50 Shades of Veganism Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

by Captain Paul Watson

I have seen the steady evolution of veganism in my lifetime. In the Seventies we had vegetarians but practically no one had ever heard of a vegan.

As a vegetarian in 1979, I was hard pressed to find a decent meal and at dinners I would find myself ordering an omelette for lunch or dinner which actually was considered somewhat unusual. Finding a vegetarian meal was possible but almost always restricted. Finding a vegetarian restaurant was more of a challenge but there was always Indian and Japanese vegetable sushi.

But I have seen the movement grow and although it began slowly, in recent years it has accelerated rapidly to the point where traditional meat venues like MacDonald’s and others have seen the writing on the wall and now are offering vegan burgers and the dairy industry is totally freaking out over coconut, soy, almond, hemp, oat and pea milk.

Vegan scarcity has evolved into a cornucopia of vegan alternatives. The movement has exploded and due to many considerations like animal rights, health, the environment etc, the movement is becoming stronger with each passing day.

My prediction is that by 2030, western society will be predominantly vegetarian and veganism will be the norm and not the exception.

Being a vegan sometimes appears to be a complicated affair. People seem to be vegans for different reasons and there does seem to be a bit of bickering amongst vegans on just how vegan one should be.

The only negative aspect of veganism is intolerance. And it’s not just intolerance by vegans towards meat eaters and vegetarians but intolerance of other vegans.

Sea Shepherd ships have been vegan since 2000 and we have had thousands of crew participate in campaigns so we have had plenty of opportunity to see the various factions of veganism in relationship to each other.

People do not have to be vegan to be crewmembers but they must be vegan on the ship as crewmembers. Because of this over the years we have introduced hundreds of meat eaters to veganism and as a result many have made the decision to adopt veganism as a life style.

Given the opportunity to eat real vegan meals by excellent vegan cooks it is amazing how many people have discovered veganism as a real option – healthy, delicious and easy to do.

But we have also discovered a major obstacle to people embracing veganism and that obstacle is vegans with hostile, holier than thou, angry and judgemental proselytizing attitudes.

I tend to look at this from the point of view of both the animals and eco-systems which really means I do not give a damn why anyone is vegan. The motivations to me are irrelevant. Anyone who is vegan is good for animals and for the environment. Vegetarians are also good for animals and the environment and even people who refrain from eating meat once or twice a week or who cut down on their meat consumption are good for animals and the environment.

Abstaining 100% is wonderful. Abstaining 50% is good. Abstaining 25% is helpful.

Most vegans were once vegetarian and/or meat eaters. People can change but they change best by seeing examples from others. Those who lead by example are helping to recruit more people to a vegan life style than those who try to recruit though shaming, anger and ridicule.

Every vegan meal consumed is a bonus for animals and for the environment.

It’s easy to tell when someone is a vegan because they will damn well tell you but it is somewhat more difficult to determine what kind of vegan a person might be.

Just for fun, I thought I would prepare my 50 Shades of Veganism to illustrate the wide diversity within this thing we call veganism.

VEGANISM

“A philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.” Definition of veganism by the Vegan Society in 1979.

1. True vegan – Absolutely no animal products used in any manner without the need for any justification, explanation, defensiveness or offensiveness.
2. Level 5 Vegan. … A Level 5 Vegan was defined as someone who never eats anything that casts a shadow. While this definition is nonsensical the Level 5 term as it’s used today is a mostly tongue-in-cheek reference to someone who refuses to make any compromises at all in their vegan lifestyle.
3. Paleo-vegan – The Paleo diet without the meat – unprocessed foods.
4. Compassionate vegan – does not consume animal products out of a deep love for animals.
5. Compassionate Ethical vegan – does not consume animal products out of a deep love for animals and a deep concern for the lives and welfare of animals.
6. Compassionate Ethical Health vegan – does not consume animal products out of a deep love for animals and a deep concern for the lives and welfare of animals and sees veganism as a healthy life style.
7. Compassionate Ethical, Health, Environmentalist vegan – does not consume animal products out of a deep love for animals and a deep concern for the lives and welfare of animals, sees veganism as a healthy life styleand is concerned about the impact of the meat and fishing industry on the environment and climate change.
8. Activist vegan – a vegan who is an actual activist for animals. An on-the-ground-gets-things-done-in the-face-of-the-enemy-vegan.
9. Enemy Identification Confused vegan. A vegan who is unable to actually identify the real enemy i.e. the animal abusers, meat producers, hunters, and abusers and instead sends time and energy attacking vegetarians and other vegans.
10. Ethical Environmentalist vegan – does not consume animal products out of concern for the lives and welfare of animals and because they are concerned about climate change and the environment.
11. Ethical Environmentalist Health vegan – does not consume animal products out of concern for the lives and welfare of animals and because they are concerned about climate change and the environment and they also want to have a healthy lifestyle.
12. Raw vegan – A vegan who only consumes raw fruits, nuts and vegetables.
13. Raw till 4 vegan – Raw until 4 and cooked vegan after.
14. Raw Ethical vegan – A raw vegan who adopts a raw vegan diet out of concern for animals,
15. Fruitarian – Vegans who eat only fruits and nuts.
16. Raw Environmental vegan – a raw vegan who adopts a raw vegan diet out of concern for ecology and climate change.
17. Raw health vegan – a raw vegan who adopts a raw vegan diet for health reasons.
18. Organic vegans – only organic vegan foods
19. Organic Raw vegans – only raw organic fruits and vegetables.
20. Home Grown Vegans – Vegans who only eat food locally grown and preferably organic.
21. Competitive Purist Vegan – An ethical vegan who is constantly comparing themselves to other vegans and pointing out how they are better vegans than other vegans.
22. Veggie Jesuit – An ethical competitive purist vegan whose mission is to convert all of humanity to veganism through intimidation, shaming and bullying.
23. Proselytizing vegan – They just really have to preach – all the damn time.
24. Angry vegan – Constantly angry with anyone who is not a vegan.
25. Health Vegan – A vegan because it is healthier but could not give a damn about the environment or animal rights or welfare.
26. Annoying vegan – a person whose advocacy is just damn annoying.
27. Celebrity vegan – Promotes veganism in an attempt to be cool.
28. Compassionate celebrity vegan – Promotes veganism because they are actually cool.
29. Athletic vegan – A vegan who sees veganism as providing their body with more endurance, stamina and overall health.
30. Ethical Athletic vegan – An athlete who embraces veganism and promotes it because of concern for the lives and welfare of animals.
31. Environmental vegan – A vegan who is vegan because they are concerned about the impact of the meat industry and fishing on the environment and climate change.
32. Trendy vegan – A vegan who is a vegan because it’s like – well, trendy to be vegan.
33. Straight Edge vegan – A vegan who does not smoke or drinks alcohol but loves coffee.
34. Plant based vegans – These are vegans who do not like to be called vegans primarily because they are environment or health motivated vegans. Like it or not they are still vegans.
35. HCLF vegans – High Carb low fat vegans.
36. Honey eating vegan – A vegan who for different reasons justifies the consumption of honey. One reason put forward is that there is a need to support bee colonies for pollination.
37. Non-Face Eating vegans – People who view themselves as vegans but will eat animals without faces like oysters, clams and scallops for example and will insist it is still a vegan lifestyle.
38. Leather wearing vegans – People who refrain from eating animals but continue to wear leather clothing like belts and shoes.
39. Flexitarian – A person who is a vegan sometimes but not always depending upon circumstances.
40. A Freegan vegan – A person who views themselves as vegan but eats anything as long as it is free.
41. Fall off the Wagon vegan – a vegan who decides to no longer be a vegan but intends to become vegan again. ]
42. Revengeful ex-vegan – a vegan who now eats meat and passionately embraces carnism.
43. Goth vegans – Goths who practise veganism. It’s kind of their thing.
44. Nazi vegans – Yes there are indeed vegan Nazi cults because they claim Hitler was a vegan.
45. Hindu vegans – Not all Hindu’s are vegan but there is a movement to embrace veganism in Hinduism.
46. Krishna vegans – Hari Krishna, hare veganism.
47. Infiltrating vegan – someone who nefariously pretends to be a vegan for the purpose of infiltrating vegan activist groups.
48. Pervy vegans – Males who pretend to be vegan in order to pick up vegan females.
49. Norvegans – not real vegans just Nor vegans.
50. VEGANS – aliens from the star system Vega.

