Posted under Seal Hunt & Whaling
It looks like Sea shepherd are wasting their breathe again by asking Greenpeace to co-operate during the next whale hunting season…
I actually hope that Greenpace will “snap out of it” and they will all be singing off the same hymn sheet!
An Appeal for Cooperation from Captain Paul Watson
Okay, here we go again, but nothing ventured and nothing gained.
This is the official 2008 Sea Shepherd Conservation Society request to the Greenpeace Foundation to work in cooperation with each other to defend the whales of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary for the 2008 and 2009 Antarctic summer.
The targeted whales need all the help they can get when the Japanese whaling fleet returns to illegally slaughter endangered whales in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary in December 2008.
During the last season we stopped them for 50% of the time and cut their quota by 50%. If only we had two ships and sufficient funding we could stop them up to 80% percent and perhaps to 100%. But we are a small organization with only one fast ship to deploy and we need to raise funds to finance the campaign.
But there is a solution. If both the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and the Greenpeace Foundation could cooperate in a joint coordinated effort to oppose the Japanese whaling interests we could stop the pirate whalers cold in Antarctica.
Every year Sea Shepherd has supplied Greenpeace with the Japanese coordinates when we have found the fleet although Greenpeace has refused to return the favor. And yes there have indeed been harsh words between Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace over the years but the word Greenpeace does include the word “peace” and therefore I am appealing to Greenpeace once again in the name of peaceful cooperation to work with Sea Shepherd to protect the whales.
Let the past stay in the past and let’s deal with the present with a focus on a constructive future. There really is no practical reason why Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd cannot work together.
After all, I am an original Greenpeacer and a co-founder, not just of the Greenpeace Foundation in 1972 but also of Greenpeace International in 1979.
Both Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace work towards our goals in a non-violent manner although our definition of non-violence is not harming sentient life. As Martin Luther King once wrote, “violence cannot be committed upon a non-sentient object.”
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has never caused a single physical injury to a single person in our entire 31 years of operations. Nor have we ever had any crew convicted of a felony crime anywhere in the world. And we have never been sued.
The Dalai Lama is a Sea Shepherd supporter and he describes the Sea Shepherd approach as being consistent with the spirit of Hayagriva or the compassionate aspect of Buddha’s wrath meaning that we should never injure anyone but sometimes we need to be intimidating to intervene against violence.
