SAM VINCENT
Black Inc., 2014, 274 pages, $29.99 (pb)
Industrial-scale whaling, writes Sam Vincent in Blood & Guts, had picked clean the
world’s oceans until only the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary remained, protected
by the icy remoteness of Antarctica and a worldwide ban on commercial whaling. A convenient loophole allowing lethal whaling
for ‘scientific research’, however, was exploited by Japan, resulting in many thousands
of gory whale deaths – until the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society began physically
disrupting, on the high seas, Japan’s annual hunt.
The “bad-ass do-gooders” of Sea Shepherd come with the
blessings of the nine out of ten Australians (including former Greens leader,
Bob Brown) who support the organisation’s direct action campaign. Vincent, a journalist for the Australian establishment
media, has, however, some disillusioning news for what he derisively calls the “whale-huggers”.
During his time with Sea Shepherd in 2013, Vincent uncovers,
behind the donor-friendly, charismatic image of the Sea Shepherd leader, Paul
Watson, a domineering, “megalomaniacal misanthrope” who harbours, amongst his
whale-loving crew, like-minded “human-haters” who care more about whales than the
plight of refugees in Australia or homosexuals in Africa.
Racism, too, Vincent discovers, is an “integral part of
Australia’s whale advocacy”. Norway and
Iceland kill more whales than Japan but it is only the latter that draws
condemnation because, he says, it is easier to demonise Orientals as barbaric,
especially Australia’s old war-time enemy.
Vincent also disparages Sea Shepherd as an example of cost-free
environmental activism, its feel-good whale-saving theatrics allowing us to
ignore the greater threats to whales from pollution, overfishing and climate
change with their attendant demand for changes in personal consumption
behaviour.
Vincent’s killer blow against Sea Shepherd is to blame it for
the continuation of Japanese whaling. If
only the anti-whaling zealots in Sea Shepherd (and Canberra) would back off, he
says, then Tokyo would have no pretext to play the nationalist card in defence
of a bogus ‘tradition’ against ‘Western cultural imperialism’, leaving market
forces to bury an antiquated industry kept alive only by a large government subsidy.
Vincent’s lack of awareness that irrational and uneconomic
government policies can well continue because of their domestic political
benefits is on a par with the rest of his obsessive fault-finding crusade
against Sea Shepherd.
Yes, Watson is personally and ideologically fallible but he is
extremely good at what he does – disrupting the whale-hunt to financially
cripple a terrible industry. Yes, a
proportion of Sea Shepherd’s popularity does come from anti-Japanese racial
prejudice but this layer of support is an aberration.
And, yes, whilst there are other issues deserving attention,
the whale slaughter, which, for Australians, takes place in Australia’s own
backyard/ocean, raises a philosophically profound environmental issue ripe for
political generalisation - is Nature simply a resource to be ruinously exploited
or are we hominids part of a mutually inter-dependent biosphere, a part,
moreover, with a unique responsibility to mind our technologically oversized ecological
footprint.
Vincent, however, is exercised by a different question. Because whaling is “so miniscule in every
respect – whales killed, money made, cultural importance”, Sea Shepherd’s
fixation on it must be about something other than whales, he reasons, nominating
Watson’s “Gaddafi-size ego” and vegan fanatics using whale conservation to aggressively
promote their extremist (to the “no moral qualms” carnivore Vincent) creed of
animal rights.
This is too cynical, by half. Saving whales can serve as a symbolic entrée to the necessary revolution in thinking from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. Life on planet Earth is not all about us, especially not the profit-crazed elite who literally make a killing out of exploiting the natural world which is our one and only home.
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