The end of the line

Author Charles Clover on the scourge of overfishing, disgraceful restaurants, and yes, sustainable McDonald's.

By Samuel Fromartz

Read more: Environment, Fish, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

June 20, 2007 | I first met Charles Clover, the environment editor for London's Daily Telegraph, over a dinner of striped bass in Washington. I used to surf cast for the fish off the beaches of Long Island, N.Y., in the 1980s, a time of stringent catch limits because of the shrinking bass population. Then strong fisheries management and conservation measures led to a dramatic rebound in the fishery, now evident on our dinner plates.

Clover has been monitoring the oceans since the late 1980s. His book, "The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat," was published in the United States last year but, sadly, was met with a deafening lack of attention. That's a shame, because Clover presents a compendium of how precisely we are eating our way through the seas. Scientists reported last year that fish would be gone from the oceans by 2048 if this behavior goes unchecked -- though Clover points out that it's not as if the seas will be empty. In the absence of all the fish we've eaten, we'll also experience a surfeit of species like jellyfish because biodiversity has been undone.

In a globe-trotting expedition, Clover takes readers to Newfoundland to visit with fisherman who no longer have cod to catch; to Africa, where massive fleets roam the seas unchecked to feed the hungry maws in Madrid, Spain, and Tokyo; to Scotland, where successful boats fish illegally, because legal species are in short supply; to Denmark, where sand eels filled with dioxin and PCBs were sent to salmon farms and are now fished out; and to the Mediterranean, where bluefin tuna are being wiped out, while sky-high prices fall due to oversupply. He also outs several high-end eateries that serve tasty morsels of "endangered species."

While this amounts to a depressing indictment, Clover also writes about those who have gotten it right. Their efforts include marine parks in New Zealand that have led to a dramatic rebound in fish populations, and an approach to "fisheries rights" that has proved successful in places like Alaska and Iceland. He also investigates what's in McDonald's fish sandwich; the answer will surprise you.

"The problem with world fisheries is nobody sticks up for the fish," Clover says. Finally, with this book, someone has.

I had no idea how bad the global health of fisheries was until I read your book. How did you get started on this subject?

I began looking at this around the end of the 1980s. When I became environmental correspondent there was a huge fuss about the North Sea and pollution and red tide. But I thought there was too much emphasis being placed on pollution and too little on the killing of organisms, because pollution didn't kill much and fishing actually did.

I went to the Shetland Islands and a terrible thing was happening. The sand eels that live in the North Atlantic -- the sand eels on which the Arctic terns that migrate thousands of miles depend -- didn't come back that year. So the Arctic terns were starving and chicks were dying. It was all heartbreaking stuff.

As it turned out, fishermen were catching the sand eels, mashing them up and turning them into feed for salmon farms. And they were doing that right under the cliffs and on the beaches where the birds were starving. The sand eel at the time was the No. 1 forage fish for the fish industry and I heard via the bird network that they caught so much in Denmark that they were feeding the fish oil to power stations to make coal burn better. So we fingered them for that. People in the House of Lords were saying, "So that's what's screwing up our salmon fishery!"

Then I was sitting at some global warming conference in 1990 -- yes, way back in 1990 -- with the British government's chief scientist, and he said, "You think all these figures on global warming are bad, you ought to look at these figures on fisheries."

It seemed everywhere you looked -- from Africa to Antarctica -- there was overfishing. And it seems like the same problems and mistakes get repeated all over.

Well it does, and it just gets worse, that's the thing, and people don't accept you've got to do something about it.

But we don't always know it's occurring.

When I was writing about the sand eels, the bizarre thing was that the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery was also under way. I read about it six months later. We'd never run any stories on Newfoundland. Even fisheries professors didn't know about it in 1991 -- and they closed the fishery in 1992.

Is that what happened with North Sea cod too? You describe the decline of that fishery over many years.

The fisheries scientists have never accepted there was a collapse of the same order in the North Sea as in Newfoundland. But if your population is depleted by more than 90 percent, is that not a collapse? Newfoundland is considered a historic collapse and in the North Sea they keep fishing.

Next page: The disappearance of the catch