Also by Willie

Krill and other plankton are being viewed as a potential food source, but at what cost? (c) cbcastro

We humans are an inventive species. We never tire of finding new ways to do things. Just as we are plundering ever-stupider places to feed our dependency on fossil fuels, so we're unerringly heading to the most environmentally-damaging places to feed our hunger for fish.

The Marine Stewardship Council has just decided to certify Antarctic krill. This is utter madness.

There's a well-known model of how dodgy big business deals with campaigns against them. To summarise, it goes a bit like this:

• Company X gets some bad press for doing something wrong, especially bad press if it kills lots of charismatic megafauna;
• Company X initially retaliates saying, 'It's all lies, honest';
• Company X then admits it isn't all lies, but comes up with some way of kicking the issue into the long grass, usually some commission or foundation (ideally with a word like 'conservation' or 'sustainable' in its title) or some interminable period of gathering research, in the hope it all blows over and people forget what they were upset about.

When good things go bad: a purse-seine in action

Greenpeace is not against purse-seining, which may surprise some people. Sure it's a big industrial-looking fishing operation, involving huge nets and catching lots of fish. But that's not always a bad thing.

If we are to assume we're still going to catch and eat fish, then purse-seining as a method is probably going to be something that continues. Purse-seining involves setting a large circular wall of net around fish, then 'pursing' the bottom together to capture them. Where purse-seining is best used is with large single-species schools of fish, that shoal tightly together. Examples like herring or mackerel spring to mind. These can be caught relatively 'cleanly' by purse-seining.

The past few days have seen a couple of pretty important meetings in Spain about the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (the CFP). You might not have seen much coverage, which isn't that surprising when there's an election going on, nor when you appreciate that very few people know what CFP stands for. Amongst fishy circles, the acronym is often re-interpreted, but I'm too polite to say what the F would stand for.