It’s about responsibility, jerk

Mine! Mine! All mine!

In an age where we are pushing our planet’s limits in search of resources, we find more and more poignancy in questions of corporate social responsibility. What obligations, either ethical or legal, should govern an a extractive operation as it roots around in the rainforest, slurps up the oceans, or grinds its way into the Earth’s crust in search of coltan, cod, or crude oil?

We have reached a point where the simple ability to access a resource can no longer be interpreted as right to do so.  This kind of anachronistic thinking has gotten us into a world of trouble.  The fact is that we are an incredibly powerful species, with the technological capacity to perform jaw-dropping feats.  We can build immense transit tunnels below the ocean, launch intricate networks of satellites to enrich communication, and splice vegetable DNA into a chicken.  This kind of space-age tech lends perceived legitimacy to business plans which make endeavors like offshore oil drilling appear safe and massively profitable.  A few people make a lot of money, something goes horribly wrong, and we all pay the price.

Crude behavior

The toxic results of this kind of unmitigated rapacity have been spurting into the Gulf of Mexico for weeks now.  A small group of people decided that they were willing to gamble with the health of our planet for their own personal gain.  We should be furious.  Who do these pompous egoists think they are, and why, for God’s sake, are we allowing them to compromise our future for their own profit?

This appallingly selfish approach to business must be stopped.  Given that we live together on a finite planet, the corporations of the future must be those that are willing to take responsibility for their actions.

The concept of sustainable seafood is predicated on the idea that seafood purveyors, which have for decades served as implements of oceanic destruction, must start standing up for the planet regardless of traditional consumer preferences.  The fact is that the average seafood diner or sushi patron simply does not have the time to educate him/herself on the environmental impacts of the vast and ever-changing array of seafood options available to consumers in today’s world.  Diabolically efficient fishing technology coupled with cheap refrigeration and well-organized global freight networks allow us access to countless seafood items for all corners of the globe, some environmentally acceptable and some quite the opposite.  As such, chefs, merchants, and restaurateurs that take the initiative to defend the ocean and its future.  After all, if you work in the seafood industry, it is the ocean that is providing your paycheck.

The face of the future?

Thankfully, we are seeing a gradual shift towards this more responsible way of thinking.  In the seafood world, I can think of no better example than Martin Reed and his sustainable seafood delivery business, ilovebluesea.com.  Reed shoulders the burden of sorting the proverbial wheat from the chaff himself, so his customers really can’t make a mistake in terms of the environmental repercussions of their choices.  Ilovebluesea.com refuses to offer seafood items that are in the Seafood Watch “avoid” category or on the Greenpeace red list, and demands transparency and traceability on the part of his suppliers.  Gear type, catch location, and other important information must all be provided before ilovebluesea.com agrees to offer the fish.  The company is even addressing packaging and shipping issues by using recyclable and/or biodegradable containers rather than Styrofoam and similar petro-synthetic nightmares.

A much larger company also recently took an impressive step towards corporate social responsibility in the seafood world.  Maersk, the shipping giant, has declared that it will not transport any whale products, any shark products (including fins), any Patagonian or Antarctic toothfish, or any orange roughy on its ships due to concerns about the sustainability of these products.  This is a very powerful message, especially when one considers that Maersk ships about 20% of all of the world’s internationally traded sea-borne seafood products.

Full steam ahead

The Greenpeace seafood retailer rankings also help to shed some light on seafood purveyors that are – or are not, as the case may be – doing the right thing.  Companies like Target and Wegmans are taking positive steps and working towards truly sustainable seafood operations, while others, like Costco, are charging full steam, hands clapped over ears and yammering loudly, propelling us all in our mutual handcart down to Hades.

We obviously do not have the legal framework in place to reign in this kind of behavior.  Otherwise, one could surmise, we would never have had a Deepwater explosion, and Costco wouldn’t be selling Chilean seabass and orange roughy in the first place.  Given that, it is up to us as consumers to act.

We need to reward businesses that are making the change towards legitimate corporate social responsibility.  Buy seafood from honest purveyors that don’t try to pull the wool over our eyes.  Some companies are willingly selling out our oceans to line their bank accounts – so why are we shopping there?

If you want to make your money from my ocean, you’d better treat it with respect.  It’s about responsibility, jerk.

