Carlton Creek, who submitted a video to our HSBC advert challenge, has also produced this great little film which takes the ongoing discussions about attaching monetary worth to the natural services provided by our planet and turning them on their head. It's a neat little thought experiment into what the sales pitch for a company representing all life on Earth (or 'shareholders') would be like.
Elsewhere, artist and architect Maya Lin (previous work: Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC) is working on a collaborative, multi-media and multi-space project called What Is Missing? The current website highlights species which have been lost or are severely threatened, and if nothing else hovering your mouse over the map markers and hearing a soundscape of endangered creatures is haunting.
Posted by jamie — 24 June 2010 at 11:45am
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Karli Thomas, Greenpeace oceans campaigner, writes from the IWC
meeting in Morocco.
The town of Sidi R'bat on Morocco's Atlantic coast is where the
biblical Jonah is said to have been vomited up by a whale. Less than
100km from that spot, something has been going on this week that is
again enough to make a whale sick to the stomach.
The
International Whaling Commission has been meeting this year beneath a dark cloud
of scandal. As delegates descended on the city of Agadir, media
headlines exposed Japan 'buying' countries to vote with them - including
the accusation that airfares and accommodation for this meeting's
acting chairman were paid by Japan. Hardly an auspicious start to a
crucial international meeting, nor a good omen for the whales.
Next week, our governments will get together in Agadir, Morocco, to talk whales. It’s the International Whaling Commission’s annual meeting. And this year, the main topic of conversation will be the IWC itself.
In reality, this is a testing time for the whales, and in many ways we need to make sure we save them all over again. Way back in the 80s when a moratorium, or ban, on commercial whaling was agreed, many countries had already stopped whaling. As the official catch figures show, by the time the ban came into force in 1987 commercial whaling was reduced to practically zero.
John Hocevar, team leader of the oceans campaign at Greenpeace USA, is currently in Louisiana helping with Greenpeace's response to the BP oil spill. Here's his latest report from the centre of the ever-growing disaster.
Greetings from Grand Isle, Louisiana, one of the growing number of
places unlucky enough to win a "heavily oiled" classification on the
government maps tracking the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite
BP's efforts to keep it under wraps, we're here to document the impacts
of the spill. The public has a
right - and a responsibility - to know the true cost of our
continued reliance on offshore oil, and fossil fuels in general.
Posted by Willie — 14 June 2010 at 4:20pm
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Votes to support whaling are being bought by Japan in return for aid donations
So, what's your price to sell out the
whales?
Some brown envelopes stuffed with cash? A
nice big cheque for development aid? All-expenses paid trips to exotic
locations? Or some dubious entertainment, including 'good
girls'?
Welcome, dear friends, to the world of
international diplomacy, Japanese government style. Yesterday, in a shocking
expose, the Sunday Times showed the tawdry reality of Japan's vote-buying tactics
to undermine the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Using undercover
reporters, they managed to elicit scandalous accounts of just what the government of Japan offers to get the support of developing nations in the
Caribbean, the Pacific, and Africa.
Posted by jamie — 14 June 2010 at 4:08pm
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The crews of the Arctic Sunrise and the Rainbow Warrior have once more come to the aid of Atlantic bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean. Although the fishing season has ended early because the quotas have been reached, there are still large cages out there filled with fish caught over the past couple of weeks. These cages are bound for tuna 'ranches', where the fish will be kept and fattened up, before being slaughtered.
Yesterday afternoon our activists again tried to free the endangered tuna from one of these cages.
Today, or at 11.59pm tonight, to be exact, the purse-seining season for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean is being closed. A week early.
I'm back on land now, having left the Arctic Sunrise in the Med. In London, we've had a flurry of media calls, excited by what they think is the "good news" that "bluefin fishing is being banned" in the Mediterranean.
So I thought, as well as putting the record straight with any journalists who'll listen, that I should maybe explain to everyone else what exactly is happening. And whether it is indeed "good news".
Janet
Cotter, from Greenpeace's Science Unit is currently on board the Esperanza on the first leg of the Arctic Under Pressure expedition.
The ship is currently in Ny-Ålesund in the arctic,
where Janet has been helping seagulls from 'contributing' to ocean
acidification research.
In my day job, I work as a
scientist as Greenpeace's Research Laboratories in Exeter, which is part of the Greenpeace's Science Unit. We might not
get do the banner hanging from bridges and all the dramatic stuff that other
Greenpeace activists do, but we have an important role in the
organisation. We analyse samples from
around the world in our laboratories, often looking for toxic contamination of
soils, rivers and seas, or sampling foodstuffs for GM contamination.
As you may know, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki - better known
as the Tokyo Two - are on trial for intercepting a box of whale meat as
part of an investigation into an embezzlement ring within Japan's
taxpayer-funded 'research' whaling programme.
The Japanese government subsidises the loss-making whaling programme to
the tune of US$5 million a year, making the embezzlement of whale meat
exposed by Junichi and Toru a significant crime. But instead of the
criminals behind the embezzlement facing justice, it's the Toyko Two who
find themselves in the dock.
Posted by jamie — 7 June 2010 at 5:24pm
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Earlier today, the Greenpeace team in the Mediterranean made another attempt to free bluefin tuna caught by the purse-seine fishing vessels. The good news is nobody got hurt this time, but the bad news is that - despite a brilliant effort - they weren't able to release any tuna.
As you can see in the slideshow above, the Arctic Sunrise got close to a Tunisian tugboat towing a net cage, into which caught tuna are transferred and towed to a tuna 'ranch' where they're fattened up ready for slaughter. Lowering a cutting grapple from the deck of the Sunrise, activists tried to cut through the netting; meanwhile, the towing rope between the tug and the cage was cut by the crew of an inflatable.
Unfortunately, the fishing crews reacted quickly, launching their own inflatable and managing to put guards on the cage. So no bluefin tuna freed this time but the fishing season still has a week to go...