Product Description

Fish is the aspirational food for Western society, the healthy, weight-conscious choice, but those who eat and celebrate fish often ignore the fact that fishing is an industry as technologically advanced as space travel, with an attitude to conservation 10,000 years out of date. Trawling on an industrial scale in the North Sea smashes everything it does not catch, taking 16 lbs of dead marine animals to produce just 1lb of sole. Regulation isn't working, with fishermen losing money, dolphins dying unnecessarily and fish stocks collapsing, despite the warning of the extinction of cod in the seas off Cape Cod. Because of the shortage of traditional varieties the market has moved on, competing, sometimes illegally, with local fishermen in the waters off Africa, the Caribbean, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. "The End of the Line" also looks at the role of conservationists, the governments and multi-national companies and considers some models for recovery, for example how Barents Sea cod, Icelandic cod, North Sea herring have been rescued from near extinction, the possibilities of fish farming and the potential of locally managed offshore marine reserves. "Charles Clover's book is not only timely: it is absolutely necessary." - Margaret Atwood. "The worldwide scandal of overfishing must be given a public platform before it is too late - I know of no better person to undertake this task than Charles Clover." - Brendan May, Chief Executive, Marine Stewardship. "The global fisheries story desperately needs to be told in book form, and I cannot think of anyone better qualified to tell it." - George Monbiot, author "The Captive State".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #340406 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Country Life
"anyone who loves fish will be fascinated, appalled and challenged by this book...eating fish will never be the same again"

Sunday Telegraph
"blazingly powerful indictment"

Andrew Marr, Start the Week
"It is a rare book that changes one's life...a shocking book about the effects of industrial fishing"

Customer Reviews

A look at the real Captain Birds Eye
I first heard about this book on BBC Radio 4's 'Start The Week' where Andrew Marr described it as one of the few recent books that had left him feeling furious. Marr was spot on. This book sets out clearly the full ruthless horror that is industrial fishing and the irreversible damage it has been inflicting on the world's seas. How many of us know anything of modern fishing and still think of fishermen as quaint and harmless Captain Birds Eye? The seas and their increasingly desperate situation have gone largely unnoticed compared to land based farming and the state of our countryside. Hopefully this book will be a marine version of 'Silent Spring' and help bring about some form of solution. But as the book shows, solving this situation will be no easy task when faced with the comic nightmare that is the political, bureaucratic, commercial and scientific system trying to manage the seas and fishing. The book ends with a helpful guide to choosing which fish are okay to eat and those fish for which the situation is increasingly bleak and should therefore be avoided at all costs. The book is very accessible and written by the Daily Telegraph's environment editor. A must for anybody concerned with the state of our world's environment.

Interesting read with caution!
Working for a fisheries enforcement agency, I found myself agreeing with most of what Mr Clover has written and would heartedly recommend it to those with an interest in the marine environment. Sadly, the narrative does wander and looses focus near the end. There are a few errors that pedants could pick up (claiming that Greenland Halibut is also known as Turbot for example) but there were two big points I disagreed with the author on. Firstly, he is very negative on the use of Satellite Monitoring in Fisheries Control, which has really become an effective tool over the last few years - sadly, UK courts will often disregard this and the views of expert witnesses. Secondly, he touts the use of Blue Whiting as a replacement for Cod. With ICES now calling for a ban on Blue Whiting fishing to the ludicrously high weights of fish caught (Norway alone have an individual quota of 1 million tons which is the total quota ICES have recommended!) This is another fishery we could well leave alone.

Outstanding, moving book! Incredible eye-opener!
The title does not look firstly as tantalizing as what all these pages really contain. You should really take a look inside and you will very probably realize how good this book is.
The End Of Line is definitely one of the best non-fiction books I have bought in the last couple of years. Here you can read what is really happening in the oceans worldwide. People often do not care much for what they don't see, but the consequences of what they (we) are letting happen to the fish resources are terrible.
Mr. Clover explains in a very professional and passionate way the crimes (the word is not an exageration) commited by such countries as Spain and the rest of the European Union, by Japan and many others, in their pursuit of profit: depleting the fish resources of many poor countries, bribing and coercing the government of those countries to let them do what they want with the fish, hiding reports to the public opinion. What the EU is doing about controls is really a bad joke.
We consumers need to wake up. Yes, eating fish is good for your health. Now, if no radical change takes place in the way we are destroying the oceans' biological resources, we are going to be in real trouble in the future and the next generations more so.
This all sounds pretty dramatic and it really is.
Thanks, Mr. Clover