Undercurrents

Archives for: June 2006, 18

looking promising ...

Posted by buffy on 06/18/2006 2:20 pm

[ i'm apparently more web-challenged than i realized, as i think this posted to the wrong page the other day, so am now trying again ... ]

well, 2 votes in and so far, we're on the winning side ... by the skin of our teeth, as it were. so far, the first vote here in st. kitts at the IWC was on striking the issue of small cetaceans (dolphins & porpoises, for example) from the agenda. japan and their recruited allies wanted this to go through, but we scraped by with a 32-30 vote.

next up was japan's proposal to implement secret ballots. as this would be a complete violation of transparency and honesty, we are, of course, against such a move. luckily, 33 votes were with us. the anti-conservation (aka pro-whaling) side only had 30 votes. we eked out a victory on this, but MAN - talk about too close for comfort.

so, the big announcement is that greenpeace will return to the southern ocean this year to once again bear witness and confront the japanese whaling fleet as they return to the southern ocean (including the southern ocean whale sanctuary) to hunt & kill nearly 1000 whales, including 10 ENDANGERED fin whales. so we know what we're up to - the question is what will the pro-conservation/anti-whaling countries do?

more later on some of the dynamics here (as in, dynamics, but also the dynamic people i’m lucky enough to work with here … )

p.s. if you want to watch the happenings in the official meeting room, you can go to http://www.e-kujira.or.jp/iwc/iwcmeeting.html - click on the 'english' link ... if it comes up blank, that just means they're on break. or it's not working (which happened as they were taking the vote on secret ballots ... grrr ... )