Enforcement

Europe “gets” climate change, but it does not get oceans. America, by contrast, gets oceans, but it needed Al Gore, the former vice-president turned environmental campaigner, to tell it about climate change. As the film based on my book about overfishing – The End of the Line – reaches cinema screens tomorrow, I hope that we Europeans can finally start facing up to our own “inconvenient truth”.

The nightmare future in store for the world’s oceans has already arrived on the Firth of Clyde, where my wife and I spent every family holiday in the 1990s when our children were small. Back in the 1960s when I was a child, two angling festivals were held every year on the Isle of Arran. Today they are a distant memory: the bountiful stocks of herring, cod, haddock, saithe, hake, skate and shark have all collapsed.

In the absence of fish there is an explosion of langoustines – or scampi – which are frozen in batter for British supermarket shelves or fetch high prices when transported live to the Continent. But under the current regime, the cod, haddock and saithe will never recover: every trawler catching scampi in the Clyde throws away 9lb of “by-catch” – juvenile fish and sea creatures – for every 1lb of scampi caught.

Read the complete story at TimesOnline.

The world’s fish will be extinct by the middle of this century if we continue to plunder the seas, a new film claims.

Dubbed "An Inconvenient Truth for fish", the two-year global documentary, The End Of The Line, highlights the fact around 75% of the world’s fish stocks are severely depleted.

It blames increasing demand from consumers, supermarkets and restaurants, fishermen breaking their quotas and politicians ignoring the problem.

Read the complete story at Sky News.

High Street food shop Pret A Manger is to stop selling tuna sandwiches after its boss was horrified by a hard-hitting new film about how intensive fishing methods are destroying the seas.

Pret founder Julian Metcalfe says tuna and cucumber sandwiches will be taken off the menu at his 155 British shops.

He has also banned endangered bluefin tuna from sushi boxes sold at Pret and its sister outlet Itsu.

Mr Metcalfe’s tuna sandwich ban comes on the eve of the premiere at 50 cinemas across Britain tomorrow of The End Of The Line, a hard-hitting documentary about overfishing inspired by a book by environmental journalist Charles Clover.

Read the complete story at Mail Online.

Tomorrow, the first ever World Ocean Day, is the day that makers of a new film which is already making waves have cannily chosen for its global release.

A film documentary, The End of the Line, reveals that hi-tech superfishing is emptying out our oceans so that there are, in fact, no longer plenty more fish in the sea.

It opens with an account of the devastating collapse of cod fish stocks in waters around Canada’s Newfoundland in the early Nineties. Twenty years later, there has been little recovery.

Read the complete story at The Independent.

Protesting actors, pop stars, models and socialites have started a celebrity backlash against the A-list’s favourite restaurant Nobu for selling an endangered fish.

Sienna Miller, Charlize Theron, Jemima Khan, Sting and his film producer wife Trudie Styler are among 31 signatories of a letter to the Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa appealing for him to remove bluefin tuna from his global restaurant empire so that they can "dine with a clear conscience".

The model Elle Macpherson and the actors Alicia Silverstone and Woody Harrelson are also supporting the protest, which follows news that Nobu refuses to stop serving bluefin – a fish on the brink of extinction in the Mediterranean. Instead, as The Independent reported last week, its two restaurants in London are advising diners to ask for an alternative.

Read the complete story at The Independent. 

Charles Clover is so shocked by the vulnerability of fish-stocks that he’s made a £1million film that took him from Newfoundland to Japan. With its European premiere looming, he tells Steven Russell about ‘this extraordinary nightmare’ he hopes will change the world.

Charles Clover returns from an early-morning haircut to the discord of Tinker the Jack Russell, all bark and no bite, yapping at the postman. It’s a stretched metaphor to be sure, but this eruption-from-nowhere is in keeping with the mood of the past few weeks, months, years. Charles and his associates, convinced all is doom if we continue to pillage the world’s oceans, have battled the odds to put their arguments on film – a mission that’s taken them from Lowestoft to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and on to Alaska, Chile, Japan, the Caribbean and back again. Trouble is, it’s been a draining journey literally and figuratively. And, with the European premiere approaching fast and work still to be done, the strain is showing. Charles, for instance, has the air of the Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Does he feel like he looks?

“Yes, I do, most of the time. I very nearly had one at two o’clock in the morning. I do feel, at times, it’s just total meltdown,” he sighs, sinking into a sofa at his home in Constable Country.

Read the complete story at EADT24.