Tidal Wave of Recycling

Here's a fun holiday picture to make up for the gloom and doom:

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The Cove

Well, I was amused to spot one of the people in the film wearing a Sharkwater tshirt, having shown that film at the college a few years back.

They’re very similar films, Sharkwater and The Cove, except The Cove is (sorry Sharkwater guys, we love you) overall a little more coherent and compelling. Part of that is the underlying narrative which gives the film its name: a group of concerned activists discover a place on the coast of Japan where thousands of dolphins are annually driven in to shore, where they are rounded up and captured to be sold in the live dolphin trade. The dolphins that aren’t taken, including infants, are herded into a nearby secret cove where they are slaughtered for their meat, which is packaged as whale meat in Japan since the Japanese do not traditionally eat dolphin. The group of activists decide they must infiltrate this cove and film the slaughter process to get the word out to people the world over.

The film definitely had me on the edge of my seat, as it combines real life activism with a kind of Ocean’s 11 crack team operation suspense (they make the reference themselves in the film, but I found it to be fairly accurate). They obviously get the footage, and by the time you finally get around to the slaughter part your brain feels like it’s about to explode. Well, mine did. I was so angry that things like this constantly continue to go on that it was a miracle I didn’t run from my house screaming. It wasn’t simply the slaughter- it was the capture and trade of live dolphins, it was the fact that they were hiding that they sold the meat, which is highly contaminated with mercury, it was that children were dying of mercury poisoning because someone was trying to make money- it was the Japanese representative to the IWC blaming the decline in global fisheries on whales, who, according to him, eat too many fish- and backing it up with "scientific" evidence.

None of this is actually surprising. If you’re still surprised that stuff like this goes on, you’re living in a naïve fantasy world. And maybe I’m bitter and cynical, but stuff like this is going to CONTINUE to go on. Endlessly, maybe. Because no matter how many movies you make about this stuff, it doesn’t stop. Making movies does not stop people from slaughtering whales. Nor does writing letters, the suggestion given by the website of The Cove. Yes, write letters. Go for it. To whom? Who are you going to write a letter to who’s actually going to stop these people? It’s great to raise awareness, for people to know what’s going on. But everyone in the world being aware that dolphins are being slaughtered is not going to stop them from being slaughtered. Stopping people from slaughtering them is going to stop them.

Oddly enough the better depiction of how to stop people killing whales is to be found on South Park- given, they do a bang up job of making fun of everyone in the process, but that’s what the point of the show is. But as always, decide for yourself. Watch the movie, get angry, and decide for yourself if “letter writing” is the appropriate response to that slaughter- to the man who believes whales eating too much are responsible for the catastrophic decline in global fisheries- to the slaughter of millions of sharks- to all the rest of it.

Oh. And happy holiday.

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