages, go

into the cool store, and from there they'll be graded by quality parameters

and size grades, individually wrapped and labelled, and prepared for export

from there.

The hours of the market is one in the morning to nine in the morning. Those

are the market hours.

We have seafood coming from all over the world.

These are what they call six to eight kilo fish.

So they run anywhere from 13 to 17 pounds.

I get them from Chile. I get some that says Uruguay.

The fish is going to sell for something like about 20 New Zealand dollars a kilo

in its current form as it sits here right now.

You know, your average fish at 30 kgs, you know, you're looking at maybe $600

for that fish.

New Yorkers first developed a taste for the toothfish in the early 1990s, after

a local had a bright idea.

In terms of marketing, it's very important to have the right name to sell

what you want.

Wolffish doesn't sell.

As soon as you have a tooth fish, nobody wants to see a rabbit kind of a fish or

something they imagine.

And the term in the US was Chilean sea bass.

That simple name change put tooth fish on the plates of upmarket restaurants in

New York and around the world.

Chilean sea bass.

Why they call it Chilean sea bass, I don't know. Everybody wants it.

Chilean sea bass, but we get stuff from all over the world, really.

Ah, this is it?

Ah, I see.

For the chefs, it's a very forgiving

fish because it's so rich, it's never dry.

You can cook it any way you want.

You basically cannot sabotage the fish. That fish tastes good no matter what.

She says that marrow is from Antarctic.

Even though it is quite expensive, some customers, they like it so much. I think

this is a luxurious food item.

The next name it was given was White Gold.

The rush that followed saw two fish stripped out of much of the Southern

Ocean.

And it was then that that vessel from New Zealand ventured into the Ross Sea.

For New Zealand, it's a $20 million fishery. So, you know, the whole of our

fishing industry, including agriculture, is about $1.5 billion. So, you know,

it's not an insignificant part of the whole.

However, by the industry's own figures, the fishery is only worth 1.3% of its

annual earnings.

That's trivial compared to the huge ecosystem benefits and the delight.

that people get from knowing there's an ecosystem with all these amazing

creatures in it operating and knowing that this is the last ocean.

You stand in a hut looking down at a hole in the ice that's been drilled

specifically for us to drop through.

And you step off through this hole and you drop down through 10 feet of ice.

And you just enter an entirely different world.

It's like being a skydiver. The water is so clear you actually have no reference.

to whether you're going up or down. There's no particulate matter in the

water at all.

We're talking about horizontal visibility of five to six hundred feet,

two hundred meters horizontally.

It's gin clear.

There's no sound of waves and you just hold your breath and it's just like a

total soundscape around you.

And these Weddell seals will come gliding out of the blue and they're

completely unafraid of you.

Underwater, under the ice, with a Weddell seal is an experience that I

would gladly give to everyone if I could give them that chance. And if they could

have that chance, protection of the Ross Sea would just be a done deal.

In Washington, D.C., a breakthrough for the last ocean, veteran political

campaigner Jim Barnes joins the team.

Jim has a passion for the Ross Sea and is no stranger to big environmental

issues. My first big case was to try to stop the building of the Alaska

pipeline.

And I was just a young guy on the team, but I learned a heck of a lot.

And we took on all the oil companies,

the state of Alaska.

federal government and we beat them in the supreme court 30 years ago jim set

up the environmental umbrella organization antarctic and southern

ocean coalition or asoc hi claire had a good flight great it has a seat at

camera's table and with it a direct line of communication do you have 100 hours

or so ready to put into this

Well no comment on that David.

Jim's first job is gathering a team of political and scientific experts to work

on an international campaign to protect the Ross Sea.

His attention soon turns to the country that opened up the fishery.

In a country like New Zealand, I think you need a big public campaign there to

change the tenor of feeling by some of your decision makers and improve the

possibility they can see why it's important to protect the Ross Sea as a

whole.

In the country's capital, the Last Ocean campaign has launched and government

officials hear the plea to stop fishing in the Ross Sea.

But it does little to change their position.

The way we think about it is that Antarctica is important to New Zealand.

New Zealand wants a presence in Antarctica, and we have a presence

across a range of fronts.

