Sea Shepherd Conference

On Monday the 27th of November, I got to meet Mike and Liza (both Austrailian) from The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society which is a non-profit, marine conservation organization based in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, Washington, in the United States and in Melbourne and Victoria in Australia. They were founded by Paul Watson, Starlet Lum, Ron Precious, Al Johnson in June of 1977.

Seas Shepherd Logo

We’ve got to learn and hear the exciting and interesting stories that they had from working with this society. For example, they had arrested  (along the with the Timor-Leste police) 18 Chinese fishing boats off the coast of Timor-Leste (East Timor) where they were supposed to fish for Tuna and instead were illegally fishing for sharks. They counted thousands of sharks and the captains on the boat were charged also for human rights abuses. Their work consists of two very different actions that they take. As you may have noticed, the first action is very direct and aggressive tactic where they ram into boats if they are suspected of illegal fishing or other related Marine Environment abuses. The other more subtle is the advertising and events that consists of beach cleanups and information about plastics in order to minimise single-use plastic usage.

However, we talked about this society in my Global Perspectives (GPers) class and we talked about the controversies of this organization. Unlike many similar organizations, they take the very direct impact that is unique to the other such environmental and peace groups. Taking this sort of action that we talked about in our GPers class, maybe the opposite mentality that environmental groups tend to have. Instead of going to peace, this society aims to ram into boats and take serious actions that for some people can be considered as aggressive and violent. The reason that this society has done this type of actions is that one of the co-founders called Paul Watson has a perspective that protests are very submissive when he used to work for Greenpeace. However, that is their perspective and I still support the work that they have been doing.

Courtesty and Quick Reference:

Sea Shepherd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MY_Sam_Simon

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/world/shepherd+battle+with+japanese+whaling+ships+ends+with/14428765/story.html

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