Bermuda's government has an opportunity to do something historic — to commit to stronger marine protections and secure the future of our ocean for generations to come. I am writing to make the case, simply and directly, that it must seize it.

After I moved back home in 2000, I began organising expeditions for visiting film crews and had the privilege of working alongside some of the world's most renowned marine conservationists. A comment I heard repeatedly from divers who have explored ecosystems across the globe — people such as Sylvia Earle and the Cousteaus — stayed with me: “Nice corals, but where are your fish?”

They were not being polite. They were telling us something we already knew but had not fully reckoned with.

Conversations with the late Teddy Tucker, whose extraordinary life documenting Bermuda's underwater world is captured in the must-watch documentary Shark Country, confirmed what many of us had suspected. His generation witnessed massive declines under the post-war tourism boom — increasing extraction, collapsing stocks and the near-complete disappearance of sharks from Bermuda's reefs. Not gradual. Not subtle. Gone.

Setting aside debates about how best to protect what remains, one thing should not be in dispute: we are far worse off today than a generation ago, who were in turn worse off than the generation before them.

The challenge is that we don't always see it. Each generation inherits a new baseline — a diminished ocean that feels normal simply because it is all we have known. I experienced this myself. I spent my early teenage summers in the late 1970s working on one of the largest fish pot vessels operating out of Bermuda. After hauling up our offshore pots at the Argus and Challenger seamounts, we often had to speed away to escape the sharks following us, which is no longer a problem … Even then, they rarely saw them on the reef platform. The sharks were already retreating. I personally have not seen a shark on the platform — ever.

What we were doing to the ecosystem was devastating, though we didn't fully understand it at the time. The oversized pots brought everything to the surface. If you'd eat it, it was sold whole. If you wouldn’t normally want to eat it, it was filleted. If it was too small or inedible, it went into a meat grinder, then mesh bags for bait. Parrotfish were taken at massive scale. Nothing that reached the surface was returned alive.

A decade later, after considerable controversy, the pots were banned and parrotfish were fully protected. The results speak for themselves. For the first time in decades, parrotfish are returning in large pods and schools — and their grazing is almost certainly a key reason our reefs remain relatively healthy, keeping algae in check when corals are under stress. Red hinds and black grouper are also recovering, their known breeding grounds now seasonally protected. Protection works. The evidence is right in front of us.

But the picture is not uniformly hopeful. The other five grouper species — including the once-abundant Nassau grouper — were pushed past their tipping point before protections arrived. They have not recovered. They are rarely seen, if ever. And for those who fish these waters: do you know how Hogfish Beacon got its name? It was apparently named for the hundreds of hogfish historically seen there. In my own lifetime, even as a teenager, I never saw more than two or three together at a time …

That is the true measure of where we are. Not the reefs we have, but the reefs we have lost. Not the fish we see, but the ones that should be there and aren't.

The concerns about livelihoods and access are legitimate and deserve to be heard. But they cannot be the end or the only conversation. The history of our own waters proves that protection and recovery are possible — but only if we act before species pass the point of no return. Nassau grouper did not get that chance.

Doing nothing is not a neutral act. It is a choice to continue a pattern of decline that has defined each successive generation's experience of these waters for the past half century. Our children deserve to inherit a living ocean, not a historical record of what used to be here.

I am not comfortable speaking out, and am usually found behind the camera amplifying others’ voices, which I shall continue to do. However, I believe that at this point the traditionally silent majority needs to speak up.

Protection works. We know it because we have seen it in our own waters, in our own lifetimes. The reefs are speaking. It is time to listen. And to support these efforts.

• JP Rouja is a photographer, film-maker and conservation tech developer, and founder of Nonsuch Expeditions