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The Sierra Club Chooses Killers over Advocates for Life and Nature

http://aella.org/2011/05/the-sierra-club-chooses-killers-over-advocates-for-life-and-nature-by-paul-watson/

May 20, 2011

 By Paul Watson

Blog, Uncategorized

8 Comments on The Sierra Club Chooses Killers over Advocates for Life and Nature By Paul Watson

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On April 21st, 2006, Captain Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, commemorated John Muir’s 168th birthday by saluting Muir’s anti-hunting philosophy in an article that accompanied his resignation as Sierra Club National Director, only a few days prior. We have decided to reawaken Paul’s article, as we feel that it is a profound piece, which echoes the feelings of many environmental, conservation and animal rights activists, alike. Thank you for allowing us to post this. Please click on Paul’s photo above to visit the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s website. In Unity…

The Sierra Club Chooses Killers over Advocates for Life and Nature By Paul Watson

My resignation from the Sierra Club received more letters of support for condemning hunting than criticisms and this was to be expected considering that more than 80% of Sierra Club members do not hunt.

Of the few who were critical of my anti-hunting position, they reportedly took offense to my remarks as being anti-hunting(of course they were) and they insisted that hunters were a strong conservation lobby and thus essential to protecting wildlife and wildlife habitats.

I probably should have been more definitive of my position. Instead of stating that I was anti-hunting or opposed to hunters, I should have said that I am anti-killing and opposed to killers.

The choice is really between endorsing the infliction of pain, suffering and death or opposing the infliction of pain, suffering and death.

Pro-killers will say that those people like me who are opposed to killing are alienated urbanities, of the privileged class, and insensitive to the traditional rationale that supports hunting.

That argument does not work with me because I was raised as the eldest of seven children by a single mother in a small fishing village in a rural area of Eastern Canada. My father was abusive and he was a hunter.

I have spent a large part of my life in third world nations and on the ocean. I oppose the killing of wildlife not because I am alienated from nature but because I happen to believe that you can’t love or respect nature with a gun.

I walked the trap lines in the Eastern bush as a child. I walked them to free captive animals from leg hold traps and to destroy the traps. I destroyed hundreds of these vicious contraptions between the ages of 11 and 18.

I have seen the suffering. In Kenya I watched a mother elephant literally weep for the loss of her calf. In Michigan I witnessed a Canada goose sit for days without eating beside the body of its mate who had been shot and not recovered. In Alaska I saw a Grizzly cub sitting confused beside the skinned body of its mother who was killed only for her hide. In the Yukon, I followed a trail of blood for over a mile to discover an aerial gut-shot wolf staring at me in fear and bewilderment.

What I have observed in the wild is suffering. It was plainly evident and I felt remorse for the arrogance of our species for justifying the taking of lives for sport, for enjoyment, for fun, and for pleasure.

In Zimbabwe I spent time with big game hunters, some of whom reluctantly led rich trophy hunters into the bush because they had lost their jobs as rangers and President Mugabe had ruled that unless wildlife made money the animals would be eliminated. These hunters described most of their clients as slob hunters, arrogant and ignorant and expressed their shame at being forced to participate in the murder business.

I was amazed to discover that a Texan accountant had won a prize from the Boone and Crocket Club for bagging a trophy whitetail deer and then he was exposed when it was discovered that the rack of an animal stolen from a taxidermist in Alberta had been surgically grafted onto a smaller animal on a game farm in Mexico where they flushed it out from cover into the sights of the great hunter’s rifle.

It was John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club who first described hunting as the murder business.

In a few places in the world people hunt for survival. In the past, people were forced to hunt for survival. The constituency the Sierra Club is now courting through its killer outreach program are not people who have a need to hunt for survival.

They are people who spend more money on weaponry, travel and related expenses than the value of the meat they obtain. It is not the meat they are after but the thrill of the kill.

Dick Cheney, when not shooting lawyers, describes how he loves to see the ducks tumble from the sky. I’ve heard hunters describe how pulling the trigger gives them an erection.

These are men who slaughter for pleasure. I call them perverse death deviants and I have no apologies for labeling them as such. Killing for pleasure is a sickness, no different than child molestation or rape.

There is no sport in killing an animal from a distance with a sophisticated tool designed to inflict death. The name sportsman implies that there is a fair contest. There is nothing fair about being ripped apart by high powered bullets.

Hunters target the biggest, the strongest and the best of the species they pursue. This is behavior outside the laws of ecology. It is unnatural predation and certainly cannot be condoned by credible conservationists.

Hunters defend their perverse desire to extinguish life by saying it is traditional. Unfortunately many barbaric practices are traditional. However, modern day hunting bears little relation to so called traditional hunting. Hunters today are more akin to those who eradicated the bison and took only the tongues.

Hunters were responsible for the extinction of the Labrador duck, the Passenger Pigeon, the Eastern Bison, the Plains Wolf and the extirpation of the Grizzly from most of the lower 48 states. They were not only killers they were involved in the act of specicide, the complete eradication of entire species. This was not conservation.

