![]() If the charismatic, intelligent Great Whales cannot be saved, there is no hope for the rest of the planet. Office of Naval Intelligence issues a piracy warning, and international media begin to track the developing whale war.įor the Sea Shepherds there is no compromise. Watson presses his enemy while Japan threatens to send down defense aircraft and warships, Australia appeals for calm, New Zealand dispatches military surveillance aircraft, the U.S. The sailors on board both ships know that there will be no rescue in this desolate part of the ocean. The Japanese factory ship is ten times the tonnage of the Farley. In the ice-choked water a swimmer has minutes to live. With Force 8 gales, monstrous seas, and a crew composed of professional gamblers, Earthfirst! forest activists, champion equestrians, and ex-military, the action never stops. The oceans may be easy to ignore because they are literally under the surface, but scientists believe that the world's oceans are on the verge of total ecosystem collapse. The exploitation of endangered whales is emblematic of a terrible overexploitation of the seas that is now entering its desperate denouement. The ship is all black, flies under a Jolly Roger, and is outfitted with a helicopter, fast assault Zodiacs, and a seven-foot blade attached to the bow, called the can opener.Īs Watson and his crew see it, the plight of the whales is also about the larger crisis of the oceans and the eleventh hour of life as we know it on Earth. The Japanese, who are hunting endangered whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, in violation of several international laws, know he means business: Watson has sunk eight whaling ships to the bottom of the sea.įor two months, Heller was aboard the vegan attack vessel as it stalked the Japanese whaling fleet through the howling gales and treacherous ice off the pristine Antarctic coast. The Farley is the flagship of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and captained by its founder, the radical environmental enforcer Paul Watson. In The Whale Warriors, veteran adventure writer Peter Heller takes us on a hair-raising journey with a vigilante crew on their mission to stop illegal Japanese whaling in the stormy, remote seas off the forbidding shores of Antarctica. Since then, the government has moved away from barring environmental writers like Mowat in favor of banning Muslim scholars, most notoriously a professor at the University of Notre Dame.Īs Thomas Jefferson told us, a vibrant country is not afraid of dissident ideas or of the people who express them.Author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Dog Starsįor the crew of the eco-pirate ship the Farley Mowat, any day saving a whale is a good day to die. After the Septemterrorist attacks, however, elements of it returned. The power to prevent people who are critical of the United States government from entering our country was such an embarrassment that the power was significantly restricted by Congress in the 1990s. Over the years, the Court has followed this racist precedent to rule that homosexuals can be excluded as well as people whose political ideas are unpopular with those in control of Congress. It was a relic from the Cold War that seemed to fly in the face of American traditions of liberty.Īlthough the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech, the Supreme Court in the Chinese Exclusion cases in the 1800s ruled that most Constitutional protections do not apply to immigration law. Mowat was blocked from coming here by an anti-subversive statute that was used to bar writers like Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez from entering even for brief appearances at universities and bookstores. ![]() ![]() ![]() He was told that the reasons for the denial would not be revealed. In 1985, during the Reagan administration, Mowat was on a book tour that included the United States when he was informed that he would not be allowed to enter. What few realize, though, is that Mowat was also victim of archaic laws that allowed Congress to deny certain individuals entry to the U.S. He was best known for literary works like the classic Never Cry Wolf, which combined science and storytelling. Farley Mowat, the great writer of books on the environment, passed away on Tuesday. ![]()
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