St. Kitts Declaration is an Insight into Human Ecological Insanity - Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

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St. Kitts Declaration is an Insight into Human

Ecological Insanity - Commentary by Captain Paul

Watson

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:56:52 -0700

 

St. Kitts Declaration is an Insight into Human

Ecological Insanity

 

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

 

 

The first motion Japan has introduced in 20 years that

has been passed by the International Whaling

Commission is bizarre and reflects just how out of

touch with ecological realities Japan and their puppet

sycophantic nations are.

 

The motion passed by just one vote and that vote was

cast by Denmark which now has the distinction of

casting the deciding vote that has strengthened the

hand of the whalers.

 

Fortunately the declaration was passed by a simple

majority of one vote and did not even get close to the

required two-thirds majority needed to overturn the

global moratorium.

 

A look at the wording is revealing.

 

The declaration states that whaling is necessary for

developing nations to diversify their agriculture. In

other words whales are being considered as domestic

crops to be harvested.

 

The only nations that are demanding the overturn of

the global moratorium are Japan, Norway and Iceland

and these three nations can hardly be classified as

developing nations and certainly not poor nations.

 

The declaration then states that whales eat huge

quantities of fish and therefore are responsible for

the world's dwindling resources of fish. The

declaration suggests that the IWC is being

irresponsible in allowing these whales to continue to

eat all of the fish which Japan believes belongs to

the Japanese people.

 

According to the declaration, humanity having

destroyed more than 90% of the fish in the sea, are

now blaming the whales for the demise of these same

fish and suggesting that the whales must be destroyed

in the name of fish conservation. This argument has

not a shred of scientific validity and has been

constructed to serve the commercial self interests of

Japan and Norway.

 

St. Kitts may have introduced the declaration, but St.

Kitts is not an independent nation. It is a country

that has been economically invaded and has surrendered

its integrity and honour in exchange for paltry

Japanese hand-outs.

 

The declaration then specifically targets anti-whaling

groups as " threats " to whaling and suggests that the

IWC label these groups as unacceptable and disallow

their participation at IWC meetings. The declaration

unabashedly states that NGO's that oppose whaling have

a self interested agenda that interferes with the

agenda of those who wish to profit from the killing of

whales and suggests that whaling is not motivated by

self-interest. In other words if a profit is to be

made from killing whales than that is not a

self-interested position, and those who save whales

without profit must therefore be acting in self

interest.

 

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not worried

about this part of the declaration. We have been

banned from the IWC since 1986 because we confess that

we are indeed a threat to whaling. The declaration

could hoever throw even the moderate conservationists

NGO's out of the meeting although pro-killing NGO's

like the High North Alliance would be allowed to stay

because their condoning of whaling is of course not

motivated by self-interest.

 

The declaration states that the IWC should be

" normalized " . This is the Newspeak term for the

resumption of whale killing. The Japanese argue that

since the IWC was set up to manage whaling that it

obligated to promote whaling. Yet the objectives of

the IWC have been changed over the last three decades

by the participating member nations and the IWC has

evolved from a whale killing to a whale conservation

organization. Japan finds this evolution to be

unacceptable and has chosen to negate this majority

position by recruiting puppet nations through bribery

to force the IWC to turn the calendar back to before

1947 when the IWC was pro-whaling. Japan would like to

turn the calendar back on many issues prior to 1946

when it failed to dominate and subjugate Asia through

brutality and violence. Today Japan is hoping to

achieve through economic power and bribery what it

could not achieve through military thuggery.

 

Japan claims to be killing whales for scientific

research yet they have not produced any credible

scientific papers to justify this bogus research.

After killing 17,000 whales the only research they

have to show for it is marketing and product

development efforts. Japan also claims that they have

not influenced any nations to vote in their favor. Yet

Guatemala arrived late at St. Kitts to pay their IWC

membership fee in Japanese Yen.

