No Peace For The Wicked From This Man’s Green Organisation

The oceans are under assault. Plastic waste, chemicals, effluent and industrial pollution threatens to suffocate the life out of the marine environment. Over fishing by floating factories is decimating fish stocks and through the problem of by-catch; dolphins, turtles, seabirds and a host of other species are being killed in the nets. Sharks, the supposed super predators of the ocean, are having their dorsal fins mercilessly hacked from their bodies and then thrown back into the sea to drown in order to supply a nutritionally useless soup to the restaurant tables of China and South East Asia on a scale that beggars belief. Illegal fishing is rampant throughout the ocean threatening extinction for some species and Whalers from Japan and Norway still ply their trade unencumbered by the anger of people across the world. Many people are concerned about these outrages and insist that something must be done, but what exactly. Well, some say we should all gather together with painted placards and protest outside embassies and national parliaments. Others suggest legal solutions should be pursued through the courts and international organisations like the United Nations. Others still, insist that we should all look to get involved personally and organise things like beach clean ups or buy recycled boardshorts or hold candlelight vigils for haddock. And others still, suggest that scientific solutions should be investigated without delay, as only science can stop the ensuing environmental massacre. 

Such activities have their place in the environmental activists tool kit but let’s face it; demonstrating, holding prayer meetings or hiring a bunch of snazzy dressed lawyers rarely achieves much. As for scientific solutions, well they might work for pollution but what scientific breakthrough is going to stop a harpoon smacking into a whales flesh or make a rich Chinese bloke turn his nose up at his shark’s fin soup. Faced with such an onslaught; protests, boycotts, church raffles and decade long law suits become nothing more than self righteous “ middle class” smoke that actually obscures the damage that has and is still being done. What’s needed is something far more meaningful and far more dangerous than many of us would contemplate, something that many legal minds would call piracy. Enter stage right, radical defender of the seas, troublemaker and self-confessed pirate Paul Watson, co-founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Paul Watson, who likes to be called Capt. Paul Watson, (wow what an ego) was a founding member of Greenpeace but disagreed with the way the organisation was heading and was ousted from the organisation in 1977. Soon after he co-founded the Sea Shepherd Society. The Society’s mission was to take the fight direct to those who were committing the offending acts that so many environmentalists complain about but yet do nothing themselves to stop. He successfully led campaigns against the seal hunting trade, exposed the massacre of dolphins in Taiji and in the 1990’s used his ship to ram and sink twelve Japanese whalers. Sea Shepherd still undertakes annual operations against whaling activities in the Antarctica. There are those, including the Greenpeace Foundation, who condemn Watson and Sea Shepherd, calling them violent, but Watson is unrepentant.

“Pirates get things done without bureaucratic red tape… Yes, we be proud pirates, however we are disciplined pirates with our own special code of honour. That code demands that we do not cause injury or death to our enemies… We operate within the framework of international conservation law meaning that we only oppose unlawful exploitation of marine life… We do not target legitimate operations, even if we disagree with them. We are not a protest organisation, we don’t hang banners, we intervene against illegalities.” 

Watson cites the United Nations World Charter for Conservation, which he says, allows for nongovernmental organisations to intervene in order to uphold international law. “We have been called vigilantes. And indeed, we are vigilantes, because when the law exists but enforcement does not, a vacuum is created that allows for the actions of vigilantism…” 

The activities of Sea Shepherd have not just invoked commendation from what Watson calls the green crowd of protestors, banner wavers and lobbyists. The Japanese government is a particularly fervent critic as are other governments and global companies who have labelled Watson and Sea Shepherd as eco-terrorists. Watson’s activities have led to more than a few brushes with the law too. In 2002, after being invited to lead a fight against over-fishing by the Costa Rican Government, Watson boarded a vessel suspected of illegal fishing and escorted it to harbour. On arrival however, it was the Sea Shepherd crew that were arrested. Many believe that the crew of the fishing vessel had friends in high places. Fearing an unfair trial – being self professed pirates probably wouldn’t have helped - Watson and his crew fled. Watson was arrested ten years later in Frankfurt in relation to the Costa Rica incident, but skipped bail before he could be extradited. He therefore appears to remain a wanted man yet seems unfazed about court action against him in the US and other jurisdictions, and the more whalers, sealers and illegal fisherman rail against him the more he believes he’s winning.

