When John Francis was 27 years old, he witnessed two oil tankers crashing under the Golden Gate Bridge and dumping half-a-million gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay. It was 1971. The incident spurred him into action as an environmental activist. He decided he would no longer ride in motorized vehicles. And so his journey as a planetwalker began. Silence was the second component of his activism. What started as a one-day birthday experiment lasted for 17 years.
Tonight is the season finale of Whale Wars, and I am captivated by the plight of these creatures. To get more drama-free information, I watched a couple of PBS videos recently about orcas and beluga whales that blew my mind and broke my heart. whalingOf course, I’d also recently heard and met Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society a few days before, so I was particularly engaged and enraged about whale issues. (Although, did you know that orcas are actually dolphins, not whales?)
There’s a little coastal town on the eastern seaboard of Japan called Taiji where smiling dolphin statues and cartoon whale murals greet visitors. Flanked by mountains, speckled with Buddhist temples, and inhabited by fishermen, Taiji seems quaint, homespun. However, a new documentary exposes what happens there every year between September and March – some 23,000 dolphins are captured, some being sold to aquariums and theme parks, others being butchered and marketed as whale meat.
Diving once again into the thoughts from the Michael Pollan and Dr. Vandana Shiva posts I’ve written, I can’t impress strongly enough upon you the importance and urgency for learning about the industrialized food system that is destroying us, quite literally, from the ground up. Watch The Future of Food and go see Food, Inc. These wonderful films frame the issues at stake in terms we can all understand – our very lives.
There are a number of critical factors at work within the larger, overarching category of food production. Our economic system, health care, human rights, the environment… they all hang in the balance on this one.