Many of us are filled with a great sense of wonder and awe when we have the opportunity to experience the ocean. It can excite and calm, mystify and inspire. The ocean stimulates all of our senses. We can see it, hear it, touch it, smell it and taste it. We can completely immerse ourselves in it.

As much as I love tramping through rainforest, admiring mountain views, watching rivers meander through impressive landscapes and discovering all kinds of plants an animals on land... there's something about the ocean that grabs me every time I'm near it.

This boundless blue life force seems mostly unaffected by the passing of time although it is always being pulled towards the moon on one side and pushed out by the rotation of the Earth on the other. The land may undergo frequent changes at the hands of man but the ocean remains reassuringly constant - at least on the surface. As a result most of us are unaware of just how much the ocean has deteriorated in the last hundred years.

I have never liked boundaries that prevent access to places where I have wanted to explore but out here on the ocean there are no fences or walls, no locked gates or signs saying "Keep Out!"... "Trespassers WILL be Prosecuted". Out here you can go for many miles in any direction without coming across anything that is man made. Out here on the high seas there is no ownership, nobody telling you where you can and can't go, nothing to get in your way. Out here you can be truly free. Yet the very reasons why these areas of the planet are so appealing are the same reasons why they are being so tragically abused. International waters belong to nobody and everybody at the same time.

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Posted by Lisa at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greenpeace Japan's Junichi Sato displaying the stolen whale meat to the media. ©Greenpeace/Naomi Toyoda

Brian's already blogged the full story on the emerging whale meat scandal, so I thought I'd fill you in on the latest happenings here in Tokyo. Most of us at the Greenpeace Japan office were up late on Wednesday night and very early Thursday morning, working hard on the preparation for today's announcement - that the crew of the Nisshin Maru have been siphoning off tonnes of whale meat and thousands of dollars of public funds for personal gain.

We met for breakfast at 6:30am; the sun was shining for the first time in days, and the scandal had been splashed all over the front page of the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading newspaper with 8 million copies circulated daily. A good start to the day. By the time our press conference kicked off at 10am, news had spread, and the room was packed with domestic and international media, including all the top Japanese TV stations, and international agencies like Bloomberg and Agence France-Presse. Cross conferences can be notoriously dull affairs - but this was a little different. Our whale campaigner, Junichi, while presenting the conference with Jun (Greenpeace Japan executive director) pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, and held up a piece of the stolen whale meat for the cameras. Mind, seeing wasn't enough to convince one journalist who was forced to ask "is it real?" To which Junichi replied that it certainly was, and invited the journalist to have a sniff - the whale meat doesn't smell so good, and by the time the conference was over, the entire room smell of dead whale - an Antarctic minke that found an ignominious, pointless end, stuffed into a cardboard box.

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Posted by Dave at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Written by Lagi, our Pacific oceans campaigner.

Our work reaches out to the 20 Pacific Island countries in this region to move towards a sustainable and equitable fishery. I am from Fiji and as a Pacific Islander allow me to point out that the Pacific is about to hit a catastrophe with the global tuna industry that could see an end to our poor countries' economy and most importantly the livelihoods of my fellow pacific islanders.

Let me give you some shocking facts about the Pacific and I will tell you a bit about why Greenpeace is here in the Pacific and why we do what we do best and that is confront the truth, tell the world by bearing witness and speak the unspoken.

The Pacific contains the last relatively healthy tuna fishery left in the world. Most of our island countries have nothing else but their huge ocean resources to survive on both as an economic need and an important livelihood that most of our people depend on for survival. The ocean for us defines and makes us who we are and I see that this is slowly being taken away from us.

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Posted by Lisa at 2:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally, we can tell the story some of us have been sitting on for months now: the whale meat embezzlement we uncovered in Japan, in which stolen cuts of prime whale bacon are smuggled away from the "scientific research" vessels and sold for oodles of yen -- one of our informers heard a crew member claim he built a house on his illegal proceeds.We hit the front page of Japan's biggest newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, this morning -- a first for Greenpeace in Japan, where whale stories have always been hard to sell. But with the Japanese government in seeming constant free fall with corruption scandals being unearthed all the time, whale meat embezzlement -- especially since it involves taxpayers' money -- is a monster story.

