Whale Wars - Eco-Terrorism as Reality TV

Tonight begins the second season of "Whale Wars" in which a scruffy band of eco-crusaders, the Sea Shepherds, go to war against the evil whaling ships, by any means necessary. The reviews for the first season were great. Neil Genzlinger of the New York Times writes: "Whale Wars splashes across the increasingly exhausted genre of people-at-work reality series like icy seawater, jolting you awake with a frothy, briny burst of -- well, you get the idea. This is one spunky show."

What's not to like? The show is action on the high seas; ocean combat to save the whales! Everyone likes whales. I like whales. Who doesn't like whales? What great television for those bored with shows about fishing off Alaska, Ice Road Truckers or the Real Housewives of Duluth!

So what is the problem with "Whale Wars"? The problem is that it is cheap exploitation in praise of what is nothing less than eco-terrorism. It is the glorification of vigilantism on the high seas. And oh, by the way, the Sea Shepherds do almost nothing to protect the whales where they really do need protection.

While "Whale Wars" presents a simplistic case of us against them, the noble environmentalists against the evil whalers, the reality, of course, is not so black and white. By international agreement with the International Whaling Commission, the Japanese were allowed to kill up to a nine hundred minke whales and fifty fin whales in 2007/2008 in the Antarctic ocean for "research purposes." Critics claim that this is thinly disguised commercial whaling. Whatever it may be, minke whales, in particular, are not considered to be particularly threatened. Estimates have placed the minke population in the Southern Hemisphere in the range of 200,000-416,700 whales.

Negotiating international agreements may not make for rousing "reality TV" but it has made a significant difference in actually "saving the whales."

The Sea Shepherds on "Whale Wars" are abolitionist animal rights activists. They believe that every whale is sacred and should be preserved. On this basis, they justify aggressively interfering with and attempting to disable whaling ships in international waters, including pelting the ships with bottles containing butyric acid, which recently injured four Japanese crew members. Their zealotry is strongly reminiscent of anti-abortion extremists. (Both groups share a fondness for butyric acid attacks.) The Sea Shepherds also attempt to maneuver Zodiac boats in between the whalers and their prey. More seriously, they have taken to ramming Japanese whalers with their ship, the Steve Irwin. (They deny this but several videos of the Irwin ramming a whaler are widely available.) Members of the Sea Shepherds have also boarded whalers at sea and in one case the Sea Shepherds interfered with the search and rescue of a Japanese sailor washed overboard. (The Sea Shepherds deny they interfered but that is not the opinion of those conducting the search and rescue.)

The Sea Shepherds fly the Jolly Roger flag of piracy. I think that they should be more accurately described as eco-terrorists.

''You don't beg criminals to stop doing what they're doing,'' Mr. Watson said in the first episode last season. ''You intervene, and you physically and aggressively shut them down.'' Of course the whalers, whatever you may think of their activities, are operating legally. It is Watson and the Sea Shepherds who are the criminals.

And where are these self-described pirates or eco-terrorists, call them what you will, based? In Friday Harbor, Washington. Given their arguably illegal and dangerous antics, I am surprised that the group, as well as the producers of the television show and the Animal Planet Network have not been swamped in lawsuits.

But do the Sea Shepherds make a difference? Not in any significant way. The WWF estimates that 90% of non-natural whale deaths are due to collisions with ships, followed by "by-catch," whales becoming caught in nets, and then lastly, by fishing. Only this week, an oil tanker bound for Valdez apparently collided with a humpback whale and dragged the carcass into the harbor on the bow of the ship. Special shipping lanes have been set up off Cape Cod to reduce collisions between ships and the extremely endangered northern right whales, which migrate through the area. It is hoped that these collisions will be reduced by an estimated 74% during the migratory season. Changes in shipping lanes around the world and the development of new technologies are making a real difference in reducing the number of whales who die needlessly, which also does not make for entertaining television.

In the end, "Whale Wars" is a highly dangerous sideshow, which may make for diverting "reality TV" for the couch-bound, but has nothing meaningful to do with "saving the whales."

