A question from a reader:
Hi Ted
We talked about Sea Shepherds a bit on the South Georgia trip. I probably
was commenting more on the tactics than principle of their mission ... of
course, supporting the intent of stopping whaling, and this is great news!
It makes for interesting television too, especially last season.
A friend of mine stayed at a B&B in Bar Harbor, ME last summer and the guy
running the place was planning on sailing with Watson and company this year.
He didn't have much to say at that time, other than being willing to take
the risk.
So Watson makes a good point ... people may not like his tactics, but he is
the only one really doing anything effective as he's proven this year
especially. What are your thoughts? Does he go too far and actually break
laws and endanger the Japanese in a way that should be prosecuted? And what
about the Japanese captain who got away with intentionally turning and
running down the Sea Shepherd boat sitting dead in the water in broad
daylight posing no threat?
My feelings on Sea Shepherd:
For one, they are bold and brave saying absolutely no to whaling, and willing to back it with their lives, where so many just accept things as they are, feeling powerless. A better world is made by that kind of spirited but ardently disciplined peaceful activism.
And good on 'em for being effective. Nothing else has been and the impotence of any other route to reducing whaling makes the best argument for their tactics I can think of.
Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd Conservancy says the whaling is all about $. I disagree, rather I think it's mostly about nationalism (happy to share a great essay to this end if anyone is interested). But if Sea Shepherd is disruptive enough to render it a huge financial hole for the Japanese government, it makes whaling much more difficult to support politically. Reports show that Sea Shepherd slammed the total catch this year :)
As to laws.... well each in turn, the whalers and the anti-whalers are breaking laws. Just depends on which set of laws you put more stock in. Geopolitics are stronger than difficult to enforce laws governing behavior on open oceans. Witness the discussions that wikileaks revealed about Japanese whaling (I posted on this back in January). Japan is breaking marine sanctuary laws that only apply to Australians and New Zealanders. The only laws Sea Shepherd runs afoul of are maritime safety and commerce laws, and after the Ady Gil was sunk, this got tested.... Australia's courts walked the political tightrope by saying it was mutual fault, mutual reckless endangerment but nobody was specifically criminally negligent. Read: Japan is a #1 trading partner, yet Australians love whales. It's all shades of grey, but laws in this case are hardly the point, as the battle is being waged over nationalism and PR.
What's the ultimate goal here? To me, it's having healthy oceans with full populations of all the oceans wonderful critters. Thus to me this is one little piece. Stop all whaling I say except possibly where there is deep-rooted cultural sustenance at stake. And, no, the argument that whaling is a tradition in Japan doesn't hold water, not at all. There was no pre-WWII open ocean whaling out of Japan. It's no more a tradition than the US dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities is a tradition; we will likely all agree that needn't happen again. When white people go whaling, though, we tend to ignore it compared to when Japanese go whaling, but Iceland shouldn't either:
My perfect little world: whaling stops, or at least slows dramatically, and the many thousands who have been motivated by cries to save the whales grasp the larger issues of ocean health. Whaling is one piece, but no less are issues of marine mammal entanglement and ship strikes (with serious potential to drive the Northern Right Whale extinct), fisheries depletion, noise pollution and climate change. What is nuts is that there were once probably 20 times current numbers of whales on this planet, and while whale populations are in general recovering, they're unlikely to get to that level thanks to all the rest that we're doing to the planet. I want to see Cumberland Bay in South Georgia so full of living whales that it looks like we can walk to shore on their backs!
