(Not) Leaving #Taiji

It is now 72 hours since I left Taiji, the first 30 of which were travel from Japan back to Scotland via France and Wales. I found it both interesting and very pleasing to note that 4 nations is still not as internationally diverse as an average Cove Guardian group.

In the just over a day since I got "back," I've been home, I've been to work, I've met some friends and I've even been to a funeral though thankfully as a work duty rather than through any personal connection. It should have felt like a slightly busier "normal" day. It didn't. It felt like I had abandoned the most important task of my life so far. It felt like unfinished business. It felt bad.

Watching Taiji Dolphin Defense on Livestream TV has not helped as there have been 3 hunts since we left, one where all the dolphins escaped, one where a mother and 2 babies were captured and one which is happening as I type this.

Those hunts and the dreadful aftermath will be future blog material for sure but they are just too raw to write about tonight.

There are three tasks facing me now:

Firstly making sense of the last month most of which was spent in Taiji. There have been some incredible high points, there have been too many desperately low points.

Secondly, I need to develop and implement a plan to engage with individuals, agencies and corporations who will be motivated both to ensure the best interests of Japan and to end the dolphin killings and captures in Taiji. Those dolphin killings and captures in Taiji clearly do not serve the best interests of Japan. If you are reading this blog and think you can help with that then please contact me via my Google+ page.

Finally I need to work out I can get back out there to continue this "unfinished business" and make sure that Cove Guardian is not just a nice slogan on a t-shirt, it is who I am.

Cove Guardians Anna Oliver and Nicole McLachlan

Perhaps I should have said 3 tasks facing us and used "we" instead of "I" for those 3 tasks because I have no doubt that my best friend and fellow Cove Guardian, Anna, will be as instrumental in helping to bring all this to fruition as she was amazing defending dolphins in Taiji over Christmas and New year. One thing that did make sense from the minute we got involved with this campaign was the need for mutual support on every step of the journey.

The emotions triggered by the experience of Taiji are so very strong and the impact so very personal though that I will keep my blog mostly about my impressions for the time being. Having said that, if my experiences have inspired you to get involved then you should recognise that the Cove Guardians are a growing and strengthening "we" and so there is no reason why you cannot also become a member of that amazing team of ocean champions. Cove Guardians come from every corner of the globe including Japan, could you be the first from your part of the World as Anna and myself were from ours?

In today's blog I am going to try and make some kind of sense of my initial thoughts regarding my Taiji experience, a starter for ten if you will because I do not think there are enough words to describe the full experience in a single attempt. Proof reading this I realise I have not managed it at all, it's going to take a long time to exorcise these demons if it can even be done.

I arrived thinking that the "story" was of some poor, impoverished fishermen claiming tradition as an excuse to murder what they reputedly describe as "big fish" with the occasional bonus of a live dolphin being sold to a dolphinarium generating a welcome cash windfall.

The truth was the exact opposite.

The Taiji dolphin drive hunt is an extremely well organised and ruthless, profit-driven and demand-led, live capture business with those dolphins not deemed worthy of being sold into captivity being butchered to squeeze every last penny out of that day's evil activities with no thought whatsoever to the morality of those actions.

The evil men who lead this programme are amongst the wealthiest individuals in this part of Wakayama whilst most of the rest of the town has an obvious and significantly lower standard of living than is generally evident throughout the rest of the prefecture.

This raptor is flying wild and free above the Dolphin Base
sea pens where live dolphins are held prisoner and forced
to turn tricks for spoilt tourists

Ignoring the poverty and ignoring the dolphin captures and slaughters (although it really is an impossible thing to do) we would have to view Taiji as a small, traditional fishing village with very impressive eco-tourism potential, not just from marine eco-tourism but also from the diversity of birds and land wildlife in the area.

The wildlife is amazing whilst the scenery is spectacular and, to me as a businessman, the ethical commercial opportunities are as obvious as it is staggering to see them being ignored.

As the fishermen of Taiji seem hell-bent on hunting dolphins to extinction whilst also wiping out every other species of fish in the surrounding oceans the end seems as inevitable as the end already experienced by countless similar traditional fishing villages the World over.

I spent my teenage years living and working on west coast fishing boats during the late 1970s and early 1980s at a time when we (Scotland) were fighting Iceland, Faroes and Norway over who had the most "right" to fish cod to extinction.