Comments

[Atalaya]

Three Hundred and Five Whales Saved by Operation Musashi

Japanese Whalers "Enraged"

The Institute for Cetacean Research has released their 2008/2009 kill figures in the Southern Ocean. They slaughtered 679 Minke whales of their targeted 935 and they only took one endangered fin whale from their targeted 50 whales.

Sea Shepherd this last season has saved 305 whales. The Japanese Fisheries Agency is blaming the failure to reach their quota on disruptions by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

The Japanese whalers extended their whaling season by two weeks in an attempt to recover losses. Despite this, they took only 2% of their fin whale quota and 72% of their Minke whale quota. The estimated loss of profits is in the tens of millions of dollars. With costs increased due to security measures, the Japanese whaling industry needed to secure 700 whales to break even financially. They have failed to secure their required 700 whales.

Once again the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has negated the profits of the Southern Ocean whaling fleet.

"We continue to speak the one language these whale pirates understand," said Captain Paul Watson. "Profit and loss: we need to keep their losses up and their profits down. We will eventually beat these killers with aggressively applied economics." I am delighted that the Japanese whalers made zero profits this year and most of all I am delighted that we saved 305 lives. That is three years in a row we have negated their bloody profits.

[Commodore1]

Article is interesting but not well researched.



1.) "By international agreement with the IWC, the Japanese were allowed to kill up to a 900 minke whales and 50 fin whales ... for 'research purposes.'" FALSE. There is no such language in the agreement. The ICW bans all commercial whaling. A limited number of whales may be killed in international waters for research. ICW rules say nothing about excessive numbers like this -- the "950" number is made up by Japan. No marine biologist worth his salt says that killing 950 whales per year = "research." These ships are whale-meat canneries. They are violating the ICW, whether or not they -- or YOU -- say they are.



2.) They are whaling in Australian territorial waters. The Australian courts have outlawed this, and ruled that the Japanese are illegal poachers. No amount of lawyering or ICW loopholes can change that. This is Australia's jurisdiction.



3.) ICW allows for private citizens to enforce the ban if they witness whaling. Sea Shepherds are therefore acting within the law. They've never been charged with a crime in relation to their anti-whaling campaign.



4.) "Eco-terrorists" are environmental activists who commit crimes against innocents. Since the Sea Shepherds are not legally criminals, and according to the Australian courts the Japanese whalers ARE criminals, the term "eco-terrorist" is a shock-value exaggeration.

[Atalaya]

If they were only doing this for the image, they wouldn't be risking their lives and the emotions of their loves ones... They would be donating large amounts of money to WWF or sitting on their butts and watching whales go extinct through a camera lens like Greenpeace.

[JeanRR]

Thanks you for an excellent article. I agree that these people, like most terrorists, are more in love with their own image than with the cause.

[IsisCat]

Then you don't know them then. I do... what you've just accused them of is as far from the truth as it is possible to get. If only you could open your heart and your mind...

[ecw0647]

I have to agree. The show bothers me because it's another example of confrontational ecology which may make the participants feel good and perhaps make for interesting television, but does little for the whales. If Greenpeace were truly serious about stopping whaling, they would use the funds they receive to make it more profitable for the whalers NOT to whale, i.e., find them other jobs, or even just pay them not to go whaling. Watching the show, I also get a sense that the Greenpeace folks are amateurs and not a little incompetent.

[IsisCat]

Firstly. They're not Greenpeace. They're the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Secondly, the crew are all volunteers. There's just not as much money is saving whales as there is in killing them and cutting them to pieces.
So... yes... they are amateurs. But they have saved many whales and harmed no human beings in the doing of it.
In the meantime, if there is some group - started by you perhaps - who'd like to work with the whalers to find them alternative streams of income, then you should do it. Conservation International works on a similar model.
But until that day - many innocent lives are being taken and the Sea Shepherd does good work to save as many of them as they can.
particularly as the whaling is in illegal waters and the governments of the world are not policing it.