Hunters cite Theodore Roosevelt as a big game hunter who was also a conservationist. This is true, he was both. He lived in a time when killing for pleasure was accepted but it was also a time when racism was accepted as normal and it was considered abnormal for women to have any rights, especially the right to vote. Roosevelt did set aside land to conserve much in the same way that the British aristocracy set aside land as exclusive hunting preserves to keep out the lower classes.

The Sierra Club is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach out to invite killers to join the Club. The leadership of the Club believes that the over 80% of Club members who don’t take pleasure from killing must be tolerant of the less than 20% who do. They want to bring in more killers into the Club.

There is a big difference between hunting and killing. Photographers and film makers can hunt wildlife. It actually takes more skill to hunt a Mountain sheep with a camera than with a rifle. Any nimrod can pull a trigger and send a high velocity bullet unexpectedly into living tissue to shatter organs and induce shock. The photographer brings back nobility, a creature caught in its natural habitat in harmony with the world around it.

The killer watches his victim tumble from the air or crash to the ground as it chokes and gurgles on its own life blood. The photographer brings back life. The hunter brings back death.

I have been a hunter myself. I’ve never killed anything but I have stalked and hunted human poachers. I have destroyed their ships, their rifles, their nets, their longlines and their harpoons. I have snatched clubs from the bloody hands of sealers and defended myself from their attacks. My form of hunting is much fairer and gutsier than these killers who prey upon their unsuspecting and innocent victims. I target the guilty not the innocent.

Once I trekked with Kenyan rangers across the plains of Tsavo on the track of poachers. We followed their trail of elephant carcasses rotting on the ground with only their tusks removed. We found the criminals. They fired on us and killed one of our rangers. We did not kill them. We wounded two and arrested seven. They were armed with AK-47 rifles and our rangers were armed with British Enfield 303’s. We were up against a superior foe and we beat them. It was not sport. It was not fun. It was dangerous and necessary work and the objective was to save lives, not to extinguish lives.

That is the only kind of hunting that makes sense today in a world with a human population approaching seven billion. If every American exercised their right to kill, the ducks, geese, quail, elk, deer and other creatures would disappear quite quickly. There are simply to many of us and not very many of them.

It can hardly be an egalitarian sport if only a minority of citizens can realistically participate. Instead of encouraging hunting, groups like the Sierra Club should be discouraging the number of hunters. The nation and the world needs fewer killers of wildlife, not more.

In Europe over a hundred million songbirds are gunned down every year. Elephant populations have been reduced by 70% in East Africa since I worked on poaching patrols there in 1978. World fisheries are in a state of collapse. Wildlife is getter scarcer and there is more need now than ever for protection.

Why can’t we protect wetlands simply because wetlands need to be protected? Why is there this demand that killers are needed to help protect wetlands simply because they want to slaughter ducks? Canada geese mate for life. Shouldn’t it bother us that we shatter tens of thousands of these relationships every year? Why should we tolerate the accumulation of lead and steel shot in the marshes and estuaries? Why should we tolerate the legal murder of human beings that we label as hunting accidents, especially when the victim is a non-killer, perhaps a child some nimrod has mistaken for a deer.

The son of Sigmund Freud was walking on his own property in Quebec when a hunter shot and killed him. The killer was found not guilty because the death was ruled an accident.

When a stranger can kill you on your own land and get away with it, it demonstrates that our tolerance for this legal killing has gone over the top of acceptability.

One killer wrote me to say that my radical anti-hunting ideas were unacceptable for a member of the Board of the Sierra Club. When did opposition to killing, to the taking of life, to the extinguishment of a living creature, to the wasting of a sentient being become a radical idea?

Sometimes I think we live in such a bizarre world where advocates for life are considered radical and proponents of death are considered normal, where violence is considered acceptable and non-violence is dismissed as unpatriotic or cowardly.

Few killers question the morality of their actions. Once you have reached a stage where you can inflict cruelty and death, thoughts of morality, empathy and respect have long since vanished.

For if a killer of a deer could feel the pain and anguish of his victim or see the fawn starve because of a mother that did not return they would have little appetite for the meat.

Humans who have crossed the line into dealing death and inflicting misery have become alienated from the wonderment of life and no longer see or appreciate the magic of being alive.

Life is to be cherished, protected, defended and championed, not to be wantonly and cruelly destroyed, and certainly not for so frail an excuse as pleasure or sport.

This essay may be freely distributed and published.

Captain Paul Watson
Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-
Co-Founder – The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)
Co-Founder – Greenpeace International (1979)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director – The Farley Mowat Institute
Director – http://www.harpseals.org

Whom when I asked from what place he came,
And how he hight, himselfe he did ycleepe,
The Shepheard of the Ocean by Name,
And said he came far from
the main-sea deepe.
– Edmund Spenser
A.C.E. 1590

http://www.Seashepherd.org
Tel: 360-370-5650
Fax: 360-370-5651

Address: P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, Wa 98250 USA

“ECO-PIRATE: THE STORY OF PAUL WATSON” is a feature-length documentary about a man on a mission to save the planet and its oceans. Currently being screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival to wide acclaim, this documentary is the first of it’s kind to follow the life of Captain Paul Watson’s tireless battle to save our oceans. Do not miss this film!

Shark charities flooded with donations after Trump says he hopes sharks die

 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/shark-charities-flooded-with-donations-after-trump-says-he-hopes-sharks-die-2018-01-23

Published: Jan 25, 2018 10:25 a.m. ET

Raising money to protect the feared sea creatures can be a challenge

Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection

Charities that help sharks have seen an uptick in donations since the publication of President Donald Trump’s anti-shark comments.

By

LESLIEALBRECHT

PERSONAL FINANCE REPORTER

President Donald Trump’s reported death wish for sharks has been a lifeline for charities that protect them.

Shark-related nonprofits have been receiving a steady stream of donations in the wake of Trump reportedly telling adult film actress Stormy Daniels, “I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.” Trump’s comments came to light in an In Touch Weekly interviewwith Daniels, who reportedly had a fling with Trump in 2006. Daniels said Trump was “obsessed” with sharks and “terrified” of them.

Since Trump’s strong anti-shark stance became public late last week, donations have poured in at the nonprofits Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, their leaders told MarketWatch.

“It’s actually more dangerous to play golf than it is to go swimming in the ocean with sharks.”

— Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

“We have been receiving donations in Trump’s name since the story was published,” said Cynthia Wilgren, chief executive officer and co-founder of Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, based in Chatham, Mass. Most of the money has come from first-time donors, she added. “It can certainly be a challenge to raise money for a species that most people fear,” Wilgren said.

Captain Paul Watson, founder of the Burbank, Calif. based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said his group had received “quite a few” donations from benefactors who specifically mentioned Trump’s comments.