“The more enemies we recruit from that crowd of ecological criminals, the more successful and credible we become.”

And successful they have become, Sea Shepherds activities and adventures are posted all over the web, they’ve had their own television series called Whale Wars and have stopped the issue of whaling from falling off the more mainstream environmental agenda. In 1998 they even planned to use a submarine in their actions against whalers, an idea that prompted the Canadian Navy to rebuke the organisation publicly by saying: “no one at Sea Shepherd know anything about operating a submarine and it is ridiculous for Sea Shepherd to acquire one.”

It was rebuke that Paul Watson savaged with buccaneering style by replying: “Since World War II, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has boarded more ships, rammed more ships, engaged in more high seas confrontations and sunk more ships than the Canadian Navy. They are hardly in a position to presume to judge what we are competent or capable of doing.”

No one apart from the Japanese and Norwegians seem to think that whaling is acceptable and the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, is as pointless as it is sickening. So whether you agree or not with Paul Watson and his Society’s methods there is no doubt that he has shown a courage and commitment that few of his fellow environmentalists have. In truth while illegal fishing is rampant, whilst the Japanese still pretend that slaughtering whales on mass is necessary for scientific research (seriously how many whales do you have to kill before you work out what a whale is?) and Sharks are killed in their millions for their fins whilst all the while the United Nations, national navies and law enforcement agencies the world over sit by and do nothing, we need Paul Watson. We need the volunteers of Sea Shepherd and thousands more like them.

Some of you out there may be content to paint catchy slogans on placards and hang banners from bridges. You might even prefer to hold a jumble sale or hold an all night candlelight vigil in the hope that such demonstrations might prick the conscience of hardened whalers or stop illegal fishing. We however are slapping on the eye patches and raising our frothing glasses in salute to Paul Watson and all the souls in Sea Shepherd. Hoist the Jolly Roger me hearties  Argggh!

More information on Sea Shepherd is readily available on the web. However we’ve added some pertinent links below. You can sponsor Sea Shepherd directly via their website click here. The more adventurous amongst you might even want to volunteer for active service in one of their many operations or simply help out in their onshore activities if so click here.

The Taiji dolphin slaughter video – caution graphic content

Whale Wars on Youtube

Sea Shepherd in Paul Watson’s own words

The Easybreath Full-Face Snorkelling Mask. We Don't Know Why You Need It.

Last year we spotted an article in the Daily Mail that hailed a revolution in snorkelling equipment. A mask that let’s you breathe through your nose! In all honesty we paid little attention at the time. Full-face snorkelling masks are not revolutionary; they have been around since the 1950’s in various forms but have never caught on, mainly because they didn’t actually work. Now however we’ve noticed that the Internet is awash with articles, blog posts and images of this new mask. So we thought we’d better have another look, just in case someone really has come up with a full-face snorkelling mask that works. In hindsight, we really shouldn’t have bothered.

