\'Grumpy old man\' roars

'Big fish are gone and never coming back'...

Katherine Monk, Canwest News Service

Published: Tuesday, March 31, 2009

"I'm all about fish. I'm made of fish. Fish are part of who I am," says David Suzuki, looking decidedly non-scaly as he sits in his Vancouver kitchen.

"Fish are essential to human life in all kinds of ways, but we're losing them at such a rate that they'll never recover. I used to go fishing with my dad all the time and sit in a rowboat and catch cutthroat trout. We'd jig for halibut and we could drop a line anywhere at the mouth of the Fraser and catch sturgeon," he says.

"I grew up with fish. But the big fish are gone now and they're never coming back. And if we don't act soon and treat this with the same focus and intensity of fighting a war, we're going to be looking at a much different world than the one we live in now."

The worst-case scenario approaches science-fiction, he says, because as commercial over-fishing and climate change begin to change ecosystems, the quality of the oceans begins to change as well.

Acidity levels are rising and carbon dioxide levels are saturated. If we continue on the same track, Suzuki says within 50 years waterfront homes will be as desirable as a yurt on a garbage dump as the water becomes slick, acidic, stinky and laden with jellyfish.

"It's already happening in different parts of the world . . . so it's not even science fiction. It's here now," he says.

In hopes of raising public awareness about the crisis facing the world's oceans and fisheries, Suzuki will present a sneak preview of a new documentary, The End of the Line, on Thursday at this year's launch of Projecting Change, Vancouver's environmental film festival.

Though Suzuki is a near-ubiquitous presence on the Canadian environmental and scientific scene thanks to his long-running and highly respected TV show The Nature of Things -- and myriad other pursuits including several books and a forthcoming film with B.C.-raised filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson -- he says he's a "grumpy old man" now and doesn't have the time or desire to play rhetorical games about what's happening to the world around us. Presenting a film such as The End of the Line isn't something he'd normally do, but as he said: He's all about the fish.

Suzuki recalls when John Crosbie announced the moratorium on the cod fishery in Newfoundland in 1992 -- seen in the introduction of The End of the Line, Rupert Murray's adaptation of Charles Clover's bestseller, which got big buzz at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

"We really did think that if we stopped fishing, the stocks would recover. But here we are . . . close to 20 years later and there is no sign of recovery. Things are actually worse. We know what happened: Cod swim like a giant whale with the younger, smaller fish in the middle for protection and the larger fish outside. They move as a whole, but without the older, bigger fish who knew the behaviour, the schools don't form properly. The species disappears."

The End of the Line takes a long, hard but frequently beautiful look at the decline in fish stocks as Murray and Clover criss-cross the globe to examine the near-primal relationship between humanity and fish.

From the Mediterranean to Canada's East Coast, close to 90 per cent of the world's big fish approach extinction. One of those threatened species is bluefin tuna -- affectionately called Toro on any sushi menu. The fish is officially endangered, but the world's most sophisticated fishing fleets are fishing it out -- apparently on purpose -- in order to increase the value of the tonnes now sitting in cold storage in Japan.

"You can find Toro on any menu in Vancouver," says Suzuki, offering up his famously stoic smile.

"The politicians don't care. The media doesn't understand. Here we have a prime minister who says he's all about law and order, but when we signed Kyoto, we ratified international law. Stephen Harper is actually breaking the law -- even though he says he respects it. We never hear about that angle," says Suzuki.

© The Vancouver Province 2009