05/15/2008 THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

Greenpeace Japan said Thursday it will seek a criminal investigation against 12 crew members of a research whaling ship over allegations they embezzled a ton of meat from whales caught in the Antarctic Ocean.

The group says the crew members aboard the research vessel Nisshin Maru sent cardboard boxes believed to have contained whale meat to their homes.

At a news conference Thursday in Tokyo, Greenpeace Japan members displayed whale meat they said had been intercepted on route to the home of a crew member. The box contained 23.5 kilograms of coveted whale meat used in bacon.

The estimated value of the meat is between 110,000 yen and 350,000 yen ($1,048 and $3,334), according to Greenpeace Japan.

This goes to the heart of the legality of the whaling programme. The ICR (Institute for Cetacean Research, which runs the scientific whaling programme) is constantly claiming that they are *compelled* to sell the "byproduct of their scientific research" by the International Treaty on the Conservation of Whales -- they don't really *want* to sell it, no no no it's not a commercial activity, there's a *law* see? Well guys, you made your bed, now sleep in it. If it's the law, then turning a blind eye to your own crew members skimming the best cuts off the top and distributing them to cronies and restaurants for kudos and profit is, literally, a criminal offense.

On top of that, the commercial sales are supposed to be "deferring the cost of the research programme" which costs the Japanese taxpayer US$ 4.7 million every year. So you can imagine there's some unhappy Japanese taxpayers reading the paper this morning. And watching the news as well -- every Japanese TV station was at our press conference a few hours ago, and the story has run already four or five times, even before prime news time.

So what do the whalers have to say about this? When we asked before the revelations, on the 8th of May, this is what the Japanese Fisheries Agency, the government agency responsible for whaling said:

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Posted by brianfit at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Written by Dean our communications officer (from Aotearoa/ New Zealand) on board the Esperanza.

When I was in the Solomon Islands an old man came up to me with a bag made out of an old yellow sack strapped around his neck. "I have a carving, very cheap for you," he said.

“Here we go…” I thought, "How am I gonna get rid of this guy?" I told him I had no money on me but I’d be around in the afternoon. I don’t know why I said that because I’d already bought Honiara out of carvings.

Anyway, he turned up later and pulled a stone carving out of the sack. It was a figure of a man's body with a frigate bird's head, holding a spear in one hand and a fish in the other. It was Kezoko, god of the sea and fishing from his tribal area.

The old man’s name was Sali and he emphasised it was a very special price and that it took him 6 weeks to make. I thought, “What the hell… but I don’t know how I’ll get that one home. It's the heaviest one yet.”

And as soon as I accepted he was hugely relieved and grabbed my hands with both of his and started crying. “Thank you so much for saving our tunas. I am worried for our children and the next childrens. I want them to have tunas too,” he said looking deep into my eyes.

I realised he wanted to give me his carving for free but he was too poor and couldn’t. We held hands and looked into each others' eyes for ages. It was a really emotional moment, his carving meant so much more and would be one of the treasures of my life.

I’m told that when Kezoko takes aim with his spear he always hits his target.

After days of not finding any fishing boats, I put Kezoko up on the bridge. The next day we found a huge mothership accepting catches from other boats, a fish aggregation device and two pirate fishing vessels. The following day we came across a fleet of Taiwanese longliners. I'm thinking that maybe Kezoko would like a few days holiday in the wardrobe because we all need some sleep.

Image: © Greenpeace/ Lisa Vickers

Posted by Lisa at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

At yesterday's Organisational Review meeting here in the hallowed halls, we had a presentation from our Multimedia Producer, Daniel Bird, about the making of Onslaught(er) -- the Dove parody ad that the Wall Street Journal credits with flipping Unilever into taking action on their products' role in forest destruction.

