Sea Shepherd Launches Operation Migaloo II / Sharkwater Film released on Feb. 22 / Planktos Ocean Dumping Scheme Defeated

The Hunt for the Japan­ese Whale Poach­ers Resumes…

Press Release: 02/13/2008

After twelve days of repairs, refu­el­ing, re-crew­ing, re-sup­ply­ing and re-pro­vi­sion­ing, the Sea Shep­herd ship Steve Irwin is return­ing to the South­ern Ocean. The esti­mat­ed time for depar­ture is 2000 hours Mel­bourne time on Thurs­day Feb­ru­ary 14.

“A spe­cial thank-you to Aus­tralia,” said Cap­tain Paul Wat­son. “You helped to send the Steve Irwin back to sea as a Valentine’s Day gift to the whales.”

Dona­tions of mon­ey for fuel, dona­tions of food and sup­plies flood­ed onto the decks of the whale con­ser­va­tion ship dur­ing the brief stay in Vic­to­ria dock­lands.

“We are anx­ious to return to the coast of Antarc­ti­ca,” said Sea Shep­herd cook Amber Paar­man from South Africa. “Every moment that we are not on the tail of the Japan­ese fleet means that the lives of the whales are in per­il.”

The Steve Irwin intends to harass and inter­vene against ille­gal Japan­ese whal­ing for the next four to five weeks. This should stop them to the end of the whal­ing sea­son. The fleet’s oper­a­tions were shut down for more than three weeks in Jan­u­ary. Sea Shep­herd intends to shut them down again.

“In Jan­u­ary we pre­vent­ed them from slaugh­ter­ing whales for three weeks, we cost the Japan­ese over two mil­lion dol­lars in fuel dur­ing the pur­suit and we exposed their ille­gal whal­ing activ­i­ties world­wide and most impor­tant­ly we got the sto­ry into the Japan­ese media. This pro­voked a real debate in Japan on the cost of whal­ing to Japan’s rep­u­ta­tion,” said Cap­tain Paul Wat­son.

The Sea Shep­herd Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety does not intend to sur­ren­der the South­ern Ocean Whale Sanc­tu­ary to the poach­ers. After this sea­son, Cap­tain Paul Wat­son is work­ing to secure a 2nd ship with the objec­tive of mount­ing a non-stop pur­suit for the 2008/2009 whal­ing sea­son.

The Steve Irwin dropped off 16 vol­un­teer crewmem­bers in Mel­bourne on Feb­ru­ary 2nd and 19 vol­un­teers have joined the crew. Eleven crewmem­bers have been with the cam­paign from the begin­ning.

The 32 crew, 8 women and 24 men return­ing to the South­ern Oceans rep­re­sent 10 dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ties. In addi­tion to 15 Aus­tralians, crewmem­bers have joined from New Zealand, Cana­da, the U.S.A., Swe­den, South Africa, the Nether­lands, the U.K. Spain, and Japan.

http://www.seashepherd.org
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Award win­ning doc­u­men­tary Shark­wa­ter will have its the­atri­cal release in the Unit­ed King­dom on Feb­ru­ary 22. In the film, shark con­ser­va­tion­ist Rob Stew­art teams up with Cap­tain Wat­son and Sea Shep­herd to com­bat the shark fin mafia in Cos­ta Rica and the Gala­pa­gos.

“This is a film that will for­ev­er shat­ter the stereo­typ­i­cal myths that sur­round sharks. Where Jaws taught peo­ple to hate and fear sharks, Rob Stew­art’s pas­sion­ate mas­ter­piece will have peo­ple lov­ing and car­ing for these impor­tant ani­mals,” prais­es Cap­tain Wat­son.

Full details: www.sharkwater.com www.seashepherd.org

UK THEATRICAL RELEASE SCHEDULE
ALL VENUES PREMIERING 22nd FEBRUARY
Lon­don
Apol­lo Cin­e­ma
19 Regent Street Lon­don, SW1Y 4LR

Regions
Birm­ing­ham Show­case
Kings­bury Road (A38) Erd­ing­ton, Birm­ing­ham, B24 9QE

Bris­tol Show­case
Avon Meads, St. Phillips Cause­way, Bris­tol, BS2 0SP

Cardiff Show­case
Heol-Yr-Odyn, Park Nant­garw, Tre­f­for­est Indus­tri­al Estate, Nr Pon­typridd, CF15 7QX

Hull Odeon
Kingston Park, Kingston Street, Hull, HU1 2TX

Glas­gow East Show­case
Bar­rbridge Leisure Cen­tre, Coat­bridge, Glas­gow, G69 7TZ

Nor­wich Odeon
River­side Leisure Park, Wher­ry Road, Nor­wich, NR1 1XA

Not­ting­ham Show­case
Red­field Way, Lenton, Not­ting­ham, NG7 2UW

Leeds/Bradford Odeon
Gal­lagher Leisure Park, Thorn­bury, Brad­ford, BD3 7AT

Man­ches­ter Show­case
Hyde Road (A57), Bel­lVue, Man­ches­ter, M12 5AL

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Plank­tos Ocean Dump­ing Scheme Defeat­ed by Anti-Whalers

News release: Sea Shep­herd
02/14/2008

Our cam­paign against Plank­tos Inc. is over. The con­tro­ver­sial plan to dump hun­dreds of tons of iron ore dust into the ocean in a bizarre scheme to seed plank­ton blooms has been aban­doned by the Plank­tos cor­po­ra­tion of Cal­i­for­nia.

This is a vic­to­ry against a cor­po­rate car­bon trad­ing scheme that had no sci­en­tif­ic cred­i­bil­i­ty.