Tags: bp, chilean sea bass, corporate social responsibility, costco, csr, deepwater, fin, greenpeace, gulf, ilovebluesea, loggerhead, maersk, martin, oil spill, orange roughy, reed, seafood watch, shark, target, toothfish, turtle, wegmans, whale

License to krill

Increasingly meaningless

Two days ago, the gavel came down in an adjudication decision which may, more than any other recent hammer-strike, determine the future of fishing: The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) officially bestowed its blue-and-white fish-check label to a massive factory operator that targets Antarctic krill.

This is not a good thing.

Antarctic krill are tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that cluster in vast multitudes (known as “blooms”) in the waters of the Southern Ocean.  They form a critical building block in the oceanic food web: small fish consume the krill before being eaten themselves by seals, penguins, toothfish, and other animals.  Krill are also a primary source of nourishment for migratory whales — in fact, the majority of the world’s baleen whales journey to the southern ocean to feed on krill and replenish their energy supplies after depleting their reserves during their mating and calving seasons.

While krill in their vast numbers do seem on the surface to be an “inexhaustible resource,” one would hope that, by this time, we have learned that this mindless assumption will never be accurate in regard to any of the inhabitants of our finite planet.  There is no such thing as an inexhaustible resource.  Ask any great auk or passenger pigeon, they’ll tell you.

Oh, wait — you can’t ask them.

Because there aren’t any left.

Because there’s no such thing as an inexhaustible resource.

Trouble bath

There are a few things that we are certain of about krill.  The first is that the tiny animal, like many other sea creatures — especially crustaceans — is vulnerable to climate change, especially through the ocean acidification trends resulting from the rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.  Nowhere in the Marine Stewardship Council certification system are the potential effects of climate change even discussed, let alone taken into account by the methodology.  Strike one.

Next, we know that Antarctic krill exist in the Southern Ocean – an area adjacent to a land mass that is uninhabited by humans.  The simple fact that we are sending fishing vessels into this area bespeaks an unsustainable paradigm, known as finite expansion.  There is a certain amount of ocean on this planet.  That we continue to fish farther, deeper, and longer simply underscores the fact that we are not approaching the management of our oceanic resources from a sensible and comprehensive standpoint that would account for the idea that one day – one day quite soon, actually – these fishing boats are going to bump up against the ice shelf.  No more expansion.  What then?  The Marine Stewardship Council methodology again fails to even consider these perspectives, concentrating instead on discrete management techniques that do not consider the idea that sustainability is more than a fishery-by-fishery label – it is a way of looking at the world.  Strike two.

Little critter, big mystery

Finally, we know that we have only a very rudimentary understanding these tiny animals.  Krill have been studied only cursorily and we have almost no knowledge of their life history and behavior.  It is irresponsible in the extreme to proceed with the certification of a fishery that is so cloaked in mystery – we have no idea what kind of damage we could be doing.  Strike three.

And yet in the face of all these worries, the rubber stamp comes down and the MSC pronounces the krill fishery to be sustainable.  Let’s not forget that vehement objections to this certification have already been lodged by the Pew Environment Group and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.  These objections were overruled — but let us not forget that the three strikes listed above were not taken into account in the decision, as they are simply not part of the MSC methodology… and if something isn’t part of the system, it apparently doesn’t have any relevance on reality.  Or so the adjudication decision would lead one to believe.

In search of pink gold

There is a conceptual concern here too.  The certification of this fishery gives an unofficial nod to the basic idea that vacuuming up the tiny life forms forming the foundations of the oceanic ecosystem is an acceptable practice.  In reality, it’s not.  Even the United States fishery management authorities banned fishing for krill in US waters, specifically to allow it to remain in the ocean as a food source for other organisms.  Legitimizing and expanding Antarctic krill fishing is simply transferring our unceasing resource demand to a hitherto unrecognized protein source.  This is not the way to move forward – in fact, pulling too hard on this loose yarn just might unravel the whole tapestry.

The certification of krill makes no sense.  It’s a minuscule building-block animal on the other side of the world that simply doesn’t belong to us.  We can’t even eat it – the krill will just be used to make oil, fish food, and other rendered products.  And for this, we may end up short-changing whales, toothfish, seals, and other animals – all because the powers that be refuse to look at the entire issue from a larger perspective.  Fishing for krill will not feed the world — but it just might end up starving it.

Tags: antarctica, asoc, bloom, certification, certified, council, greenpeace, krill, marine, msc, ocean acidification, PEW, seal, stewardship, toothfish, whale

A tough week

It’s a bad time to be an ocean-dweller.

