“Take care of our tuna, because they are going to exterminate them.” – Maltese fisherman talking about the big boats using purse seine nets and drift nets, which he said were responsible for the fact that he was no longer able to find many fish. 

The Rainbow Warrior is patrolling the waters of the southern Mediterranean.  We spent most of yesterday listening to fishermen.  We also carried out a lot of inspections, ensuring that boats were legally licensed to fish, but mostly… we listened.  Since few fishermen would be willing to speak openly over the radio, we visited their boats with our inflatable Zodiacs.  The first challenge was finding a suitable language.  Here in the eastern Mediterranean, we have already had conversations in Spanish, Italian, French, Arabic, English, and Maltese.  Then there is the fact that many of the fishermen are pretty angry – about the disappearing fish, and about the regulations that have been put in place to try to stop the declines.   

As we approached a trawler yesterday, the captain got more and more animated the closer we got, shouting, pointing, and even turning color.  The Greenpeace boat driver was from Tunisia, and reported that the guy was threatening to shoot us if we didn’t leave immediately.  We managed to strike up a conversation without anyone pulling out the heavy artillery, and the story the captain told was one that we had already heard many times from other fishermen.  He would prefer to be fishing, but there were no longer enough fish to make it profitable.  Instead, he was using his boat to help tow cages full of bluefin tuna caught by bigger, more expensive boats.  It was slow, boring work; what was once a way of life had been replaced with something that was just a paycheck.  

The owners of the bluefin fleets know their days are numbered, but are so far choosing to carry on with business as usual instead of doing what is necessary to ensure the survival of the tuna and fishery alike. And as often is the case, it’s not a question of jobs vs. the environment.  Which jobs are we talking about?  The large number of small-boat fishermen who have been connected to the sea for generations?  Or the guys on the multi-million dollar purse seiners owned by fat cats often based thousands of miles away?  The responsible fishermen who hope their kids and grandkids will be able to follow in their footsteps, or the ones who flaunt regulations in order to make as much money as they can as quickly as possible? 

We spoke to several longliners, which lay out lines that can stretch 30-50 miles dragging thousands of hooks.  This is a pretty indiscriminate way to catch fish, and bycatch is a serious problem.  Even those who were fishing for other species would still catch a number of bluefin, probably more than allowed by law.  However, the impact the longliners have on bluefin populations is a mere fraction of the damage done by the purse seine fleets, which can catch hundreds of tons of bluefin in a single day.  So while things have reached the point where every fish counts, we couldn’t help but see these small boat fishermen as victims and potential allies rather than a serious part of the problem.   

Finding common ground with the bluefin purse seiners is a bit more difficult, and so far they have not let us get close to them.  The only exception was when we came across a purse seiner in the process of transferring her catch to a transport cage, a process that we were able to capture on film.  This is another indication of how dire the bluefin situation has become: there are so few large fish left in the Med that today the most common practice is for fishermen to transfer the small bluefin they catch to floating cages, which are towed to giant tuna ranches in Malta and Tunisia to be fattened and eventually turned into sushi. 

This is an outrage on multiple levels.  First, we are witnessing the disappearance of northern bluefin tuna, one of the most remarkable species with which we share this planet. Worse still, this is happening despite the fact that it could be avoided if leaders in the US and Europe would simply demand that managers follow the best available scientific advice.  This creates not only an ecological outrage, but an economic and social one as well.  People who have fished here for generations are losing their livelihoods.  A way of life is disappearing along with the bluefin. 

Will ICCAT’s members take care of the tuna this year?  Or will they allow them to be exterminated?  It’s too early to say for sure, but you can be sure that we will not sit idly by. 

For the Oceans –  

John Hocevar

Oceans Campaign Director

Greenpeace USA

Greetings from the Rainbow Warrior!

We are out in the southern Mediterranean, working to prevent the extinction of bluefin tuna.  I joined the ship in Malta, and we have been patrolling the fishing grounds between Malta, Tunisia, and Libya since yesterday.  There are quite a lot of boats in the area, which is itself a big part of the problem – too many boats chasing too few fish. 

Bluefin are critically endangered, but continue to be sold in trendy high-end sushi restaurants like Robert DeNiro’s Nobu chain.  Bluefin stocks here in the Med and in the northern Atlantic are (mis)managed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.  ICCAT consistently ignores the advice of its own scientists, making a mockery of the “conservation” that is ICCAT’s middle name.  Catch limits for this year were set at nearly double the levels recommended by ICCAT scientists to enable the species to recover.

The US Government is a member of ICCAT.  While the US role tends to be a positive one, it has so far been willing to go along with ICCAT’s mad rush towards extinction for one of the most remarkable creatures in the sea.  Weighing as much as a car, the warm-blooded bluefin is still capable of maintaining speeds of up to 45 miles per hour. 

