Shark Attacks Are Up 800%—And It’s Not The Sharks’ Fault
The great white shark, nature’s most efficient apex predator, has become the new scapegoat for a society that has completely forgotten how to share a planet.
You’ve seen the headlines. You’ve felt the primal chill. A surfer in California. A swimmer in Florida. A bodyboarder in Hawaii. The summer of 2025 is shaping up to be the Summer of the Shark, with reported unprovoked encounters skyrocketing by a staggering 800% over the last decade in certain coastal hotspots. The media is, of course, having a field day. They show the grainy GoPro footage. They use words like “rampage” and “frenzy.” They interview the terrified tourists who vow never to go back in the water.
And they are missing the point so completely that it’s a moral outrage.
Let’s be clear: the sharks are not the problem. The sharks are the symptom. They are the canary in the coal mine, except the canary is a 2,000-pound predatory fish with rows of serrated teeth, and the coal mine is the entire American coastline.
We are seeing a 800% increase in shark interactions not because sharks have suddenly become more aggressive, or because they’ve developed a taste for human flesh. We are seeing this increase because we have, as a society, systematically destroyed every buffer zone that used to keep us safe. We have built million-dollar condos on dunes that were meant to erode. We have pumped billions of gallons of nutrient-rich sewage and agricultural runoff into the ocean, creating a murky, bait-filled soup that is a shark’s version of an all-you-can-eat buffet. We have decimated the populations of seals and other natural prey, forcing sharks to hunt closer to shore, right where we’ve decided to hold our paddleboard yoga classes.
This is not a wildlife problem. This is a moral failure.
Think about the American daily life that has led us here. You wake up in your air-conditioned home, which was built on a filled-in wetland. You drive your SUV, which leaks oil and microplastics, to the grocery store to buy a Styrofoam container of farmed salmon. You then drive to the beach, where you slather yourself in chemical sunscreen that bleaches the coral reefs and disrupts the marine ecosystem’s chemical signals. You wade into the tepid, murky water—water that is ten degrees warmer than it was fifty years ago thanks to your lifestyle—and you are shocked, *shocked*, when a creature that has been on this planet for 450 million years mistakes your silhouette for a sea lion.
The audacity of our outrage is breathtaking.
We have convinced ourselves that the ocean is a swimming pool. A giant, flat, blue extension of our suburban backyards, where the only danger is a jellyfish sting or a sunburn. We have forgotten that the ocean is a wilderness. It is the last truly wild place on Earth. And when you enter a wilderness, you are subject to its laws. You are not the main character. You are a visitor, and sometimes, a visitor is eaten.
The real story here isn’t the “shark attack epidemic.” The real story is the collapse of our collective environmental and moral intelligence. We are witnessing the consequences of a society that prioritizes short-term convenience over long-term sustainability. A society that believes it can pave over paradise and then complain when the wildlife doesn't get the memo.
Look at the proposed solutions. In some coastal towns, there is a growing movement to install “shark barriers” or even to cull the populations. Cull the sharks. The apex predator that keeps the entire marine food web in balance. The same species that has been demonized since *Jaws* warped our collective psyche in 1975. Instead of asking, “What are we doing to the ocean that is forcing these animals into our laps?” we ask, “How can we kill them all so I can float on my inflatable unicorn in peace?”
This is the exact same moral bankruptcy that has led to the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, and the collapse of the American middle class. We treat symptoms, not causes. We put a band-aid on a bullet wound. We blame the messenger.
The surfer who lost his leg in California last week wasn't the victim of a "rogue shark." He was the victim of a system that has pushed the shark out of its natural habitat and into a crowded surfing break. The shark wasn't hunting him; the shark was surviving. It was confused, hungry, and displaced.
So, what is the moral path forward? It starts with a profound and humbling admission: we are not in control. We cannot terraform the ocean. We cannot domesticate the wild. We can, however, change our behavior. We can stop treating our coastlines like industrial waste dumps. We can invest in real sewage treatment. We can stop building luxury high-rises on barrier islands that are meant to disappear. We can teach our children that the ocean is a place of respect and awe, not a theme park.
Or, we can keep doing what we’re doing. We can keep blaming the sharks. We can keep building closer to the water. We can keep pumping our waste and our heat into the sea. And we can keep being shocked—absolutely, morally shocked—when the wild pushes back.
The sharks are not attacking us. We are invading them. And they are doing what any animal does when its home is destroyed, its food is gone, and its space is violated.
It fights back.
Final Thoughts
After wading through the grim statistics and the sensationalist headlines, my takeaway is this: the real terror isn't the creature with the teeth, but the blind panic we inflict upon the ocean itself. We’ve turned the shark into a monster to justify our own rapacious appetites, decimating populations that have survived millennia while our own industrial folly chokes the seas. The lesson, as grim as it is simple, is that the apex predator was never the shark—it was always us, and we are the ones who need to be caged.