So that's everything from our national programme in science activities based

out of Scott Base.

We have our fishing presence as well. And we have tourist operators operating

in the region.

Tourists take only photos.

Scientists need permission to take a feather.

Yet the fishing industry is taking tens of thousands of living animals out of

the Ross Sea ecosystem every year.

And they believe the fishery is sustainable.

They don't see the Ross Sea as the last ocean.

They just see it as a well-managed fishery.

With consumers more aware about how and where their fish are caught, companies

are keen to have their catch deemed sustainable.

That certification comes from the London-based Marine Stewardship Council.

New Zealand and UK companies fishing for toothfish apply.

We've seen the market starting to demand.

more and more assurances that the management processes are robust, that

the science is good, that compliance is being adhered to and things like that.

The cost of certification itself, we often say, is usually between $50,000

and $150,000.

We continue to have a lot of fisheries wishing to go into the program.

There is evidence that they get economic...

benefits from doing so. There's stronger evidence, however, that they get market

access benefits and it secures their place in the market.

If this toothless fishery is certified, then it's going to become politically

correct to be eating toothfish again.

The demand is going to go up, the price is going to go up.

An independent assessor from London-based Moody Marine, appointed and

paid for by the fishing industry, flies to New Zealand.

to hear the case for and against fishing in the Ross Sea.

Dave Ainley has to pay his own way to take them on.

I've come to New Zealand to say my piece.

Somebody has to speak up for the Ross Sea.

So at the end of the day, the moody marine people, they go through and they

score box X, box Y, box Z and so forth, and they come up with an overall score

and they say, OK, you pass, you get to be certified.

But if you ask them this question, are you certain and on what basis would you

say you're certain that this is truly sustainable, they don't really have a

good answer.

MSC assessments, again, as you probably know, we define a fishery or

a unit of certification.

based on a number of criteria.

You're trapped in their system instead of being able to bring independent

scientists, which is what we tried to do. We brought inputs from more than 30

very experienced Ross Sea scientists, challenging all sorts of their

assumptions. The second principle is that the impacts of the fishery on the

ecosystem should be sustainable.

And the third principle is that there be an effective management system in place.

I'm also assuming you've got an open mind.

despite the fact that you're being paid by these three companies to do the

certification. The certifiers that I've dealt with to date in regard to MSC

certainly haven't had an open mind and I hope that you guys have.

Our role is to take an independent, objective view of the

information available in the fishery. How many have been turned down at this

stage? One fishery has failed the main assessment process so far.

Out of how many?

I think there's 23 have been certified.

Do you know where these fish spawn?

Do you know anything about where Ross Sea Toothfish are going through their

juvenile cycles?

The answer to all these questions is no.

Despite the challenge from Ainley and many other scientists, the MSC certifies

the Ross Sea fishery as sustainable.

I guess I'm a little bit angry because in my naivete, I spent

my life studying what I thought were penguins in a natural laboratory without

a lot of unknown anthropogenic factors involved.

And now the New Zealand fisheries and other countries come along and they

decide to make the Rossi this big meat bucket.

Dave had put in huge amounts of time, invested his life in the Ross Sea.

He knew more than anyone about the consequences of that fishery on the

ecosystem.

These people, they just have a feel for the environment. And clearly, you don't

go back 30 years again and again unless you have a passion for that environment.

And David has that passion. And he and other scientists like that, they really

need to be...

treasured and looked after and more importantly listened to.

On the frozen sea off McMurdo Station, decades of groundbreaking research on

Antarctic toothfish slowly comes to a halt.

When I began my studies almost 40 years ago, we might catch 500 pulling the line

once or twice a day in October through middle of December.

Some years we only caught about 150, so there's some...

variation from year to year, but never did we not catch any.

I think it was in 2003, I only caught about 30, and this past year, I only

caught two, so they seemed to have disappeared from the sound.

Stop, Juergen, stop, stop, stop.

First hook, not on it. Hold on. Just last year, we pulled seven or eight in.

And as I say, that was a good year, but, you know, seven or eight versus 500, you

know, it's obviously clearly not really good fishing at all.

