“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own.”
Wangari Maathai

An email from a friend today alerted me to a video of the annual dolphin slaughter in the Taiji region of Japan. Taiji is in the far south of the Japanese archipelago, surrounded by mountainous forests where the opportunity for agriculture is minimal. The people have traditionally survived on fishing and whaling.

In 1994, in the wake of an international ban on whaling, the people of the region published a letter to the international community describing their situation and making a plea for the preservation of their culture and way of life. They wrote:

“We believe we know more about our own sea in Taiji than anyone who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away from us. We also believe we are more concerned with its protection and assume more responsibilities than anybody else in the world. We are sure that the same view is shared by Alaskan Eskimos, Faroese, Greenlanders, Icelanders, Norwegians, and Russians in Chukotka as well. We hope many environmentally concerned people in the industrialized nations will understand our views and trust us as rational and humane people, and stop making whaling a “scape goat” of the environmental crusade and making inhumane attacks on whaling people. Cultural diversity is just as important as biological diversity in order to protect the earth’s environment. After all, it is only a diversified people who can really take tender care of a diversified nature and make truly rational and orderly use of it.”

To “trust us as rational and humane people” becomes near enough impossible once you have seen this video.

In January this year, Pedro Oliveira from Portugal started a petition to the Prime Minister of Japan demanding that this horrendous inhumane slaughter is stopped. As I’m uploading this, the number of signatories has now passed 828,000 and people from all over the world are signing up at a present rate of around one every 5 seconds. With the recent success of an online petition demonstrating to the UK government the strength of national feeling about proposed road taxation changes, this international demonstration has the potential to far exceed it and become a powerful statement of the will of ordinary people the world over. Let’s hope it can achieve some concrete action on the part of the Japanese government.

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.”
Cree native proverb