IMAGINE a world without fish." So runs the simple tag-line for The End Of The Line, the world's first cinema-release documentary film about fish and how there literally won't be any left in approximately 39 years time (2048) due to over-fishing and all of its deadly friends: industry ruthlessness, merciless profiteering, governmental short-sightedness, consumer apathy, general ignorance and outright contempt for the spectrum of marine life by the majority of human beings.
There's also the matter of not being bothered enough to think of anything else to eat in the face of a sumptuously juicy salmon steak fizzing away under the grill, to be served with a drizzle of virgin olive oil and a splash of the zingiest lemon yum! For me, a world without fish is a world where there's nowt for tea. I write as someone who eats fish three times a week, who hasn't eaten meat since The Smiths declared it was murder in 1983 and has been resolutely adolescent on the subject ever since - apart from a few bacon sarnies in the 1990s when the hangover was particularly bad ...
Now, though, the end of the line has arrived all round, as the just-released film globally acknowledged to be the Inconvenient Truth of the oceans thunders home its staggering facts about "the greatest environmental disaster that no-one's heard of".
Since the 1990s, this disaster has seen the voracious global fishing system savage 90% of the ocean's largest species - tuna, swordfish and sharks - bringing about an imminent end to the eco-system, the planet and the one billion people who rely on fish for protein. And if we don't know much about fish in peril because we just don't particularly care (apart from the smiley-dreamy dolphins who inspire "dolphin friendly" tuna, whereas absolutely nothing has ever inspired "tuna friendly" tuna) - then why not? Is it because we "must" eat fish for our "essential" Omega 3, otherwise we'll be dead within weeks from 19th-century scurvy? Or because fish are Earth's own aliens, no-limbed spooky beings with amoebas for brains? Or because we've more important things to worry about, like unemployment? Even though we didn't care in the good old days either as we stampeded to Yo! Sushi in the name of being gastronomically cool (and thin)?
No, we don't care about fish because we don't know anything about fish or how they came to be sizzling on our plates. Plundering shoals in supermarkets, we are ill-informed innocents at best, consumptive zombies at worst: inadvertently slicing the kitchen knife through the cast of Finding Nemo in front of our weeping children, who may never see their own offspring shriek like seagulls at a gigantic skate's rectangular mouth grimacing through an aquarium wall.
But The End Of The Line also informs us that all of that this is reversible: through overhauling fishing methods, catching fewer fish and, when we can afford it, buying only sustainable fish. (And, you know, eating something else.) Two months ago, Chrissie Hynde - rockn'roll's most militant animal rights activist and life-long vegan - contemplated why a truly ethical world was still several dimensions away. "Because people can't control their pornographic tongues," she blared, scoffing a pecan cake. "We've been talking about this stuff for 30 years - factory farms, global warming, recycling When you put something in your mouth, where does it come from, where's it going? Trace it right back to the source. These are fundamental questions but people don't ask them. Why? Because they're sleepwalking, they're indifferent, lazy ..."
An occasional handful of Omega 3-rich walnuts, meanwhile, might be sadly less scintillating than a sizzling salmon but what choice, now, do we have? It's either that or a handful of toxic grave-water, in 40 years' time, where our miraculously abundant tea (and sea) once was.