So the fact they can't catch toothfish there anymore is, we think, is related

to this fishery. The fact that fish-eating killer whales are not as

prevalent as they used to be is another effect that we think is related.

The call from scientists on the ground in Antarctica is not being heard, not by

governments anyway.

New Zealand remains committed to the fishery it started.

In Wellington, the government hosts a two-day meeting with the fishing

industry and environmental groups to discuss its proposal for marine

protection in the Ross Sea.

A proposal it intends to present to Kamlar.

If we're successful, it would, I understand, be the world's largest

marine protected area.

At just shy of two and a half million square kilometres, it would be nine

times the size of New Zealand.

But of course it's not just about size, it's also about quality.

But size is crucial.

New Zealand's proposal does not include the main areas where fishing takes

place.

My understanding is that it's built on the premise that there'll be ongoing

fisheries activity in the Ross Sea, but that it's going to be managed

appropriately, that the fish stocks are going to be carefully assessed.

There's a term called agenda setting in policy theory, which precisely is about

how people try to remove from the agenda the things that they don't want to have

talked about.

And that was exactly what was going on today.

Well, they're sort of disaggregating the whole ecosystem.

They're looking at different portions of it rather than seeing it as an intact

whole. You have to look at the Ross Sea and not see it only as the toothfish.

It's also the whales.

It's also the penguins. New Zealand is a leader globally on whale conservation.

And I've worked with the New Zealand government at the Whaling Commission.

Well, if New Zealand really cares about whale conservation, they shouldn't.

be out there fishing and altering this most pristine of ecosystems for whales.

The US is also developing a proposal, slightly different from New Zealand's,

but it too doesn't go as far as to ban fishing.

There are other ideas that are even more ambitious, but I think that everyone

will need to take into account that you have to satisfy all of the members of

Camelar in order to make progress.

Summer in the southern hemisphere.

The solid ice that has kept humans at bay for the last eight months

disappears.

In New Zealand, the toothfish fleet prepares to exploit once again that

brief period of opportunity in the Ross Sea.

The Ross Sea toothfish fishing season is very, very short, two to three months at

a maximum.

So it augments some other activity that these vessels are able to do and the

fishermen are able to do.

The growing appetite for Antarctic toothfish is luring vessels from all

over the world, including South Korea and the United Kingdom.

Being there, there's a sense of hopefulness about, you know, issues that

drive the rest of the planet crazy.

But when you're there, you can see that the ecological salvation of the planet

resides there.

Everyone has to understand or taste that sense of sacredness about the place, you

know, and the fact that it is a life-giving place.

I understood why Ed Hillary, it was his favourite thing to just, you know, sit

and look at the Ross Sea.

The New Zealand Government says that fishing in the Ross Sea is managed with

great care.

New Zealand vessels are known to be one of the most well performing vessels in

the fishery. So in some ways I don't think as a government we feel a need to

apologise for our participation in the fishery. For us as a government at the

moment it's a legitimate activity and in the pursuit of that activity we feel

that we can make sure that Kamala continues to set a high standard for the

performance of other vessels in the fishery as well.

When vessels arrive in the Ross Sea, they enter an Olympic-style fishery,

where each country competes to get as much of the quota as they can, as

quickly as they can.

Our experience with the ice conditions down there is that this is a very, very

dangerous place.

And here we're allowing fishing to take place in the worst sea ice conditions in

the world.

From that point alone, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

A South Korean fishing vessel, the Gyeongwoo 2, sank in the Antarctic

waters yesterday after a fire on board. A month earlier, the Russian fishing

ship, the Sparta, struck ice in the Antarctic and had to be rescued.

We've been asked to help out a Russian fishing vessel. We know that there's a

hole of about 50 centimetres in the vessel that is taking on water.

Once the icebreaker gets in location, the plan is to pump across some of the

180 tonnes of fuel on board.

the anxious wait is over for three new zealanders and 22 others on a fishing

boat which has been adrift for more than two weeks the united states air force

dropped engine parts to the argos georgia which became stranded just

before christmas after its engine blue new zealand says rescuers have been

unable to find any more survivors from the south korean trawler that sank off

antarctica yesterday three south korean trawlers searched overnight for 70 men

missing from the number one in song which sank more than two thousand

kilometers

New Zealand, the nation responsible for starting this fishery, now uses the

chaos to justify its ongoing presence.

