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The End of the Line (How overfishing is changing the world and what we eat), Charles Clover
Ebury Press
Reviewed by Lindsay Wright (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)
Some of the most passionate paragraphs in Charles Clover's expose of industrial fishing and its effect on our oceans are the first three.
"Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net between two massive all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across the plains of Africa. This fantastical assemblage, like something from a Mad Max movie, would scoop up everything in its way: predators, such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangered herbivores such as rhinos and elephants, herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthogs and wild dogs. Pregnant females would be swept up and carried along too, with only the smallest juveniles able to wriggle through the mesh.
"Picture how the net is constructed; with a huge metal roller attached to the leading edge. The rolling beam smashes and flattens obstructions, flushing creatures into the approaching filaments. The effect of dragging a huge iron bar across the savannah is to break off every outcrop, uproot every tree, bush and flowering plant, stirring columns of birds into the air. Left behind is a strangely bedraggled landscape resembling a harrowed field.
"The industrial hunter/gatherers now stop to examine the tangled mess of writhing and dead creatures behind them. There are no markets for a third of the animals they've caught because they don't taste too good, are too small or too squashed. This pile of corpses is dumped on the plain to be consumed by carrion."
This scenario, called trawling, happens to sea-floors all over the world on a continual basis, 24/7, and Clover goes on to explain its devastating effect on maritime ecosystems and fish stocks.
Seventy-five percent of the world's fish stocks are fully exploited or overfished and, if nothing is done about it, fish stocks will collapse and millions of people could starve, he contends.
Clover, who has spent 15 years as environmental editor for the Daily Telegraph, documents several instances of collapsed fisheries; the Grand Banks and North Sea Atlantic cod stocks particularly, and the political flim-flammery and lack of will that allowed them to happen and which continues to this day.
The greed that led to the depletion of New Zealand's orange roughy fishery rates a mention but not hoki stocks, which are also being trawled to the brink of extinction right under our noses. I recently passed a fleet of 12 foreign trawlers scooping thousands of tonnes of squid south of Stewart Island; mid-water trawling at 7-8 knots. Those same squid feed many of the Southern Ocean's other inhabitants, notably rapidly depleting albatross and sea lion stocks.
The New Zealand Government recognised that many of our fish stocks were in danger of being fished to death in 1986 and introduced the Quota Management System (QMS) as an antidote. But Clover places little faith in political moves to protect the oceans and urges consumers to vote with their wallets and boycott trawl-caught, endangered fish species.
Clover spends most of his words outlining the depletion of fish stocks in the Northern Hemisphere but the story is the same here. Twenty years ago, at least four trawlers fished from Port Taranaki; now there's one.
Because what fishermen do is obscured by distance and a veil of water, and because fish are cold-blooded rather than cuddly, he argues, most people view what happens at sea differently from what happens ashore: "We have an outdated image of fishermen as bearded adventurers in the mould of friendly Captains Birds Eye, not as overseers in an industrial slaughter house."
The End of the Line is a call to action; a plea for the public to shun illegally - or immorally - killed fish and help save our seas before it's too late. Thoroughly researched and authoritative, it may change the way you eat - fish and chips will never be the same again.