While reading a story about the first good thing George has done for the environment since he took office (that national monument in Hawaii), I followed a link to another story that took away my good mood pretty quickly.
Apparently there's an organization that most countries are a member of (the IWC, I think) that regulates whaling, and in more recent years has mostly just been a platform for certain countries to try and reinstate commercial whaling. The big pro-whaling nations would be Japan, Iceland, and Norway. This is the first year that the pro whalers are expected to have enough votes to reinstate commercial whaling. Of course, being banned hasn't stopped the big three. A loophole allows countries to kill whales for "research." Japan, therefore, does an awful lot of research, harvesting hundreds of mink whales each year, and last year they took 10 endangered fin whales (their quota this year will be 20 or 30). Still, most of the meat from these whales ends up in gourmet restaurants in Japan. I don't see how all this killing is needed for research, many American institutions are constantly learning new things about whales without killing a single one. Iceland exploits the same loophole as Japan, although not quite as extensively, and Norway openly defies this ban, not even trying to cover up it's commercial whaling expeditions.
This just makes me so frustrated, because I'd thought the world had matured to the point where we didn't need to keep killing endangered animals just because they're worth a lot of money, or an outdated cultural tradition. Americans used to have lots of destructive cultural traditions, slavery and Indian hunting among them. Over time, though, we saw that we really shouldn't be doing these things. The fact that there are three small countries that want to keep killing endangered animals (which, I'll point out, would've been hunted off the face of the earth by these three if the rest of us hadn't stopped them) is very selfish and cause for great concern.
This is an ideal situation to put good old American bullying to use. While George is still on this trip that's made him environmentally friendly, he tells Japan (and those Norskies) that under no circumstances are they going to resume whale hunts. And if they don't back down, we bring in the navy. If I was a whaling captain, being buzzed by an American fighter would be enough to make me turn around. If it's not... well, accidents happen when you run weapons checks.
I encourage you all to make a ruckus so that the American government does something to stop this. I myself will be emailing the president about it, the address is president@whitehouse.gov.
3 comments:
do you really think the president reads any of the thousands of e-mails he receives a day? probably not.
He doesn't, but the auto reply you always get says that staffers read all of them, and if there's a good one he'll read it. There's only so much I can do, and I'm trying to do it all, if a lot of people all email him on the same topic, you'd think the staffers would tell him about it.
Do what Mr. Pittman did... he typed up a document stating his stance on an issue, got the e-mails of all of his elected officials, and e-mailed the same same message every day until they started listening.
Post a Comment