The Easybreath Mask is designed and manufactured by the French company Tribord and came about as a response to the problem of people wanting to snorkel, but not being able to because they couldn’t breathe through their mouth. To explain this problem the company released an advertising video where we were introduced to three wannabe snorkellers. Jean-Marc had a terrible problem, every time he put a snorkel in his mouth he felt “oppressed” and found it impossible to breathe. “It just didn’t feel natural” he bemoaned. Yang on the other hand, had leaned his head too far forward, when he first tried the sport, and consequently swallowed the water that entered his traditional snorkel. Yang was so panicked by this event he never tried snorkelling again. Finally there was Catherine. Catherine had dreadful trouble with both putting on and wearing a mask. “I tended to breathe through my nose and therefore suffocate”, she said despondently. “Then it fogged up, I couldn’t see anything, it was too tight and therefore I was really scared”.  All of these snorkelling-preventing problems were solved instantly when they tried the new Easybreath. Jean-Marc stopped feeling oppressed and started feeling more at ease. Yang could move his head as much as he liked and thought that this was just great. Catherine was equally gushing in her praise. “I saw fish, starfish”, she said joyfully. “It’s really great, I felt incredibly free”.

It was not just Jean-Marc, Yang and Catherine who are impressed either. In December last year, the Easybreath Mask won the Oxylane Innovation Award for 2014. Impressive you might think, until you realise that the Oxylane Group is the new name for French sports company Decathlon and Tribord is one of their brands. In a rather tacky ceremony, with dancing girls and overexcited Frenchmen prancing about everywhere, the people who make the Easybreath were presented with the 2014 innovation award by the people who…. Err… Make the Easybreath. Doesn’t look that impressive now, does it? So let’s go back to that advertising video with the oppressed Jean-Marc, Yang with his head issues and the “prone to suffocation” Catherine and see if we can solve their problems without inventing a brand new, revolutionary mask. 

Is it really too difficult for Jean-Marc to learn to breathe through his mouth? All divers and snorkellers have experienced the same issue when they first try the sport. Breathing through your mouth using a demand valve or snorkel takes practice but we would hardly call it an oppressive experience. It’s something that you get used to the more you do it. As for Jean-Marc’s suggestion in the video that breathing through the mouth is unnatural, we imagine that he must never have undertaken any strenuous exercise. Anyone who has ever exercised, run for a bus or had to take the stairs because the lift was broken will know that, as your muscles demand more and more oxygen, you stop breathing through your nose and switch to breathing through your mouth in order to increase the amount of air getting to your lungs. The same thing will happen if you exert yourself when snorkelling. Then there is Yang and his water swallowing issues due to immersing his head too much. This is not an uncommon problem and is easily solved by using a snorkel with a dry-valve purge system. These valves are available in a variety of makes and models. In fact the Easybreath uses exactly the same technology itself! Now we come to Catherine and her problem of suffocating herself and her mask fogging up. We’re worried about Catherine, very worried and here’s why. If every time that Catherine has difficulty getting air through her nose she starts to suffocate, how on earth does she cope when she gets a cold? We don’t want to sound rude here, but open your mouth Catherine and breathe! Seriously, even premiership footballers have mastered mouth breathing so it can’t be that hard. As for mask fogging, this is due to a number of reasons from variations in temperature between the outside and the inside of the mask to the inside of the mask being contaminated with microscopic dirt which moisture can attach to. There are a number of ways to stop fogging from using commercial de-fogging spray to the old tried and tested method of spit and rinse. However the best advice we can give you here Catherine is that when you buy a new mask make sure you clean it thoroughly to remove any remaining contaminants left over from the manufacturing process. Many people claim rubbing the lenses with non-abrasive toothpaste works but we prefer a simple solution of washing up liquid and water – works a treat. There you go Tribord, de-fogging solved without having to design, develop, test and re-test a revolutionary new mask.

Besides, the suggestion made by the company that the Easybreath eliminates the problem of fogging does not stand up to much scrutiny anyway. In fact the Easybreath designers state that their exclusive anti-fogging concept (yes it’s only a concept) is based on the principle of ventilation used on car windscreens (and they never fog up do they?) and only actually works properly in water temperatures over 18 degrees. Umm… That means if the water temperature is below that optimum, the anti-fogging concept stops working. This means snorkelling in the UK and most of the Mediterranean is out of the question.

