In Continuum.

Another Kind of Green

Hearts are worn in these dark ages
You're not alone in this story's pages
Night has fallen amongst the living and the dying
And I try to hold it in, yeah I try to hold it in

I understand that in the previous post, I have declared my temporary break from the blogging circle. I guess in a way, part of the introduction of this entry should be dedicated to the explanation. The truth is that I felt uninspired, unmoved, unmotivated to blog for that period of time. People say that one of the ways to gain inspirations is through a method of writing called 'Free Writing'. Basically, it involves a writer writing whatever that comes to his or her mind, hoping for something good to emerge from the depths of one's mind. But then again, I thought about quality control on this blog and thus, laid that idea to rest. Anyway, I came back because I have something to say, something I feel strongly about. And it is not just another post about how my old love cheated on me, or how much I miss the old life that I had in the past. I know I should be on some kind of hiatus, but I do have something to say. So hear me out, and here we go.

When it comes to going green, or environment conservation, I cannot say that I am a leading figure in that field. After all, there isn't much you can do as a twenty-one year old, whose life revolves really around school textbooks and notes. The most people like me can do is to bring our own bags to shopping malls and supermarkets, or eat less turtle soups or meat of endangered animals. The least anybody can do really, is to not do retarded things like - burning down a hundred year old tree for example. I am guilty however, to contributing to global warming one way or another. And sometimes, even with that thought in mind, I really cannot be bothered. Because seriously, you cannot expect somebody who lives in Singapore to live without air-conditioning, which in turn contributes to our global crisis. You might as well ask us to dip our heads into a boiling pot of water.

The world's on fire and it's more than I can handle
I'll tap into the water, I try to pull my ship
I try to bring more, more than I can handle
Bring it to the table, bring what I am able

Yesterday night, was one of the hottest nights I have ever experienced. There was no wind, no air movement, no nothing in the night air. And there I was with the window opened, feeling that I was better off locked up in a vault. It was impossible to still have Al Gore's messages from the Inconvenient Truth in mind when the weather is that hot. Perhaps he should live in Singapore for half a year, and see if he still thinks that air-conditioning should be abolished altogether. Perhaps in the act of going green which I support, we can leave out the act of dumping all air-conditionings away?

Anyway, enough of the senseless introductions. What I truly want to say is not the issue regarding global warming, but another kind of environmental crisis that we are facing.

I watch the heavens and I find a calling
Something I can do to change this moment
Stay close to me while the sky is falling
Don't wanna be left alone, don't wanna be alone

I'd like to bring people's attention to the problem of whaling on our good Earth. There aren't a lot of documentaries that can move me to the brink of tears, but the one I saw a week or so ago about whaling did exactly that. As a child, I had an infinite amount of love and passion for the sea, particularly the wildlife. If you guys have been reading my older entries, you'd know that I used to sit before the fish tank hours on end, just watching those colorful fishes swimming in and out of those small caves and holes, or the way they'd come so close to the glass and stare into my eyes with infinite wonder. There was a time when my family went to Vancouver for a family holiday, and we were received warmly by the relatives we have who lived there. They brought us to a steamboat restaurant, and as everybody enjoyed their fantastic dinner around the table, there I was crying my eyeballs out because they were dumping life prawns into the boiling water.

So you see, despite the fear of deep waters and the inability to swim properly, there is still a part of me who adores the ocean. So when I saw the documentary about whaling for the first time, the images that struck me remained there like carved words on a rock. I guess when you are talking about the endangering of animals, nothing works better than images of humans trying to play God, or the sight of blood spilled out of opened guts. That was what I saw, the way the whales laid on their sides on the deck of ships, just waiting for humans to slice their stomaches open for whatever purposes they have. Allow me now, to give you a brief history on whaling.

The world's on fire and it's more than I can handle
I'll tap into the water, I try to pull my ship
I try to bring more, more than I can handle
Bring it to the table, bring what I am able

The act of whaling started off in 7000BC, when people of the stone age hunted whales with boats they built and spears they made. Of course, as human technologies progresses, the weapon of choice when it comes to whaling hunting has been improved and upgraded. What used to be just spears became what we call the harpoons. Harpoons are one of those giant guns mounted at the front of ships, with a big spear mounted at the very end, with a rope attached to the ship. So when the target is spotted, the fisherman would fire the spear at the target and then slowly reeling the target towards the ship later. The same basic method can be read from books like Moby Dick, where Captain Ahab and gang used pretty much the same method to hunt down whales for their meat and oil.

