Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Whaling Group Using Drones To Find Whalers
FatLittleMonkey writes "Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd is using aerial drones to find and track factory ships used by Japanese whalers. The group claims the tactic shortened the Japanese whaling season last year by a month, saving 200 whales, and this year they've spotted the factory ship even earlier."
In other news, Sea Shepherd are a conservation group, they defend all marine species, including Tuna (for which they have been doing a major Mediterranean campaign). You should check the width of their action before pointing out “boo, there are other fish species endangered, so you get no points for protecting one and not all of them!”.
Interesting that while TFA is about clever use of technology in a space where it's not obvious, most slashdotters seem more interested in bashing the group of people using this technology for not following their (very traditional and anthropocentric) view of life. Nice.
No wit here.
Paul Watson was asked to leave Greenpeace because when GP was attempting to get charitable status with the US IRS, the IRS told them "No property damage". Later that week, Watson disarmed a harp seal hunter who was clubbing a seal to death and tossed the club into the ocean. That is considered property damage and the board asked him to resign.
A few years later, one of the other founders of GP decided that they had become too soft, left and joined Sea Shepherd.
I believe everyone on board SS's ships are vegetarian, if not Vegan.
There are plenty of nuclear waste disposal options that are cheap, reliable and safe. They are just politically problematic.
The easiest would be to just put it in boxes and throw it down the Mariana Trench. There is no possibility of anyone getting it back, and if it ever comes back up naturally it'll be long after safe decay. The problem is political: Throwing nuclear waste in the ocean violates international law, and for some reason no politician wants to start the process of changing that.
There's a narrow line between "endangered" and "not endangered". The seas have grown barren, compared to 300 years ago. With five years of sea duty behind me, I can state that whale sightings are rare, dolphins are only somewhat less rare.
It's a bit tough to find tales of life at sea 300 or more years ago, that don't include a lot of superstitious nonsense, but it seems to have been common for ships to be constantly trailed by dolphins, and whales were common sights. With each passing decade, there are fewer and fewer.
The only two explanations for that, that make any sense, are over hunting, and pollution.
We really need to allow the ocean, and the populations found in the ocean to recover. Why wait until any given species is actually "endangered" before trying to conserve resources?
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