The question is would you rather have a responsible fishing nation like New

Zealand participating in the fishery or in the vacuum that we're not in the

fishery, a fishing member that may or may not be as responsible as New

Zealand.

When the business and politics behind the Ross Sea fishery were questioned by

highly regarded New Zealand journalist Mike White, he received a strong

reminder of the forces he was dealing with.

Initially the reaction came from Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade

who wrote a strong letter and then Ministry of Fisheries also wrote a

letter. The main reaction came from the Seafood Industry Council of course who

represent the fishing companies who are involved.

They sent us a 24-page letter including all the points that they

felt we had got wrong and expected us to apologise and retract.

Their tactics were pretty strong-armed. They were just trying to bully us,

trying to push us into saying that we'd got it wrong.

They took it to the press council and eventually the press council ruled that

not only was there no substance to the

the claims of the Seafood Industry Council, but many of the facts and

arguments that the Seafood Industry Council had actually put forward

actually supported the arguments that we made in our story. It was a fabulous

example of an own goal, if you like.

After the story came out, we got documents under the Official Information

Act which showed the reaction from those three groups.

And the communication between them shows that there's obviously a very close

relationship and that it was almost a concerted response from them.

The force of big business and governments is something Jim Barnes is

familiar with.

In Washington, DC, he's rallied the support of major environmental

organisations from around the world.

The campaign he's coordinating now has come a long way from three men with a

common cause.

We are delighted to welcome you to our launch tonight.

An international coalition is formed, the Antarctic Ocean Alliance.

And to launch this alliance, a coalition of leading environmental and

conservation groups from all over the world.

In the months that follow, his team begins gathering the information and

evidence to build the case for a ban on fishing and for protecting the entire

Ross Sea.

We've got a team of 20, 25 people around the world working on this, a mix of

scientists, lawyers, policy experts from all the different key countries.

And so it's a great, great team. We need them all.

The case draws on research that goes back more than 100 years.

on the ideals of the treaty, peace and cooperation, and on strong conservation

clauses that protect the Antarctic ecosystem.

There's rapid environmental change coming, and it's happening now.

Those changes are really making it more and more urgent that we don't work in

isolation. We have to work together.

500 scientists add their names and support.

We're trying to bring everything together and have the perfect case, the

best possible case for the Ross Sea. And it is a beautiful case.

If Camelot is based on science, then we should get some justice from them and

acknowledgement that the Ross Sea is not just an ordinary place and just to be

treated as just another stretch of the ocean.

That is a special place.

The legacy aspects of protecting the Ross Sea are so powerful in relation

to the pitiful economics that sustain the fishing that common sense will

prevail in the end. But it's going to be a hard struggle.

Each November in Hobart, delegates from the 25 nations of Canlar gather for the

annual meeting.

They will ultimately decide the fate of the Ross Sea.

The man instrumental in starting the fishery 15 years ago now says it has

turned into something that was never intended.

With the lessons of the Ross Sea in the last two or three years, I think we

should have steel in our spine.

And we should say, right, this is just utterly unacceptable.

Without question, the value to New Zealand of protecting and preserving the

Ross Sea as a pristine environment for the benefit of future generations far

outweighs any short-term profit we can get from exploiting the fish of the

region.

If there is going to be any change to the way in which that area is used from

a fisheries point of view, I think it's going to require a consensus.

I'd like to think that if we're going to move into putting, if you like, a

stronger priority on the conservation issues, that New Zealand would lead that

charge.

But in Kamilar's consensus-based system, it takes more than one government to

create change.

Alliances must form, and one is beginning between the two nations

proposing marine protection.

Hillary Clinton and I met very recently and one of the issues that we discussed

was the fact that we do have different proposals in that respect and we've

committed to asking our officials to work together to see if we can find

agreement.

But to protect the pristine qualities of the Ross Sea ecosystem,

Both their proposals need to go one vital step further.

