Charles Clover Talks The End of the Line

by Helen Earnshaw | 8 June 2009

Charles Clover

Back in 2005 journalist Charles Clover wrote s book that looked at the detrimental effect that over fishing was having on the world's fish stocks and the oceans themselves.

Filmmaker Rupert Murray read the book and felt as passionatley about this plight as Clover and together they have gone on to make a documentary that looks at this rising global issue.

And it's time to sound the alarm as scientists have predicted that if we continue fishing at the current rate, the planet will run out of seafood by 2048 with catastrophic consequences.

I caught up with Charles to discuss the movie and what can ebe done to turn the situation around.

- Ok so your new movie is The End of the Line can you tell me a little bit about it?

This is a film about why we should all be much more concerned than we are about what is happening to the oceans, where the biggest influence upon 70% of the planet’s surface is fishing.

We have already passed an important barrier, a milestone, of the moment when wild fish catches stopped going up and started going down as long ago as 1988 and now it looks as though by somewhere around the middle of the century, give or take a few decades if we carry on as we are we will have exhausted all of the world’s fish stocks to the extent that we have exhausted the North Sea cod or the Ground Banks cod off Newfoundland. And that is a pretty depressing picture when the human population is going to go up by a half in the same period.

- The film is based on your book so how did this become a subject of interest for you?

I’m a fly fisherman I fish for salmon and trout and sea trout and it was initially fishing for those fish, I now fish of sea fish with a fly and bass with a fly, but I used to fish for salmon in the eighties when the big salmon were getting rarer and rarer.

And I caught a really big fish back in 1981 and it was almost the last that anyone saw of the really big fish from the spring run on the Welsh Dee and I started wondering whether I really should have kept that fish and then we discovered that angling pressure, just a little fly, was responsible for the decline of salmon on the river Wye and I thought if anglers can cause this much damage locally with one little hook then what is going on out there at sea?

And at about that I time I became an environmental journalist and every time there was anything about fishing I took a particular interest in it when my colleagues thought it was boring. It has just built from there I just discovered a story that is more interesting that my editors thought it was.

- And how did you get involved with the film?

Well I wrote the book, which was very well reviewed, and it always seemed that it worked really well visually, my travel log was a very visual travel log, and I thought it would be marvellous if we could get a really good film made of this; either a pre-standing feature length documentary or as even twelve episodes because it was such a massive story.

But then I discovered that you can’t just do that all sorts of people have ideas about what they are going to put on their television channel or in their documentary and they don’t include your ideas.

So I found myself a producer and then an executive producer, and these were people that I got on very well with and who I didn’t think would betray me, and we set up a little company together and we were trying to think how we would make this film and try to find a director when this guy kept ringing up saying how he had read my book thought it was fantastic and wanted to make a film of it.

We sort of discounted it originally we thought that we had to start from first principles and think who we would like to make this film? But this bloke kept ringing and then he came round and we discovered, it was Rupert Murray, we discovered that he was just as passionate about it and just as annoyed that the rest of the world didn’t get it as everyone else was. He instantly entered the club and became a member of our company and duely made the film.

- The film took two years to shoot so what was the filming process like? And where about did you film?

We filmed all over the world, it was mainly Rupert, we went from Britain to Newfoundland, the East coast of the United States, we went across to Alaska, oh I have missed a bit out we went to the Caribbean where we saw these amazing marine reserves in the Bahamas, Rupert spent a month there.

We then went on to Tokyo, Rupert went to the coral triangle, which is between Indonesia and the Philippines they harvest live fish for the Asian live fish trade. Then Rupert went of to Peru where they have the largest fish stock in the world, the Peruvian Anchoveta which is mainly turned into a fish meal used to feed farmed fish, and he nearly died because he got caught in a trawl net but luckily he was with a Peruvian navy diver who knew how dangerous it was to be filming in the nets and cut him out. Rupert said ‘I always dive with a knife and my knife is about three inches long and this bloke had this knife that he produced and it was about a foot long.’

- When you were planning the movie were there any particular images that you wanted to capture or people that you wanted to speak to?

Yes there were some very distinguished scientists around the world who had led the discovery of how the world’s fish stocks have been eroded; Daniel Pauley and Boris Worm have been at the front end of describing how man’s influence on the ocean is happening on a global scale, we used to just look at if this fish stock would be ok or not and not look at it from a global or ecosystem point of view.