How machine learning is teaching drones to see for themselves

He and his fellow conservationists consider Trump’s comments “ignorant,” Watson said, but they’ve had a positive effect. “Anything that focuses attention on the plight of sharks worldwide is valuable, so I guess in that way the president did good service,” Watson said.

His group sends boats across the world to catch poachers who illegally kill sea animals. Some 75 million sharks a year are killed, often when their fins are cut off and they are tossed back into the ocean, Watson said. When their fins are removed, sharks are unable to swim effectively, so they sink down to the bottom and die or get eaten by other predators. Sharks are also killed to make shark leather shoes and belts, and for shark liver oil, which is used as a dietary supplement and in beauty products such as lipstick, according to Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

The popular image of sharks as super predators is unfair, Watson said. While hundreds of millions of people swim in oceans every year, sharks kill only about five people a year around the world, Watson said. “It’s actually more dangerous to play golf than it is to go swimming in the ocean with sharks,” Watson said. “Quite a few more die from lightning strikes and bee stings while playing golf than from sharks.”

Don’t miss: Trump may hate sharks, but these animals cause more deaths each year

Sharks are a critical part of ocean ecosystems and their fate is closely tied to the health of oceans as a whole. If they go extinct, humans wouldn’t be too far behind, Watson claimed.

The president’s hatred of sharks pre-dates his time in office, according to his Twitter history. Back in 2013 he said he’s not a fan of the animals. In November 2017, Trump drew the ire of conservationists after eating shark fin soup during a visit to Vietnam.

Shark charities and other nonprofits face an uncertain future under Trump’s new tax law. Some estimate that charities could see a $13 to $20 billion drop in donations because of changes in the tax code.

Oh Despicable Me!

 

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

For all of the people who hate me, criticize me, loathe me, troll me, threaten me and generally carry on like I really give a damn, all I can say is thanks for taking your time to say so. It is much appreciated.

Sometimes you’re amusing, but most of the time you’re simply boring. But it’s no bother, because I have this simple delete button and a cyber dungeon to conveniently drop your ass into the internet version of the phantom zone, where for all intents and purposes you simply no longer exist on my particular plane of existence.

However I must confess that I do love the fact that so many people get all hot and bothered and spend time talking, complaining, ranting, sharing and even going to the trouble of setting up websites and Facebook pages simply to attack me. How awesome and flattering is that!

People I don’t know and have never met, hate me and I think that’s pretty damn impressive.

I considerate it a disappointing day when I don’t receive at least one hate message. It’s good to know that they know that I’m still here, pissing them off.

A person without enemies is a person who does not do much. Give me a person without enemies and I can guarantee few people really know or care who they are.

All great people have enemies. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Dianne Fossey, John Kennedy, Malala Yousafzai, Russell Means, and so many others including even Jesus Christ. I can only aspire to have the number of enemies they have had. In fact the more enemies one has, the more one achieves. Everyone needs a legion of enemies to inspire them to greater and better deeds and to validate their achievements.

I am not in the business of pleasing everyone. In fact I’m not in the business of pleasing anyone. I’m in the business of defending biodiversity from the irresponsible actions of my own species and that guarantees me volumes of enemies.
I pick up enemies like a dog picks up fleas except that I can shake them off easier than the dog.

If I can please my wife, my daughter, my son, my family, supporters, and my friends, I’m happy. Everyone else is irrelevant.

Even allies become enemies at the slightest disagreement. The infighting within movements is hilarious, like when the People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea attacked the Judaean People’s Liberation Front in Life of Brian.

We really can be a silly assortment species of primates.

I often wonder if a person who sends me a vile or threatening message imagines the said message as being hurtful or damaging to me. Do they really think that I shed a tear with each word? Do they really think I care what they think? I suppose it’s a good thing if they feel a sense of satisfaction with the illusionary belief that they are threatening me. If they deprive some sort of pleasure from it, all I can say, is go for it and enjoy yourself.

Now although I don’t care what people say about me or to me, I am posting this really to help people who are sensitive to attacks from perfect strangers in the internet. It is easy for me to ignore bullying because I simply don’t give a damn but there are people, especially younger people who are indeed hurt by comments from strangers and sometimes such bullying has disturbing and sometimes tragic consequences.

So I would like to advise such people to treat offensive and threatening comments as nothing more than a momentary fart in a windstorm. You may get a whiff but the stench is gone in seconds. People only have power over other people when people allow other people to have power over them.

So my advice to anyone plagued by trolls, haters and critics is simple. Ignore them, block them and delete them. They and their opinions simply do not matter.

Words are not bullets. Words are harmless.

Hell even being called names can be flattering. Years ago I was at the home of a famous Hollywood personality when the phone rang. I picked it up and a familiar voice said “is Maurice there?”

I said no but would you like to leave a message. The voice answered, “yes tell him Orson called.”

“Orson who”” I replied.

“Orson Welles, you idiot.”

Was I offended? Hell no. Orson Welles called me an idiot because I did not recognize his voice. How awesome was that?

How Do We Oppose Murderous Psychopaths?

by Captain Paul Watson:

In 2003, Sea Shepherd brought the issue of the dolphin slaughter to worldwide attention. In October of that year we sent photographer Brooke MacDonald to Taiji. Her pictures appeared on the cover of newspapers around the world and her video was aired on CNN.

Yet the killing continued.

In November two Sea Shepherd volunteers including Sea Shepherd Global Director dove into the Cove, cut the nets and freed 16 Pilot whales. They were both arrested and spent a month in prison and were fined $8,000.

And the killing continued.

In 2009 Louie Psihoyos and Ric O’Barry made a documentary film called The Cove. It won the Academy Award for best documentary film and exposed the horror of Taiji to hundreds of thousands of people.

Yet the killing continued.

Sea Shepherd’s Cove Guardians were on the ground every year since 2009. Seven years for six months, a total of 42 months on the ground, livestreaming, witnessing, filming, photographing, protesting, monitoring – watching dolphins die and unable to do anything to physically stop it.
During that time we sent in hundreds of volunteers.

After yet after 14 years the only dolphins saved were the 16 freed when Sea Shepherd cut the nets in 2003.

Since 2014 Japan has been denying entry to Sea Shepherd Cove Guardians eliminating 100% of our Cove Guardian leaders and most of the volunteers.

This year, Japan has made Sea Shepherd tactics subject to charges of terrorism. Under the new laws, 2 people with a camera may be charged with terrorism.

This is, to put it bluntly – insane!

These official decisions have convinced me that we are dealing with a psychopathic attitude where every single obstacle is being thrown into the path of anyone who opposes the mass slaughter of dolphins in Taiji.

