Three men and three women came together in South Australia to forge a public alliance to say “no” to British Petroleum’s (BP) offshore drilling plans along the longest east/west ice-free coastline in the Southern Hemisphere – The Great Australian Bight.
The Great Australian Bight is pristine and one of the largest remaining whale sanctuaries on the globe.
The Great Australian Bight Alliance includes Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Surfrider Foundation Australia, the Wilderness Society, Mirning and Kokatha elders, Oil Free Seas Kangaroo Island, and Clean Bight Alliance Australia.
BP intends to use more sonic air guns to bombard The Great Australian Bight seafloor in search of more climate-altering, subsidized fossil fuels and then extract them. The price of oil is at an 11-year low. The world is afloat with heat-trapping fossil fuels, which, according to the International Monetary Fund, were government bankrolled by $5.6 trillion last year.
The Earth has pneumonia. The oceans are supercharged with man-made heat from burning fossil fuels, and sea life is perishing around the globe. Recent mass die offs, including thousands of dead Chilean squids and thousands of penguin-like Alaskan birds called common murres, are continuing to pile up.
The number and occurrence of whale and dolphin strandings over the past 12 months is shocking. The oceans are critically ill.
The well-being of these “doctors of the sea” – whales and dolphins –are essential to our survival on the planet. We are missing 40 percent of oxygen-bearing oceanic plants called phytoplankton – the basis of the entire marine food web – from overheating oceans due to the climate crisis. Some cold-water currents are not surfacing, denying iron and nitrogen needed to grow phytoplankton.
The filter-feeding whales are fertilizing the sea with their flocculent fecal plumes (their feces). It is rich in iron and nitrogen – essential to grow oxygen-bearing phytoplankton, which provides almost three out of every four breaths of air we all breathe. The whales create more oxygen.
We require every whale remaining in the oceans alive and healthy to fight the climate crisis. We need the whales in order to live.
An oil spill in The Great Australian Bight from a deep-sea well blowout, reminiscent of the Deepwater Horizon debacle, would be a catastrophe for fisheries, tourism and marine life.
Sonic air guns deafen whales, and a deaf whale is a dead whale.
Tweet Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to stop promoting fossil fuels, killing whales and start protecting the breathtaking biodiversity of The Great Australian Bight, a legacy for all Australian children.
Earth Dr. Reese Halter is the author of “Shepherding the Sea: The Race to Save Our Oceans” and a faculty member of The Patel College of Global Sustainability, University of South Florida.