Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by Reece Turner
Filed under Uncategorized |
Commercial Whaling Back on the Cards – What Role Does Australia Have?
The end to large-scale industrial whaling was realized in 1986 and is seen as one of the few great victories of the environmental movement.
But commercial whaling could be set for a comeback after closed-door negotiations between 12 key countries including Japan and Australia resulted in a proposal to open the floodgates to whaling once more.
The proposal is to amend the schedule to the International Whaling Commission rules for a period of ten years. The proposal includes getting rid of the so-called “scientific” whaling loophole but would put in place quotas for current Japanese whaling.
It has been said that the quotas would be lower than existing whale takes, thereby saving whales. But this proposal also effectively legitimises Japanese whaling and opens the doors for more countries to put a case to undertake full-blown commercial whaling.
As a member of the 12 nation closed-door talks the Australian Government was closely involved in this proposal. It was released as a draft consensus document and further discussions are ongoing.
The Australian Government has released its own proposal to phase down scientific whaling in the Southern Ocean over a 5-year period. And it says that it will take Japan to court over its whaling if this is all not resolved by November.
However, if the proposed deal is signed at the IWC meeting in June, the whole basis of Australia’s legal challenge will be thrown into doubt.
Sadly, it seems the momentum seems to be going the way of the whalers at the moment.
You can find the full text to the proposal here: http://www.iwcoffice.org/_documents/commission/future/IWC-M10-SWG4.pdf
What do you think?
Has the Australian Government gone soft on Japanese whaling?
Do you think it will follow through with its promise to bring legal action against Japan over whaling?
Send a message direct to the Japanese Government to ask them to end whaling.
http://www.send-a-whale.com/sendawhale/landing.php
Posted on December 7th, 2009 by Darren Smith
Filed under General |
We’ve launched a new, improved blog with all the latest news on Greenpeace’s campaigns and other developments in the green universe. It’s got a bunch on new features including tagging, post ratings, individual campaign feeds and buttons for you to share the word across Facebook and Twitter.
The new blog is located at http://www.greenpeace.org.au/blog.
Be sure to change your bookmarks and if you do subscribe to this blog, you’ll need to subscribe to the new one. It’s easy to do — we’ve introduced an email subscription for those who don’t want to bother with RSS feeds.
This is the last post for this site. We’ll see you on the new one!
Posted on November 25th, 2009 by Darren Smith
Filed under General |
We recently welcomed Dr Linda Selvey into the fold here at Greenpeace as our new CEO.
Linda comes to Greenpeace Australia Pacific after a long career as a medical doctor, cancer researcher and public health advocate. For more than 12 years, she held senior management positions in Queensland Health, including Executive Director, Population Health Queensland. She is highly respected professionally and personally within the field of public health in Queensland and nationally.
Her environmental cred is pretty good too. At the age of 21, Linda joined the Australian Conservation Foundation and got very active in their Queensland-based campaigns. She was a volunteer with The Wilderness Society and the Rainforest Conservation Society.
More recently, Linda has been Chair of the Queensland Conservation Council since 2001 and represented Queensland on the Council of the Australian Conservation Foundation (1995-97 and 2004-06). In 2007, she was trained by Al Gore as a climate change presenter and has since conducted 25 presentations to large audiences across the country and overseas. Linda says meeting AL Gore was “fabulous, very inspiring … I learned an incredible amount and my interest and motivation to do something about climate change expanded dramatically.”
Linda sees strong links between health advocacy and environmentalism. A few years ago, she got to see first-hand the health implications of climate change when she travelled to Nepal and India. She was there to work on a polio eradication program for the World Health Organisation and noticed just how much people living a subsistence lifestyle were dependent on the regularity of the seasons. She says the experience “taught me humility and helped me understand that the Western way of doing things is not the only way”.
Linda is perfectly primed to lead us to greater success with all our campaigns to create a green and peaceful future.
We also say farewell to Steve Shallhorn, Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO since November 2005, who moves on to a coordinating role with Greenpeace International.
