Where are the whales now Mummy?

Greenpeace are currently asking for ideas for an anti-whaling campaign. It worries me that people should come up with answers such as ‘kill the whalers’ and ‘ram the whaling ship’. That these people are young doesn’t signify – surely even a teenager would realise these are nonsense answers of no help.

I have met grown men who thought in a similar vein – the only answer being to fight fire with fire, according to them. Fire does work pretty well against fire, but their logic is flawed. To use fire against the people who support whaling you need to use economic argument. A change of sentiment to being actively against whaling in the general population is important too. Destroy, figuratively speaking, any customer base or reason to justify continuing.

Work on the fringes as well – look at the chain of people and industries supporting or supported by whaling. With logic and marketing, find ways to take them out of the mix, one by one. Where are whaling ships built – these people lose economically when you take that custom away so what can it be replaced with? Is an appeal to a ship-builders better nature likely to work when they think in terms of their business survival or are they successful enough to lobby? How do you go about making sure whalers don’t have ships?

Take that thought down to the smallest thing that they need. Find a supplier who supplies something essential to a whaling ship, but it wont hurt them financially to stop supplying it, and convince them (with logic and lobbying) to end their contract. The ship will find someone else, but do this often enough and it might be another straw to the camel’s back.

Stopping whaling, like climate change, requires massive restructures in society. It appears a daunting task to those undertaking it and the sheer magnitude of what is being asked of people who don’t want to change is going to cause confrontation, which is why, like all good changes, it has to be constant, unrelenting but gradual. Like a good diet, this needs to be taken up by people as a lifestyle choice forever and not just as a fad.

http://whales.greenpeace.org/global