Nets of doom

First, we have the overfishing crisis, which continues virtually unabated. Every day, we yank hundreds of thousands of pounds of life out of the sea, often in strikingly inefficient and destructive ways – bottom trawls rake the floor of the ocean, pulverizing corals and flattening any animals that lack the locomotive capacity to evade them, while pelagic longlines indiscriminately slaughter curious seabirds, turtles, and sharks as collateral damage in our unrelenting quest for seafood.

To make matters worse, President Obama, who was elected in part by an engaged and hopeful environmentalist demographic, has completely turned his back on the oceans and their largest denizens – whales. His 2008 promise to strengthen the international moratorium on commercial whaling has been completely subsumed by an insidious new agenda that seeks to dismantle the moratorium, legalize whaling in the Southern Ocean (including Japan’s ongoing hunt for endangered fin, sei, and humpback whales), and create an unspoken tolerance among the world’s governments for this intolerable activity.

Nice work, slick

And above it all, offshore drilling has finally revealed itself as exactly what we have always feared it would be – an inevitable environmental cataclysm. The ruptured Deepwater Horizon pipeline continues to release untold amounts of toxic crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, strangling birds, fish, and any other life forms unfortunate enough to be caught within its suffocating expanse… which is currently the size of the State of Delaware, not to mention up to 45 feet deep in some areas.

Our oceans and their denizens are besieged on all sides. Given these seemingly insurmountable odds, it is difficult to maintain any sense of optimism when one considers the state of our world’s waters. Still, all is not lost. All three of the aforementioned menaces have sparked resistance, and with the right kind of passion and leadership, we just may find a way out of this mess after all.

Misleading labels: an endangered species

Although overfishing remains a tremendous problem, Greenpeace’s recent Carting Away the Oceans report highlights some significant progress: quite a few major retailers have taken strong steps towards the development of sustainable seafood operations. Companies like Target, Wegmans, Whole Foods, and Safeway are making positive sourcing decisions that reduce environmental degradation and enable their customers to shop with a more confidence. Even Trader Joe’s, which earned both ire and infamy last year for its indifference to sustainability in seafood, has turned a corner.  A recent announcement on the company’s website indicates that Trader Joe’s has discontinued orange roughy and is currently developing a sustainable seafood policy as well as more informative and transparent labeling. Beyond this, the company has called out the need for marine reserves in fishery management and has promised to use its purchasing dollars to support visionary leadership in industry (such as closed-containment salmon).  The work has only just begun, but it is comforting to know that this company, which was once an incorrigible laggard in these areas, may now be in the process of becoming a true leader.

Our government’s efforts to legalize whaling and reward Japan, Iceland, and Norway for their continual disregard of international law and the will of the vast majority of the Earth’s population seem to have hit a snag as well. Monica Medina, the lead US delegate to the International Whaling Commission and the champion of the legalization effort, seems to be backpedaling a bit in the face of enormous public resistance. Opposition to this despicable initiative is so vocal, in fact, that a petition urging Congress to reconsider has received over 100,000 signatures – and the number is growing every day.

Apply lessons learned... please

It’s not easy to find something positive to say about the horrific oil disaster in the Gulf, but maybe – just maybe – we can find a way to coax a silver lining out of this mess. One can surmise that if it is this difficult to repair oil drilling mishaps in an area as accessible and temperate as the Gulf of Mexico, it would be infinitely more challenging in the Arctic. And there will be mistakes in the Arctic. There will be spills, fires, and other accidents – they are inevitable to some degree, as we have so painfully learned. So perhaps our government will read the writing on the wall and reinstate a total moratorium on offshore drilling, including the new leases in the Arctic. While this won’t quell Deepwater’s hemorrhaging, save Louisiana’s shrimp industry, or clean the crude off of any brown pelicans, it would certainly be a massive positive step towards precluding even more – and even worse – nightmares like this from occurring in the future. Even California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has heeded the harsh lessons of Deepwater Horizon and rescinded his support for a bill that would prompt new oil exploration off the coast of California. Now, I never thought I’d want Obama to take a page from the Governator’s book, but in this case, it seems like Schwarzenegger has the right idea.