[Nick Roberts]

first off no one has proved that the japanese have been killing illigaly second these people think they are saving the world, when they are just risking their own lives. They are lucky the Japanese have no faught back against them. In reality this show is pointless when they are the ones breaking laws because there has been no proof that the japanese have done this illegaly.

[IsisCat]

Actually it has been proven and two of Greenpeace's activists in Japan have been detained to cover it up.

You can read about it on Greenpeace's website.

Gosh I truly wish people would find out the facts before they formed opinions.

[rawlus]

i find the television series entertaining, which i assume is the point. especially entertaining is the recklessness and unpreparedness of the all-volunteer crew. perhaps it is in the unflattering editing but when watching, one gets the impression of passionate cause-minded people following the orders of a modern-day cult leader who could not possibly care less for the health and welfare of his flock. again, great editing!

i am on the edge of my seat each time they clumsily load the Zodiac into the water and a ragtag band of inexperienced volunteers race at full throttle in high seas into the salty spray only to almost immediately forget where they were going, lose their bearings, forget to maintain communications with the steve irwin and invariably return after much hand-wringing with someone injured due to inexperience or incompetence. i don't know how many hours of footage went into the editing of the roughly 45min of each episode, but i'd like to think that these embarrassingly clumsy, disorganized, inept and dangerous to your peers escapades were not continual occurrences.

i suspect the issue, like most issues, is way more complex than the easily digestible and mass-marke­t-appealin­g good vs. evil that is clumsily-portrayed in the series.

the real way to stop the whale harvest, if that is truly the goal, is to eliminate demand for the meat. for as long as demand exists, commercial interests will find a way.

[IsisCat]

Behaviour change needs to be a part of the solution, but it is not the real way or the only thing that needs to happen. Because it is excruciatingly slow, behaviour change almost never happens on its own accord. It needs regulation and government policy to enforce it.
That means the Japanese Government needs to outlaw whale meat.
That's the only way it'll happen. And the only way that will happen is if the industry is no longer profitable. Now while influencing consumer demand needs to happen on the one hand, the other way to work towards this is to simply get between whales and the hunters and make each hunt increasingly less profitable.
Sea Shepherd does crucial work and I for one am glad they're out there.

[colddoseofsumthin]

thank-you for sharing your rhetoric-laced opinions with the world richard. as a journalist­/videograp­her who has spent time on board one of watson's ships, i can say (based on what i've witnessed) that your blog reads like smear campaign, not one of objective reporting. but it's a blog, right? and blogs, like the ubiquitous bunghole, know how to do one thing very well: spew waste. so journalistic integrity be damned, let's fwd the agenda of ill-informed bias!

[jinsei]

What exactly is Spilman ill informed about? He cited all of his information. This is called an OPINION?EDITORIAL piece, so as you would probably agree, Spilman is writing his opinionb.

You however, have not written a word of evidence in refutation, so why should anyone listen to you? "I was on one of Watson's ships" is means what exactly?

[jinsei]

Please ignore the numerous typos in my above comment.

[IsisCat]

Um... that they have first hand experience where Spillman and yourself do not?
That their opinion as a result counts for more as they have experiential evidence where Spillman and yourself do not?
I know some of the Sea Shepherd crew personally and Spillman's 'opinion' is misrepresentative, ignorant and ill-informed.

[confidance government]

So they kill 900 whales per year, what's the big deal? Most of us could care less about hunting whales, as long as their are reasonable quota limits to prevent overharvesting.

[GrahamInCanada]

Ahem, sorry to wake you up chap, but a long time ago we passed the point of over-harvesting whales almost to the point of no return, and the whaling industry killed itself in the process.

That's why its illegal to hunt commercially for whales. There is a quota, it is zero.

Now you can go back to sleep...

[confidance government]

Has the population recovere? I am just curious as I prefer that our wildlife is responsibly managed. It seems that we are in the process of repeating this mistake with commercial fishing.

