Green Options

All six crew on board the Ady Gil, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s high-speed intercepting vessel, are safe, but the fate of the boat is in doubt after a collision with a Japanese harpoon vessel left it disabled off the coast of Antarctica.

Anti-whaling activists, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, made famous in the Animal Planet television program, Whale Wars, have requested the Australian Navy send a vessel to their location in the Southern Ocean after the Japanese whaling vessel Shonan Maru 2 reportedly struck and sunk the radical conservation group’s new $2 million speed boat, the Ady Gil.

Just Born — the makers of Marshmallow Peeps — says they’ll be producing whale-shaped, and whale-sized, Marshmallow Peeps in an effort to end Japanese whaling.

The Peep-maker said the joint effort is between Darryl Hannah, The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Greenpeace, and that they are uniting under the moniker PEEP: People for Everything and Everyone on the Planet.

A while back we posted about a bomb threat against the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s ship, the Steve Irwin. Well, the mystery has been solved: a drunk fisherman called in the threat on his cell phone from his ship across the harbor.

Kenneth James Archer admitted to calling in the threat because of a “dispute” with the crew members of Sea Shepherd. Police tracked him down because he made the call to the police from his cell phone.

He did it while he was merely Senator Obama, but will President Obama openly condemn Canada’s annual baby seal slaughter?

Humane Society Canada has sent a representative to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to document and broadcast the commercial killing of over 300,000 young seals beginning today.

Rebecca Aldworth, who has attended the seal hunt for 11 years in a row, has arrived in the area. She will photograph the scene and send live updates through the Humane Society website and via Twitter (@humanesociety or #sealhunt09).

The Canadian seal hunt comes around once a year, and along with the hunt comes the international day of action against it: March 15th.

This year is looking more promising than ever. The European Union is considering a complete ban on seal products, a bill to ban the hunt has been introduced in the Canadian senate for the first time since the ’70s, and the general demand for seal products is shrinking worldwide.

An end to the hunt seems inevitable, but it won’t happen without continued pressure. Here are 5 simple ways you can help stop the hunt next Saturday:

The five Sea Shepherd crew members on board the Steve Irwin found Tasmanian police back at their ship a few weeks after they had confiscated all their video material from the latest campaign. But this time, the police arrived to protect the crew.

“Someone called in a bomb threat about 20 minutes ago, stating that it would detonate in 30 minutes,” a police officer told the crew. “You therefore have 10 minutes left.”

Two British supermarket chains will ensure that none of the seafood products they carry will be supplied by companies that support or engage in whaling or the hunting of other sea mammals.

Waitrose, one of the two stores, has already written to the Icelandic government asking them to reverse their decision to allow an extended whaling quota this year. The other store, Marks & Spencer, said they are drafting a letter to send soon.

Things turned bad for Sea Shepherd when they arrived back to port in Tasmania today. They were greeted by Australian federal police who boarded the Steve Irwin ship with a warrant.

They confiscated “all edited and raw video footage, all edited and raw audio recordings, all still photographs, producer’s notes, interview transcripts, production meeting minutes, post production meeting minutes as well as the ship’s log books, global positioning system records, automatic radar plotting aid, purchase records, receipts, financial transaction records, voyage information and navigational plotted charts.”

Contrary to previous reports, Iceland’s new government announced that they will keep the controversial increased whaling quota that the outgoing Fisheries Minister enacted last month, just one day before leaving office.

Steingrimur J Sigfusson, Iceland’s new Fisheries Minister, said that the country will keep the whaling quota, but added that whalers should not expect the quota to extend five years, as was originally planned. The quota increase has been criticized by environmental groups because it allows the killing of 150 endangered fin whales.

The longstanding and notoriously outspoken punk outfit Propagandhi has released their new two-track single as a high-quality download for fans who donate $1 to $10 to Sea Shepherd, PETA2, or Partners in Health.

The two songs, “Supporting Caste” on the A-side and “Human(e) Meat” on the B-side, come from their upcoming new record. The downloads are available through G7 Welcoming Committee, a record label collective that became download-only for environmental reasons in 2007.