the greycat blog

Something about whales brings out the mystic in otherwise admirable people, and very embarrassing it can be. Deep in the Southern Ocean a Japanese whaling flotilla is at work, tracked and harassed by the anti-whaling forces of Greenpeace (the Esperanza) and Sea Shepherd (the Steve Irwin). If there’s one thing the latter two organizations hate more than whaling, it’s each other, and co-operation in the cause of the whales has not been very evident down there: each has been going its own way in the hunt for the Japanese.

But, the Melbourne Age reports, it turns out that the radicals of Sea Shepherd have a great advantage over their establishment rivals at Greenpeace. The whales are on their side.

Greenpeace declined to comment on Esperanza’s position, but the western location confirmed Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson’s belief that the whalers were likely to be working north of Prydz Bay, in the Co-operation Sea, where he was headed. He also said a whale showed him the way. ‘Yesterday a large humpback whale surfaced beside the Steve Irwin and seven times raised his long flipper into the air, and seven times brought it down pointing in a direction due west, as if to say “go this way”.’

Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, is a formidable figure, a man Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey would have called ‘a capital seaman’,* but it’s hard to respect someone who really believes that a whale popped up out of the water for him, knew who he was and what he was doing, and gave him a helping flipper. Yet Watson is typical of a paradoxical but strongly-rooted tendency in the conservation movement to put humanity at the centre of everything: he cannot see the whales in their own terms, he has to humanize them and believe that there is some kind of relationship there that sanctifies his anthropocentric view of the natural world.

The ‘they went that-a-way’ whale is not an aberration for Watson. If you visit Sea Shepherd’s web site you’ll find that the whole enterprise was inspired by a similar Disneyesque fantasy:

In June 1975, Robert Hunter and Paul Watson were the first people to put their lives on the line to protect whales when Paul placed his inflatable Zodiac between a Russian harpoon vessel and a pod of defenseless Sperm whales. During this confrontation with the Russian whaler, a harpooned and dying sperm whale loomed over Paul’s small boat. Paul recognized a flicker of understanding in the dying whale’s eye. He felt that the whale knew what they were trying to do. He watched as the magnificent leviathan heaved its body away from his boat, slipped beneath the waves and died. A few seconds of looking into this dying whale’s eye changed his life forever. He vowed to become a lifelong defender of the whales and all creatures of the seas.

Presumably defending ‘all creatures of the seas’ would mean protecting giant squid from the sperm whales who prey upon them (’Paul recognized a flicker of understanding in the dying squid’s eye …’) but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Despite his claim to care not only for ‘the whales, dolphins, seals’ but for ‘all the other creatures on this earth’ the truth is that only some species are of interest: the ones that are beautiful, that make people feel bad about humanity but good about themselves, and that can have human characteristics - the nice ones, at least - projected onto them. Watson even claims that he has been ‘rewarded by friendship with many members of different species’: friends with dolphins and killer whales? It must put a strain on things when one of your friends hunts down, tears apart and starts to eat another. But such conflicts are absent from Watson’s world because he sees nature only from his own point of view, and interprets it in accordance with his own moral, aesthetic, and even spiritual, standards. Nature is harmonious and peaceful, filled with gentle, intelligent, beautiful creatures. It’s just human beings who screw it all up and stop it being what human beings like to think it should be.

By the way, the Jolly Roger flown by Sea Shepherd’s Steve Irwin (formerly Farley Mowat) is not just for show. The ship is unregistered and is, genuinely and legally, a pirate. Watson is quite proud of this, holding forth about what he imagines is the noble history of pirates:

‘It was not the British Navy that ended piracy in the Caribbean, it was Captain Henry Morgan who did that, and he was a pirate,’ said Captain Watson. ‘I am proud to add my name to the long list of honourable and noble pirates like Sir Francis Drake, John Paul Jones, and Jean LaFitte.’

Henry Morgan certainly did not end piracy in the Caribbean, which continued for thirty years after his death in 1688 and was eventually brought to an end by the actions of the British and Spanish navies. Nor were Morgan, Drake or LaFitte pirates; they were privateers, licensed by letter of marque to prey upon the commerce of their country’s enemies during time of war (and LaFitte was a slave-trader, among many other disreputable things: ‘honourable and noble’ he was not). As for John Paul Jones, that great man was an American naval officer, and to suggest that he had anything of the pirate about him is insulting as well as profoundly ignorant.

* Another quote from Jack Aubrey: ‘I have always liked whalers’ (Patrick O’Brian, Blue at the Mizzen (1999), p. 183).

