Earlier, when I made the comment about it’s a shame that the National Geographic Channel doesn’t have the same level of recognition that the Discovery Channel does, it didn’t mean that I don’t like the Discovery Channel. In fact, amongst the family of Discovery Networks, which includes Animal Planet, Planet Green, and TLC, there’s a ton of great programming to be had…and I’m not just saying that because they gave out these awesome tote bags at the end of their presentation. (For the record, though, National Geographic gave out a pretty sweet backpack themselves.)
I don’t know if there was some sort of elaborate coin-flipping procedure to determine who would get to go first, but if so, then the winner was apparently Animal Planet, who introduced their latest programming addition, “Whale Wars.”
“Whale Wars” focuses on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an organization whose members refer to themselves as “eco-pirates.” All things considered, it’s rather edgy fare for Animal Planet, with the group battling against Japanese whalers who claim that they’re hunting for scientific research purposes (as opposed to commercial interests), but you can’t say it isn’t gripping. You also, however, can’t say that Animal Planet is actually endorsing the organization by putting the spotlight on them during the program, since Majorie Kaplan, president and general manager of the network, said outright that they are not. “This is really a character study,” she said. “We think this is terrific television. We are on the boats. It’s not a piece of investigative journalism. So it’s the experience of life on these ships and this conservation organization.”
Paul Watson, founder of the Society, was onhand for the panel, and one of the more interesting revelations during the course of his comments was the fact that he was also a founding member of Greenpeace.
“I was the youngest founding member of Greenpeace, at 18,” clarified Watson, “(but) I left Greenpeace when I was 26 to set up the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society because I got tired of protesting and I just felt that this would be more effective to be doing direct intervention. Now, it’s true that I started out studying communications and everything, but I just fell into this. And I always thought it was something, in the early seventies, I would be doing temporarily. And here it is, 2008, I’m still doing it.”
Ashley Dunn, who assisted in the documentation of the organization’s activities for the series, described her work as “a warts and all representation of what happens on the ship. I by no means had any bias one way or the other. I was there
solely to document, and we did that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We were their shadow, basically, and what you get is what happened. There are just no arguments about it.”
Ben Potts, one of the other members of the society, agreed with Dunn’s assessment without hesitation. “You could say that it was embedded with us,” she said, “because every time I rolled out and woke up in the morning, there was a camera in my face, and they would follow us around for the whole day. So they captured, yeah, every moment of that — of that cruise, of our campaign, and from our engagement with the whaling fleet right down to daily activities.”
So when you say “daily activities,” Mr. Potts, are you winking at all? If he’s not, his compatriot Peter Hammarstedt is. “I think there was a bit of a toss-up whether the series would be called ‘Whale Wars’ or ‘The Love Boat,'” said Hammarstedt, with a laugh. “Certainly, there’s passion.”
But let’s not make this show seem more sordid than it is. At its heart, “Whale Wars” is the story of a group of people who are trying to do right by some of the largest mammals on the face of the earth; it’s definitely not always an upbeat story, but when things go right, it’s downright inspirational.
“It really hit home to me just sort of what effects we were having for the survival of endangered species such as a fin whale when my mate, Giles and I, boarded the harpoon boat and we were detained in a cabin on board and for two, two and a half, three days,” said Ben Potts, another Society member. “We were looking out the porthole one day, and a huge whale surfaced just outside the porthole not more than 20 meters away. And it breathed, you know. A huge burst of
mist came out of its blowhole, and then its tail fluke went up. It dove. And the whole time, we were, like, ‘Quick, get away. Quick, get away,’ you know. We were on a Japanese harpoon boat. And, you know, if we hadn’t have been there, if we hadn’t have taken the action that we did and if the crew hadn’t have gone down to Antarctica, that whale would more than likely have had a grenade-tipped harpoon fly into its body. It would have been winched up to the bow of that ship, and then they electrocute them with low-voltage current.”
Good thing, then, that the Society was there.
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