Broiling Arctic
Avarice bankers,
O’ Great Ones,
Climate firestorms
Marine bottom heatwaves
Sea ice, krill, crustaceans
Going, going, gone!
Barbaric bastards,
Bully brutes,
Finest Fins,
Bluest Blues,
Hvalur hf hoodlums
Hideously harpooning!
True ice whales,
Colossal crowns,
Perfect strainers,
Seventeen grand metres
Sixty-four big tonnes,
Your Highnesses!
The vaquita is the world’s most endangered marine mammal. Studies estimate there may be as few as eight vaquitas remaining in the Gulf of California, the only place they exist and where they often become entangled in illegal gill nets and drown.
Mexico faces sanctions from the international wildlife body known as CITES for not doing enough to protect the vaquita. The sanctions are designed to compel Mexico to to save the vaquita where all other efforts have failed.
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Doom’d humpback,
Mighty Moon
Lone traveller
British Columbia to Maui,
Pure grit!
Stuff brimming,
Wretch’d hurrying vessel
Smash’d her spine,
Five thousand
Agonising kilometres,
Three months
All strength!
O’ mysteriousness
Complexities
Sophisticated dialects
Cosmopolitans
Preceptive Ones,
Don’t die!
Fourteen sperms
Brainy Ones
King Island
Tasmania,
Lifelessly strewn
Necropsies awaiting,
Horrific.
On September 1, 2022, after Captain Paul Watson’s recent resignation from Sea Shepherd USA and upon mass criticism of abandoning their famous direct action tactics for their new focus on scientific research, Sea Shepherd USA (SSCS) and Sea Shepherd Global jointly released the following statement: “Sea Shepherd Conservation Society USA and Sea Shepherd Global continue standing shoulder-to-shoulder in defense of marine wildlife around the world.”
And to make matters even more capricious, Watson received notice the next day that he has also been removed from Sea Shepherd Global’s Board of Directors.
Sea Shepherd Global Director, Alex Cornelissen, who Watson mentored and provided the opportunity to rise from the ranks of galley cook all the way up to captain on numerous Sea Shepherd campaigns, wrote:
“I am sorry to inform you that based on the conversations that we’ve had, and the legal issues between you and SSCS (USA), we asked you to step down from the board. Since you have not complied with that request, the majority of the Global Board has decided that it is a conflict of interest for you to remain as a Director on the Board of Sea Shepherd Global; and has therefore reached the decision that you are no longer a Director of Sea Shepherd Global.”
This shocking betrayal has prompted many long-standing Sea Shepherds to wonder if anyone left in this movement has any integrity?
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For forty-six wonderful years,
Spot on fluke thrilled us,
Awesome mysterious humpback kin,
Glacier Bay Sitka Sound,
Magdalena Escarpment Sea of Cortez.
Stranded lifeless Killisnoo Island,
Way too young to leave!
Superb oxygen-maker carbon-storer,
May thee seafloor enrich,
Gone but not forgotten.
Fishers fluke scarred,
Wretched pain fraught,
Planet-destroying horrid industry,
Fishing bone cutting entanglement gear,
Forever poisons rubbish marine debris.
Second largest brains orcas,
Twofold human adults,
Black/white largest prevalent dolphins,
Stunning sonar echolocation,
Pinpoint golf ball hundred-metre
split second!
Transient pack hunters,
Roaming oceans,
Sharks sealions porpoises,
Minke Gray calves,
Residents hug coastlines,
Herding balling devouring herring.
Mysterious adventurers, epic long-distance voyagers,
We landlubbers marvel at your Royal Highnesses.
Marbled gray, sleek tapered head, streamlined robust body,
A dozen knuckles supporting eighty thousand pounds,
Barnacles, sea lice, ecosystems within gray’s ecosystem. Hallelujah!
O pinnacle of piscine evolution,
Pointed snout, plump middle, crescent caudal,
The ultimate predator, bluefin tuna.
Counter-shaded, dark topside, light below,
Blue, green, silver befitting only the regal.
Olympians inhaling ramjet oxygen-loaded seawater,
Travelling a distance equal to length each second.
Sampson-like heart 10X other’s size.
Gracefully cruising 46 knots, top-end 55 knots!
Night schooling, slower, musing, bunched.
OSLO – Over the previous four months, subsidised Norwegian whalers slowly and methodically tortured and eventually killed 575 minke whales.
A fleet of fourteen vessels equipped with rocket launching harpoons tipped with penthrite grenades and state of the art satellite technology mercilessly hunted our brethren and sistren, the filter feeding whales. Perhaps as many as three-quarters (~430) of the defenceless whales were pregnant.
