February 2013

When I was little, salmon and shrimps were posh, fancy food, served up at celebrations and the like. Fast forward a few decades and both of those have descended to becoming everyday food, available in pre-packed sandwiches and cheap meals in every supermarket.

But cheap and available at what real cost?

Twenty-one people took direct action to stop the dash for gas and got slapped with a £5m lawsuit. Here’s how you can help them fight back.

It's about time that major fashion labels cleaned up their act. They're still using toxic chemicals and buying from companies that are chopping down rainforests.

Antarctica is special. It’s home to globally recognisable species that we, as a planet, value. It’s a continent apart from all others, and it’s a place we have all pledged to protect for the future.

But this isolated continent is surrounded by a sea, the Southern Ocean, that doesn’t yet have the protection it needs.

It’s a sad day, but I think I have run out of krill puns. Well, I’ve been banging on about this for a few years now, and since Happy Feet 2 basically unleashed every krill joke possible, courtesy of Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, there’s not a lot left.

And that, dear readers, is my worry about krill itself.

Listen up tweeps, put your Twitter addiction to seriously good use. It's Friday experiment time.

With the help of some volunteers we've pulled together a list of all MPs on twitter. We need to lobby as many of them as we can, to make sure they support the urgent amendment to clean our electricity currently in front of Parliament (here it is in the full geeky details).

At a most basic level, the idea of protecting areas for nature and the benefits that brings is pretty simple. Where it gets tricky is when there are competing interests in the form of human activities.

‘Dredge’ is one of those evocative words that just doesn’t sound nice. When it comes to the seabed, the effects of dredging are certainly none-too-pleasant. That’s true whether it’s scouring out the seabed on purpose to remove sand and gravel, or using heavy metal fishing gear to churn up the sea floor to catch scallops that live in it. 

The trailer for the new series of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight (which starts tonight at 9pm on Channel 4) shows quite graphically what dredging for scallops looks like.