oceans

Young diners at Nobu get the bluefin message

The newspapers and blog sites have been full of Nobu's bluefin shame over the past week or so. And quite right too. The spotlight of the imminent release of The End Of The Line which features the plight of endangered bluefin, is putting the celebrity-favourite restaurant under increasing pressure.

On Friday Greenpeace ran a full page advert in the London Evening Standard, and the story of celebrities' bluefin backlash has been reported from Hello! to the New York Post. So today seemed an ideal time to pay Nobu's London restaurants a visit too. And that's just what we did.

The End Of The Line author Charles Clover talks to us about his book, the film and the plight of the ocean.

What's the film about?

It's an adaptation of my book, exploring how fishing is currently the most destructive human activity on 70 per cent of the planet's surface.

Fishing with modern technology is wiping out whole ecosystems we have barely started to understand. It's driving species such as the bluefin tuna towards extinction, undermining the food security of billions of people and damaging the oceans ability to act as a sink for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – all to provide us with delicious things to eat.

A detail from today's Evening Standard advert

Update: we visited Nobu London last night to ask why bluefin is still on their menu

The advert above appeared in today’s London Evening Standard, and does so amidst increasing pressure on the swanky Nobu sushi restaurant chain. The issue of course is that Nobu continue to serve bluefin tuna, which is officially listed as an endangered species by the IUCN. That makes it equivalent to serving up gorilla, tiger or rhino on a plate.

Hot on the heels of The Age of Stupid comes The End of the Line, a disturbing and powerful film about one of the world's most shockingly ignored problems - overfishing.

For centuries people have viewed the seas as an unlimited resource which can be tapped into at will, and one that will rapidly replenish itself regardless of how much we take from it. But the more we learn about what's happening in our oceans, the more we realise that this is no longer true, if it ever was.

We've been out and about this morning at the Japanese embassy in London to show our support for the Tokyo Two. Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki are two brave whaling campaigners who are facing prison terms for exposing a major embezzlement scandal at the heart of the Japanese whaling industry.

Fish? No thanks, I'm vegetarian... © CC Michelle Lyles

Sometimes, you are a bit dumbfounded by stories that make the news. Seriously, you couldn't make some of it up, could you? I couldn't let this one pass (so to speak) without comment.

Today's belter is the new study suggesting that feeding fish to cows will help climate change. Yes, you read that right. The theory is something like this – cows, which we farm for milk, meat and leather, produce methane. Most of this is by burping, not flatulence as the comics would prefer. Methane is a bad, nasty, evil greenhouse gas. And we want to cut those down, don't we?

Sea turtles have been nesting at Gahirmatha on the Orissa coast of India for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. But if we don't act now, we could see this change within a decade – an eye blink in geological timescales.

A new port being built at Dhamra, near Gahirmatha, will push the endangered olive ridley sea turtle closer to the slippery edge of extinction. The main threat to the turtles is posed by dredging to make a channel deep enough for large ships to anchor.

So I’m 'it' today, and in truth I'm behind with some blogging about the campaign anyway, so it’s about time I wrote something.

As the oceans' campaigner in the office I tend to get asked a lot of very different things in any one day – and quite frankly don't have time to deal with or consider every single oceansy thing that crosses my email box. Over 70 per cent of the planet = a lot of issues…  the issues that are variously piled up on my desk include marine reserves, whaling and over fishing.

And we can work on those with the public, our active supporters, colleagues in other countries and other groups, retailers, industry, politicians, journalists, artists, celebrities and any combination of the above. It's my job to basically do whatever it takes to make oceans campaigning happen – which can lead to very different 'typical days' in the office indeed.