The End of the Line

"I know Charles and he is a very sober, solid journalist – you’d never accuse him of sensationalism. He has researched this issue for years, and the book is a journey of his around all manner of places: the Tokyo fish market, the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, English fishing ports… And there’s a simmering, developing anger. it’s different from the anger of an environmental campaigner, demanding action on something. It’s this sense of building outrage, never losing the plot, never going over the top, but always very well-founded on fact and his own research. It’s a slow build, as he travels around and sees the staggering rape of the oceans. He’s got a description of some of the largest fishing nets – which are big enough to catch half a dozen Boeing 747s if they were flying formation. Images like that are incredibly powerful and in terms of awareness-raising, it’s absolutely staggering. It’s hard to eat fish having read this book. It’s been turned into a documentary that was released as a movie. I haven’t seen it, but I can see why they did it. It’s also such a hot topic. There’s this constant battle between the political imperative of helping fishing communities and meeting market demand, and what the science is saying about what’s happening to the oceans. It’s a very passionate but I think level-headed book. He describes fishing with modern techniques – with radar, and these huge nets – as the most destructive activity on earth. He says that over-fishing is changing the world. We don’t see it, because it’s underwater, but if the same went on, on land – imagine if you had miles of net dragged over the plains of Africa, catching everything – it just wouldn’t be tolerated. But that’s what’s going on underwater."