A few Saturdays ago I helped on a Greenpeace stall outside The Forum in Norwich. It was a bright day and there was a small farmer’s market on (I should probably make it clear that it was a small market run by farmers, not a market for diminuative land tillers), neatly tucked around the side where most passers by would miss it, mainly selling local sausages made out of local pigs and tasty scones.
The Greenpeace stall was to raise awareness of the British government’s Common Fisheries Policy that is encouraging overfishing, as highlighted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his ‘Fish Fight’, which sadly wasn’t the giant trout wrestling with said TV chef-based show that I’d hoped for, but still made a good point about the unnecessary waste that the industry creates.
So, what’s the catch? Fishing quotas have to be reached, so trawling nets catch all of the fish in the surrounding area, with those not required being inhumanely killed by suffocation, then thrown back as slurry into the sea. I’ve haddock with this kind of thing! Greenpeace’s caption ‘Change the F***ing Policy' makes a neat point, but I was a bit tentative about offering it as stickers to members of the public.
What are they carping on about? Perhaps we should follow the science?: - http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/1501&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
If you're still fishing for an answer, here's more: - http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/damanaki/headlines/speeches/201...
I wrote a letter to that lovely Mr David Cameron. In it I said, “I hope that the discussions are as clear as we’d like the waters around our country to be.” I thought that a bit of jingoistic rhetoric ought to stir him up, alongside some hard facts, unless he’s proud of having sludgy sewerage around the Sceptred Isle. Would be unusual though, since they claimed to be "the greenest government ever". That said, politicians can be slippery eels, but we mustn’t let them off the hook. To find out more, see the Greenpeace Website here: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/oceans/save-our-seas-fix-common-fisher...
Recent developments from Europe here: - http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/oceans/exposed-organised-crime-sea-201...
Write your own letter to Mr Cameron here: - http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/SeasInCrisis
Earlier in the year, in July in fact, I participated in a Walk For Whales for the Whales and Dolphins Society, because whales can’t walk for themselves. We had a lovely day out walking along the coast at Great Yarmouth, and ended up having a stroll around the Sealife Centre too. Yay. All in all it gave me a warm sense of porpoise.
I did have a poem about some fish to finish things off, but I appear to have mislaid it. It was probably something of a red herring. Sorry about that! Here's a little something I knocked up in the meantime:
The global villains are gathering, here's the reason why
They're drumming their Goldfishfingers
Just to Live and Let Fry
They think they have a license to krill
And throwing Octopussy on the grill
But this is for your eyes only
These diamonds of the sea are not forever
They don't live twice
Be friendly to our fish
Or they won't be so nice
So that's it for now, hope you enjoyed it. If we keep our guard, we and the fishies will continue having a whale of a time! This is the fin.
Tom Read, Norwich Greenpeace Group Member
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