There are other problems too. The Easybreath cannot be used for breath hold dives, even short ones, due to the fact that you cannot equalise pressure since you can’t get to your nose to pinch it. The volume of air in the mask is also considerably larger than traditional designs and diving down to even the relatively shallow depth of one metre means that the increase in pressure is going to make your face look like a squashed tomato when you surface. 

You can’t do much swimming in the Easybreath either. The Company states on it’s  website: Swimming requires a lot more effort than snorkelling, just as running requires a lot more effort than walking. Swimming training needs a significant amount of oxygen and your body will automatically switch to intensive mouth breathing. At this point, breathing with the Easybreath® would become very uncomfortable. 

Apparently no one at the company bothered to tell Jean-Marc that. Nobody at the company seems to be aware either, that not all snorkelling consists of simply bobbing about at the surface. As some of our other posts have highlighted, snorkelling has some inherent dangers and the ability to be able to swim quickly is damn important. Swimming quickly and being able to breathe too is even more important.

Then there is the problem of sizing. The Easybreath only comes in two sizes, Small/medium and large/extra large. These two sizes the company suggests, encompass 90% of the worlds faces… Really?  Bad luck for the other 10% then. Because it is also a full-face design, beards will play havoc with the seal and based on the FAQ’s on the company website and customer feedback received, there are quite a few other issues. The Mask sometimes leaks, the snorkel sometimes doesn’t work, sand tends to cause things to block, breathing causes a buzzing sound in the mask and the mask is rather cumbersome.
 

1955

All in all the Easybreath seems to be a solution to a problem that doesn’t actually exist outside of the mind of the designers. At £35 it’s cheap and unfortunately, with its garish colours and child’s toy-like appearance, it looks it too. The size and shape makes the whole thing unwieldy, the tightening strap has a tendency to break and the entire design limits your snorkelling activities to simply viewing the underwater world from the surface – you could do the same thing from a glass bottom boat. If, like Catherine, you can’t master the survival skill of breathing through your mouth or like Jean-Marc you want an oppressive free snorkelling experience, then the Easybreath will probably suit you – if it fits. If however, you want to experience the underwater world closer up, if you want to be able to swim and breathe at the same time and generally go snorkelling rather than laying dead still, face down in the water, like a drowned fisherman than we think that you, like us, will come to the conclusion that the makers of the Easybreath haven’t come up with anything revolutionary at all. Instead they have re-visited an old idea that didn’t work and come up with a new idea that doesn’t work either.

 

Clean Up The Oceans – We’re Going To Need A Bigger Pair Of Boardshorts Riz!

Some time ago we wrote a piece on “Gentleman Surfer” and Designer Riz Smith and his idea of turning ocean plastic into boardshorts (click here for that post). At the time we thought that Riz’s idea, although probably well intentioned, was a bit gimmicky and unlikely to have much, if any effect on the billions of kilos of plastic that are dumped into the ocean annually. Now however, after doing a bit more research into the issue of garbage entering the marine environment, we think that Riz’s idea is not just gimmicky, it’s impact on the problem will literally be a drop in the ocean. In fact it will be a drop in a billion oceans. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, 6.5 billion Kilos of plastic waste gets dumped into the oceans every year. 80% of which comes from inland sources. Some of this waste is swept up by the currents and concentrated into great whirlpools of plastic. The most well known concentration, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has become so large that it has been nicknamed “The Plastic Continent”. Not all plastic though, bobs about on the ocean waiting for Riz to pluck it up and mutate it into a pair of snazzy shorts (yours for just £80 or thereabouts), 70% eventually sinks to the bottom where it accumulates to create the marine equivalent of a 1960’s chintzy carpet. This no doubt horrifies the more fashionable of the fishes but more importantly it prevents exchanges between water and sediment and thus before you can shout “boardshorts, boardshorts, get your boardshorts, two for 120”, the entire environment is suffocated to death and ocean biodiversity takes another blow to its chin.

