Europe “gets” climate change, but it does not get oceans. America, by contrast, gets oceans, but it needed Al Gore, the former vice-president turned environmental campaigner, to tell it about climate change. As the film based on my book about overfishing – The End of the Line – reaches cinema screens tomorrow, I hope that we Europeans can finally start facing up to our own “inconvenient truth”.
The nightmare future in store for the world’s oceans has already arrived on the Firth of Clyde, where my wife and I spent every family holiday in the 1990s when our children were small. Back in the 1960s when I was a child, two angling festivals were held every year on the Isle of Arran. Today they are a distant memory: the bountiful stocks of herring, cod, haddock, saithe, hake, skate and shark have all collapsed.
In the absence of fish there is an explosion of langoustines – or scampi – which are frozen in batter for British supermarket shelves or fetch high prices when transported live to the Continent. But under the current regime, the cod, haddock and saithe will never recover: every trawler catching scampi in the Clyde throws away 9lb of “by-catch” – juvenile fish and sea creatures – for every 1lb of scampi caught.