Sharon Feinstein

I went to a private screening of the must-see new film Pirate for the Sea, which details the life and work of Paul Watson, a hero of our times.
Watson, having formed Greenpeace, was booted out by them for being too radical, which means he couldn’t stomach sitting on a ship and being an ‘ observer, ‘ while  Japanese fishermen coolly and cruelly harpoon the majestic fin whales, a slow, horrific death during which their organs explode, and electrodes are sent through their bodies. This is done in the name of scientific research, of course. Suffice to say these Japanese scientists have produced just one paper on research in the past 20 years which states that some whales eat fish. No, it the meat they are after, fed to their school children and minced into burgers.
Paul Watson treats all forms of life equally, human beings are not rated above the rest of the earth’s creatures in his books. He cannot bear to watch the Canadian seal hunters booting and bludgeoning seal pups into bloody  messes while their mothers sit beside the carcasses, pushing them and trying to revive them for as long as two days. Some of these men even feel it’s good to let off steam that way, you know, get away from the wife and kids, have a drink and smash in a seal pup’s head. They have said as much. Paul Watson feels the seals’ pain and puts himself on the line time and time again, arrested in Costa Rica, attacked in Canada, threatened in the Antarctic, in danger on the high seas.
He is dependent on volunteers and other like-minded individuals who want to save what is left of our planet. As Paul says, if you went into the Sistine Chapel and started to smash it up you’d be arrested or shot, same with the Wailing Wall, or a holy mosque, but people go into the great cathedrals of nature and ravage the rainforests and the oceans, and the rest of the world just tut tuts and has another conference.
Watson is trying to do something every day, to save the whales, the seals, the sharks, the great creatures of the sea. It is cold, dangerous and lonely work. He is a great man who will be remembered  when all the little men who scurry round on their hamster wheels and cling to their safe worlds have long been forgotten.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 12:08 am and is filed under SharonSpeak. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.