In many ways, I think aquaculture sounds like a sensible idea.

• Natural fish stocks around the world are now dangerously low because of overfishing. By farming fish in giant tanks, we can reduce the pressure on natural stocks while ensuring man’s food supply.

• As the fish nutritionist in this story points out, farmed fish on a controlled diet are free of the mercury and other contaminants found in fish taken from the sea.

• The story also suggets fish-farmers can charge more for farmed fish as they are more standardised in size, and the fish can reach the plate much faster (catching them really is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel…).

• Researchers are also trying to make the practise sustainable, by using waste-water to feel algae, which feeds plankton, which in turn feeds the fish.

But I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about aquaculture – or at least, in the form in which it is described here.

• The description of how the fish eggs are extracted is pretty gross in itself: “Flounder specialist Troy Rezek demonstrated “strip-spawning” on an anesthetized female, harvesting her eggs by pressing them out in a fluid-looking stream.“

• The fish might be free of mercury, but you can bet they require a lot of antibiotics and other medication because they’re kept in such close proximity.

• The story also says that a local company is now “air-expressing” fillets from North Carolina to other major cities in the US. A model built on air-freighting can hardly be the way forward – we’d certainly need to investigate inland fish farms as opposed to flying it inland from the coast.

• The journalist says that, because commercial fishmeal is expensive, the research centre has been experimenting with substitute protein sources such as soybeans. Considering the massive Amazon deforestation that is already taking place to make way for soya plantations, developing yet another industry which depends upon it does not sound good.

That said, the fish do have to be fed on something, and soya would be preferable to smaller fish being taken from the ocean to feed them – a practise which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb mentioned in his lecture in December.

I didn’t have a clue how big the global aquaculture industry is, but when I looked into it, I realised it’s huge:  WWF says almost half the seafood we eat have been artificially farmed, and that aquaculture is the fastest growing food industry in the world.

SeaWeb and WWF are extremely concerned about damaging aquaculture practises – but I see that both organisations are currently helping set up the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) – a new body expected to be in operation by 2011. Furthermore, new global standards for the farming of tilapia were released just a few weeks ago, with several other species guidelines to come, so I’m hopeful that aquaculture will develop in a responsible and sustainable way in the future.

Discarded plastic bags were causing the deaths of birds, turtles, dolphins and other marine creatures which swallowed or became entangled in the rubbish blown out to sea. I’ve dived the Red Sea a couple of times and been disappointed to see litter – it really makes your heart sink.

But the governor of the Red Sea brought in legislation in January, and the campaign seems to be doing extremely well.

HEPCA (Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association) has now given out 50,000 cloth bags free-of-charge; most local restaurants and shops have started giving out paper bags instead, and people are re-using their plastic ones.

In a perfect example of how going green usually has even wider benefits, the making of these fabric bags has generated much-needed employment for local women.

It’s a lovely ‘good-news’ story, but what a contrast to the photo-story on The Guardian site yesterday that highlighted the monstrous swathes of plastic floating around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A mass of plastic bottles, caps and beer can loops the size of Texas is hidden beneath the surface of the water, breaking down into tiny parts that get into the food chain at the lowest level.

The effect on bird life is also catastrophic. Albatrosses pick up the litter and feed it to their young, thinking it’s food. On the nearby coral atoll known as Midway are the corpses of thousands of albatross chicks which have died from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

The photographer, Chris Jordan, did not interfere with the corpses in any way – the photos show the exact contents of the chick’s stomach when it died what must have been its very painful death. There are more photos in all their technicolour glory on his website.

You don’t see so much about ‘Keeping Britain Tidy’ any more. It’s perhaps a less pressing concern in the face of irreversible climate change, but these photos have been a chilling reminder to me of why litter is still very much something we should be worrying about.

They’re much cuter in real life than in the Looney Tunes cartoon. They’re not fussy eaters, and have one of the strongest jaws in the world so will chomp down bones and all, but they’re actually quite a shy marsupial, and an icon the Tasmanians are very proud of.