Juvenile hammerhead shark landed at Taiji butcherhouse

Of course we didn't know that is what we were doing then but it is now so very hard to understand why those same nations, my own included, are repeating exactly the same arguments and behaviours in the 2010s over mackerel.

I suspect if I had not escaped that lifestyle that I would still be on the boats, still too blind to see what should be plain to all but I have escaped and I now know the issues so there is at the very least a moral obligation on me to face those issues and do what I can about them. 

If I was still on the boats I also have no doubt that I would be amongst the poor fishermen wondering how a very few of our community had managed to get so rich whilst the rest of us just got poorer and more and more tied up with regulations. I would almost certainly have been trapped in the "us against the World" mentality that seems to be gaining the Taiji dolphin exploiters support which they absolutely do not deserve from their harbour neighbours.

Governments say it is all about jobs but it has seemed to me for some time that a combination of licensing more and more super-trawlers whilst also issuing licences to murder marine megafauna (cetaceans in Japan, pinnipeds in Scotland) to solve the problem of coastal community employment  is the marine equivalent of fighting a house fire with gasoline and that is what I spend most of my time lecturing about to anyone who will listen.

More wildlife at Dolphin Base, Taiji

In any case, it is clear that tourism - especially wildlife tourism - is the really easy, minimum investment solution to coastal community employment but it does require an element of "cleaning up your act" before it can be most heavily promoted.

That may explain why it is the most overlooked potential net contributor to GDP for my country, or at least the most under-recorded, or possibly it is simply because it is too hard for a politician to take credit for stuff that existed before the politicians started interfering with it to begin with.

I cannot help reflecting that in Scotland our Police would prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who harmed a dolphin or pilot whale or any other wildlife, marine or land - although admittedly not licensed seal killers, see this blog for more info CLICK. They would prosecute both deliberate and accidental harm and that is only right and proper. In Taiji, the Police are obliged to protect those whose deliberate intent is to harm these magnificent animals both by lethal injury and by enslavement with all the subsequent harm which goes with that.

I thought that I was fully prepared for the experience of actually being a Cove Guardian but I now know that nothing prepares you for Taiji, there is always going to be a surprise around the corner. One pleasant surprise has been the warmth and pleasantness of the Japanese people we have encountered and I have no doubt that as more and more Japanese nationals become aware of what is going on in this village of hell that we are approaching the start of a credible solution for this solvable problem. I will explore that much more fully in a day or two when I am in a calm place and able to focus on the positive. For now, please accept that there is a lot of positive and it does give great hope for the future.

For now, thank you for reading.

Plenty More Fish in the Sea. Really?

Today's blog is based partly on the speech which Captain Paul Watson delivered for Earthday 2007... (copied at the foot of this blog)



...and it is wholly based on me stumbling across this You Tube horror movie featuring the World's largest pelagic trawler operating at sea, emptying the Atlantic of fish.

Of note should be that this movie was not produced by activists or any other planet-saving campaigners, it was produced as an advertorial for the company which installed the flash freezing units on board this floating factory in anticipation of more and more trawlers this size being built and allowed to turn the planet's very life-force into profit for the tiniest of tiny minorities who operate without a care for you, for me, about government, about natural law, about any kind of law except the law of the greedy, the selfish, the unthinking.

You may think I am exaggerating a bit when I use the phrase "emptying the Atlantic of fish" but let me tell you that this is just one of many vessels greater than 100 metres in length and then let me tell you what this one is actually capable of:

She carries 3,000 tonnes of fuel so she can stay at sea for a long time and/or she can travel an enormous distance.  For comparison, the Sea Shepherd flagship, the MV Steve Irwin has a fuel capacity of around 200 tonnes, less than 7% of the capacity of the Annelies Ilena (ex Atlantic Dawn).  This particualr freezer trawler also has hold capacity for 7,000 tonnes of frozen fish - fairly important when she can - and does - catch and process up to 350 tonnes of fish per day.

7,000 tonnes

One shipload from this trawler represents 2% of the entire ANNUAL consumption of all species of fish in the UK.   Except...

Except this fish is not being used - in the main - to feed people.  

Much of it will be sold to other fishermen to use as bait for long lines and for creels.  How mad is that?  If you must eat fish, why not eat the first fish you caught?  Or do we just keep using each fish in turn as more and more bait until we eventually get something that the supermarkets are happy to put on their shelves because it somehow manages to acquire some kind of sustainability stamp to let them turn a blind eye to how it was produced in the first place?

