NET FOR ALL

On Changshan Archipelago, a traditional Tanzi net weaves together many different meanings. For fishers, it carries a family’s livelihood. But for porpoises, it can mean injury, or even the loss of life. The same net also brought a group of people together: Captain Lu, the Qingdao Marine Conservation Society team, and many others who care about the ocean. Net for All documents how they began with a traditional net and searched for new possibilities between conservation and livelihood. 

As someone from Qingdao, a coastal city close to our filming location, I grew up eating pomfret, mantis shrimp, and sea snails, but I rarely thought deeply about where the food on my plate came from. Filming this story brought me into the fishing community of Daheishan Island and Tudao Village. For the first time, I got to know fishers, and for the first time, I saw the process behind a fish traveling from the ocean to the table. For me, this was also a journey of rediscovering the relationship between people and the sea.

Through this experience, I began to ask myself: in the face of global environmental challenges, what do these specific, seemingly small conservation actions actually mean?

Jane Goodall, who devoted her life to nature conservation, once encouraged young people with these words: “You have it in your power to make a difference. Don’t give up. There is a future for you. Do your best while you’re still on this beautiful Planet Earth that I look down upon from where I am now.” As someone born in the 2000s, I often feel overwhelmed by environmental crises. The first twenty years of our generation have been marked repeatedly by melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and global warming. At the same time, biodiversity is being lost at an accelerating pace. The vaquita in the Gulf of California has been reduced to only a few individuals, while North Atlantic right whales continue to struggle against fishing gear entanglement and vessel strikes, and dugongs have become functionally extinct in southern coastal waters in China. Can we still find a path toward utopia? Where are the power, hope, and future that Jane Goodall spoke of?

Perhaps the process of making Net for All gave me an answer.

Power comes from these small but solid actions. Hope comes from the lives still swimming in the sea. And the future comes from fishers, researchers, and everyone who cares about the ocean. Let us continue to learn from one another, support one another, and move forward together on this long but meaningful journey of conservation.