Since September 1st, Sea Shepherd has received some criticism for not being in Taiji this season. This criticism is quite unfair. How can the Cove Guardians be in Taiji when they can’t even get into Japan? And how can they expect us to send inexperienced volunteers into a position where they will be charged with an act of terrorism just for being there?

Some critics say that the Dolphin Project is there, so why is Sea Shepherd not there?

It is true that Ric O’Barry has been banned from Japan but very few Dolphin Project Cove Monitors have been denied entry – yet. Sea Shepherd is happy that Dolphin Project people can be on the ground but I predict their freedom to do so will soon be greatly diminished.

The Japanese government wants to remove observers.

The thugs in Taiji are psychopaths completely lacking compassion and empathy for the dolphins. The attached image screams the word – psychopath!

The politicians enabling the mass slaughter are also psychopaths lacking empathy and compassion.

Being on the ground in Taiji now is a fruitless endeavor. Years of documentation and live-streaming have not made a difference. The killing continues and the killers become more entrenched in their ruthlessness to the point that their very identity as Japanese is equated with the merciless massacre of dolphins.

It has become painfully evident to me that they simply have a perverse lust for killing. They do it for money AND they do it because they enjoy it. We can see it in their eyes, this lust for inflicting gross suffering and death.

The Dolphin drives are an organized highly ruthless slave trade. Slavery is where the money is, the meat trade is minor by comparison. They could enslave dolphins without killing any and still make a huge profit. The reason they don’t do so is very simple – they like to kill.

What has been going down in Taiji can only be understood as a form of collective insanity. We cannot expect reason, compassion, pity, empathy and kindness will have any influence on the minds of psychopathic individuals and collectively Taiji has become a community of psychopaths backed up by the not surprising psychopathic politicians, passing laws against compassion, empathy, kindness and pity.

Because of this I came to the realization that continuing to be in Taiji, with the increasingly difficult possibilities of even being there, was becoming very unproductive.

We have achieved nothing since 2003, not a single dolphin saved since 2003. Yes, we have raised awareness throughout the world but Japan does not care what the rest of the world thinks or feels.

Sea Shepherd is not abandoning our opposition to the despicable cruelty and killings. We are simply changing strategies and developing new tactics.

We have 14 years of documentation so there is little that continues to happen that we have not already captured on film. We need to get these images out to the public – in Japan.

We need to develop a Japanese website and Japanese social media. We need to make the Japanese people at least as aware as the rest of the world. We need to develop economic strategies aimed at Japan with a special focus on the Olympics in 2020. We need to research legal options.

Unfortunately we’ve done all that we practically and strategically can accomplish on the ground in Taiji.

We are refocusing and planning for a new strategy.

The Cove Guardians were heroic, steadfast and I appreciate the efforts of each and every person who spent time on the ground there. They suffered harassment and abuse including numerous abuses from the police and fishermen and most importantly they had to endure the trauma of witnessing the monstrous acts of cruelty and murder.

They did all that could have been done within the context of having to do so within Japanese territory under the ever present watch of the police and rejection from border guards.

When I first organized the Cove Guardians I felt confident that it could have success but I did not take into account the one factor that makes it difficult to overcome such a heartless behavior and makes it impossible to deal with the situation in any meaningful way.

That factor is insanity. We can’t reason or appeal to the heart of a Psychopath because we have been looking for something that does not exist – their heart!

We must develop a new and effective approach.

Uncover Photo

What I learned the day a dying whale spared my life

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/09/dying-whale-greenpeace-paul-watson

by  Paul Watson

It was 1975, Greenpeace’s first campaign, and the bodies of six Soviet-slaughtered whales were lying lifeless in the swell. I thought to myself, is humanity really this insane?

 Paul Watson on top of a slaughtered whale calf in the foreground, with the Greenpeace ship Phyllis Cormack behind, on 26 June 1975. Photograph: Rex Weyler/Greenpeace

Wednesday 9 January 2013 10.40 ESTFirst published on Wednesday 9 January 2013 10.40 EST

The greatest gift that I have ever received is also my great and enduring curse.

It was June 1975 and I was a crew member on the first Greenpeace campaign to protect the whales. It was off the coast of northern California, 60 miles offshore. Before us, spread across the waters like some invading foreign armada, was the Soviet whaling fleet.

The ships were grey, black, and freckled with rust. From out of the side of the largest vessel, the huge factory ship Dalni Vostok, a steady stream of thick steaming blood poured into the sea.

We felt pretty small on board the 85ft Phyllis Cormack, the halibut seiner we had chartered out of British Columbia, skippered by big no-nonsense Captain John C Cormack.

We were a crew of 13 and I was the first officer.

This was before the 200 territorial limit had been imposed and when the Russians freely fished and whaled up to 13 miles off the shore. The Americans did not like it, but legally there was nothing they could do. Thus it fell to a small band of idealistic young Canadians to challenge the whale killers off the Californian coast.

We had been searching for them since April starting in the north off the Queen Charlotte Islands. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack and we had no idea of where to even begin looking.

However in early June we received a tip-off from a source I can never reveal in Washington DC that if we wanted to find the Russian whalers, we needed to go south. As we proceeded south, the source supplied us with the movements of the Soviet fleet.

And there we were, 60 miles off the town of Eureka, approaching a massive factory ship and three fast, killer boats, each mounted with harpoons painted the colour of robin’s eggs.

We caught them hunting, arriving on the scene just as a harpoon tore into the backside of a young sperm whale. The whalers left it there floating with a radio buoy attached as they took off in pursuit of another victim.

We launched a Zodiac inflatable and I stood in the bow, the bowline wrapped tightly around my wrist for support as we approached the body bobbing up and down in the swells.

I stepped off the Zodiac and on to the carcass of the whale. It was still very warm and blood oozed and bubbled from a gaping raw wound in its side. A long yellow polypropylene rope protruded from the ugly wound. It had been cut and the nylon strands danced about on the surface of the water, whipping rivulets of blood into a salmon pink tinted foam.

The Phyllis Cormack came alongside for our photographer Rex Weyler to take a picture of the whale, using my body as a gauge to measure the animal. It was small, around 22 feet. A young whale.

My bare hand on the whale felt the warmth of its body and the blood on my skin was hot. The whale was lying on its left side and the right eye was open, staring sightlessly skyward. The lower jaw opened and closed with each swell and I could see the lower two rows of pointed teeth.

Suddenly there was a shout from the Phyllis Cormack. The harpoon vessel was returning and they had a fire hose blasting a stream of high-pressure water from the bow.

I jumped into the Zodiac as the Soviets quickly lashed the dead whale to the side of their ship and made way back to the factory ship. We followed and filmed them as they transferred the whale over to the slipway, where it was hauled by cables and winches up on to the flensing deck, where men with long sharp knives waited to flay the body.

