October 2009

Having made a startling movie which has changed the way people think about what’s on their dinner plate, Charles Clover and the End of the Line team have now turned their attentions to restaurants which are still serving endangered fish.

A survey of more than 100 top restaurants conducted for their new guide, fish2fork.com, found that nearly 9 out of 10 were serving at least one 'fish to avoid' from over-exploited stocks. And some of the most critically-acclaimed eateries are among the worst offenders - 7 out of 25 Michelin-starred restaurants visited served species officially listed as endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List.

Gatwick will shortly have a new owner. BAA is selling the airport for much less than it originally hoped in order to reduce the company's debt. But the new owners have already indicated they intend to expand Gatwick as soon as possible, including a new second runway.

Global Infrastructure Partners, which has paid much less than BAA wanted, want to give Gatwick a major make-over, including a second runway. An injunction prevents them from doing this until 2019 at the earliest, but GIP has suggested it will get planning applications sorted so a new runway could be built as soon as possible.

As regular readers will know, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, better known as the Tokyo Two, are on trial for intercepting a box of whale meat as part of an investigation into an embezzlement ring within Japan's taxpayer-funded 'research' whaling programme.

The Japanese government subsidises the loss-making whaling programme to the tune of US$5 million a year, making the embezzlement of whale meat exposed by Junichi and Toru a significant crime. But instead of the criminals behind the embezzlement facing justice, it's the Toyko Two who find themselves in the dock.

A large chunk of northern Russia is tundra where the ground is hardened by the arctic conditions into permafrost. Yet even in these harsh climes humans manage to thrive - like the Nenet people, whose nomadic reindeer-herding way of life takes them across north-west Siberia.

But as climate change takes hold, the permafrost is melting, releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane. It's causing problems for the Nenet, altering the availability of their reindeers' food as well as prompting other changes in the local eco-system.

It's finally here.

The movie that changed the way people think about what’s on their dinner plate is hitting a small screen near you. The End of the Line will be screened at 10pm on More4 tomorrow night, Tuesday 20th October.

Ed Miliband receives some light reading material 

As if using a large fluorescent pen to highlight the reason why our volunteers were sitting up on top of the Palace of Westminster, on Monday the Climate Change Committee (CCC) released its first annual report on the government's progress in meeting its own emissions targets.

Not everything in the report chimes with what we think is required (there's no room or need for nuclear power, for instance) but what comes through loud and clear is the scale of the challenge and the radical action required to meet it. Our climate manifesto is exactly the sort of thing needed to deliver it.