I read the article and realized that it had a completely different meaning to me than the average HN reader. I felt it might be interesting to share. If nothing else, the responses should be instructive.
If your value for the ocean is "it must support the life of humanity" then that's fine. Just come out and say it. Of course the next step in the conversation is what, exactly, is required for the ocean to do to support life. That's where it starts getting more tricky.
I think the problem here is that writers such as this are asking folks to have a religious experience -- to feel a sort of transcendence or guilt that doesn't have to be explicitly defined or looked at too closely. Therefore anybody can read the article, feel guilt and anguish, and join in the emotional fun. Hey, who wants to nuke the ocean, kill the fish, and fill it full of garbage? Nobody, that's who. That's the troll, not my analysis of the piece.
It's like humor. Once you start to really look at it, it goes away. A good sign you're having your chain yanked.
I shared my opinion because articles like this only serve to gin up mobs. Take a look at some of the comments. You'll have free marketers talking about the people that were fed, green earth types venting over the damage to mother earth, and so on. Not much in the way of actual analysis aside from just reassuring each other of our mutual shared subjective values, no matter which ones they are. Just noise.
I would have flagged it, but, as I said, it has artistic value. I could really feel I was there on the guy's voyage. However your point is valid. My honest reaction seems to have generated plenty of disgust. So I invite fellow HNers to just take a look around. I've shared my reaction to the piece. It's emotionally manipulative, but that's okay -- as long as you understand what it's doing. But for you personally, is this a useful article for the site or not?
[On the same trip 10 years earlier] "There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.
They observed a trawler going back and forth day and night across a reef and later the same trawler offered them buckets of fish...
"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."