Problem is, the Devils have developed a lethal form of facial tumour that distorts their face (see gross photo below) and eventually kills them. Unusually for a cancer, it’s contagious, and spreading fast. It’s predicted they might die out all together in the next 20 years if the rate of Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) infection cannot be slowed.

The Tasmanian government has brought in a fantastic volunteering programme to get people involved in helping to save the Devil though. You can join the DFDT team on 11 or 12-day field monitoring trips into the Tasmanian countryside, helping to clean and maintain traps, and record the details of trapped Devils.

Greg Irons, head-keeper at Bonorong Wildlife Centre, has also been telling me about how locals and holidaymakers alike can get involved in feeding and caring for orphaned Devils at his centre, as well as helping build enclosures and educating visitors to the centre.

With all hands on deck, and enough money spent on research, perhaps a cure or vaccination for DFTD will be found. But Australia’s track record is not good – it has the worst record in the world in terms of mammal extinction. There is also a massive risk that the disease could jump from the Tassie Devil to another species….There’s a great little video on the Save the Tasmanian Devil website if you want to find out more.

I’d been looking forward to seeing the film since I first heard about it but was also bracing myself for a very harrowing 94 minutes. The crucial footage of the dolphins being killed – which had never been caught on film before – does not come until near the end but there are plenty of other weepy moments in the build up to the bloody finale.

One thing I didn’t anticipate was to find any humour in the film, but there were actually some funny moments, particularly the absurd Japanese official dubbed ‘Private Space’ who brandished his video camera at the activists like a crucifix at a vampire.

It was fascinating to hear how Japan has been paying tiny Caribbean countries to join the International Whaling Committee in order that they then vote in favour of Japan being allowed to continue whaling.

I’m a big fan of the Caribbean and they definitely need the money right now. But islands like St Kitts, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines try to promote themselves as birdwatching, diving and wildlife destinations, and selling their integrity to the Japanese is going to backfire on them sooner or later.

The film ends with some positive notes, including the removal of dolphin meat from school lunches. But the bigger victory has been since the film’s launch – in September, 70 dolphins were captured but not a single one was killed. Almost all were released again, with just some sent to aquariums.

That’s good news but there’s still more work to be done, to raise awareness of the risks of mercury poisoning and to stop Japan’s wider pursuit of whales and dolphins for meat and to put in captivity. The Cove’s website makes it really easy to sign a petition and write letters – you can also buy the DVD if you missed it at the cinema. It’s definitely the film of the year for me.

“Executives from the Shell Oil Company blasted a floundering, oil-covered sea otter Monday, accusing the small aquatic mammal of grossly exaggerating the effects of last week’s hazardous petroleum spill.

According to Shell president Marvin Odum, the otter has been putting on “quite a show” in front of rescue workers and clean-up crews, and is making the 860,000-gallon, three-mile-wide toxic slick seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is.

“He’s fine,” said Odum, referring to the 40-pound sea creature, who was found washed ashore and appeared to be suffering from anaphylactic shock. “Trust me, before all of the cameras and reporters showed up, our little buddy here was having no problem at all cleaning himself off. Now, all of a sudden, it’s severe spastic convulsions this and complete kidney failure that.”

“Seriously, come on,” the Shell executive continued. “Talk about laying it on thick.”

Odum, who was alerted to the massive petroleum spill early Monday morning, claimed that the attention-seeking otter was not only overdoing it with his frantic and anguished squealing, but that his habit of gasping desperately for oxygen was “melodramatic.”

In addition, Odum claimed that the otter’s rapidly fluctuating body temperature and growing heart palpitations were nothing more than a sad attempt to curry favor with Coast Guard officials, Greenpeace volunteers, and anybody else not smart enough to see right through his “little ploy.