Still more of it will be sold to the aquaculture industry, especially the farmed salmon producers. Salmon are wild, fast moving predators. They eat other fish. So somehow we have convinced ourselves that we can keep them in static cages and feed them fishmeal and colorants and flavorings so that, again, the supermarkets get a "marketable" and cheap product on the shelves.

What that really means is that, every time someone eats a salmon, there were 10 or more other fish that could have given them the same meal instead - this isn't concentrating protein, this is distilling protein except we even get that wrong, we throw away the good stuff and keep the garbage, the frankenfish whose greatest threat to us all is to escape into the natural community. Ponder on that if you will. Oh and they shoot seals as well which is a theme I will return to in future blogs but for now, take a look at this web site if you want more info: Seal Scotland

Astonishingly, though, the vast majority of this planet-essential wild, pelagic fish will be sold for other animal feed.  Charles Darwin must be turning in his grave, did cows and sheep and pigs and hens really evolve as fish-eaters?  Did Danish pigs really work out all by themselves that they could grow even fatter, even faster by eating whale-meat clandestinely imported from Iceland?  This is insane!

But it is the World we live in.  Let's change it before it is too late.

Here is what Captain Paul Watson had to say on the subject just 5 short years ago:

Earth Day Cometh and Earth Day Goeth

And Where Have all the Bees Gone?

Earth Day Report by Captain Paul Watson


Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Earth Day is almost here. I don't believe in Earth Day myself. I think it's a little silly to devote one single day of the year to being concerned about the environment, but I suppose one day is better than no day at all.

Having been an environmental activist since 1968, I have seen the movement go up and down like a roller coaster in popularity. It was big in 1972 with the Environmental Conference in Stockholm which I attended and it became big again in 1992 with the U.N. Environmental Conference in Rio De Janeiro that I also attended. I remember that the priority issue in 1972 was the danger of escalating human populations but by 1992, that concern was not even on the agenda. Well we are approaching the end of another 20 year period and it looks like ecology is in vogue again thanks to global warming and a few other scary things. Green is once again popular.

I can always tell when the environment is getting to be faddish again. My indicator is the number of lectures I am booked for around this time of year. It reached its peak in 1992, practically disappeared for awhile and now it's coming around again. What worries me is that the movement is constantly being sidetracked by the issue of the day.

It's global warming now. When we were trying to warn people about global warming and climate change twenty years ago, no one was interested. Now it's become the "in" issue and the big organizations are tapping the public for donations to address the problem although no one has come up with anything that makes much sense. But global warming is good for business if you're one of the big bureaucratic organizations whose primary concern is really corporate self preservation.

Greenpeace is even telling people that they can slow down global warming by (and I kid you not) "singing in the shower". Yep, you see all you have to do is run the water, then get wet, shut the water off, and sing in the shower as you lather up and then open up the faucet and rinse off. Ah, so simple to save the world.       

The problem is that these big organizations are too politically correct to address the ecologically correct solutions. Instead they are baffling everyone with abstract concepts like carbon trading and carbon storage or trying to sell us a new hybrid Japanese car. Even Al Gore with his Inconvenient Truth totally ignored the most inconvenient truth of all. I'll get to that in a moment.

But let's look at the number one cause of global greenhouse gas emissions. First and foremost it is human over-population, the very same issue that was the priority concern at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm. It's 6.5 billion people folks. Remember in 1950, the world population was 3 billion. It's now more than doubled.

6.5 billion people produce one hell of an annual output of waste and utilize an unbelievable amount of resources and energy. And this number is rising minute by minute, day, by day, year by year. And most of the people having children have no idea why they are even having children other than that's what you do. Most of them don't really love their children because if they did they would be very much involved in trying to ensure that their children have a world to survive in.

Unless over-population is addressed, there is absolutely no way of slowing down global greenhouse gas emissions. But how do you do that within the context of economic systems that require larger and larger numbers to perform the essential task of consuming products?

Corporations need workers and buyers. Governments need tax-payers, bureaucrats and soldiers. More people means more money. I've said for decades that the solution to all of our problems is simple. We just need to live in accordance with the three basic laws of ecology.

First is the Law of Diversity. The strength of an eco-system lies in diversity of species within it. Weaken diversity and the entire system will be weakened and will ultimately collapse.

Second is the Law of Interdependence. All of the species within an eco-system are interdependent. We need each other.

