******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Just over six years ago I reviewed “The Cove”, a documentary by Louie Psihoyos that exposed the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan. The local authorities had been warding off photographers and activists ever since the coastal waters became a killing ground. Local fishermen discovered that they could stampede dolphins into a cove and kill thousands at a time, saving just a few animals for export to seaquariums around the world, including Seaworld, at $150,000 per head. As CounterPunchers might be aware, Jason Hribal wrote a book titled “Fear of the Animal Planet” that took up the cause of such sea-going mammals, including the orca that was so driven to distraction by living in confinement that it killed a trainer by holding her underwater.
Those dolphins that are slaughtered end up in Japanese supermarkets labeled as whale meat. Technically, this is true since dolphins are small whales. But the meat is hazardous to one’s health. Laced with mercury, an inevitable by-product of factory emissions, they can potentially cripple or kill you.
To his everlasting credit, Louie Psihoyos joined Rick O’Barry, a former dolphin trainer and subject of his film, in guerrilla raids on the dolphin killers using hidden cameras rather than AK-47s. “The Cove” can be seen on Youtube for just $1.99 and is must viewing for anybody concerned about the massive threat industrial-fishing poses not only to the whales but to humanity as well. If the ocean becomes empty of sea-life, the earth itself is threatened since there is a delicate balance between the two biospheres.
This is essentially the theme of “Racing Extinction”, a film that Psihoyos has been working on for the past six years. I saw it on Wednesday night at a press screening introduced by Susan Sarandon and the director. He warned the audience that the film was a bearer of bleak tidings but that it was not too late to avert a Sixth Extinction, the subject not only of the documentary but one omnipresent in print and electronic media.
The film begins by providing a context for the threat we face today in what has been dubbed the Anthropocene era, one marked by the dominant footprint of homo sapiens and more particularly its use of fossil fuels to sustain an increasingly unsustainable “good life”.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/23/the-politics-of-extinction/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