More blood gushed from the scuppers into the sea.

And we felt so helpless, so small, and so useless.

After the harpoon vessels transferred their whales, they spread out to resume the killing. We followed one of the harpooners in three Zodiacs as the Phyllis Cormack slowly followed.

It was not long before the Russians found another pod, and once again the chase was on. But this time we were chasing the whalers as they pursued the whales.

Our strategy was simple. We would place our bodies between the whales and the harpoon. We were Gandhi-influenced non-violent advocates, and this was the only tactic we could think of to protect the whales without injuring the whalers.

We had practiced what we would do for over a year and I turned to Bob Hunter, our expedition leader, who was in the boat with me, and said, “Well Bob, this is it. Let’s do it.”

I gunned the outboard motor, and our inflatable boat roared ahead of the harpoon vessel, with the other two inflatables on either side. Within minutes we were racing ahead of the whaler and behind a pod of eight magnificent sperm whales.

They were racing for their lives, unable to take in enough air for a deep dive. They were spouting rapidly and we could see rainbows sparkling from the mist they expelled into the air. We were so close we could smell their breath, and our objective was to block the path of the harpoon.

Would the Soviets risk killing a human being to slay a whale? The answer to that question was a mystery to us.

But we were tempting them to give us an answer one way or another. As our three inflatable boats raced before the bow, I looked back to see an ape of a man stooping behind the massive harpoon cannon, trying to get one of the whales in his sight. He was not succeeding, and was clearly frustrated.

Suddenly a larger man came storming forward along the catwalk and began yelling into the ear of the Soviet harpooner. The harpooner nodded and crouched down behind his gun as the man who we later identified as the captain stood up and looked down at us with a smile. He brought his finger slowly across his throat, and that was when we realised that Gandhi was not going to work for us that day.

I saw the pod of whales rise up on a swell in front of us just as the harpoon vessel rode up on a swell behind us. As our inflatables descended into the deep trough between the two large swells, a horrendous explosion boomed over the whales.

The explosive-tipped harpoon whizzed through the air above as the attached cable slashed down upon the water close by, cleaving the surface like a heavy sword.

In front of us a female sperm whale screamed in pain as she rolled on her side, with a fountain of hot steaming blood pouring from her. Beside her, the largest whale in the pod rose up from the surface of the sea and dove. As his mighty tail slapped the water with a bang, he disappeared. The other six whales carried on fleeing as the huge male turned to defend them.

For a moment we thought he would attack us. We had all seen the old prints and woodcuts of enraged sperm whales cutting Yankee whaling boats in half with their sabre-like teeth, spilling wounded whalers into the sea.

We had little time to think as the ocean exploded behind us, and this great whale hurled himself from the water trying to reach the man behind the harpoon.

They were ready for him and had quickly reloaded the harpoon gun with a unattached harpoon. As the whale rose up and out of the water, the harpooner lowered the gun, pulling the trigger at point black range. With a thundering explosion the harpoon tore into the whale’s head.

He screamed. It was an excruciating cry of pain, shock, and confusion. He fell back into the sea, rolling in agony on the surface in a sea stained scarlet with his blood.

The two dying whales struggled to hold on to life between the harpoon boat and the six of us in three boats, sitting motionless on the swells.

I could not take my eyes off the dying whale closest to us. His tail flayed the sea and pink foam frothed all around him.

Then suddenly the whale was looking directly at me. I saw his huge eye and I could see that he saw me. At that moment he dove once again and I saw pink bloody bubbles coming to the surface, moving closer to our boat. Within seconds the whale’s head shot above the surface of the sea and began to tower above, rising higher, but as if in slow motion, and angled so that we could see that his intent was to come crashing down upon us.

And as his head rose ever higher I saw that eye once again, so close that I could see my own reflection in that deep dark orb. Suddenly I was struck with the realisation that this whale understood what we were doing.

His lower jaw hung down almost touching the side of our inflatable boat, so close that I could have reached across and encircled one of the six-inch teeth with my fingers.

His muscles tensed and he stopped rising, and began to slowly slide at an angle back into the sea. I kept eye contact with him until his eye sank beneath the surface of the sea and disappeared.

And so he died.

He could have killed us, but he had not, and the look in that eye has haunted me ever since.

I felt understanding and I knew he knew that we were there to save him, not to kill him. I felt ashamed that we had failed. I felt powerless and angry, frustrated and awed all at once. I felt indebted to him for sparing my life.

But I also saw something else in that eye, and that was pity.

Not for himself nor for his kind, but for us.

An uncomfortable pallor of shame fell over me as I sensed what the whale perceived. It was indeed pity, but pity for us, that we could take life so ruthlessly, so thoughtlessly, and so mercilessly; and for what?

We sat there in our little inflatable boats in the midst of the Soviet whaling fleet with the bodies of a half dozen sperm whales lying lifeless in the swell. I watched the sun begin to set in the west and I remembered that the Russians were killing whales primarily for the valuable spermaceti oil.

Spermaceti oil is valued for its high resistance to heat, and thus it is used in machinery where there is excessive heat. One of the demands for this oil by the Soviets was for use in the production on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Here they were slaughtering these magnificent, intelligent, socially complex, wondrous sentient beings for the purpose of making a weapon designed for the mass extermination of human beings.

And I thought to myself, are we really this insane?

It is that thought, that unanswered question, that has haunted me every day since.

It is from what I saw in the eye of that whale that has led me to devote my entire adult life to the defence of the whales and the other creatures of the sea, because I know that if we cannot save the whales, the turtles, the sharks, the tuna, and the complex marine biodiversity, that the oceans will not survive. If the life in our oceans is diminished, humanity is diminished and if the oceans die, humanity will die; for we cannot survive on this planet with a dead ocean.

• Captain Paul Watson is a co-founder of the Greenpeace Foundation and the founder in 1977 of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He is currently on board the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin intervening against the killing of whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary by the Japanese whaling fleet

Sea Shepherd abandons pursuit of Japanese whalers, lashes ‘hostile governments’

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2108739/sea-shepherd-abandons-pursuit-japanese-whalers-lashes-hostile

Captain Paul Watson accuses ‘hostile governments’ in the US, Australia and New Zealand of being in league with Tokyo

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 29 August, 2017, 12:43pm

UPDATED : Tuesday, 29 August, 2017, 9:46pm

COMMENTS: 3 

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The anti-whaling vessel Sea Shepherd will not contest the Southern Ocean against Japanese whalers this season, Captain Paul Watson has announced, accusing “hostile governments” in the US, Australia and New Zealand of acting “in league with Japan” against the protest vessel.