“Give me a break,” Odum said as rescue crews tried to remove hazardous waste from the mammal’s pelt. “Clearly, this otter has some weird, personal vendetta against Shell and large corporations in general, and wants everyone to cry at his pathetic sob story.”

“Just look at him out there,” Odum added while volunteers tried to keep the sea creature from losing consciousness. “The sick bastard’s loving every minute of this.”

Odum also downplayed claims by rescue workers that the otter may not be able to handle the stress of the clean-off process, saying that the animal is “acting ridiculous” and is just doing an impression of what he thinks an otter affected by a massive oil spill is supposed to act like.

“The extreme shivering, the wheezing, the prolonged dehydration, it’s all part of the same gaudy burlesque,” Shell CEO Peter Voser said. “It’s simple: The otter gets some oil on his body, and he thinks that gives him carte blanche to play the victim. Don’t you people get it? This is exactly what he wants. You’re all playing right into his twisted little game.”

Voser even called into question the otter’s mental stability, citing the sea pup’s early attempts to drink the highly contaminated water around him as an example of just how far the publicity-hungry mammal was willing to go to make the Shell Oil Company look like “the bad guy.”

On Saturday, Shell chairman Jorma J. Ollila issued a statement accusing the sea mammal of being a master manipulator, and said that what the otter really needs to do is grow up.

Ollila went on to praise a number of petroleum-soaked seals, pelicans, and sea turtles in the contaminated area, commending them for remaining completely still and silent, and not “making a big production” out of the environmental disaster when rescue and camera crews arrived at the scene.

The one-page document, however, focused largely on the single otter, who as of press time was in critical condition.

“Rescue crews have to stop coddling him and giving him everything he wants,” Ollila said. “Because if they don’t, other otters are just going to pull the exact same crap the next time one of our tankers ruptures and we spill crude oil everywhere.”

For cereal and porridge, I’ve had to swap from soya milk to rice milk, which is much more drinkable. And I’ve had to allow myself one cup of tea with real milk per morning, as I couldn’t finish a mugful made with either soya or rice milk, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge me one cuppa a day.

Entirely by chance I happened to give up dairy at the same time as Natural Soya Week, and I came across a website with lots of useful info.

Unfortunately it’s also confused things for me rather, as I’ve been reading that not all soya products are created equal….unscrupulous soya companies use unsustainable practices, clearing the Amazon rainforest for their plantations almost as quickly as the cattle farmers are.

The European Natural Soya Association (ENSA) which is behind Soya Week has a charter which ensures its members do not buy soya grown on land that was previously rainforest, do not use GM ingredients, and use only natural manufacturing processes – that is, using the whole soya bean rather than ‘isolates’.

Alpro is the only ENSA member that sells products in the UK, so if I stick to that (expensive as it is), I should be assured that my blueberry yoghurt is ethically sound. I saw some infinitely cheaper Sainsbury’s no-frills soya milk for just 60p, but I doubt it meets the rigorous ENSA criteria if it can be produced that cheaply.

Once I’ve got through my box of rice milk, the next variety I’ve bought to test is….oat milk. How they manage to squeeze milk out of an oat – surely one of our driest foodstuffs – is beyond me. I’m rather hoping the milk will taste like flapjack.

So in terms of milk and yoghurt, I’m fairly happy, but the lack of cheese could prove my undoing.

I wondered if goat’s cheese (feta, mmmmm) would be an acceptable alternative, but from what I can gather, goats bred for milking tend to be kept in similar production-line conditions to dairy cows.

Even if you bought organic goat’s milk products, from goats who led the life of Riley, you can’t escape the fact that the goat spends most of its adult life pregnant, so the milk is still full of hormones, and there’s still the question of what they do with all the huge number of unwanted male goats that are born.

So I’m currently in search of some soya-based alternatives.

Soya cheese was a little beyond Sainsbury’s means, so I’m going to have to head down to Mother Earth. I’m not relishing the sound of products like ‘sheese’ though, I’ll be honest……

Hoping she’d made it up, I launched a full-scale Google investigation as soon as I got home. Alas, it does appear to be true – PETA has an entire campaign about it.

