Yesterday, Japan announced that its bloodthirsty Southern Ocean whaling fleet had returned with 333 Minke whales — 200 of which were pregnant.
Japan plans on repeating this cruel, needless and cunning massacre of 3,667 more sentient piked whales of the Antarctic for another 11 consecutive years.
In 2014, the International Court of Justice at The Hague found Japan guilty of feigning science in order to commercial whale in the Antarctic Ocean. Last year, the Australian federal court fined Japan for killing thousands of Minke whales inside the Australian quadrant of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
Japan refuses to abide by the world and Australian court rulings. They intend on continuing ecocide without any retribution.
Japan does not own the Antarctic Ocean; in fact, it belongs to the commons — every citizen of Earth.
The oceans are in terrible shape. They are supercharged with man-made heat, which has disrupted some of the cold-water currents from carrying iron and nitrogen to the surface for re-growing phytoplankton — the basis of the entire marine food web. That phytoplankton also supplies each of us with almost two out of every three breaths of air. The oceans are missing 40 percent of the oxygen-bearing phytoplankton.
The filter feeding whales like blues, humpbacks, fins, Minkes and many others are performing an essential life-sustaining process of fertilizing the seas with their flocculent fecal plumes (or feces), rich in iron and nitrogen. The filter feeders have a crucial role in healing our ailing oceans by creating more phytoplankton, which enriches ocean habitat and invigorates the atmosphere with more oxygen.
Since 1985, Earth’s atmosphere has lost 589 oxygen molecules per every one million oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, due to burning climate-altering, subsidized fossil fuels. That’s almost enough missing oxygen to begin disrupting human sleep patterns.
In the last ice age, The Pleistocene, the newest and smallest member of the filter feeders, a “little” 14-ton piked whale known as Minke was produced. It’s the Southern Ocean Minkes that Japan is determined to destroy.
The Japanese population lost its palate for whale meat four decades ago. So now the only Japanese whaling company, which is owned by the government, forces whale meat into the Japanese school lunch program. But even that program cannot accommodate over 6,000 metric tons of stored whale meat in addition to the many thousands of tons of annual slaughtered whales from the North Pacific and Antarctic Oceans. So Japan is attempting to force the whale-friendly European Union to take its stockpiled commercial whale meat in a pending new multi-billion euro trade agreement.
The truth, ladies and gentlemen, is that in climate in crisis; we need every filter feeding whale on the globe alive, fertilizing the ocean and generating oxygen because by 2023, the United Nations predicts eight billion people on Earth. Currently, we are 7.4 billion — that’s an additional 600 million people requiring oxygen to breathe.
I predict that my colleagues in the whale’s Navy — Sea Shepherd Australia — will protect the Minkes in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary next year in their sleek, custom vessel soon to set sail on the seven seas.
Earth Dr. Reese Halter is the author of “Shepherding the Sea: The Race to Save Our Oceans.”