Mal Holland - Steve Irwin - Sailing Master – Australia
In a time of material wealth beyond need, it seems we humans suffer from a scarceness of emotional wealth, brought to us directly, by a fatal disinterest in the biosphere that has formed us. Our disconnection with the natural world in favour of a sedentary life, of television, fashion and boredom would be our undoing.
But making my way southward, in this world, progressively ruined by cynical economics, it was fortifying to arrive in the port city of Melbourne with a group organising themselves against the attitude that submitting to pursuit of possession is inevitable, and rather, around principles of direct action for the less celebrated cause, of natural beauty. Thinking and acting for themselves, the Sea Shepherds place themselves physically, at the interface where industrial insatiability meets with the dwindling remnants of wild nature. And stand to protect the lives that would otherwise vanish, silent and vulnerable in the face of modern man’s heartless advance.
20 years after international consensus brought an official end to commercial whaling, the kill ships of Norway, Japan and Iceland still conduct industrial whale harvests.
The Australian state ignores the interests of its own citizens and the citizens of Japan alike when it chooses not to enforce the Whale Sanctuary.
I’m delighted to have sailed under the black flag of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. It’s my great hope that the principles of this work will be seized upon by others who’ve the courage to refuse complacency and defeat. That people might find focus in their best attributes, of imagination and creativity, and work in their own regions and their favourite arenas for true progress. For a world of diversity and an end to the extinction crisis.