As our technology advanced, the idea of explosive harpoons was invented. Basically, it involves the spear piercing the skin of whales, and then have the tips explode inside the whale itself to successfully kill the whale. This method was widely used and welcomed initially because of the time and efforts saved in reeling the whale in while it is alive. However, by having the spears explode inside the whale, it destroys too much meat and tissues inside the whale, making most of the captured whale unusable. Therefore, we humans came up with the method of electrocution. Basically, we would harpoon the whales with normal spears, then when we get close enough, we'd electrocute the whale with long sticks with metal tipped ends until the whale eventually dies. In this way, the fishermen get to preserve the meat and in the process, effectively kill the whales.

Hearts break, hearts mend
Love still hurts
Visions clash, planes crash
Still there's talk of
Saving souls, still the cold
Is closing in on us

There is an organization called the IWC, or the International Whaling Commission, which is really a bunch of countries coming together to talk about whether they should be subjected to a moratorium when it comes to whaling. The organization was set up in 1946, but was never viewed upon as something very important in the countries that actively involved themselves with whaling, simply because of how lucrative the business was. It was easy to not be confined to the rules of this organization, and that is to simply not be part of it. So if you do not want your money in whaling to go down the drain, just don't be a member of this committee, it is that simple, and that is exactly what Russia and Norway are doing right now.

Countries like Japan and America joined the organization, pledging themselves against commercial whaling, and always working under an annual quota. However, despite the promises made during the meetings, a lot of those countries in turn killed whales for supposed scientific purposes. Countries like Iceland and Japan continued their whaling rampages by claiming their scientific purposes, which to me is just utterly ridiculous. There was a video I saw on television during the documentary, where a bunch of people would hold up signs on the decks of a ship that read "This is for scientific research!" to the cameras on board of a helicopter. The irony in this is that while the man is holding up signs to claim their innocence, in the background we see people gutting the whales and then carrying their meat off into hidden storerooms and chambers.

So there I was in the comfort of my living room, watching the whales lying helplessly on the wooden decks of the ships where a thousand of their cousins were killed as well. I pictured the whale laying there, still alive and still trying to breathe, but unable to stay that way for long because their guts were flowing out from the wounds in their stomach. Other animals - humans - so many times smaller than themselves, crawling all over the whale to salvage the carcass for anything worthy of a few dollars on the market. The smell of blood on the decks, the repulsive smell of dead fish, they almost came through the glass of the television into my nostrils as I watched.

They dangled helplessly at the side of the ships, with ropes tied to their tails and the blue ocean stained red below them. In fact, only 6% of the whales that existed a century ago, exists now due to extensive whale hunting in the first half of the century. In records, it wasn't difficult to see schools of whales in the wild, just swimming by the ships and the boats. But we hardly see them anymore right now, and with the problem of global warming affecting the temperature of the oceans, the natural habitats of whales are even more treacherous than ever. As if the harpoons and the electrocuting sticks aren't enough to kill them, we humans had to come up with this little thing called global warming to kill them even more swiftly. Good job humans, you guys are winning.

I just think that, instead of nit-picking on little things like how many pieces of tissue you use to wipe your ass with in the toilet, we have bigger issues like whaling to take note of. And this is just whales we are talking about here, when there are millions of other animals in this world on the brink of their own extinction. After all, extinction is a permanent deal, you cannot reverse the effects of extinction and say "If Dr. Hammond managed to bring back dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, all we need to do is to find a mosquito stuck in tree sap somewhere and then clone the extincted animal out of it". The truth is, there are many other animals at risk in our world today, and there are really a lot of things we can do to stop them from happening, even more realistic than trying to cut down on the number of tissue paper you use on the toilet.

So instead of going green, I say we go less red. Red being the blood spilled by the animals for our own materialistic needs and satisfactions. Less red, less blood from those innocent animals, especially if they are going to be killed for ridiculous reasons(For example, bones of whales were made into dominoes). I personally restrict myself to Maguro at Japanese restaurants, and never ever touched the more exotic meat. So I guess, that is the least I can do as a human to redeem the other acts and crimes committed against mother nature. So the next time you decide to have another bowl of turtle soup at Serangoon Gardens, think again. An endangered animal might have died for your temporary satisfaction.

The world's on fire and it's more than I can handle
I'll tap into the water, I try to pull my ship
I try to bring more, more than I can handle
Bring it to the table, bring what I am able