The problem seems to be this: because they are farmed so intensively, dairy cows get mastitis, a painful udder infection which creates loads of pus. Around a third of dairy cows will have the infection at any one time, so a lot of it ends up in the milk we drink.

There can legally be up to 400 million pus cells in every litre of milk in the UK. It also contains antibiotics and growth factors given to the cows, and since a dairy cow spends most of its life pregnant, it’s full of cow hormones.

I’ve always thought of milk as one of the most natural and healthy foodstuffs there is, and vital for strong bones and all that jazz. But the more I think about it, the stranger the idea of drinking milk sounds. As Heather McCartney (patron of the Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation) says:

“No other mammal drinks milk after weaning – and certainly not the milk of another species. Would you drink the milk of a cat, dog or elephant?”

It’s not just veggies and treehuggers who are anti-dairy. Some medical practitioners say it has health risks too.

The ethical implications are also massive. PETA’s Milk Sucks website says:

“Male calves, the “byproducts” of the dairy industry, endure 14 to 17 weeks of torment in veal crates so small that they can’t even turn around. Female calves often replace their old, worn-out mothers, or are slaughtered soon after birth for the rennet in their stomachs (an ingredient of most commercial cheeses). They are often kept in tiny crates or tethered in stalls for the first few months of their lives, only to grow up to become “milk machines” like their mothers.”

I’m still looking into it – there are bound to be some good counter-arguments – but in the meantime I’m going to have a go at cutting dairy out of my diet.

I do eat an awful lot of yogurt and cheese so it’s going to be tricky. I’ve already invested in some soya milk: the unsweetened version tastes like crap, to be honest, but the sweetened version is a bit more drinkable.

It ruins a cup of tea, mind. So let’s see how long I last…….

Any celebrity wearing real fur will be pounced upon, but Campbell is the most hated of them all for her outrageous hypocrisy: in 1994 she took part in a major PETA anti-fur campaign yet in the last few years has been wearing and promoting real fur clothing.

Cramped cages and violent animal abuse within the fur trade I could well imagine, but I hadn’t conceived the full horror of the conditions on some farms until I watched this video on the Peta website. The footage was taken inside a Chinese fur farm and is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. Please do watch it, but not just before bedtime:

I would never entertain the idea of buying real fur for myself. But I do have friends who have vintage furs – passed down through the generations, or second-hand furs snapped up from a market stall in Portobello Market.

But does the fact that these animals were already dead – killed maybe 50 or 60 years ago – make them ethically sound? Many in the fashion world think so. Some have even suggested that recycling and reusing of fur is the best possible use for it, as it reduces the need for chemical-intensive artificial fur to be created.

If even vintage fur was banned, the question would be what to do with it. Burn it all in a carbon-spewing pyre like they did with ivory in Kenya in the late 1980s, when 12 million tonnes were burnt to make a statement on the threat posed by poaching?

As a meat-eater, I can hardly get on my soap box to protest against the use of animal products. Cows, pigs and chickens die all the time because I want to eat them. But there are organically-reared cattle who have a good standard of life and are killed in a very humane way.

Is the same possible within the fur trade? Would a coat made from the fur of organically-raised, free-roaming, humanely-killed seals and foxes be no crueller to animals than me enjoying a nice piece of steak?

There are certainly many companies, like Vulpecula, which say this is possible. Vulpecula kills wild possoms which are currently being culled by the New Zealand government because their numbers are too high, and are destroying habitats. Is it better to throw away the carcass, or to make best use of the resource but thus perpetuate the availability of real fur?

It’s something I’m still struggling with.

But one thing’s for sure, we could do without influential celebrities saying she just ‘loves fur’.

If that video made you feel as sick as it did me, take Peta’s Pledge to Go Fur Free here and get your mates to sign up too.