[jsgaetano]

Maybe people would rather see a show about abortion clinic terrorists?

Also, the entire "eco-terrorist" label is asinine.

[Bytown]

It's all about the money.

See Paul Watson's interview with the CBC here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_gTBDFTXE0

[GrahamInCanada]

My goodness, the Canadian sealers lobby (ding dong, the hunt is dead, which old hunt, the sealer's hunt, ding dong the wicked hunt is dead!) are masters at taking things out of context, but really, give up.

Paul Watson was a founding member of Greenpeace. Watson grew disenchanted with his creation Greenpeace, and the hypocritical do nothing but witness restraints his first creation put on him, and founded the Sea Shepherds to not do nothing about the things witnessed, way way back in the 1970's.

Bytown links to a radio interview shortly after Watson left Greenpeace and founded Sea Shepherds, where Watson slags Greenpeace, not the Sea Shepherds, and certainly not himself.

If only it was all about the money, Canada would have shut down the seal hunt 30 years ago, and not waited for the Europeans to do it for us, and Japan would turn anti-whaling in a second, were it all about the money.

Spilman chose a man difficult to slag as irrelevant, and tried, weakly, to slag him anyway.

Watson founded two of the most successful organizations of their type in the world, and spent decades racking up victory after victory, I mean, what has Spilman ever done to compare to Watson.

As far as Mr. Watson's capacity to captain on the high seas, well, anyone who has found and sunk so many pirate ships without being sunk himself sure looks like a skilled captain to me.

[TryToBeFlexible]

"go to war against the evil whaling ships, by any means necessary". Uh, I don't think so. That would seem to imply that the crew of the Sea Shepard are using guns and bombs and torpedoes.
They are throwing butyric acid, which is actually rancid butter, on the other vessels to make them stink. Wow, stink bombs. Pretty terroristic.
"boarding the Japanese ship".. Kind of implies they jumped in mass, with weapons loaded, onto the Japanese ships to take them hostage. In actual fact, one guy boards a Japanese ship, is immediately taken prisoner, in order to generate some news and get the story out. Wow, once again, pretty terroristic.
Too bad the real terrorists in the middle east don't throw stink bombs, and chain themselves to vehicles to generate news stories.

[jsgaetano]

This is all the far right has. They compare people willing to risk their own lives in an effort to inconvenience people doing harm to the planet to the lunatics on the far right, who cowardly assassinate unarmed people working in women's health clinics.

[dolly1000]

I thought I heard Watson say something like, "Let's give this guy a scare" and then you see him steering his ship toward the Japanese vessal.

[GrahamInCanada]

If, as Mr. Spilman writes, the minke whale are not considered to be particularly threatened, than why are they on the threatened species list maintained by CITES?

Since I've never seen the TV show myself, I can't comment on whether the Sea Shepherds on "Whale Wars" are abolitionist animal rights activists. The Sea Shepherds in real life assume a law enforcement role as provided by the United Nations World Charter for Nature.

It is the Japanese that are saying that there are no laws on the high seas.

And the Japanese did not "By international agreement with the International Whaling Commission" win anything, the IWC is rendered dysfunctional and unable to prevent Japan from conducting a hunt under fraudulent terms by Japan's antics.

And furthermore, the Japanese are in for a pyrrhic victory if they ever manage to win their way at the IWC. The IWC will dissolve around them, and what replaces it will stop the hunt.

[10SNE1]

To call these individuals "eco-terrorists" is off base...Whale Hunting is Illegal, Abortion is not.

The biggest benefit of this show is raise awareness that this illegal harvest still takes place.

[laddieluv]

Agree!!!

[kathy001]

And to just add one point - the comparison of whale hunting to abortion is an apples to anything-o­ther-than-­an-apple comparison. The whales that are killed by hunters are fully functioning adult animals - not non-viable fetuses.

[GrahamInCanada]

Um, actually, 91.6% of the mature female minke whales killed by Japan are pregnant when they are killed. So their fetus dies too.