Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Saturday, October 09, 2010

Scuppering The Ship

Paul Watson, environmental activist, defender of the seas and the threatened mammalian life within, is dedicated to good causes. As he sees them. His notoriously violent confrontational techniques used to 'influence' sea conservation has garnered him a well-deserved, and somewhat unsavoury reputation. Among his life causes are promoting a vegan human diet, population control, and honouring the biosphere from an eco-biological perspective.

Paul Watson

All of this sounds quite honourable as a life pursuit. He was originally a member of Greenpeace, another, more authentic eco-activist group which pursues its agenda through non-violent persuasive actions and public relations. Because Mr. Watson felt more inclined toward using physical and violent means to persuade the public to his cause, he broke off his association with Greenpeace, and founded his own group, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Japan views Mr. Watson and his group with great revulsion for their violently confrontational dedication. And they've had ample opportunity to weigh whether they would prefer to avoid those confrontations. On the other hand, the Japanese are insistent that seafood of all varieties, including endangered whales, should still be caught for 'scientific' purposes - where oddly enough, they end up for public sale at the Islands' fishmongers.

Mr. Watson's reputation has taken a further hit of late where a former member of the Sea Shepherd Society has testified that its leadership is "morally bankrupt". For Mr. Watson, according to the accusations from Pete Bethune, former captain of the Ady Gil, sunk in a violent confrontation with a Japanese whaler, ordered the sinking of the bio-diesel boat, despite that it could be salvaged.

The purpose being that a boat sunk by a deliberate and violent ramming by a Japanese whaler would make for a more morally outraged and enthusiastically supportive public invested in protesting Japan's Antarctic whaling obsession. "It was definitely salvageable, it was still rock-solid from the engine room back", Mr. Bethune explained in a radio interview in New Zealand.

That high-seas collision between the Japanese whaler Shonan Maru II and the Sea Shepherd's trimaran speedboat Ady Gil, led to Mr. Bethune's arrest for illegal boarding the whaler at a later date. But he now accuses Paul Watson of scuppering the vessel needlessly as a public relations stunt. Moreover, the man who funded the purchase of the Ady Gil for $1-million, supports Mr. Bethune's allegations.
"The really dishonest thing about it is if they really wanted to scuttle a boat, they should have just come clean and said, 'Look, we can't lose more time against the whalers, we're gonna leave the boat here and scuttle it'.' But instead, they scuttled it, but did it secretly."
"I think an organization that relies on public money and public generosity to survive has an obligation to be honest", Mr. Bethune explained.

Paul Watson denies all allegations of such misdemeanors deliberately misleading the public for his eco-active advantage. Who could be surprised?

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