I’m a little bitter because I would have loved to be on the show myself (I certainly didn’t see the adverts, did you?) but I can’t think where on earth they dug up this motly crew.

In Week One, there was Sardia, the mum from east London who couldn’t have been less interested in the wildlife if she tried.

Then there was George whose main claim to fame, according to the narrator, was that he happened to go to public school. Well done, George.

Until this week. there was also Lucy, who seemed a bit more clued-up, but then she does hold a zoology degree. I bet half the students on zoology courses want to get into wildlife films – it was hardly outside the realms of possibility, unlike for factory-worker Alan from Rotherham.

Alan seems a nice chap, but you couldn’t sit through a whole hour of his Joe Pasquale voice-over.

There’s also Sherilynn, who’s afraid of heights and cannot swim. Unfortunately, rather a lot of wildlife lives up trees or in the sea, so she was always going to struggle. Amazingly, she’s still in the running after Week Six, and next week the judges will be deciding between her, Alan, and Anna.

Which brings me onto judge/presenter Nick Knowles himself.

I like Nick Knowles. I enjoy DIY SOS. But he knows as much about wildlife as I imagine David Attenborough knows (or cares) about Medium Density Fibreboard.

There are tonnes of well-known wildlife presenters who could have done it – Steve Leonard, Charlotte Uhlenbroek, Chris Packham. Even Kate Humble and Ben Fogle off Animal Park could claim some prior exposure to the wildlife of Africa, even if only in the cages at Longleat.

Perhaps the BBC will economise on airfare by getting Knowles to film a ‘DIY SOS Africa’ while he’s out there. There’s bound to be a few mud huts with wonky shelves that need fixing.

Something I’ve never considered, however, is their ethical/green credentials. Luckily, the latest issue of Ethical Consumer has done the research for me.

Interestingly, when the magazine looked at biscuits a decade ago, the issues were very different. The emphasis then was on the use of genetically-modified ingredients. A lot of food companies have since moved away from GM products, though it remains an concern.

A massive new issue to be addressed is the use of palm oil by food manufacturers. Indonesia has already given up six million hectares of land to palm oil, displacing local people, creating soil erosion, and destroying natural habitats – of the orangutan in particular.

(I don’t want to put you off your breakfast but see the Born To Be Wild site for more on the brutal killing of orangutans to make way for palm oil plantations.) Clearly that’s to be avoided, so I’m keen to steer clear of products which contain palm oil – or unsustainable palm oil such as that from Indonesia.

Now, rightly or wrongly, I perceive more ethically and environmentally-conscious products to be more expensive, and in the case of biscuits it seems to be broadly true.

Duchy’s Originals get quite a high ‘ethiscore’ (in 8th place out of 31) and they are bloody good biscuits. I’ve enjoyed many a Sicilian Lemon Shortbread – mainly when I’ve bought them for my Nan for Christmas. But at £2.39 per 100g for Chocolate and Vanilla Shortbread, it’s hard to justify them as an everyday biscuit.

The biscuits with the 2nd and 4th-highest ethiscores were also extremely expensive: Island Bakery’s Organic Chocolate Gingers at £3.08 per 100g and Against The Grain’s Chocolate Chip and Hazlenut biscuits at £3.05 per 100g.

The fact that I’ve never even heard of these brands says something about their availability in supermarkets.

What was a pleasant surprise was that the brand which had the highest and 3rd highest scores were not nearly as expensive as some less ethical brands. Dove’s Farm Hazlenut Cookies are quoted at just £1.53 per 100g, so half the price of Island Bakery’s comparable product.

I hunted high and low at the big Harringey Sainsbury’s but couldn’t find these mysterious Doves Farm biccies. Or Island Bakery or Against The Grain, for that matter. Doves Farm might be reasonably priced but where on earth can you lay your hands on them?

The Doves Farm website says Mother Earth in Islington is one of its stockists so I will make it my weekend’s mission to purchase some of their champion biscuits. In the name of ethical research, you understand….