This is from the Feb­ru­ary 13th, 2008 edi­tion of the New York Times” ( http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/commercial-ocean-fertilization-project-
halted/index.html?ref=technology):

“Plank­tos, the Cal­i­for­nia com­pa­ny try­ing to turn a prof­it by fer­til­iz­ing the ocean with iron dust, pulled the plug on planned field tests on Wednes­day, cit­ing a lack of funds. At the com­pa­ny’s Web site, planktos.com, a sim­ple notice blamed the shut­down on a “high­ly effec­tive dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign waged by anti-off­set cru­saders.”

The busi­ness plan had been to sell “car­bon off­set” cred­its earned by trig­ger­ing blooms of phy­to­plank­ton that, in the­o­ry, would absorb a pre­dictable amount of the cli­mate-warm­ing gas car­bon diox­ide through pho­to­syn­the­sis and then sink to the seabed. The cred­its would be sold to com­pa­nies or indi­vid­u­als try­ing to com­pen­sate for unavoid­able emis­sions of car­bon diox­ide (from dri­ving, fly­ing, and the like).

Plank­ton blooms hap­pen nat­u­ral­ly when dust con­tain­ing iron set­tles on ocean waters where a lack of iron oth­er­wise pre­vents plank­ton from thriv­ing. Huge blooms have result­ed after dust from the Sahara Desert blows over the Atlantic, for exam­ple. But efforts to repli­cate the process arti­fi­cial­ly have met with strong oppo­si­tion from envi­ron­men­tal groups. The Sea Shep­herd Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety, which for years has con­front­ed, and some­times rammed, whal­ing and fish­ing ves­sels had threat­ened to block a fer­til­iza­tion effort by Plank­tos last sum­mer near the Gala­pa­gos Islands, forc­ing it to change plans.

A num­ber of marine and cli­mate sci­en­tists have also opposed com­mer­cial fer­til­iza­tion efforts, for var­i­ous rea­sons. In a “joint pol­i­cy state­ment” pub­lished in the jour­nal Sci­ence last month, a group of researchers from around the world said trade in car­bon cred­its earned this way was pre­ma­ture “unless research pro­vides the sci­en­tif­ic foun­da­tion to eval­u­ate risks and ben­e­fits.”

The Plank­tos ves­sel Weath­er­bird II has been stuck in port on the Por­tuguese island of Madeira after months of revised plans and failed efforts to attract more investors. Finan­cial trou­bles had been mount­ing for months. On Wednes­day, the com­pa­ny said it had called back the ves­sel and its crew.

The Plank­tos state­ment said:
“Man­age­ment has also rad­i­cal­ly down­sized the com­pa­ny’s staffing while the board of direc­tors has formed a new com­mit­tee to explore all options cur­rent­ly avail­able. Options include a pos­si­ble re-launch of planned marine oper­a­tions, pend­ing addi­tion­al financ­ing or new part­ner­ships, as well as the pos­si­ble pur­suit of oth­er promis­ing busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties in the envi­ron­men­tal sphere.
The board of direc­tors con­tin­ues to believe in the urgent eco­log­i­cal neces­si­ty of its ocean restora­tion plans and the sci­en­tif­ic spe­cious­ness of objec­tions voiced to date. How­ev­er, ide­o­log­i­cal hos­til­i­ty to and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of this work will con­tin­ue to stymie progress until the true grav­i­ty of our cli­mat­ic and ocean crises is more wide­ly under­stood.”

The Sea Shep­herd Posi­tion:
The Sea Shep­herd Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety opposed the iron ore dust dump­ing scheme because it was con­demned by the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency of the Unit­ed States and was in fact a vio­la­tion of Unit­ed States and Inter­na­tion­al reg­u­la­tions on the dump­ing of mate­ri­als at sea. The scheme was also opposed by the Gala­pa­gos Nation­al Park, the Charles Dar­win Foun­da­tion and the Min­istry of the Envi­ron­ment of Ecuador.

Sea Shep­herd did not make any judg­ment on the sci­en­tif­ic mer­its, if any, of the scheme. We act­ed because the dump­ing was a vio­la­tion of Ecuado­ri­an, Amer­i­can and Inter­na­tion­al law.

In August of 2007, Sea Shep­herd blocked the plan in the Gala­pa­gos. In Novem­ber 2007, Sea Shep­herd con­front­ed the Plank­tos ves­sel in Bermu­da forc­ing it to move onto Madeira.
The Sea Shep­herd Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety would like to thank Plank­tos for acknowl­edg­ing our oppo­si­tion as the rea­son for the aban­don­ment of this scheme.

Will dump­ing iron ore dust into the sea stim­u­late plank­ton blooms? Will increased plank­ton blooms sequester more car­bon diox­ide? We don’t know but the answers need to be found in the lab before using the liv­ing ocean as a test­ing facil­i­ty. The Sea Shep­herd Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety is not in a posi­tion to deter­mine sci­en­tif­ic mer­it. We can only act upon the rec­om­men­da­tions of sci­en­tif­ic bod­ies and law enforce­ment agen­cies. As a part­ner with the Gala­pa­gos Nation­al Park and the Ecuado­ri­an Nation­al Envi­ron­men­tal Police we act­ed in accor­dance to their oppo­si­tion to this scheme and we agreed with the EPA in the USA, and the Dar­win Research Cen­tre in the Gala­pa­gos, that the Plank­tos scheme lacked suf­fi­cient sci­en­tif­ic cred­i­bil­i­ty.

The Sea Shep­herd Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety will con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor this kind of activ­i­ty and will inter­vene if the plans do not demon­strate test­ed sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ments that show such plans are safe for marine life.

http://seashepherd.org