The images that we particularly wanted were of these vast trawlers, the huge trawlers that go out and catch vast quantities of sardine family fish off the west coast of Africa depriving the inhabitants of these fish and financial arrangements with African countries and they are estimated to have taken far more than they were entitled too in recent years.

- I imagine that you went to places where you wre not welcome so what was the most difficult footage to obtain?

Funnily enough we couldn’t get on a super trawler because no one would let us on a super trawler, the researcher tried for six months to get Rupert on a super trawler.

In the end Rupert didn’t even shoot it himself, he shoots most of it himself, I had to use some connections in Iceland, I struck up some good relationships when I was in Iceland last time they are very forward thinking people, and they knew that it would be fine if I got someone onto a super trawler but they had to not say what they were doing ‘Oh no I’m a camera man making a film about fishing.’

It’s these huge winches and sheer size of the machinery and the wasteage that was amazing we have this picture of the fish, that are herring, just spilling down a convayor belt it seems to go on forever and Rupert plays this fantastic plaintive music called Women of Ireland against it and it symbolises all of the fish that we have eaten, more than what we should have done.

- And there are some very harrowing images in the film so what kind of message did you want to portray with this documentary?

We wanted to do two thing; we wanted it to be very stark and quite shocking because I think that people don’t know the killing power of modern fishing technology can be enormously destructive, these are wild animals out there and nobody is looking after them unless it’s us we have to be more rational about this.

The other thing that we wanted to say was the importance of it because every time that we came to summarise the meaning and message of the film then another scientific report and another turn and twist of the story meant it was more important.

The blue finned tuna took an awful pasting from a really rampant year of over fishing in 2007 there were papers that came out that said that the fish stock would be gone, or collapsed to a tenth of what they were in 1950 by 2048, that paper came out very controversially and we disagree with the date because it’s too precise but within thirty years of that it is a real possibility if we carry on as we are.

Then we said to ourselves this is just about individual fish stocks this fishing is such a problem all these fish are declining so what effect is this having in the health of the sea?

And I was very ruthless and told Rupert that he couldn’t speculate and had to find some evidence saying that was a problem and he did find some evidence that the eradication of predatory fish meant that there had been explosions of other creatures; in the Chesapeake Bay the sharks decline has been exactly mirrored by the rise of something called the cow-nosed ray which has eaten all the oysters, so there are now no oysters in the Chesapeake Bay because of the over fishing of the shark.

Then the ultimate ecosystem effect actually dropped as a scientific paper on the day we arrived at the Sundance Film Festival with a finished film, and we have actually massaged it back into the film at the very end, fish poo seem to be what renews the alkalinity of the ocean and keeps it acting as a carbon sink, it’s the world’s most important carbon sink buffering the effects of climate change, and that is dependant on a healthy fish population and we have driven a third of the world’s fish population down by 90% since 1950 and continue to do so and that’s a very serious warning that fishing has wider effects.

The importance of the issue kept rising for us and we think that this issue should be up there considered with the most important issues of our time such as global warming, food security and the human growth and the human population because they are related to all three of them. And it’s not just a discussion over whether a bunch of chaps at the end of a pier can go and catch a bunch of fish or not.

- You have mentioned this already and it talk about it in the film that fish levels have been depleting since 1988 but we didn’t figure this out until 2002 so how did we miss the warning signs?

We missed the warning signs because countries are required to report their catches to the UN Food and Agriculture organisation but the UN Food and Agriculture organisation assumes that they have reported honestly.

But the trouble was that Chinese communist officials were not reporting honestly and there was an inbuilt biased to exaggerate fish catches, most reporting under-reports the numbers of fish being caught but in the one case the over reporting was so great in the Chinese waters that it was beyond the possibility of the productivity of the sea, and that is why we missed this and the official figures were wrong until Daniel Pauley wrote a letter in 2001 and gradually, because it was a very complicated paper and no one understood it, it started to come out.

And that was the great silent spring moment and it was the moment that everyone realised that we couldn’t go on in the future how we had gone on in the past.

- Finally what kind of change do you want to see?

We want people to buy sustainable fish and that means that is comes from systems that is properly and scientifically managed where the quota is set on what the scientists recommend. Above all else we don’t want people to go on eating things that are endangered, in the sense that they are on the IOCN red list.

Number one don’t eat something that is as endangered as giant panda or the snow leopard and that is what the blue finned tuna is, it is a population that has been listed as critically endangered in one side of the ocean and endangered in another side since 1996, and there has been a gold rush on this fish ever since which is a disgrace, it’s a for Europe and it’s happening in Europe and on our watch and within our system of governance.