Norway’s government is as crooked and cruel as the day is long. This well-to-do miniscule nation of less than six million citizens makes its living from killing, poisoning and cooking the Earth alive.
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LONDON – A recent British study, which included ten thousand Gen Zs (under 26s) from ten countries, revealed they are anxious and that governments have betrayed them.
Moreover, they are “incredibly worried” about the climate catastrophe. Fifty-six hundred of the ten thousand respondents concluded that humanity is doomed.
One 16-year-old wrote: “For us [young people] the destruction of the planet is personal.”
It’s personal for all of us, surely?
Turning despair into action is the antidote for the Gen Zs and the gray heads, too.
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Thirty-nine years ago, the world agreed to end commercial whaling. Only two rogue nations, Japan and Norway, still refuse to abide by the rule of law.
In 2020, Norway’s bloodthirsty whaling armada slaughtered 503 minke whales, 74 more whales than they destroyed in 2019. This year, Norway has issued death warrants for 1,278 minkes. These crazed planet-killers have single-handedly annihilated more than 14,000 wonderful whales over the previous 39 years. What the frack!
Image credit: Bill Waldeen
Are the Norwegians starving? Is there really a consumer demand to eat our mammalian kith and kin, the whales? No. Instead, these glorious masterpieces are brutally killed and minced into dog food. Wot.
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A horrible whale massacre took place last month near the infamous town of Taiji, south central Japan, renowned for its cruelty. It sickened (and rightfully so) millions of empathetic people as they helplessly witnessed cold-blooded executioners in-action.
Try as it may, the minke whale could not escape from these wretched penned fishing nets.
Image credit: Ren Yabuki/LIA
On Christmas Eve 2020, a minke whale unsuspectingly swam into a pen of stationary nets near Taiji. Ren Yabuki, an animal activist with the Life Investigation Agency, fortuitously saw it. Using a drone, he documented the whale’s plight and enlisted the global support of animal lovers to free our brethren and sistren of the sea.
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*
The year 2020 set another horrible heat record in the oceans, which make up 99 percent of the planet’s biosphere, or, where life can exist. Many billions of our brethren and sistren, the animals, are already dead. It’s simply too hot.
The ocean heat is in lockstep with burning fossil fuels and wood pellets. In 2020, the world’s oceans absorbed the equivalent heat to dropping 10 Hiroshima atom bombs every second of the year (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 {sextillion} joules).
Image credit: Kevin Trenberth
Allow me to remind you that the oceans drive Earth’s climate. Hence we are amid a worsening man-made climate crisis. It is never just about humans though. We share this glorious blue planet with a couple of million other life forms. All life is interrelated and we need everything that is left, alive.
*Orcas are the most widespread of the cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises). These beauties are the pinnacle of mammalian evolution, and so worthy of our admiration and protection.
Image credit: Tatiana Ivkovich, Shutterstock
With brains more than twice as heavy and as complex as that of humans, orcas are feared predators. It’s not just other cetaceans that must constantly watch their backs for sudden ambushes by pods of the intelligent ones. Orcas give great white sharks a lot of grief and occasionally much pain. Keep Reading
*Around the globe, the dolphins are showing scientists that the planet has become unlivable. Dolphin deaths are piling up.
Globally, 44,000 floating slaughterhouses are marauding the oceans 24/7/365. Measuring a total of 13 million miles, with a couple of billion legal and illegal hooks, they are wiping, tunas, sharks, rays, sea turtles, cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), sea birds and so many other masterpieces off the planet at an unprecedented rate. Keep Reading
*Oceans occupy more than 95 percent of all living space on Earth. Oceans drive Earth’s climate. Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of all fossil fuel combustion heat. The oceanic heat is now equivalent to detonating three Hiroshima-style bombs every second for 75 straight years. That heat is wreaking death upon all life on Earth.
This week, scientists announced that worst-case scenario climate model predictions underestimated oceanic heat by a whopping 40 percent.
Houston, we have a problem. Keep Reading
*On December 30, 2018, the third imprisoned Atlantic bottlenose dolphin died in just over one year since Dolphinaris Arizona filled its tanks.
Now there are just five remaining inmates housed at this wretched facility located near Scottsdale. 400 miles from the Pacific Ocean in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, these masterpiece bottlenose dolphins are forced to swim in bathtubs, performing asinine tricks until they perish. It’s cruel and inhumane.
What horrible crimes did these exquisite mammals commit to merit such a heinous lifetime of punishment? Keep Reading