Thank you

So yes, things look grim for our oceans, no doubt about it – but there is hope. There is always hope. Countless people are struggling against the crises facing our oceans, doing their utmost to heal this planet that we are ravaging so blindly. And it is those people, and their efforts, and the possibility of a better future for us and for our children that keeps hope alive. It is undoubtedly a bad week to be a fish, or a whale, or a turtle, or a Louisiana shrimper – but next week just might be a little better.

Tags: arctic, bottom trawl, bycatch, california, carting away the oceans, catastrophe, deepwater, drill, drilling, environment, fin, governator, gulf, horizon, humpback, longline, louisiana, medina, mexico, monica, moratorium, obama, oil spill, overfishing, oyster, safeway, schwarzenegger, seals, sei, shrimp, shrimper, slick, target, trader joe's, turtle, wegmans, whale, whales, whaling, whole foods

A bad, bad, bad, bad plan

All tangled up

There is no doubt that Japanese illegal whaling is a problem.  How and why it is a problem varies depending on your perspective, but the simple fact that something is rotten in the Southern Ocean is beyond debate.  Whales are having their brains blown apart because of political pigheadedness, anti-whaling activists are causing tremendous economic harm to the whaling fleet, the government in Tokyo is losing face, Japanese taxpayers are wasting their hard-earned money, and sailors and whalers alike are being put in mortal danger by the high-pressure water hoses, butyric acid (which, incidentally, is not strong enough to “burn” anything), long-range acoustic weapons, and other offensive contraptions regularly used in these whale wars (wait — can I say that?  Did I violate something?)

Anyhow, it is in everyone’s interest that action is taken to remedy this situation and restore some semblance of order to those frigid, choppy seas.  In fact, Kevin Rudd – Prime Minister of Australia, the country in whose waters (as much as Antarctic waters belong to anyone) most of the mayhem occurs – has recently served the Japanese with an ultimatum: cease all whaling in the Southern Ocean by November of 2010, or face a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice.  New Zealand, too, has vowed to support Australia’s challenge.

Whale, schmale... I want a new Lexus

The International Whaling Commission (IWC), a multilateral organization tasked with “managing” whale stocks, has proven to be relatively ineffectual.  This is largely due to a voting structure that is quite conducive to electoral fraud.  Rich countries are able to bribe tiny nations that have no interest in whaling one way or the other, and since population has no bearing in the IWC – Brazil, for example, has the same weight as Barbados – large, wealthy nations with a vested interest in the outcome of the vote can easily sway things their way with some well-placed deposits.

Since the IWC can’t manage to do its job, it has created a “support group” tasked with finding a way to tame this bugbear.  Unfortunately, this support group’s plan – known as the Maquieira Plan after Christian Maquieira, the Chairman of the IWC and the mastermind behind this proposal – is just about the worst possible way to deal with this issue.

How do we solve the problems created by the Japanese scientific whaling program?  Maquieira’s answer is simple: we legalize whaling.

I’ll say that again.  Japan is illegally killing whales, so we solve that problem by… making it legal to kill whales.

Open season

Basically, the Plan proposes that the scientific whaling proviso – by which Japan lamely justifies its whaling enterprise – be stripped from the management regulations set by the IWC, but in exchange, the global moratorium on commercial whaling will be lifted, and those countries that currently hunt whales (Japan, Norway, and Iceland – the three problem-child states that have brazenly defied the rest of the universe for the last twenty-eight years and have continued to kill whales regardless of international law and public opinion) will be awarded kill quotas for at least the next ten years.

The quotas themselves have not yet been set, but they will include minke, humpback, and endangered fin whales — just like the ones that are currently being hunted.  So basically, Chairman Maquieira’s eponymous plan is palm-meets-forehead moronic because it does absolutely nothing.  It is also palm-meets-forehead brilliant, however, as it makes the reprehensible actions of the Japanese fleet legal, and thus no further “illegal activity” will be taking place in the Southern Ocean.  Problem solved!

Telling it like it isn't

Maquieria’s Plan is not about saving whales.  It’s about helping governments save face, and giving the policymakers in Tokyo a way out of this mess at the expense of the planet.  Sure, there’s still blood in the water… and we’ll still have warehouses full of unwanted whale meat… and Japanese tax dollars will continue to fund an anachronistic, backwards industry… but hey, at least the politicians get to retain their pride, right?

Thankfully, no one has been fooled by this laughable piece of idiocy.  Canberra roundly rejected the Plan and reiterated Rudd’s ultimatum.  Moreover, environmental groups like Greenpeace have pulled no punches in calling it out as the absolute waste of paper that it is.

