No matter what hat he’s wearing—that of an avid sea angler, newspaper editor, author, husband or father—Charles Clover is committed to the oceans. Currently the environment editor for London’s Daily Telegraph, Clover has been monitoring the seas since the 1980’s. Back then, he noticed that pollution grabbed all the headlines, so he used his platform to bring attention to another important issue—poor fishery management.
In a recent interview with Salon, Clover recalls, “I went to the Shetland Islands and a terrible thing was happening. The sand eels…on which the Arctic terns that migrate thousands of miles depend—didn’t come back that year. The Arctic terns were starving and chicks were dying. It was all heartbreaking stuff.”
That was almost two decades ago, but only two years ago Clover received numerous awards for his book The End of the Line. The book carries readers around the globe—from Africa to Denmark, from New England to Spain, from Scotland to Tokyo—in order to explain how fishery mismanagement and eager demand are devastating certain fish populations.
“In another fifty or a hundred years,” he writes, “all the world’s oceans will be like the Mediterranean or the Java Sea—largely empty of everything but tiny fish attempting to evade the nets long enough to reach breeding age and mostly failing.”
The Guild of Food Writer’s awarded Clover the Derek Cooper Award for Investigative Campaigning Food Writing 2005 while the book received a special commendation at the Andre Simon Memorial Book Fund Awards. Speaking about the book at the time, the Trustees of the Fund said, “its reportage style of writing made the book highly readable […] it is a modern polemic and a harangue from the heart.”