This year, the big question is whether the US will seek to ban commercial trade of bluefin by proposing it to be listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or whether it will continue to leave matters in the corrupt hands of ICCAT.   We’re out here confronting illegal fishing, and compiling evidence which we will share with relevant US and ICCAT authorities.

Things can get a bit tense, as the declining fish populations have created a sense of desperation among many fishermen here.  In 2006, French tuna boats blockaded the Rainbow Warrior in Marseilles.  Last year, Turkish tuna fishermen attacked the Arctic Sunrise, disabling our helicopter with lead weights. 

In reality, however, the measures Greenpeace is proposing may well be the best chance to save the bluefin AND the fishery: creating marine reserves to protect vital spawning areas, adhering to scientific recommendations, and closing the fishery until the species can recover.  Stay tuned, and I’ll keep you updated from out here on the front lines.

For the oceans,

John Hocevar
Oceans Campaign Director
Greenpeace USA

Today is World Oceans Day.  It’s always a little bittersweet when things as large and vital as "earth" or "oceans" are marked with a Day like this, particularly when the urgency and severity of the state of our planet requires all hands on deck. In fact, things are so bad that it can be easy to forget that we have actually made a lot of progress in recent years, and to lose sight of the fact that solutions ARE within our grasp.

So this World Oceans Day, I’d like to take a moment to remind us all – myself included – just how far we’ve come.  

The high seas, the areas of the oceans beyond national jurisdiction, make up nearly two thirds of the surface of our planet.  Yet for nearly the whole of human existence, the high seas have been almost completely unregulated.  It wasn’t until the early 70s that we started to change how we think about the oceans.  Gradually, we have come to realize that the sea is not bottomless, that what we do there can have lasting consequences.

This realization has enabled significant reforms.  First, we tackled ocean dumping.  At the time, Greenpeace was decried as unreasonable and alarmist for arguing that we needed to stop dumping nuclear waste into the oceans.  Fortunately, we were able to help policy makers come to their senses, and now, just a few years later, it seems hard to imagine that this was ever even a contentious issue.  Further bans on incineration at sea, dumping of sewage sludge and industrial waste have meant that millions of tons of toxic materials are no longer dumped into the oceans each year.

Turning our sights to another highly visible and serious problem, we fought for and won a moratorium on commercial whaling.  While Japan, Iceland and Norway continue to flaunt the ban, the number of whales killed today is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and many populations have begun to recover.  Populations of humpbacks, bowheads, blue whales, and right whales are increasing between 3 and 12% a year, and eastern gray whales have gone from a few hundred individuals in the early 1900s to more than 20,000 today.

Next, we successfully campaigned for a United Nations ban on giant high seas drift nets, some of which stretched over 40 miles long.  Called “walls of death” due to their ability to indiscriminately kill marine life, the ban has ended the needless deaths of hundreds of millions of dolphins, sea birds, sharks, turtles and other creatures.

As understanding of marine ecosystems advanced, efforts to protect them have grown more sophisticated.  Greenpeace, together with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, pushed the UN to protect vulnerable seafloor habitats.  A 2006 resolution called on policy makers to ensure that destructive bottom trawl fisheries did not destroy fragile coral and sponge communities. Perhaps the best thing about the resolution was that it included a deadline: December, 2008.  This year, Greenpeace will press UN to ban bottom trawling in places where the resolution has not been implemented.

Starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the international community began recognizing that protected areas were needed on the high seas.  Several targets have been set, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity goal of establishing a network of protected areas by 2012.  Progress is being made, but it is admittedly far to slow.  Fortunately, not everyone is waiting around for the UN on this one.  Last year, a group of small island countries in the Central Western Pacific stood up to some of the most powerful nations on earth – including the US – and took steps to protect the high seas areas surrounded by their territorial waters.  This is fantastic news, both in terms of the impact it will have for fish and fishing communities in the region and for the precedent it sets internationally.  We can, we must, and... we ARE creating marine reserves to reverse the damage being done to our oceans.

 

Ahoy -

As Somali pirates have captured the world’s attention over the past week, I’ve been up to my neck in pirates of a different sort.  Greenpeace got a tip that several Spanish owned vessels blacklisted for engaging in pirate fishing were en route to Singapore to offload illegally caught Chilean sea bass, or Patagonian toothfish.  We alerted U.S. authorities at NOAA, the Coast Guard, and the State Department, each of which deals with pirate fishing.  All three agencies were helpful and responsive, sharing the information we provided with other governments, updating databases, and even contacting the Singapore Navy Maritime Operations Center.

