An Environmental Article from All-Creatures.org

Every Day is World Oceans Day

From Captain Paul Watson Foundation
June 2024

The World Oceans Day is a charade and a distraction.... This seal clubbing, over-fishing, destructive salmon farm producing nation has such an egregious history that in 2014, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans destroyed the entire library and archives of the its history of mismanagement. Files burnt, shredded and sent to landfills. That was one way to hide its shameful history.

World Oceans Day is an international day that takes place annually on the 8th of June. The concept was originally proposed in 1992 by Canada's International Centre for Ocean Development and the Ocean Institute of Canada at the Earth Summit or the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I remember that conference. I was there to hear the promises that were never honored, the conference where Norway’s Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland coined the phrase “sustainable development” which quickly became the marketing motto for business as usual.

It was within that spirit of hypocrisy that Canada decided to coopt marine conservation with the invention of this thing called World Oceans Day. Canada has long been one of the major ocean destruction nations. The very year that Canada launched World Oceans Day, the North Atlantic cod fishery collapsed and 32 years later has not recovered and will never recover. This seal clubbing, over-fishing, destructive salmon farm producing nation has such an egregious history that in 2014, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans destroyed the entire library and archives of the its history of mismanagement. Files burnt, shredded and sent to landfills. That was one way to hide its shameful history.

Going back to the Seventies, I accused the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans of being the most incompetent Canadian Bureaucracy in the country for overseeing the decline of fish species after fish species with the collapse of the cod fishery followed by the decline in the indigenous salmon and herring fishery. All under the careful auspices of Canadian government employed scientists that serve the pleasure of politicians and corporations as hired biostitutes to consistently give the government the answers it demands to support irresponsible commercial fishing exploitation. When Canada could not get public support for whaling, the government quit the International Whaling Commission in 1982 stating; Canada withdrew from the IWC after the vote to impose the moratorium, claiming “that the ban was inconsistent with measures that had just been adopted by the IWC that were designed to allow harvests of stocks at safe levels."

The World Oceans Day is a charade and a distraction. On June 8th, 2015, I was invited to address the United Nations for World Oceans Day. Needless to say, what I had to say was not what some wanted to hear, especially the Japanese Nippon Foundation, a major funder of the annual U.N. event. I was told that I would no longer be welcome to attend World Oceans Day in the future as a speaker because the Nippon Foundation disapproved of my condemnation of overfishing and whaling.

So now we have this one day of the year to recognize the importance of the marine eco-systems of the planet that sustains us each and every day.

We can talk about how pretty the fish are and how wonderful the sea is but let’s not dwell on the fact that since 1950 there has been a 40% diminishment in the global population of the phytoplankton that produces some 70% of the oxygen in the air that we breathe and sequesters an enormous amount of CO2 in addition to being the foundation for the food pyramid in the sea.

As I have said for decades, when the ocean dies, we all die and the one thing we must not speak about on World Oceans Day is the possibility that the Ocean is dying. We can’t talk about ocean mining, industrial over-fishing, commercial whaling, the slaughter of dolphins in Japan and the Faroe Islands, the massacres of seals in Canada and Namibia. We can talk about plastics, but we can’t dwell on fishing gear, nano-plastics and how recycling plastics is not a good idea. We can’t talk about the destructive impact of offshore windmills on marine life. We can talk about how wonderful the Marine Stewardship Council is which they are not, we can talk about whale watching but not whaling and of course we can talk about surfing, diving, sailing and swimming and all the fun time recreational uses of the sea by humans.

What we should be talking about every day and not just one day every year is that this is the Planet Ocean- meaning water in continuous circulation through the media of the sea, the lakes, the rivers, the clouds, the ice, underground and through the cells of every living plant and animal. We are the ocean, intimately connected to every part of the ocean and our priority responsibility must be to defend and protect the diversity and interdependence of all the species that maintain the health and well-being of this wondrous life support system of Spaceship Ocean.

Because if we don’t and the Ocean is diminished, we are diminished and if the Ocean dies, we die with it.

We are the Ocean and this means self-defense and survival.

It means being involved and active every single day of the year and not just on the one day that the Canadian government decided we should think about the sea.

---

Posted on All-Creatures.org: June 8, 2024
Return to Environment Articles
Read more at Fishes and Other Sea Animals Articles