Greenpeace vs. Sea Shepherd: An Unfortunate Conflict
Greenpeace issued a lengthy statement on their website in an attempt to further distance themselves from Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd yesterday. With an aim at setting the record straight, Greenpeace made the statement out of frustration with what it claims are lies and falsehoods propagated by Watson, compounded by a general public misconception that Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd are associated with one another.
Greenpeace takes issue with what they describe as a fundamental difference in the anti-whaling tactics practiced by each organization. It is interesting to note how Greenpeace characterizes and differentiates their tactics versus that of Sea Shepherd, particularly their characterization of what constitutes violence.
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For Greenpeace, violence constitutes doing something that might put a human being in jeopardy, something they say Sea Shepherd and Watson are guilty of.
However, in their attempt to illustrate how proactive they are in the fight to save whales, Greenpeace makes reference to how in the past, Japanese whalers run from their ship at high speed when faced with a potential confrontation.
Regardless of Greenpeace’s non-violent policies, would the Japanese ship run from them, or resort to bringing the coast guard, if there wasn’t a perceived threat of violence? The success of Greenpeace’s anti-whaling efforts is clearly connected to the willingness of Sea Shepherd to take tough action and thereby instilling fear of the protesters in the whalers’ minds.
And anyway, is there a huge difference between sabotaging a propeller or sinking an unmanned whaling vessel (Sea Shepherd tactics) and blocking a harpoon vessel from shooting a whale with your ship (a Greenpeace tactic)? All these tactics are designed to achieve the same result, namely to prevent or reduce the killing of whales, and none particularly put lives at risk. Can’t we all just get along?
Image credit: Michael Dawes at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Nice short article that is to the point. I did not even know about the Sea Shepherd until ‘Whale Wars’ docudrama started. Before that I had a deep loathing for Green Peace and there skewed perception of the world. Pretty easy to develop that perspective when they are media queens. In the end do they help though? Yes. They do expose the wrong and do help bring change. Do they also take credit from the actions of others? Heck ya.
In the end, however, actions speak louder than words. Sea Shepherd seems to have a passion for one thing, saving whales, and with this goal and focus they bring direction to change one thing to help make the whole better. Green Peace seems to also have a singular passion, themselves. They focus on saving the “world” which spreads them thin and exposes the lack focus. They are like fashion, always changing and laughing at the past interests as boring and so “yesterday” while always grabbing media attention and stealing credit for creating the original trends when others did.
Of course media attention is great/needed to expose something. But do you do something to get media attention or do you see it as icing on the cake? We know the Sea Shepherd has done things to gain media attention, but not every act tries to grab media attention. It more like a “lets do this to get the attention and let people know what we are doing.” versus “hey check out out HUGE “GREEN PEACE” banner we poorly made and can be see by even the lowest camera zoom level.”.
In the end I think Green Peace is becoming yesterday’s fashion and they are in fact a little jealous of the media attention the Sea Shepherd has recently gained.
Greenpeace: ‘Harpoon that whale and we’re gonna, uh. . . write you a letter and watch you from our boat while giving you a menacing glare!’
Sea Shephard: ‘ We’ll stuff up your prop and shove that harpoon up your butt!’
Which tactic works better?
sea sheppard is doing a great job, these whalers deserve no mercy.
lol @ ryan. spot on mate. Sea shepard don’t mess around, greenpeace needs to grow some balls. they can hang all the banners they want while sea shepard is in the face of these butcher whalers.
Keep up the great work sea shepard.
Are you kidding me? Fouling a prop at sea in the south pacific is dangerous for everyone on that ship. Throwing stuff onto the deck in the hopes of having a man slip into the water where he would be dead in minutes is violence. The Sea Shepard and it’s crew are pirates and should be tried and jailed. The forced a boarding of a third party vessel at sea and should be glad the Japanese don’t want the publicity cause if you forced a boarding of my ship I would shoot you.
Listen whaling is bad and I hope is stops, but Greenpeace, Sea Shepard and the like have never in there history stopped them from taking their full quota of whales, all they have done is put people in danger. The only way this will ever stop is by changing the law not by attacks at sea.
Look, Sea Shepard is a bunch a pirates, and they will get what’s coming to them. I by no means support whaling, but having seen what Sea Shepard is doing, they’re totally undermining their own movement.
What’s going to happen when the Sea Shepard does sink a whaling ship causing a serious loss of life? How will that aid the cause? All its going to do, is formally move Sea Shepard into being called pirates, and give Japan the political will to use military force against greenpeace and the like.
Back in the 80’s when the french sank the rainbow warrior, what largely gave Greenpeace support was the fact that up until then they had been non-violent. That’s why Greenpeace, however irritating they are, is still widely supported. However, as soon as violence is being used against a non-violent adversary(the Japanese haven’t exactly been seeking out Sea Shepard ships to sink them), you’re really asking for trouble.
Honestly, I hope that Sea Shepard is interdicted by a coastguard vessel or something and put under arrest before they kill someone.
Nathan,
Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace have both helped cause the Japanese to miss their whaling quota the last two years.
-Alex
well screw them both, i think the whalers should have a shiny .50 cal mounted on their brow and perforate those damn hippies.
Disabling a ship at sea definitely poses a risk to the lives of the crew. If a ship is not under power at sea there is always a chance that it could get into a dangerous situation.
Disabling a ship also sends a needlessly strong statement. Instead of saying “don’t kill whales or other sea mammals” they are saying “don’t go fishing. Period.”
whatever it takes to stop whaling is fine by me. direct action brings about change. keep on keeping on defending our beautiful brothers and sisters of the sea!