Happy Earth Unboxing Day
Save the whales and the oceans... and thank you Iceland!
The day after Christmas is Boxing Day, so we were thinking the day after Earth Day can be Unboxing Day since we ought to be using fewer boxes…
Right now we’re working on covering one story about saving the earth…
One about saving the southern resident orcas and the Salish Sea…
And one about saving a specific southern resident orca…
We’ve done and/or are lining up interviews to deep dive into all three of these stories.
We’ll start with Lolita/Tokitae because I just published a story covering the supposed plans for her return to the Salish Sea. I wrote this for The Victoria Times Colonist - my home-town newspaper, which is also the Canadian paper that devotes the most space to orca coverage.
If you’ve followed Skaana - or my non-Skaana work - you’ll know we rarely talk much about orcas in captivity and our focus tends to be on wild whales.
So what prompted me to weigh in on this?
I’m not 100% convinced that the company agreeing to allow Toki to move isn’t going to stall this indefinitely.
So many of the objections to the plan are based on referencing the release of Keiko (the Free Willy whale) by people who know that these situations are not remotely comparable and are intentionally spreading whale scat.
So here’s what I wrote for The Times Colonist. Please share the article from the TC site so that they run more stories about orcas… including more stories by me… Here’s the link. https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/comment-tokitae-is-not-keiko-so-bring-her-home-now-6874369
Save the Salish Sea…
Blackfish is a brilliant and vital documentary that has been instrumental in the fight to end captivity since its release just over a decade ago. It has led to better treatment of cetaceans who are in captivity. It also left a lot of people with the bizarre impression that captivity is the single biggest threat to orcas in the world - despite the fact that no North American orcas have been caught to display since… well… pretty much since Toki was caught 50 years ago.
The other danger that is frequently treated as a huge threat to the endangered southern resident orcas is whale-watching which is based on… it being far easier to regulate whale-watching than to reroute a tanker, cancel a pipeline project or not build a new shipping container terminal in Vancouver that is expected to have a devastating impact on the Fraser River - which is vital to the salmon, who are vital to the orcas.
Here’s the scoop on the newly approved Terminal 2 Project from our friends at The Georgia Strait Alliance. And, yes, we will be deep diving into this story.
Deep Sea Mining
And the big potential horror show… courtesy of a company based in Vancouver - Deep Sea Mining off the shores of Nauru - a tiny country in Micronesia. Canadians consider this kind of mining too dangerous to do off our shores - here’s a great story from The Narwhal - but Canadian companies ripping up the ocean floor in other countries… Cue crickets chirping…
We’ve got a few upcoming interviews with people leading the fight to stop this from happening, so please stay tuned to Skaana.
#1 in Iceland
If anyone in Iceland wants to let us know how this keeps happening - and what stories you’d like us to cover… please contact us on social media or via email… And thank you!
And if you’re in Iceland - or anywhere else - and would like to help us with any of these fights - please support us on Patreon and/or become a paid subscriber here on Substack - since you’ve already found us here!
And thank you to all our Patreon patrons who help make it possible for us to cover these stories and for me to write stories like the one for Times-Colonist - because I don’t get paid for commentary pieces and I’d like to be writing these more often and sending them out to more publications.
Until next time, just keep swimming…
Mark
PS I’ve started my own Substack where I’ll mostly be writing about the stuff I do that isn’t related to orcas, octopuses and oceans. So please click here to join that conversation.