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Charles Clover, Blue Marine Foundation’s executive director, has won the Special Achievement award from the Footprint Awards, a celebration of work by individuals and organisations in the food service industry that has run annually since 2011.
The award, which is given for outstanding individual contribution to sustainability and the environment in the previous year, cited Clover’s 30 years’ work as a journalist, covering virtually every issue in food sustainability, as well as his book which became a film, The End of the Line, about global overfishing, and for founding the restaurant review website, Fish2fork.
The nomination also mentioned the book on organic farming he wrote with HRH the Prince of Wales, Highgrove: Portrait of an Estate, and his role in the 1990s in founding the Agricultural Reform Group, promoting agricultural reform. Many of its objectives then, the nomination noted, are now stated principles of government policy.
The award was also given for the work that BLUE is doing, funded by Marks and Spencer, in the Lyme Bay project, where fishermen are rewarded for fishing sustainably, and for BLUE’s part in the proposed designation in 2016 of the largest marine reserve in the Atlantic around Ascension Island in the Atlantic.
The Award, fortuitously, was made on Ascension Day.
The Footprint Awards judges said:
“Charles has achieved bringing the subject [over-fishing] into the public eye – in hugely successful way.”
“I remember watching The End of the Line documentary which really opened the public’s eyes to the impacts of overfishing and got the issue noticed.”
“Charles is a very fair journalist and is always willing to listen to other sides of the argument and modify articles to be scrupulously fair – an excellent and influential journalist who deserves recognition.”
The runners up for the award were David Clark for the Red Tractor scheme and George Eustice, the Fisheries Minister.