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Sea Shepherd has been obstructing Japanese whaling vessels in the Southern Ocean each year since 2005, but Watson said the cost of sending vessels south, Japan’s increased use of military technology to track them, and new anti-terrorism laws passed specifically to thwart Sea Shepherd’s activities made physically tracking the ships impossible.

Australia took Japan to the international court of justice over its Southern Ocean whaling programme in 2014, winning a judgement that condemned Japan’s whaling programmes as being in breach of the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling. The court rejected Japan’s argument that its whaling was for “scientific” purposes.

Watson said his volunteer organisation could not compete with Japanese military satellite technology, which tracked Sea Shepherd in the ocean. Japan has also passed anti-terrorism laws that make protest ships’ presence near whalers a terrorist offence.

“We’re just a group of volunteers trying to do the impossible, trying to do the job Australia and New Zealand and the United States and all these others countries should be doing but they’re too busy appeasing Japan.”

In a statement on Monday, Watson said the Japanese whaling companies “not only have all the resources and subsidies their government can provide, they also have the powerful political backing of a major economic superpower. Sea Shepherd however is limited in resources and we have hostile governments against us in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.”

Speaking on radio in Australia, Watson accused the Australian government of acting in league with Japan, indirectly supporting whaling by obstructing Sea Shepherd’s activities.

“Australia is definitely in league with Japan,” he said.

“When our ships come in we’re harassed, we’re investigated, we’re searched, when our crew come in from other countries they have problems getting visas. We’ve been applying for charity status for 10 years – they won’t give it to us. This has been extremely hostile.”

The Sea Shepherd’s pursuit of whaling vessels has also attracted criticism. The Japanese government has described Sea Shepherd as “ecoterrorists” and sought to have Watson placed on an Interpol watchlist.

Watch: 2010 anti-whaling clash in Antarctic

Why a ‘pirate’ who has tried to stop whalers near Antarctica is stopping

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/29/why-a-pirate-whos-tried-to-stop-whalers-near-antarctica-is-stopping/?utm_term=.53fc1d4b44f1

By Cleve R. Wootson Jr. August 29 at 3:29 PM

Crew members aboard the Sea Shepherd vessel the Bob Barker react as the Japanese whaling vessel Yushin Maru 3 crosses close to its bow during a six-hour-long ordeal at close quarters in the Antarctic in 2014. (Simon Ager/Sea Shepherd Australia/Reuters)

Every year, Japanese boats with the word “RESEARCH” stenciled on the side head to the Southern Ocean to hunt for hundreds of whales. And every year since 2005, Paul Watson has used pirate-like tactics to try to stop them.

The ships of Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society nestle up to the back of the large Japanese factory boats that winch whale carcasses up a ramp for processing. Staying so close, Watson says, is a risky but nonviolent way of preventing the vessels from hauling in whales.

“We thought the best way to do this was to intervene directly,” Watson told The Washington Post. He and other international critics say the whales aren’t killed for research at all. “We block their ability to load dead whales and if we do that, they can’t hunt.”

But now, Sea Shepherd is stopping.

The organization said the Japanese have used military-grade satellite tracking to evade Watson’s whale-hunt-ending ships, which simply can’t get close enough.

In the past two years, Watson said, his organization’s ships have only caught glimpses of the Japanese whaling vessels.

“Every time we approached them, they would be just over the horizon,” he told The Post. “They knew where we were at every moment. We’re literally wasting our time and our money.”

It amounts to about $4 million per expedition, nearly a third of the nonprofit’s total yearly budget. And that wasted money could be better used to protect other marine animals around the world, Watson said, instead of endlessly chasing Japanese whalers.

The nonprofit group has been operating in the oceans near Antarctica since 2005, when it took the Farley Mowat, a “battered and slow vessel” out to thwart whalers, according to a news release.

Over the years, they added five other vessels, including one named after “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, and they claimed more and more successes.

At the same time, they’ve been engaged in other efforts to prevent poaching and illegal fishing across the globe. The battles aren’t just at close quarters in the high seas but are also in international courts of law.

[Feds review annual whaling quotas for Alaska Native hunters]

Watson said one judge deemed him a pirate because of his tactics. Over the past 40 years, Sea Shepherd has engaged in embargoes and sunk several ships in the 1970s and 1980s. That was decades ago, Watson said, but he conceded that even blocking the whaling vessels involves dangerous maneuvering at close quarters.

Watson was one of the founding members of Greenpeace in 1969, but was expelled seven years later for what the organization deemed violent actions. He said he took a club away from a man who was attacking baby seals.

A Post story in 1979 dubbed him the “angry shepherd of the seas.”

“People sometimes say I have a suicide complex,” Watson told The Post’s Henry Mitchell for that story, which detailed his attempt to get between whalers’ harpoons and their intended target. “Well, in fact I enjoy being alive, more than most people. But people can’t believe a man will risk death to save whales. That’s what they can’t understand. So they think I’m crazy or that I attach no value to my life.”

Watson conceded there’s an air of oceanic vigilantism to what he does, but he told The Post that in his four decades of protecting sea animals, no one has been killed or injured. And he believes some of the people he’s trying to combat are violating international laws. The rest, he said, are just outright poaching. He described Sea Shepherd as an “interventionist anti-poaching organization.”

“Our opposition are criminals,” he said Tuesday. “These people are operating against the law. We shouldn’t be out there doing this. The governments of the world should be doing this. We would gladly step aside if they would do what they’re supposed to be doing.”

The legalized whaling is particularly vexing, Watson said, because the Japanese say they are killing the animals in the name of research.

As The Post’s Rachel Feltman wrote in 2015: “Most of the whales won’t end up in laboratories, but on dinner plates. Japanese officials claim that the specimens will be used to study the health and migration patterns of minke whales, but some argue that these research vessels have never been anything but a way around commercial whaling bans imposed in 1986.”

Even then, Wired wrote in 2015, only a small percentage of Japanese eat whale meat. The magazine cited a 2006 poll conducted by the Nippon Research Center that found that 95 percent of Japanese people very rarely or never eat whale meat. And the amount of uneaten frozen whale meat stockpiled in Japan has doubled to 4,600 tons between 2002 and 2012.

And the Japanese government spends about $50 million a year to heavily subsidize whaling, according to National Geographic. The staunchest advocates say it is a centuries-old tradition — and that no outside nation or international treaty should be able to tell the sovereign nation what it can hunt.

 

2015: Japan resumes ‘scientific’ whale hunts

Japan restarted its “scientific whaling” program on Dec. 1, 2015 after a year-long hiatus, amid international condemnation for the practice. (Reuters)

“And just as the whale has become symbolic for environmental groups like Greenpeace, it has, in response, become symbolic for the Japanese, too,” Wired wrote.