Now, when a campaign like this puts eight months of preparation into ten days of active campaigning, and the target accedes to nearly all your demands, other campaigners tend to take notice, and beat a path to your door asking for... you know, one of those viral things. And can we have it tomorrow? And can it say "Tell Minister Mullitover Not to Approve EU Directive 2567?"

Daniel put together a fabulous primer on what makes a video viral, and some of the pitfalls that Greenpeace campaigners and other activists might want to avoid in trying to create such a beast. There's plenty of excellent advice here about how you MIGHT make a video that goes viral as well as ways to guarantee you won't. Here's a sample:

Don’t rely on the viral to do the work that a longer documentary video should do, or provide the information that the campaign’s webpage should provide. If you insist that more information is included, then you are forgetting the main idea of having a viral aspect to your Greenpeace campaign: the viral’s job is to grab people’s shirt collars and haul them through the door. It is then the rest of the campaign’s job to sit them down and point at the blackboard.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by brianfit at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Louise's blog on the Greenpeace UK site:

A group of Czech Greenpeace activists are set to begin their third week occupying the site of a proposed US 'Son of Star Wars' base in the Czech republic. About 20 Greenpeace activists broke into the Brdy military zone south of Prague on April 28th. After establishing a base camp in nearby woods, they entered a wooded area inside the military installation and hung a 60 ft banner carrying the message "We don't want to be targets" across a series of tree-platforms.

The US want to build an X band radar at Brdy - like the one the Labour government controversially gave go ahead for at Fylingdales in Yorkshire - as part of the European end of their proposed 'Son of Star Wars' missile defence system.

The plans have sparked major opposition in the Czech Republic - where polls have repeatedly shown that more than six out of 10 Czechs oppose hosting the US facility. The Greenpeace occupation is one of a whole series of protests against the plans over recent weeks and months.

Despite this opposition the Czech and US governments still appear to be closing on a deal to place the radar base in Czech territory, although the last minute cancellation of the signing ceremony by US Secretary of State Condoleza Rice earlier this week have raised hopes of opponents.

If you can read Czech, all the latest updates are on the Greenpeace Czech Republic site. I've been able to puzzle a few words out. I bet "radaru" is radar, "aktivisté" is activist and "fotoblokada" (photo blockade) is where you can upload photos to support the protest. Pretty cool.

Also found a news story in English here or press release here. There's been a big protest in Prague as well.

Posted by Andrew at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A bigeye tuna on a Taiwanese longliner in Pacific international waters

Over the past three days we have discovered and taken action against overfishing by six Taiwanese longliners in the Pacific Commons. One of these was the Ho Tsai Fa 18 that we met eleven days ago and released marine life from her hooks. Having previously agreed with the captain that they would leave these international waters we were very disappointed to find them again but we managed to prevent this boat from fishing for three days.

Another vessel we boarded (the Yu Jaan Shang) had nine tonnes of tuna, sharks (including sacks of fins and tails) and marlin. We came across one longliner that was actually fishing (the Chin Yu Chun) so we hauled in what line they had in the water and confiscated 2 of their radio beacons (they need these to find the ends of their lines). Last night we escorted this vessel out of the international waters, where we returned the beacons. We asked all of the longliners to leave the Pacific Commons and they agreed. We are also writing an official letter to the Taiwanese Government asking them to withdraw their entire fishing fleet from the Pacific Commons so that tuna stocks here will be able to recover in this ecologically important area.

Two of our activists who were involved directly with these vessels have been lovely enough to write about some of their experiences.

By Rose - our Chinese translator from New Zealand:

We talked to three boats on Saturday, and surprisingly all of them were from Taiwan. They were not from the same company, and each experience was totally different.

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Posted by Lisa at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What do all these newspapers have in common: The Wall Street Journal, Germany's Financial Times and Handelsblatt newspaper, and the Dutch Financieele Dagblad? They've all reported positive stories about our campaigns and campaigners around the world in the past few days.

First Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and the Netherlands's leading business paper, covered the success of our Dove palm oil video, and the effect it's having at Unilever HQ.

And this weekGermany's FT says the unlikely shift that GMO campaigners helped create in the European Commission has "seriously set back" the agro-chemical industry, something the industry would like to play down.

Finally (how's your German?), Handelsblatt.com printed a detailed feature on Lo Sze Ping, our top guy in Greenpeace China.

greenpeacebuzz

Posted by Eoin Dubsky at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we caught an illegal tuna purse seiner (Queen Evelyn 168) in the Pacific Commons between Papua New Guinea and the Federated States of Micronesia. This Philippines-flagged vessel was close to the transfer of tuna between her sister vessel and a refrigerated mothership. It is likely that a transfer of fish at sea involving an illegal vessel was about to occur, but upon our arrival the vessels immediately separated and fled.

Transfers of fish at sea are known to facilitate pirate fishing around the world and now we have seen it with our own eyes in the Pacific. For years tuna have disappeared unreported on motherships like this.

One of our volunteer activists from Fiji boarded the mothership and has written about her experience.

---

My name is Ana and I am a Fijian volunteer. I am the assistant cook on board the Esperanza . Today, I was an activist for the second time since I have been on the ship. Early this morning at about 5.30am I was woken up by a phone call from the bridge, telling me that they had spotted a fishing boat and that I must get ready because the boat was launching at 6.00am. Little did I know that the real action would not start until about 11.00am, so back to the galley I went to help prepare lunch. That's just the way it goes sometimes. The helicopter came back and we began to chase a reefer (a vessel that takes the tuna catch away from fishing vessels so they can keep catching more fish without coming to port) out here in international waters.

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Posted by Lisa at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Last time I was on the Esperanza we were on the Grand Banks off the coast of Nova Scotia, exposing the destruction of bottom trawling in 2005. We were asking the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) to wake up and start protecting deep sea life.

Well guess what! Yesterday they reached a groundbreaking agreement in Montreal and adopted a blueprint for action to protect the high seas from bottom trawling. NAFO members include Canada, the European Union, Norway, Iceland, Russia and the US.

The agreement reached will implement a United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in 2006, which called for urgent action to protect deep-sea corals and other vulnerable ecosystems from the impacts of bottom fishing in international waters. NAFO has now agreed that all high seas bottom fishing will be subject to impact assessments by the end of 2008, and that fishing areas should be closed or fisheries prohibited where damage to corals, sponges and other deep sea species cannot be prevented.

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Posted by Lisa at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Langi, on board our ship the Esperanza, with an update on destructive fishing in his part of the world, and what we're doing about it.

Posted by Andrew at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Written by Daniel Loo on board the Esperanza

I was born in Fiji and have lived there all my life although my family emigrated to Fiji in the early 50s from Kiribati. I have a really interesting heritage as my Dad is Chinese while my mother is Gilberteese (Kiribati) with ancestors from Tuvalu, Ireland and Germany.

When first approached to write something about my experience onboard Esperanza the first thing that came to my mind was whether I had to write something from an activist point of view or as a deckhand. Well to start off, this is my first time to work on a ship and these three weeks have been some of the best in my entire life. Its been truly amazing!!!

Being out at sea as a volunteer has been an exciting experience, and I take my hat off to the dedicated hardworking crew who give one hundred percent effort including their lives for a cause they believe in. By doing this we are able to raise global awareness about the decline of our precious marine resources currently overfished today by hungry money making tuna fishing companies.

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Posted by Lisa at 2:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[Photo copyright Jiri Rezac / Greenpeace]

This morning, the crew of the Arctic Sunrise found an illegal drift net in the Mediterranean. Our crew went into action, seizing the net and releasing the sea life trapped in it. Now our ship's followed the fishing boat back to Sicily, where it's being met by the coast guard. (Full story with video.)

