Before and after - from boreal forest to strip mining, that's tar sands. © Jiri Rezac / WWF-UK

Oil is rubbish. I mean, obviously it's been great - you know, they way that it underpins what we call 'advanced industrial civilisation' - that we can make it into petrol, plastic, pharmaceuticals, fertiliser. That's obviously brilliant, because in my opinion all that stuff has (by and large) been great. But now that we've got better, cleaner and smarter ways to power our cities, run our cars and heat our homes forgive me if I find the black stuff a bit... last century. Read more »

Update, December 2009: John West introduces new sustainability policy »

Last year we published our tinned tuna league table, ranking the main retailers and brands on the overall sustainability of their canned tuna. Tinned tuna, which is normally skipjack (the most common variety), is a food cupboard staple in the UK, and we are the second biggest consumers in the world, so we can have a massive impact on improving the sustainability of the fishing that fills the tins.

As well as assessing the information given on the tins (some didn’t even tell you what species was inside!) we also evaluated the impact of how the fish were being caught, and the company's overall sourcing policies.

This female Caribbean Reef Shark in Roatan apparently survived a finning - most do not © CC yukikokubo

Tesco have just announced that they're going to stop selling shark fins in their stores in Thailand.

This follows some bad press on the issue and subsequent lobbying by the Shark Trust to clean up their act.

Sharks are a dividing issue with people – some people love them and are fascinated by them, others are terrified of them. Whilst sharks have an ferocious and fearsome reputation, and any shark attack or alleged sightings of man-eating great whites off Cornwall make the news, we rarely hear of the impact we humans are having on sharks. And we are having an enormous impact.