overfishing

John Hocevar, aboard the Rainbow Warrior in Malta, describes how sailors from one of the Mediterranean's largest tuna fishing companies violently attacked a female crew member trying to inspect and document their trawler's cargo. Watch the video evidence for yourself.

Sugababes star Amelle Berrabah helps to promote our 'Endangered Sushi' message outside Nobu London © Dennis Gill

The End Of The Line has certainly been getting the rich and famous agitated on the often-overlooked issue of fish. The film's narrator Ted Danson has been a long time campaigner on oceans issues but in the past couple of weeks many more famous faces have been getting interested in fishy things.

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.

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.

Lords of the sea no longer... bluefin tuna carcasses await auction at a Tokyo market - Japan is the main destination for Turkish tuna (image by stewart, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

No, this is not another story about the crazy things we feed to our farm animals, but rather yet another sad tale of failure in fisheries management … and yet another nail in the coffin for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean.

A pollack called Colin... what's in a name?

Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you. Unless you're at the fish counter it seems, where the retailers Sainsbury's have 'renamed' pollack as 'colin'.

No, it's not April Fools' Day - apparently customers had a bit of an issue asking for pollack. I guess in much the same way as Uranus started being pronounced 'Yoo-ran-uss' at some point in the last couple of decades to avoid embarrassment and puerile jokes.

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.