 

The fact is that the nations voting a straight yes to

all of Japan's resolutions have together received over

$400 million in Japanese foreign aid packages

including tens of thousands of Japanese cars dumped

cheaply or for free onto Caribbean and Pacific

islands. Thanks to Japan, St. Lucia has traffic jams

and every car is a Japanese model.

 

In short, Japan wants us to believe that whales must

be killed before they eat all the fish in the oceans

so that poor developing nations can have a way to

diversify their " agriculture " by harvesting whales.

This is an altruistic approach unlike those selfish

self-interested whale defending non-governmental

organizations who continue to embarrass Japan by

pointing out their reams of lies and their ridiculous

cultural pride that motivates their extermination of

the world's whales and dolphins because no one is

going to tell Japan what to do.

 

What Japan needs is an economic equivalent of the

Hiroshima bomb. Their last insane lust for power and

control ended in near suicidal horror as they

attempted to loot, plunder, slaughter and rape their

way through Asia. Today they are looting, plundering,

slaughtering and raping their way through the world's

oceans. Instead of victimizing innocent Chinese

citizens and raping their mothers, they are massacring

the world's innocent whales and dolphins and

systematically destroying entire populations of fish

and invertebrates in their commercial quest to feed an

appetite based on a cultural preference for living

beings from the sea, preferably raw, exotic and rare.

 

The sheer audacity of it is mind-numbing. One hundred

million sushi eating Japanese have the gall to accuse

the world's whales and dolphins of eating to many

fish. The nation that devolved racism into a cultural

pillar of their society where non-Japanese are

considered inferior now have the effrontery to accuse

conservationists defending whales of being racist.

This incredibly wealthy nation has the arrogance to

state that whales must be killed to appease poverty by

shipping the whale meat to the Tokyo fish market to be

sold at high prices to affluent Japanese citizens. In

return Japan will toss a few used cars onto remote

islands and construct a fish plant or two to help

locals plunder more fish to send to Japan.

 

The St. Kitts Declaration is ecological insanity

presented by a mindset that is so ruthlessly resource

exploitive in its priorities that all means are

justified to keep the madness of perpetual oceanic

resource extraction continually active.

 

To say that whales are abundant is ridiculous. To say

that whales are eating all the world's fish is

delusional. To say that the IWC can only be

" normalized " by a return to wholesale whale slaughter

is sadistically sociopathic. Empathy for the whales is

dismissed as " emotional " .

 

Emotion is a human trait that is rejected only by

totalitarian systems. To dismiss emotion is to dismiss

humanity's greatest virtue and it's only hope for

survival.

 

It is madness to reject emotion in favor of cold

systematic utilitarian exploitation. It is the same

madness that sent the Nazi's on the march to horror

and self extermination and it is the same madness that

screamed Banzai as Japanese lopped off Australian

heads and starved American and British soldiers and

civilians in Southeast Asia only a generation ago, a

madness that was only stopped by the madness of

nuclear annihilation.

 

The St. Kitt's Declaration will go down in history as

one of the most bizarre and most incomprehensible

attempts at a regulatory document ever devised.

 

The sad part is that the little Japanese island pawn

nation of St. Kitts and Nevis will shoulder the

ridicule that future generations will heap upon it

because the name will implicate them for a document of

ridiculousness authored by the sushi samurai brigade

under the leadership of Joji Morishita whose idea of

honour is to wallow like a power drunken psychopath in

the hot spurting blood of intelligent sentient

creatures, as he prattles nonsense from a brain

riddled and addled from years of exposure to mercury.

 

We can only hope that when Morishita is drooling and

staring into space from a heavy-metaled assaulted

swiss cheesed brain that he will have failed to ignite

a pogrom of slaughter upon whalekind.

 

The St. Kitt's Declaration is good for one thing. It

has no effective power and it reveals the utter

ecological ignorance and arrogance of Japan and their

purchased rinky-dink finger puppet nations.

 

 

This commentary may be freely distributed and

published.