Whaling in the Southern Ocean is illegal for a reason — it is an unsustainable and environmentally devastating enterprise.  Solving the problem of illegal whaling by legalizing it is like trying to reduce the rate of gun-related homicide by stabbing everyone to death.

We will end illegal whaling.  We will do it, though, by saving whales – not by saving politicians.

Tags: australia, brazil, canberra, christian, fin, humpback, iceland, illegal, international whaling commission, iwc, japan, kevin rudd, LRAD, maquieira, minke, new zealand, nisshin maru, Norway, sea shepherd, southern ocean, tokyo, whale, whaling

Blubbering and wailing

Battlestar Impractica

Last week, the black-hulled Nisshin Maru, public enemy number one of ocean worshipers around the globe, steamed out of an oddly quiet Japanese harbor.  While traditionally its departure has been the cause of much revelry in the local port of Inoshima, this year saw no fanfare, no sendoff ceremony, no parades – just a shame-steeped ship, skulking southward, bound for the icy waters of the Southern Ocean.

Yes, it’s that wonderful time of year again, the season when the Japanese whaling fleet descends upon the Antarctic whale sanctuary and slaughters hundreds of peaceful cetaceans in the name of research.  The scientific papers drawing from this annual festival of brutality are not publicly released, but the Japanese government is unequivocal in stating that these mysterious and inconclusive studies are a more than valid reason to massacre over a thousand whales each year.  It is odd, however, that no other country engaging in cetacean research seems to need to butcher these animals in order to learn about their habits, behavior, social networks, and physiology.  Strange.

Ouch

Anyhow, the Nisshin Maru and its sidekick fleet of spotter boats and kill ships return to the Antarctic every year to revisit their dubious mission of butchering whales in the name of science.  These ships were designed for one purpose, and one purpose only — the wholesale destruction of cetacean life.  The Nisshin Maru in particular is equipped with all facilities necessary to completely disassemble a perfectly functional minke, humpback, or fin whale.

Once the whale has been speared with an explosive harpoon by one of the kill ships, it is transferred to the Nisshin, whereupon it is hauled up onto the deck.  A team of specialists eviscerates the whale right then and there, all the while holding up signs with asinine messages like “We are conducting scientific research,” just in case there’s a Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd helicopter around.

Don't worry -- they're scientists

The whalers transform the carcass into hundreds of bricks of whale meat, which are then frozen in a specially designed refrigeration unit.  The ship rinses and repeats, and when it has fulfilled its quota, it transports its illicit gains over seven thousand miles of ocean, from the Antarctic coast back to Japan.  Minus the infinitesimal percentage claimed by the scientific research program, the whale meat is either sold on the open market or purchased and held in deep storage by various appendages of the Japanese government.

It’s difficult for many Americans, Australians, and Europeans to not see whaling as an inherently evil activity.  Numerous western cultures have a sort of reverence for these gentle giants.  We admire their playful, intelligent nature, and spend our hard-earned dollars to head out to sea in little skiffs in the hope of seeing one or two whales breach nearby, sending small geysers of mucus and salt water skyward as they break the surface.

Why are you picking on me?

Still, it’s important to realize that this respect for whales is both cultural and recent.  The United States was a major whaling nation up until the early 20th century, and some would argue that just because we Americans have some new-found appreciation for these animals doesn’t mean that there’s any kind of intrinsic reason why a whale merits more consideration than, say, a hagfish.

It’s in this spirit of equality that many Japanese, as well as numerous residents of other whaling nations such as Iceland and Norway, see these animals.  There’s nothing special about a whale that disqualifies it from being dinner.  What is the difference, one might ask, between a whale and some big fish?

I mean, well, yeah, sure, they’ve got lungs, and a complex evolutionary history, and an intricate social network… oh, and faculties for speech and song, and a larger cranial capacity than humans, and even a fourth cerebral lobe that’s unique to cetaceans, the purpose of which we haven’t even begun to understand… but besides all that, what’s the difference?

So bear with me for a moment and let’s assume that there is no inherent reason why whales merit more respect than any other life-form.  Is that reason enough let the Japanese whaling industry off the hook?

Maybe if I have a half-off sale...