Lisa's posted here a few days ago about the Esperanza crew's direct action to stop a dodgy long liner in the Pacific commons.

This is the kind of thing I love to see Greenpeace doing. These aren't the first Greenpeace ship tours to either region. We've been there before, talked to the governments, talked to the industry, talked to the scientists. At some point you've got to stop talking and do something.

Great work by both of our crews.

Update (8 May): "Turtle's demise greatly exaggerated" The Arctic Sunrise also saved a turtle from the driftnet. I didn't mention it in my first post because I'd seen the video here and thought it was dead. This morning I got news that the crew was able to revive and release the turtle. Hopefully it will recover from its ordeal.

Posted by Andrew at 7:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Type the word “Dove” into YouTube’s search box, and what do you find in the number one spot?

Not Unilever’s ads, that’s for sure. Produced by WPP Group’s PR agency Ogilvy & Mather, Unilever’s ads have previously scooped top prize at the annual advertising convention held in Cannes, France. But they’ve been knocked off top spot on YouTube by Greenpeace’s parody of Unilever’s “Onslaught” ad. “Onslaught(er)” was launched only two weeks ago, and produced at a fraction of the cost of the original.

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Posted by Steve E at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An ex-fisherman from the Solomon Islands speaks out on overfishing in the Pacific.

I shot this video using a little digital hand held camera and edited it on my laptop - so sorry about the background noises of the ship and the wind

Posted by Lisa at 3:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've just confiscated several kilometres of tuna fishing gear, freed marine life and sent a Taiwanese longlining vessel out of Pacific international waters and all before lunch! The 5am wake up call today came way too early for some but the dark, surly morning quickly turned into a dramatic action-packed wildlife rescue operation. Last night we spotted a longliner in one of the areas of international waters just north east of Papua New Guinea.

We researched the vessel and discovered that it was previously involved in shark finning in Costa Rica. We stayed with it until first light this morning when we launched inflatable boats. I helped to navigate the Esperanza alongside the fishing lines and later went out in a boat as safety crew in case anyone ended up needing help - but I wasn't out on the water for long and didn't get to see most of the action so I have bribed Sari, one of the campaigners on board, with chocolate to write an update for you.

The following is from Sari

We first tried to radio the vessel from the ship but got no response so our Chinese translator went over to speak to the vessel. We handed over the letter which explained our campaign and the captain nodded whilst reading it. We asked him to stop fishing and leave the area and he agreed but wanted to haul in his line first. We told him he had to free all marine life on his line and then we branded the hull of the ship with "PIRATE?" in red paint because it is impossible for any authority to know if this vessel is fishing legally as it is very difficult to regulate fishing in international waters.

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Posted by Lisa at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's a blog from Dean, our Kiwi communications officer on board the Esperanza

OK, so I admit it, I didn’t want to leave Honiara. Land itself had been such a welcome relief for me – but the big smiles, the new food, the busy markets, the curious people, the artistic talent - particularly obvious in weaving and carving), the smells – both intriguing and horrible, the multiple languages and tribal groups, the history and the sense of humour of local people had an unexpected intoxicating effect. I loved Honiara. And also it was quite a shock to be in a town that was incredibly poor with bad sanitation and air pollution (especially for 50,000 people) and to know that the ocean wealth and potential wealth of the country was disappearing. In fact, you could watch it happening from town, the wharf and along the foreshore. From there was my strongest first and last impressions of Honiara: the massive cargo motherships, with a smaller purse seiners each side with cranes lifting the tuna catch into the expansive hold of the motherships.

At night they looked like brightly-lit floating casinos. Then of course, the motherships leave, destined for the fish markets of Tokyo or another huge city. And in return, Pacific Island nations get 4-5% of the US$3 billion generated from catch in the region. There is obvious unemployment and they must to pay for their children to go to school from the time they are 8 years old. HIV/AIDs transmission has exploded as a result of increased contact with foreign fishermen and prostitution.

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Posted by Lisa at 5:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)