Normally, each October, I give up alcohol for the month. I haven’t this year, partly because I conveniently forgot to start, and partly because the booze industry has enough problems without me adding to them. ‘Be the change you want to see’, said Mahatma Gandhi, or someone very similar and, personally, I don’t want to see pubs going out of business.
So, instead, I am giving up eating non-sustainably farmed salmon which I admit, has very little to do with alcohol.
Since I was a boy, the population of puffins around the UK has declined by about a half (Plos One report. 2015). No population is inherently stable, but the line is relentlessly downhill for the puffin, and ends in extinction in about 2060 if it is not sustainably reversed. It is not a coincidence that the local availability of the puffin’s only meal of choice (sand eels) has also declined by about a half at the same time (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology report 2014), helped, of course, by the warming seas. I say ‘local’, because the puffin is a stubby-winged bird that can’t fly very far in one go, certainly not in a way that would enable it to go into the mid-Atlantic and get back quickly enough to feed its chick.
If like me, you have been lucky enough to visit the west coast of Scotland regularly during that time, you will have noticed the growing profusion of fish farms in the sea lochs, and you might have asked yourself from time to time what these fish are fed with. The answer is, among a few other things, sand eels, in vast and unsustainable quantities, pulped and then piped in to the underwater cages. In fact, you might not be aware that about 30% of all fish caught in the world are fed back to other fish which, when I learned it, rather shocked me. I can’t prove the causal link between this and the fate of the puffin but, between you and me, I don’t need to. But then I can’t prove the causal link between Dominic Cummings and everyone smelling a rat on the government’s lock-down policy and, again, I don’t have to.
The beautiful puffin’s rather beautiful Latin name is Fratercula Arctica, literally, ‘little brother from the north’. Probably, bird for bird, they bring more pleasure to people than anything else we have around our shores. If you have never been on a puffin island (Lundy, Skomer, Farne Island etc) during the breeding season, you have missed a massive treat.
Personally, I would rather have puffins on my planet than cheap-ish salmon in my stomach. My little gesture will achieve virtually nothing on its own, but every 1000 mile journey starts with a single step. This is mine. Next month, it is the bamboo razor.
And it means that I can go on enjoying alcohol, which makes me very happy.
Comments