The Defend our Oceans Journey
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Transcript
- Jo McVeaigh
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Just to talk through a little bit about what has happened in the past year and further back than that as well, you probably know that the Greenpeace ship the Esperanza came into Auckland earlier in the year and that was on its way south to the Southern Ocean to go back to protect the whales around Antarctica which some of you said you were studying over the summer. That was the last leg of a year long journey called The Defend Our Oceans Journey, and that journey began in November 2005 from South Africa, and it went from South Africa to Antarctica to protect whales down there. During that time Greenpeace activists put themselves between the whales and the harpoons and saved 82 whales, so that expedition was a huge success for us because of those whales that we saved and also because of the attention that we drew to whaling as an issue and what happens down in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
From there our ship travelled all around the world for 14 months and looked at other issues that are facing our oceans. So not only did we look at issues that are problems to our oceans but we also looked at ways of solving them, so we talked about marine reserves, sensible fishing quota's, cleaning up pollution and cleaning up rubbish and because these are all issues that affect not only our whales, but our wider ocean, and if we want to look after our whales, we have to make sure that the oceans are in good shape.
So the last leg of our The Defend Our Oceans Journey was, to go back to Antarctica, back to the Southern Ocean and back to the whale sanctuary again to protect whales. So when the Esperanza, the Greenpeace ship, left from Auckland at the end of January, that is when they went back to Antarctica. The action that Greenpeace takes down there, is pretty famous. We do a lot of work, the type of work that we often see on TV, the actions where Greenpeace activists got out and put themselves between the whales and harpoons. And this is our Greenpeace activists placing their inflatable ship between the harpoon and the whale. You can see the harpoonist in front of the whaling ship, the Greenpeace inflatable in the front, and that is shooting water out of the top just to block the view of the harpoonist and to protect the whale. So that is some of the sort of work that we do.