They need to support a total ban on commercial fishing.

Then both nations need to persuade the others at Kamlar's table to do the same.

We need to think carefully how to bring everybody in all the key countries up to

a similar level of understanding about why it's important to protect a

particular place.

If the wider public says we want this area to be protected for the following

reasons, then governments will simply follow the wishes of the people.

I'm a great believer in democracy.

And it's ordinary people who make the difference. From how they decide to

vote, to what they decide to eat.

The United States is the biggest market for this fish in the world.

As Americans, it's our responsibility to deal with that and to have American

companies standing up and saying, we're not going to be a part of it. Not only

are we not going to be a part of it, we want to be a part of the solution.

Then we started exploring sustainability and seafood and learning more about it.

And that's the great thing about this opportunity for us is we get to learn

continually.

In the long run, the benefits for all, all of us, we can Make it happen.

If a customer calls in and asks for Chilean sea bass, we always leave them

to black cod. It has a similar texture and consistency.

The Chilean sea bass, we were aware that there was a lot of issues and a lot of

problems, and we decided not to serve it.

Chefs are educated and know about it.

As word spreads, the campaign gathers force and includes major players like U

.S. supermarket giant Safeway.

When the Marine Stewardship Council actually did certify that fishery, we

were unhappy with that, as a number of other people were. And when we were

asked to take a public stand on it, we of course chose to do that because we're

a very socially aware company.

When I first heard that Safeway had banned toothfish sales, I was so excited

and so ecstatic because it's very rare for a large corporation to support

something like that. And it really made me feel like there were people at

Safeway who were listening.

At Cape Washington Penguin Colony, an ancient ritual is playing out.

The seasons Emperor Chicks are suddenly left to fend for themselves.

Their challenge is to survive in one of the harshest environments on Earth.

Humans were never part of it.

The Ross Sea is no longer a hidden corner of a world.

The world has found it.

Our last truly wild ocean.

Can humanity rise to the challenge and preserve this ancient natural order?

I would hope that they would have just the sense.

of wanting to be evaluated, I suppose, to be judged with their decisions,

not by their peers of today, and not by what they have grown up with as what's

the right thing to do, but to think about how we, all of us, will be judged

by those in the future, because we only have one chance.

And I do hope that every one of the representatives from those countries

will spend a few minutes just looking in the mirror.

before they go making the next round of decisions.

The historical view that the oceans were inexhaustible and limitless in a global

age is not tenable anymore.

It's all our responsibilities.

Camelot is only one player in this huge orchestra.

And the values, if the values are strong enough of the Ross Sea to protect it,

then that's the way we should do it. That's the way humanity should do it.

The toothfish fishery is not a fishery that's based on survival.

This is a luxury item.

So people who are fishing for toothfish should be wise enough to look at the

bigger picture of what they're destroying just for an economic gain.

and maybe make a decision that's wiser for the race of humanity and for the

planet of Earth than just putting a little extra money in their pocket.

People feel that they have a right to exploit the natural world for their own

gain, and if they're the first ones to do it, so much the better.

And I think we're coming to a time when we have to question that, whether that's

really the way we want the last places on Earth to be treated.

You know, this is it.

We have to be at the peak of our civilization.

We should have an amazing amount of wisdom, and we should be exercising that

wisdom.

There is still time to save.

The Last Ocean.

I'd say the size of Europe.

It's about, it's... What's massive then? It's massive.

It's one and a half times bigger than Australia.

Bloody hell.

Antarctic is the only place on the entire planet where there's no people.

Not at all. No one lives there. There's scientific bases.

Did you get polar bears and all that? No, no polar bears.

Penguins down in the southern hemisphere and polar bears up north. There's no

penguins up in the northern hemisphere. Oh really?

Yeah. They're clever fuckers, aren't they? Yeah.

Yeah. We're trying to protect the raw sea. You should protect it. I'm glad you

think that, mate. Why should they? Why touch something that ain't been touched

forever? Why touch it? Why ruin it? Why leave it alone?

Yeah. Let the animals and the fish and the seas and the whales and the penguins

just get on with it.

That's what I reckon.