The BBC have a reporter on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, tracking the Japanese whaling fleet as it hunts Humpback and Minke whales across the Southern Ocean. His name is Jonah.

‘I am still not sure whether or not sending me on this trip is a big in-joke by BBC editors back in London.’

A mere two months after it was featured in The Guardian (and right here on this blog), the Zerefos et al analysis of paintings depicting sunsets between 1500 and 1900 has turned up on the Discovery Channel’s news pages: ‘Art as a window to climate change’.

The article quotes some skeptical responses to the Zerefos approach from, among others, Kevin Trenberth of the Climate Analysis Research Center, who points out that ‘Painters are not scientists trying to do an accurate picture of nature’, and James Hamilton, biographer of J. M. W. Turner, who comments that ‘It’s very hard to tell when artists are being absolutely accurate and when they’re using vivid sky as a platform to more vivid painting’.

I agree with those reservations, and have my own doubts about the study, which I noted in my original post, but it’s still an interesting approach and, if nothing else, provides some illuminating insights into the interaction between artists and nature (however they saw that nebulous concept) over a long period. This is a direct link to the Zerefos article (PDF) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, August 2007.

What do caring environmental campaigners do at Christmas? Frighten and intimidate children, of course:

A grim Christmas message for kids from the mayor of Seattle. Greg Nickels told small children he’s launching ‘Operation Save Santa’ to protect the big guy from global warming. At a Christmas tree lighting, Nickels warned the kids they had to use energy efficient light bulbs, or climate change could melt the North Pole — and drown Santa, his elves and all his reindeer.

Find out more about the kind of man who is capable of telling children not only that Santa, his elves and all his reindeer are going to drown but that it is all their fault by wallowing in his smugness here.

Found via Tim Blair.

Brothels struggle, mountains grow, cats invade, sheep shrink, ice sheets expand, ice sheets contract. Yes, it is just as we feared: global warming has run entirely out of control and is now causing everything.

For all the above hotness calamities and many more (600 or so, in fact) visit Dr John Brignell’s ‘complete list of things caused by global warming’. And while you’re at Dr Brignell’s site, take a little time before the coming eco-catastrophe to read his ‘Global Warming as Religion and not Science’.

My favourite piece of warmy-alarmism: ‘Climate change “could be fashion disaster”‘. Example here.

Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year (gosh), is constantly on the look-out for signs of global warming’s terrible effects. As a result he finds them, all the time, and sometimes in the most surprising places:

The Samburu circumcise their youths in grand ceremonies, which are held every seven years or so, when enough cattle and other foods have accumulated to support such celebrations. Circumcision represents a transition to manhood, and until a youth has passed it he can’t marry. But it’s been 14 years since a circumcision ceremony has been held here. There are now 40,000 uncircumcised young men, some in their late 20s, waiting their turn. All of the eligible young women, tired of waiting, have married older men (multiple wives are allowed), so there are no wives for the new initiates.

I could never have imagined that climate change would have such an effect on an entire society. On reflection though, cultures such as the Samburu are intimately linked to their environment, so as these pressures increase it becomes more difficult to maintain long-held traditions.

I can’t sleep for thinking about those 40,000 foreskins, just left hanging around. For more on the Flannery phenomenon, Tim Blair is your man: try this Google search of his blog.

‘Conservationists’, writes Peter Wilson in The Australian, ‘are questioning the value of protecting “celebrity animals” such as pandas and tigers’. He reports on the views of Chris Packham, a British conservationist, who is arguing that we should get beyond our obsession with the cute and cuddly (pandas), the glamorous and exciting (tigers) and the big and blubbery (whales) and take a more pragmatic view of how the conservation movement/industry best spends its money. ‘I would eat the last panda if I could have all the money we have spent on panda conservation put back on the table for me to do more sensible things with’, he says; ‘The panda is possibly one of the grossest wastes of conservation money in the last half century’.

The underlying issue behind all this is that conservation is driven by a thoroughly anthropocentric worldview shaped by how we would like the world to be rather than how it actually is: hence the quasi-religious worship of whales and the lack of interest in bugs and bacteria. Extinction is a thoroughly natural process, whereas conservation is the ultimate artificial intervention. As Packham puts it, if current conservation priorities had been applied ‘during the last great global warming, we would probably have been throwing our money at the woolly mammoth instead of doing things that might actually work’.

A very interesting chap, Chris Packham. His website is here.