Well, no.  See, we still have to contend with the fact that whale meat has been falling out of favor in Japan for decades, and that the government uses tax revenue to subsidize not only its production, but the consumption of whale meat as well.  Moreover, Tokyo has been implicated in any number of vote-buying scandals at the International Whaling Commission, which has caused even more humiliation for the Japanese leadership.  So why do they do it?  The scientific excuse is as bogus as they come, and even the strict economic argument makes no sense when the losses are put alongside the gains.  What’s the reasoning here?

The fact is that behind the sham of scientific research and beyond the crude excuse of simple profit lies a deeper truth, a miasma of old neuroses and insecurities that bedevil anti-whaling efforts and lash the albatross of this anachronistic industry to the necks of the Japanese leadership.  The awful truth of the matter is that whaling has virtually nothing to do with whales.  In fact, whaling is more about all the other animals swimming in the ocean – especially tuna.

Mouths to feed

We’ve already established that a fishing nation may or may not discriminate between whales and fish based on its cultural value system.  If said nation does not do so, then a whale is, for all intents and purposes, a very big fish.  With that in mind, consider the following:

Japan is an extremely densely populated island nation, with nearly 200 million people in an area the size of the state of California.  It has little arable land and traditionally takes the lion’s share of its protein from the ocean.  Japan is also wealthy nation with a strong middle class, as well as the world’s largest consumer of seafood per capita.  A tremendous amount of Japanese GDP is reliant on the seafood industry due to unflagging consumer demand.  As such, Japanese companies must be able to access oceanic resources with as little interference as possible.

Without a cultural reason to discriminate between whales and fish, Japanese leadership can easily interpret multinational opposition to whaling as a precursor to similar efforts that would address other, more valuable (and more endangered) species – such as bluefin tuna. The Japanese bluefin tuna complex is a massive global enterprise worth billions of dollars, and it dwarfs the whaling industry by orders of magnitude.

A whale-heavy Diet

Efforts to protect or manage whale stocks are therefore seen as the ominous foreshadowing of a world where Japanese fleets wouldn’t necessarily be free to ransack the oceans as they pleased.  This idyllic vision is, of course, anathema to the policymakers in Tokyo.

Add this to the fact that the men in power (and it is men, overwhelmingly) in the Diet are the same who spent their formative years in the unfortunate era just after World War II where food security really was an issue in Japan.  People were starving in the streets; Japan’s infrastructure and traditional social networks had been eradicated by the twin tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was at this point that the American occupational force introduced large-scale whaling to the Japanese as a manner of providing protein to the hungry.  Whale meat was used in school lunches, government meal programs, and other subsidized institutions.  One could argue that at the time, the consumption of whale meat actually helped to beat back starvation and to invigorate a populace that was in the grip of malnutrition.

But that was then.  This is now, and the Japanese are healthy and wealthy.  Whales aren’t important anymore.  The principles of sovereignty and food security, however, still are.

Thou shalt not cross

So a line is drawn in the sand.  The Japanese government will fight the battle here, with whales, so no precedent is set for tuna, or for eel, or for crabs and urchin.  Never again shall Japan face the humiliation of starvation, and never shall the outside world again be allowed to interfere with Japan’s sovereign right to exploit the oceans in order to feed its people.  And if a few whales have to die in order to protect this status quo, well, so be it.  Right?

Wrong.

This is unacceptable.  Whales are dying, and I’m not objecting because I think whales are special, or because I think that the Japanese need to be more like Americans, or anything like that.  This is not a racial issue, so anyone who’s planning to come at me with some bogus “you’re a racist” argument, just give it up right now.  It’s a contrived, tangential distraction, and you know it.  (Seriously.  I’m a sushi blogger, for God’s sake.)

It's over

No, I object because these whales are being slaughtered simply to fuel a political pissing contest that has nothing to do with them.  They don’t die in the name of science, or cultural preservation, or even the dollar and the yen.  No, these whales die to appease a small group of powerful old men, riddled with insecurities, whose fear of economic disenfranchisement and aversion to political humiliation is apparently more important than the lives of these magnificent animals.   They die so the Japanese government can continue to deny the fact that if we’re all going to live on this planet, and if we’re going to save the ocean, we’re going to have to work together.

End whaling now.

Tags: antarctica, bluefin, diet, fin, flensing, food security, greenpeace, hagfish, harpoon, humpback, inoshima, international whaling commission, iwc, japan, maru, minke, nisshin maru, Norway, sanctuary, Science and Rankings, sea shepherd, sovereignty, united states, whale, whaling, world war, yushin