The investigation is still unfolding, but it looks like at least one or two of the vessels offloaded a considerable amount of illegal sea bass before local authorities were able to respond.  In fact, it is not clear that local authorities planned to respond at all – Singapore is not a party to CCAMLR, the Antarctic treaty under which the vessels were blacklisted.

While these pirate fishing vessels may seem to have little connection with the pirates plaguing ships passing through the Gulf of Aden, these issues are in fact tied together by more than a word most of us associate with eye patches and parrots.  In all oceans of the world, vessels flying under flags of convenience – registered to countries with little or no concern for what the ships are used for – and owned by shady operators based in countries such as Spain, China, or Korea, pirates illegally catch enormous quantities of fish.  

Somalia is a prime example of where pirate fishing thrives – a poor country with weak governance and no capacity to manage or patrol their own waters.  And as is often the case, the most impacted people are local fishermen, who can no longer feed their families after foreign pirate fishermen have literally stolen all the fish.  When deprived of their livelihoods, few breadwinners in any culture would be willing to quietly allow their families to starve.  So it is not surprising that some have resorted to illegal activity.  In addition to hijacking ships, unemployed fishermen in Ghana have been known to become wildlife poachers, adding new threats to already endangered populations of hippos, lions, and leopards.

It would be ridiculous to call the Somali pirates Robin Hoods when they hijack cargo ships carrying aid for starving people.  At the same time, there’s something disturbing about the international community failing to intervene when wealthy European owners of pirate fishing vessels destroy the livelihoods of coastal African communities and demanding military intervention when impoverished communities resort to violence.  Even now, European companies are illegally dumping nuclear waste off the coast of Somalia, and there have been reports of whole villages being affected when barrels have washed up on shore.

In early May, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will meet and hopefully finalize a binding global agreement to address pirate fishing.  The US has played a very positive role in negotiations so far, but Japan and Korea have balked at some of the measures that are necessary to get the job done.   If there is a silver lining to the Somali pirate story, it may be that it helps wake policy makers up to the fact that pirate fishing creates far reaching impacts and must be dealt with immediately.  

Yet another reminder that we live on Planet Ocean – and that the health of our marine ecosystems is intimately linked to the health of humankind.

For the oceans - 

John Hocevar

Covering nearly 70% of the surface of the planet, the oceans are not escaping the impacts of global warming. Bleaching is threatening our spectacular tropical coral reefs, and melting sea ice is reducing critical habitat for seals, polar bears, and other marine mammals. And everywhere in between, rising temperatures are starting to change currents, migration patterns and even species composition. The fish that used to live in a particular area are often no longer there. On top of that, acidification, global warming’s evil twin, is turning the oceans into a corrosive bath that is rapidly becoming inhospitable to clams, corals, and everything else that forms a calcareous skeleton.

So when Randy Olson asked me to review his new movie, a “global warming comedy,” I have to admit I was curious to see where he was going to find the humor in all this. As it happens, Sizzle is a very funny film, sometimes even spit-out-your-drink funny.

Similar to Randy’s last film, Flock of Dodos, which focused on Intelligent Design, Sizzle tries to grapple with questions about the causes of global warming, the seriousness of the problem, and the degree to which humans can do anything about it. For Randy, the hordes of scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and most people who read the news, these are not controversial topics. The science is clear: global warming is happening, humans are a major cause, and we can and must do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately.

Of course, some people don’t see it that way, and Randy takes his low budget camera crew out to get their stories. Other than the guy who works for Okie Senator James Inhofe, who looked like an attack dog in search of someone to bite, the climate skeptics come across as surprisingly nice guys (if occasionally hapless). Most of these interviews are followed with a scene with Randy muttering “that’s not true” or “he’s got it all wrong,” and there are some strong segments from scientists like Naomi Oreskes, but in general there’s not much of an effort to debunk the skeptics. The sense you get is that there’s really no need – everyone knows the truth already. But if that’s true, why bother with the skeptics at all?

So I was left wishing for a little more exploration of the forces behind the skeptics. Greenpeace has researched this in depth, showing how leading climate skeptics tend to be funded by ExxonMobil. If something smells funny, follow the money.

Dr. Oreskes saves the day by convincing the crew to abandon plans to film yet another scientist and to go to New Orleans instead. In the most emotionally compelling part of the film, Randy and his crew see firsthand the impacts of the kind of disasters global warming will cause. The film points out that the biggest victims will be poor people, whether in Africa or in the richest nation on earth.

If there’s a take home message, other than the fact that it IS possible to find humor in even the most dire topics, it may be a reminder that it’s probably not going to be the newest data, powerpoint slides, or speeches from scientists that convince people to take action. The stories are there, but we may need more story tellers like Randy if we’re going to wake people up in time.

John H