destructive fishing

Red fish alert! Guppies hit the slopes to help promote 'End of The Line' © Greenpeace / Mackenzie.

Update: guppies go skiing - watch the video »

Park City during Sundance is crazy busy. The Main Street, hotels, and carparks are all chockablock, and everyone has a film to sell or see. So, clearly we needed something to attract a bit of attention and make obvious Greenpeace's support for the End Of The Line film. If you've read my previous posts, you'll be aware that part of the solution (after some complicated logistics) involved five Greenpeace US volunteers  plus two red fish suits from Greenpeace Netherlands (thank you guys!).

Orange roughy: live ones can make an unusual contribution to stemming climate change  © Greenpeace / MacKenzie

Dramatic title perhaps, but maybe not quite so far-fetched. Here in sunny Sundance, one of the questions that has been coming up repeatedly at showings of the End Of The Line movie is, "What about climate change?", assuming rightly that a warming planet will have implications for our fish populations too. Well my practised response to this before I got here was simply that the effects of climate change make all of the issues of rapacious overfishing all the more important. They make the need for precaution when it comes to fishing, and the need for fully protected areas essential.

Imagine an ocean without fish © endoftheline.com

So, what's the movie we're here at Sundance with about? Well, it's an adaptation of Charles Clover's brilliant book on overfishing, The End Of The Line, which is an evocative and shocking portrayal of what we have done and are doing to our oceans – just to put seafood on our plates.

Oi - Oishi, No! (to bluefin tuna on the menu, that is). Guppie spreads the word at Sundance © Greenpeace / MacKenzie

I'm writing this from Utah, a landlocked state in the US, which hosts the Sundance Film Festival each year. Sundance is known as the place for new independent films, and we're here to support a great new documentary movie called 'End of the Line', based on former Daily Telegraph environment correspondent Charles Clover's book about what overfishing is doing to our oceans.

OK so I'm a day or two off the pace with this story (courtesy of a long weekend - well even we need a day or two off once in a while), and didn't find out about Monday's tuna direct action in Paris until I showed up at the office again today. So what did I miss? Well, our French colleagues took the opportunity to protest against France's leading role in decimating Mediterranean bluefin tuna stocks by dumping five tonnes of tuna fish heads outside the door of the French Fisheries Ministry.

Timed to coincide with coincide with the opening of the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), in Marrakech, the action targetted France (as opposed to Italy or Spain, the two other worst offenders) in this instance because French Premier Nicholas Sarkozy currently holds the EU presidency. He has been using it to shape the EU position in favour of the short-term interests of his fishing industry above the need to save the Mediterranean bluefin tuna stock from collapse.

Greenpeace Canada exposed the country's largest grocery store chain's claims to be a 'green' grocer as false this week, after an investigation into how they source their seafood. Loblaws, whose stores account for nearly a third of all groceries sold in Canada, were found to be selling 14 of the 15 species on Greenpeace's 'Redlist' - made up of those species that are most destructively fished or farmed.

To get 'redlisted' a species must be in serious trouble, usually defined as facing a 90% reduction in numbers. Currently top of the Canadian list are Atlantic bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod, sharks, skate, shrimp and orange roughy - all of which are sold by Loblaws.

Latest updates from the impressive ProtectPlanetOcean web site provide convincing support for Greenpeace's long-held contention that marine reserves provide the best long-term solution to the problems of overfishing and pollution which threaten the world's marine ecosystems. In case you've forgotten marine reserves are protected areas, national parks at sea where no fishing or other extractive industries (such as oil, gas or gravel extraction) are permitted.

The site has pulled together studies of 124 marine reserves around the world - scientific peer-reviewed research published in academic journals - to provide a clear picture of what has happened where reserves have been established.

Our oceans are the last global commons, and as such are about as effectively regulated as Dodge City when the West was at it's wildest. As recently as 40 years ago they were considered to be an inexhaustible resource. No amount of fishing could possibly make a dent, it seemed, in the teeming mass of ocean life which constantly replenished itself. It was a one-sided arms race, with increasingly advanced fishing techniques maximizing catches: GPS; sonar; trawl nets big enough to catch a jumbo jet; bottom trawling; fish aggregating devices and open-water 'ranching' are just some of the methods employed to extract maximum profit from the seas.