I know we just told you recently that there are plenty of fish in the sea, but… in reality, that adage may be on the verge of irrelevance. Just last month was the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a solemn reminder that there is much work to be done if we are to save our oceans from disappearing.

Enter World Without Fish, a game-changing book for kids about what’s happening to fish, the oceans, and our environment, and what they can do about it. The book has been enjoying a bit of a media blitz since it came out. Along with this coverage has come an onslaught of Q&As with the author, with some useful information about what adults can do to help. Here’s a round-up of the best questions and answers:

From the NY Times blog Diner’s Journal

What is the one most important action most of us can take to support healthy oceans?

From the LA Times blog Jacket Copy

In “The World Without Fish: How Kids Can Help Save the Oceans,” you take some themes you’ve touched on before — fish, fishing, sustainability and our oceans — and address them to children. How did you make the subject approachable?

Because of all the books I have done related to this topic I have traveled all over the country talking to adults and children in schools about what is happening in the oceans and I have found two things. There are a lot of people who are really concerned, kids in particular, and there is complete confusion and misunderstanding. This is partly because it is a very complicated problem and partly because fishermen, regulators and biologists all talk in extremely inaccessible language, full of inside codes and assumptions. I set out to explain the whole thing in simple, clear language, step by step, starting with Charles Darwin, who explained the natural order we are trying to deal with. I use careful explained biology, politics, economics. I use text and pictures and a graphic novel that puts it in human terms. I tell what is happening, what will happen if we don’t fix it, how we are trying to fix it, what the problems are and what concerned individuals can do about it.

From The Guardian

Is fish too cheap?

Cheap fish is one of the big problems. I promote the idea that fish ought to be expensive. You catch fewer fish, they are of a higher quality and fishermen get better price for them. The agricultural people, like Michael Pollan, are saying the same thing about produce, which raises the question – what are poor people supposed to be eating? I wish I had a smart answer for that.

You once worked as a commercial fisherman…

I always wanted to be a writer and I had in my head that a writer should either go to sea or go to war. There was a war available at the time but the sea was a much better idea. I did it for a couple of summers, to earn money for college.

My most memorable job was on a lobster boat. I was a pretty strong kid and they just needed someone who could haul pots on 200ft of line. We didn’t have a radio; sometimes you’d hear this roar, see a dark shadow and realise a freighter was bearing down on you. I never gave one thought to how dangerous it was. I absolutely loved it.

Many years later I was on a commercial fishing boat as a reporter and I wondered why the hell I’d liked it so much.

So working on boats has informed your work?

It did, it gave me a great fondness and admiration for fisherman, and a love of the sea. Wherever I go I’m always drawn to fishing ports. Fishermen are a special breed of people, they are not salaried, they are self-employed and often working for a share of the catch. It makes them a very independent, self-assured breed of people. I like blue-collar society. Communities of rich people tend to be very boring.

You sport a fisherman-type beard…

I just got back from a fly fishing trip to Idaho with my daughter for rainbow trout. There’s a photograph in the book of me with beard and daughter documenting the first fish she ever caught, a striped bass. The great irony of it is that in a book that talks a lot about overfishing there’s a shot of the author with an illegal oversize fish. I assure you we threw it back.

10 FASCINATING FACTS FROM MARK KURLANSKY’S WORLD WITHOUT FISH
Coming in April 2011–click here to learn more

1. Scientists say that the number of large fish in the ocean has decreased by 90% over the past 50 years.

2. Mammals usually give birth to one to six babies. A bird will lay this many eggs. A fish will lay millions of eggs. For years, people assumed that this meant that fish have millions of babies. Only recently have scientists come to understand that a fish will usually have only one to six surviving babies, just like a mammal or a bird.

Coelecanth

3. There are about 20,000 known species of fish, though there may be many more we don’t know about. Occasionally, a new fish is discovered, as was the case with the coelacanth, a fish thought to have died out with the dinosaurs that turned up on the deck of a South African trawler in 1938. There may be fish that are disappearing without our ever knowing that they existed.

4. The Orange Roughy is a red deepwater fish that gets its name from the orange color it turns after it dies (the fact that it’s named for appearance when dead shows that few people have ever seen it alive). When Orange Roughy became a fashionable international menu item in the 1970s, it was not understood that this species was very different from the other fish we commonly eat. Today, scientists estimate that the Orange Roughy lives for 150 years, which is at least five times as long as the lifespan of most of the fish we know. The problem is that it grows very slowly and isn’t capable of producing offspring until it is twenty years old, making it particularly susceptible to overfishing. Because we didn’t realize this in the 1970s, the Orange Roughy became one of the world’s most threatened fish within decades of being discovered.

5. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest known concentration of floating trash in the world. Located in the north central Pacific Ocean (the area between Japan and the United States), the Patch is alternately estimated to be from one-eighth to twice the size of the United States. The patch is fed by debris from both land and ships. Ocean currents carry the garbage to a point where it becomes a fairly stable patch. Sometimes there are recognizable objects in the patch, such as a chair or a satellite dish, but it is mostly made up of plastics because, unlike organic debris, plastics can’t be readily absorbed by natural processes. Consequently, they are highly poisonous to fish and birds that eat them.

Patagonian Toothfish

6. There is no such thing as a true Chilean Sea Bass. The fish we know as the Chilean Sea Bass is actually a Patagonian Toothfish, which is not a bass at all, and, for that matter, not necessarily from Chile. Since a “Patagonian Toothfish” doesn’t sound very appetizing, the alternate name was created to market the fish internationally.

7. Today, fishing is still considered to be the most dangerous job in the world. Fishermen risk the highest percentage of death and injury—more than even firefighters or policemen.

8. Most farmed fish we eat today are fed wild fish that are caught by massive net draggers the size of factories. These net draggers indiscriminately scoop up wild fish by the thousands and grind them into fish meal, which is then pressed into fish pellets to feed the fish back on the farm.

9.     Ninety percent of the fishing people do is within 200 miles of land, and most of the proven fishing grounds of the planet are now under the exclusive control of a single nation or group of nations. Some of the most destructive fishing is done by wealthy countries off the coasts of poor ones.

10. Because they live in thick, overcrowded pens and swim much less than their wild cousins, some species of farmed fish no longer resemble their wild ancestors. Farmed striped bass are much smaller than wild striped bass, and have an entirely different shape to their pointy heads and short bodies. What’s more, since a fish pen lacks predators and is largely protected from storms and temperature changes, a farmed fish would probably not know how to survive in the wild. If a farmed fish mated with a wild fish, their offspring might also lack these survival skills. Consequently, even just a few escaped farm fish accidentally released into the wild could menace the survival of an entire wild population.