Today’s WorldView

What’s most important from where the world meets Washington

Kazuhiko Kobayashi, an agronomy professor, told the magazine that the “strong condemnation of whaling by the foreigners is taken as harassing the traditional values.”

While Watson’s role in the conflict has been paused, he emphasized that his group isn’t abandoning whales in the south seas. They’re simply trying to be practical as they figure out a better way to do it.

They still claimed a victory of sorts, having saved whales for a dozen years, and shined a light on whalers’ practices.

“The Japanese whalers have been exposed, humiliated and most importantly have been denied thousands of lives that we have spared from their deadly harpoons,” a statement from Sea Shepherd said. “Thousands of whales are now swimming and reproducing, that would now be dead if not for our intervene.”

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Seismic Testing to Begin in Atlantic Ocean in Push for Offshore Drilling

http://www.ecowatch.com/seismic-tesing-oil-drilling-2402920868.html

by Lorraine Chow

11 May

Seismic Testing to Begin in Atlantic Ocean in Push for Offshore Drilling

The Interior Department announced it is moving forward with seismic surveys in the Atlantic Ocean following President Donald Trump‘s executive order last month to aggressively expand offshore drilling in protected areas off the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

Six permit applications by energy companies—ones that were rejected by the Obama administration—are being reviewed by the department.

The oil and gas industry has long pushed for seismic surveys used to search for oil and gas deposits deep below the ocean’s surface.

However, environmental groups warn that the surveys are an extremely loud and dangerous process.

“Seismic airguns create one of the loudest manmade sounds in the ocean, firing intense blasts of compressed air every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, for weeks to months on end,” Dustin Cranor, Oceana‘s senior director of U.S. communications, told EcoWatch. “The noise from these blasts is so loud that it can be heard up to 2,500 miles from the source, which is approximately the distance from Washington, DC to Las Vegas.”

“These blasts are of special concern to marine life, including fish, turtles and whales, which depend on sound for communication and survival,” Cranor said. He noted that the government’s own estimates show that seismic airgun blasting in the Atlantic could injure as many as 138,000 marine mammals like dolphins and whales, while disturbing the vital activities of millions more.

Furthermore, Greenpeace said “pursuing this development stands at cross-purposes with the nation’s necessary and rapidly accelerating move away from fossil fuels, and with previous commitments to address global climate change.”

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Capt. Paul Watson explained, “One of the major threats to the survival of cetaceans, is noise pollution. More seismic testing and military LFS testing will result in more strandings. This decision equates to a death sentence for thousands of whales and dolphins.”

Seismic data has not been gathered in the mid- and south-Atlantic regions, from northern Florida to Delaware, for at least 30 years.

The Interior Department said that the surveys are needed to update information about the Outer Continental Shelf that was gathered more than three decades ago, “when technology was not as advanced as today.”

The Associated Press reported that any new drilling activity is expected to be limited to the coasts of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia.

Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke said that the surveys will help “a variety of federal and state partners better understand our nation’s offshore areas … and evaluate resources that belong to the American people.”

Industry groups applauded the department’s decision to review the permit applications. “There has been no documented scientific evidence of noise from these surveys adversely affecting marine animal populations or coastal communities,” Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, said.

Trump’s executive order was aimed at rolling back President Obama’s permanent ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

“Renewed offshore energy production will reduce the cost of energy, create countless new jobs, and make America more secure and far more energy independent,” Trump said before signing the document last month.

But Greenpeace said that Atlantic drilling would threaten the region’s vibrant fishing and tourism industry, warning that “a spill equivalent to the BP Gulf oil disaster could coat beaches stretching from Savannah to Boston.”

Additionally, Cranor pointed out that more than 120 East Coast municipalities, 1,200 elected officials, and an alliance representing 35,000 businesses and 500,000 fishing families have publicly opposed offshore drilling and/or seismic airgun blasting.

“These individuals and groups understand that nearly 1.4 million jobs and more than $95 billion in gross domestic product are at risk if dangerous offshore drilling activities occur in the Atlantic Ocean,” Cranor explained.

Conservation groups have filed a lawsuit against President Trump, challenging his decision to reverse President Obama’s ban.

200 Year Old Whale Killed–Enough is Enough!

Comment by Captain Paul Watson:

For 200 years this incredible whale has swum through the waters of the Arctic Ocean.

200 HUNDREDS YEARS!!

Two centuries ago it was 1817. This whale was alive before the American Civil War. This whale was alive before Thomas Jefferson died. This whale was alive before the ship ESSEX was sunk by a Sperm whale. This whale is older than the Mormon church!

When this whale was born, African Americans were just commodities to be bought and sold. When this whale was born, women had very few rights and Native Americans were being slaughtered. well, because of manifest destiny, killed because of White American culture.

And now some 16-year old kid is a frigging “hero” for snuffing out the life of this unique self aware, intelligent, social, sentient being, but hey, it’s okay because murdering whales is a part of his culture, part of his tradition.

He went out in his “traditional” metal boat, powered by a “traditional” outboard motor, armed with a “traditional” exploding harpoon and “traditional” high powered rifle and they all hauled the great grandmother of a whale into the shore with a “traditional power” winch.

I don’t give a damn for the bullshit politically correct attitude that certain groups of people have a “right” to murder a whale.

Their so called “right” is not as important as the right of the whales to live, survive and to thrive.

TWO HUNDRED GODDAMN YEARS and this little prick snuffs out her life just because because he legally can. I hope he chokes on the blubber.

People like the Yupik, the Faroese, the thugs in Taiji, the Orca killing scum in St. Vincent and the whaling gangsters of Iceland, Norway and Japan are despicable murderous bastards all justifying their cruel infliction of death in the name of this mother of all justifications – culture.

Am I angry? Damn right I am. Enough is enough. I don’t care what self righteous ethnic label anyone may want to pin on themselves, killing a whale can never be justified in the name of tradition or culture.

TWO HUNDRED GODDAMN YEARS!! WTF!!

And for those who demand that I respect anyone’s “right” to kill a whale or a dolphin, my answer is I have never, I do not and I will never respect the infliction of suffering and death to any cetacean.

And for those who say, well you eat meat? No I don’t, and I would no more respect this horrific murder of this incredible sentient being than I would of the culture of cannibalism.

And by the way I have been to Gambell in 1981 where I saw the Yupik shooting walrus with M-16 rifles just for the ivory. The number of stinking rotting Walrus bodies I saw that summer was obscene.

https://www.adn.com/…/a-teenager-on-a-gambell-whaling-crew-…

A teenager on a Gambell whaling crew scored the village’s second successful strike of the season

Sixteen-year-old Chris Apassingok struck the 57-foot-long bowhead.

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