Plastic is not the only problem either. Every year thousand of tonnes of chemical pollutants enter the oceans. Some come from the disposal of everyday items such as detergents, paint, cosmetics, medicines etc. Others, such as hydrocarbons, mercury, lead and various acids come from industrial processes. Then there is the contamination by human sewage and animal waste. For instance around 80% of wastewater in developing world is dumped untreated into the ocean, even in the more developed world, sewage treatment plants don’t always prevent contaminants, pathogens and the foul smelling stuff from reaching the oceans. This not only has a devastating affect on the marine environment it presents a direct threat to human health.  

Then there is the problem of agricultural waste. Intensive farming and the over use of nitrogenous fertilisers has led to a problem know as eutrophication. No, we didn’t know what it meant either and had to look it up. Eutrophication, for those of you who aren’t scientists and therefore not used to just making words up, is defined by the US Geological Survey as: “The process by which a body of water acquires a high concentration of nutrients, especially phosphates and nitrates. These typically promote excessive growth of algae. As the algae die and decompose, high levels of organic matter and the decomposing organisms deplete the water of available oxygen, causing the death of other organisms, such as fish. Eutrophication is a natural, slow-ageing process for a water body, but human activity greatly speeds up the process.”

In other words, the pollution of coastal waters with nitrogen based fertilisers leads to explosive blooms of algae, which when they die and decompose, depletes the available oxygen and once again the marine environment is suffocated creating hypoxic or dead zones. There are now an estimated 400 such dead zones around the world. One of the largest is in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi enters the ocean.

So let’s face it Riz, selling recycled plastic boardshorts might get you into the pages of the Guardian and one or two other newspapers, but it’s going to do nothing to stop the environmental catastrophe going on in our oceans. So what can be done? Well as we have mentioned in our original post you can give your support to a myriad organisations attempting to do something practical about the problem. For instance there’s the Great Ocean Clean Up Project, The Marine Conservation Society and Project Aware amongst many others. All of who are doing great things. There is also the Let’s Do It Mediterranean Project (LIDM). On May 9^th 2015, Civic activists from around the Mediterranean will get together for an organised assault on the huge amount of waste and litter that plagues the region. LIDM is supported by the United Nations Environment Programme and has been doing amazing things since 2007. So get up, get involved and if you can’t, at least spread the word.

In truth though and despite the great efforts of the organisations mentioned and their supporters (that means you), real change will only come when there is a revolution in people’s daily habits. We live in a throw away culture and that needs to change pretty damn sharpish. So having had a bit of a ponder about the issue, we think we’ve hit on an idea that might help and you won’t have to buy a single pair of boardshorts. Besides being careful about how you dispose of things like not pouring paint down the drain or flushing cotton buds down the pan (seriously! Stop that) you can do something very, very simple. You can stop buying bottled water! OK we know that if you’re travelling to the more tropical, disease infested, parts of the world, drinking bottled water is your only option. Even in parts of the Mediterranean the water treatment process leaves a lot to be desired and so again bottled water is a good idea but here in the UK? In France? In Germany? Do you really need to buy gallons of plastic encased H2O?  In the UK for instance, the water that comes from the tap is not only clean and safe it tastes no different than the most expensive bottled stuff you can buy. Think about it, all you need to do is buy a simple reusable flask or bottle, fill it up from the tap and you have clean, hydrating water wherever you go. In one single change, we could clear the supermarket shelves of all those utterly unnecessary plastic containers. We could also end the wretched travesty of waiters in over-priced restaurants trying to sell you water for £20 a bottle because it’s been filtered through volcanic rock. It really is that simple. So wherever you are in the UK, when someone tries to sell you over-priced, over-blown and quite unnecessary bottled water, think of the environment, think of your hard-earned cash, think of how pathetic all that expensive advertising about naturally filtered water is and then in a clear, proud voice retort: “No thanks mate! Make mine tap!

And as we have mentioned before, if you see someone throwing a plastic bottle in the sea - chuck them in after it!