And the third law of Ecology is the Law of Finite Resources. There is a limit to growth because there is a limit to carrying capacity. Human populations are exceeding ecological carrying capacity. Exceeding ecological carrying capacity is diminishing both resources and
diversity of species.

The diminishment of diversity is causing serious problems with interdependence. Albert Einstein once wrote that "if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." That is the Law of Interdependence. Forget global warming folks. The disappearance of the honeybee could end our existence as human beings on this planet far sooner than we think.  And the honey bee is in fact now disappearing. Why? We don't know why. It could be genetically modified crops, I could be pesticides or it could be that our cell phones are interfering with their ability to navigate. 

Whatever the cause the fact is that they are disappearing. All around the world bees are disappearing in a crisis called Colony Collapse Disorder. And bees pollinate our plants. Everywhere on the planet, bees are hard at work making it possible for you to live and enjoy life. 

We hold on to our place on this planet by only a toehold. If anything happens to the grass family, we are screwed. If the earthworms disappear, we are in big trouble. If the bees disappear, well according to Albert Einstein who was considered somewhat smarter than most of us, we will have only four years. Just enough time to get a college degree to discover that everything you learned is relatively useless when sitting on the doorstep of global ecological annihilation. We are cutting down the forest and plundering the oceans of life. We are polluting the soil, the air and the water and we are rapidly running out of fresh water to drink. Only corporations like Coke and Pepsi have figured out that water is more valuable than gold. That is why they are bottling it in plastic bottles and selling it. This week I saw a bottle of water in my hotel room that I could have drunk for only $4. 

Unbelievable. That means that water is now being sold for more than the equivalent amount of gasoline. I hope that I'm not the only one who thinks this is insanity. Now for Al Gore's really inconvenient truth. In his film he does not mention once that the meat and dairy industry that produces the bacon, the steaks, the chicken wings and the milk is a larger contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than the automobile industry. You see, Al may drive a Prius but he
likes his burgers.

This is why the big organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club will not say a thing about the meat industry. Last year I saw Greenpeacers sitting down for a baked fish meal onboard the Greenpeace ship Esperanza while engaged in a campaign to oppose over-fishing. When we pointed out that our Sea Shepherd ships serve only vegan meals, the Greenpeace cook replied, "that's just silly."

We see what we want to see and we rationalize everything else.

The oceans have been plundered to the point that 90% of the fish have been removed from their eco-systems and at this very moment there is over 65,000 miles of long lines set in the Pacific Ocean alone and there are tens of thousands of fishing vessels scouring the seas in a rapacious quest to scoop up everything that swims or crawls.

This is ecological insanity.

The largest marine predator on the planet right now is the cow. More than half the fish taken from the sea is rendered into fish meal and fed to domestic livestock. Puffins are starving in the North sea to feed sand eels to chickens in Denmark. Sheep and pigs have replaced the shark and the sea lion as the dominant predators in the ocean and domestic house cats are eating more fish than all the world's seals combined. We are extracting some fifty to sixty fish from the sea to raise one farm raised salmon.  

This is ecological insanity.

Yet the demand for shark fin is rising in China. Ignorant people still want to wear fur coats. In America, we order fries, a cheeseburger and a "diet" coke.

Ecological insanity folks.

Last week a reporter called to ask me if I had really said that earth worms are more important than people. I answered that yes I had. He then asked how I could justify such a statement.  

"Simple," I answered. "Earthworms can live on the planet without people. We cannot live on the planet without earthworms thus from an ecological point of view, earthworms are more important than people."

He said that I was insane for suggesting such a ridiculous idea when people were made in the image of God, and earthworms were not.

What we have here of course is a failure to communicate between two radically different world views. His which is anthropocentric and sees reality as human centred and mine which is biocentric and sees reality as including all species equally working in interdependence. He sees us as divine and better than all the other species and I see us as a bunch of arrogant primates out of control.

But that's my two cents worth for Earth Day 2007.

Consider the humble honey bee and remember that the little black and yellow insect you see flitting busily from flower to flower is all that stands between us and our demise as a species on this planet. 

We better see to it that they don't disappear.


(May be freely published and distributed)


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 - www.harpseals.org

"Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all."
                                              - Walt Whitman
www.Seashepherd.org
Tel: 360-370-5650
Fax: 360-370-5651
Address: P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, Wa 98250  USA