There are plenty more fish in the sea Governments subsidise the destruction to the tune of some £13 billion a year and blithely permit over-exploitation. Another report, published yesterday by the New Economics Foundation, shows that more than two thirds of the fishing quotas set by EU ministers since 1987 have exceeded official scientific advice. About a quarter of the marine harvest is taken illegally. And almost one in every 10 fish caught is chucked back dead or dying, as "discards." But, as the Prince's report shows, fishermen themselves are beginning to pioneer change. Mike Park's drive to revive cod fisheries - for which he received an international award last year - persuades a reduced number of boats to concentrate on less vulnerable species such as hake and haddock, permitting them to spend more days at sea if they catch few cod. It is, he says, "a way of incentivising the industry, not punishing it." Ninety per cent of the trawlers operating out of Brixham, Devon, now use modified nets which allow smaller fish to escape, slashing discards by half and cutting fuel costs by a fifth because they reduce drag in the water. Setting up reserves around the Isle of Man has so boosted previously declining stocks of queen scallops that, according to local fisherman Frankie Horne, "we have never seen as many queenies in the sea." And conservation measures have almost doubled the number of North Sea herring in just two years. Establishing reserves has trebled catches from Dauin in the Philippines in a decade and increased eighty-fold the area's income from tourism and fishing. Illegal catching of Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish has been cut by 97 per cent. Regulating a race for crabs in the Bering Sea, which caused people to overload their boats, has cut a five to seven-person annual death rate to one in five years, while increasing wages fourfold. And setting up co-operatives with rights to fish clams in Vietnam has quintupled incomes and increased the number of benefiting households from 9,000 to 13,000 in four years. In all, says the World Bank, managing the world's fisheries sustainably could increase production by $50 billion a year. But obviously there is an enormously long way to go; these are merely a few bright spots in the gloom. But, as the Prince says, they show that decline is not inevitable and that there are "many possibilities for gaining more value from a resource, if only we manage it well." Are you game for the ultimate in free-range nut roast? Preserve wildlife," implored a bumper sticker I saw many years ago. Pickle a squirrel. Now, American environmentalists are taking a step further and urging us to eat them. "It is hard to imagine more sustainable local game," says the online green magazine Grist, guiding readers through dishes such as braised squirrel aurora and risotto di rodentia. Squirrels are abundant, far from endangered, and don't even require refrigeration... squirrel is like the drive-through cheeseburger of the forest. First you have to catch your Nutkin. The knack, it seems, is not to shoot the beast - you'd blow away too much of dinner - but to hit "the tree-branch directly below it, so that the animal would be killed by the concussion of the bullet, instead of the bullet itself ." The magazine produces a hunter who says killing the critters is just the thing to "help you focus on the environment and listen to the world." The meat, Grist claims, is "delicious, mostly because they eat nuts." But it does admit to a drawback: their brains can give you " a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob." Mad squirrel disease, no doubt. Dubious? Don't be. There's one country, apparently, where it's already the rage. Squirrel-eating has been trendy in Great Britain for half a decade, spurred by a nationalistic fervour to kill as many as possible of the invasive American grey. News to me - but perhaps you know different. Peak oil has passed - price rises and crises will get worse Remember peak oil? Concerns that production would soon peak, disrupting world economies, seemed to have been washed away by the financial crisis. But an important article in Nature, co-authored by Professor Sir David King, the former Government chief scientist, now suggests that the peak may already have occurred, harming the world economy. Historically, of course, world oil production has increased with demand. But since 2005 - Sir David shows in the article, written with Professor James Murray of Washington University - it has stagnated at about 75 million barrels a day, despite an overall price increase "of around 15 per cent a year." This, they say, suggests the market has "tipped into a new state... Production is now 'inelastic," unable to respond to rising demand and this is leading to wild price swings. Such major spikes in fuel prices can cause economic crises and contributed to the one the world is recovering now. It is likely to get worse, they add, with the world needing to produce another 64 million barrels a day by 2030, which is "very unlikely," and Canada's tar sands, coal, and even shale gas will not be able to fill the gap. "The future economy," they conclude, "is unlikely to be able to bear what oil prices have in store. Only by moving away from fossil fuels can we both ensure a more robust economic outlook and address the challenges of climate change. Remember, you read it here first.