Lately, belatedly, I’ve started watching the documentary, “Whale Wars.” I’m fascinated how it’s a saga of greed, idealism, recklessness, and selflessness all collapsed into one narrative. The first episode saw an entire raft of activists dumped in the ocean with near fatal consequences, and the damaging of one of the search copter’s rotors. They are wonderfully klutzy, these anti-whalers.
I’ll have more comments later, but interestingly, the hunt of the Sea Shepherd for whaling ships reflects the original boring and difficult hunt for the whales themselves. Some people knock the Shepherd’s tactics, but ultimately, its crew is actually doing something rather than blathering on about it. They make me think at least a small portion of the human race is worthy of survival. The cynical Japanese whaling fleet – which pretends killing the whales is about research – makes me doubt even that. Indeed, the Japanese tend only to be interested in researching is how much money they can make on the sushi market, not the well being of whales.
Marc Songini 