 

 

Full Text of the St. Kitts Declaration

 

 

 

St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin,

Cambodia, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominica, Gabon,

Gambia, Grenada, Republic of Guinea,

Iceland, Japan, Kiribati, Mali, Republic of the

Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mongolia, Morocco,

Nauru, Nicaragua, Norway, Republic of

Palau, Russian Federation, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and

the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, Suriname, Tog,

Tuvalu.

 

EMPHASIZING that the use of cetaceans in many parts of

the world including the Caribbean, contributes to

sustainable coastal communities,

sustainable livelihoods, food security and poverty

reduction and that placing the use of whales outside

the context of the globally accepted

norm of science-based management and rule-making for

emotional reasons would set a bad precedent that risks

our use of fisheries and other

renewable resources;

 

FURTHER EMPHASIZING that the use of marine resources

as an integral part of development options is

critically important at this time for a number

of countries experiencing the need to diversify their

agriculture;

 

UNDERSTANDING that the purpose of the 1946

International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling

(ICRW) is to “provide for the proper

conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible

the orderly development of the whaling industry”

(quoted from the Preamble to the

Convention) and that the International Whaling

Commission (IWC) is therefore about managing whaling

to ensure whale stocks are not

over-harvested rather than protecting all whales

irrespective of their abundance;

 

NOTING that in 1982 the IWC adopted a moratorium on

commercial whaling (paragraph 10e of the Schedule to

the ICRW) without advice from the

Commission’s Scientific Committee that such measure

was required for conservation purposes;

 

FURTHER NOTING that the moratorium which was clearly

intended as a temporary measure is no longer

necessary, that the Commission adopted a

robust and risk-averse procedure (RMP) for calculating

quotas for abundant stocks of baleen whales in 1994

and that the IWC’s own

Scientific Committee has agreed that many species and

stocks of whales are abundant and sustainable whaling

is possible;

 

CONCERNED that after 14 years of discussion and

negotiation, the IWC has failed to complete and

implement a management regime to regulate

commercial whaling.

 

ACCEPTING that scientific research has shown that

whales consume huge quantities of fish making the

issue a matter of food security for

coastal nations and requiring that the issue of

management of whale stocks must be considered in a

broader context of ecosystem management

since eco-system management has now become an

international standard.

 

REJECTING as unacceptable that a number of

international NGOs with self-interest campaigns should

use threats in an attempt to direct

government policy on matters of sovereign rights

related to the use of resources for food security and

national development;

 

NOTING that the position of some members that are

opposed to the resumption of commercial whaling on a

sustainable basis irrespective of

the status of whale stocks is contrary to the object

and purpose of the International Convention for the

Regulation of Whaling;

 

UNDERSTANDING that the IWC can be saved from collapse

only by implementing conservation and management

measures which will allow

controlled and sustainable whaling which would not

mean a return to historic over-harvesting and that

continuing failure to do so serves

neither the interests of whale conservation nor

management;

 

NOW THEREFORE:

 

COMMISSIONERS express their concern that the IWC has

failed to meet its obligations under the terms of the

ICRW and, DECLARE our commitment to normalizing the

functions of the IWC based on the terms of the ICRW

and other relevant international law, respect for

cultural diversity and traditions of coastal peoples

and the fundamental principles of sustainable use of

resources, and the need for science-based policy and

rulemaking that are accepted as the world standard for

the management of marine resources.

 

 

 

 

Captain Paul Watson

Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation

Society (1977-

Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)

Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979) of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006) - The Farley Mowat Institute - www.harpseals.org - Ocean Outfall Group of California

Advisory Board Member - Telluride Mountain Film

Festival

Advisory Board Member - The Animals Voice Magazine

 

Whom when I asked from what place he came,

And how he hight, himselfe he did ycleepe,

The Shepheard of the Ocean by Name,

And said he came far from

the main-sea deepe.

- Edmund Spenser

A.C.E. 1590

 

www.Seashepherd.org

Tel: 360-370-5650

Fax: 360-370-5651

 

Address: P.O. Box 2616

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