Urban Ecoist

If you have been reading this site, you may have noticed that I spend some days focused on ecology outside the Urban Ecoist’s immediate concern, and I do that because most people that are concerned about the ecology in one place are concerned about the ecology every place.

Has anyone out there caught Animal Planet’s new series Whale Wars?

Whale Wars follows the increasingly incompetent adventures of the Sea Shepherd, an environmental NGO hell-bent on saving the whales. Go ahead, check out the link in that last sentence, and you will find no end of things to laugh at on the site. Actually, that is not fair. The website doesn’t seem funny until after you’ve watched an episode or two of the series.

OK, let’s begin. Whaling has a long history of greed and waste and the near-extinction of many species of whales. I abhor whale hunting, and only in a few instances, do I think it is “culturally justified” and in those cases, I think the number of whales harvested should only be enough to satisfy the handful of people on this planet who entire way of life revolves around the whale, as it was one of the few prey that those few, few people had throughout their history.

When it comes to the Japanese (picture above to right), sorry, but you are an industrialized nation that has absolutely no need whatsoever for hunting whales. And yet, Japan regularly hunts whales, and a lot of them.

This is where the Sea Shepherd ship of fools come into play.

Sea Shepherd sails out and tries to harass the Japanese whaling fleet every season, and this last season was filmed and we get to watch it from the comfort of our urban living rooms.

And oh my, if you have ever had the desire to volunteer for an environmental organization or maybe still harbor that notion, Whale Wars will make you happy that you never signed up for active duty on the front lines, per se.

I honestly don’t know where to begin, as I don’t want to dissuade anyone from checking the show out on their own. It is too, too funny. The captain is a fat, slovenly, kicked-out-of-Greenpeace fascist that never seems to be around when the sh*t is going down. He has two toadies, a guy that looks just like the guy who was the right hand man of Jack Nicholson as the Joker in the first Batman movie; and the other guy is a scrawny guy from Sweden (although his accent is strangely Middle-American) with huge nostrils and an upturned nose, so you cannot help but be looking up his nose the whole time. He has an “executive producer/quartermaster” that seems to also do nothing most of the time, except talk about everyone else. Luckily, she decided to stay behind in Melbourne in this last episode, so hopefully, she won’t be on camera anymore.

And then there is the crew. A lot of bleeding hearts that thought, “hey, a semester at sea and we get to save whales. Righteous.” But the crew is likable, and you only like them more when you see what madness they have subjected themselves to aboard the Sea Shepherd’s flagship, the ill-named Steve Irwin (I don’t think Mr. Irwin would want his name attached to this megalomanical captain and his delusions of grandeur).

I think the most shocking thing about Whale Wars i.e. Sea Shepherd is how absolutely incompetent these people are. I mean, seriously, I am surprised they manage to keep the boat afloat.

If this is all the whales have, they are screwed.

Animal Planet, Whale Wars, Sea Sheperd, conservation, environmentalists, NGOs, whaling, Japanese, extinction, Steve Irwin, Melbourne, whales, ecology