After The Cove

By: By Louie Psihoyos | June 11, 2010 | Politics

Winning an Academy Award for The Cove was just the beginning of a larger and ongoing environmental thriller. The twisted plotlines that have unfolded in the last three months alone are filled with more bad guys, scandals and cover-ups than you might find in a Hollywood blockbuster — including sting operations in America and Asia to expose the trafficking of endangered whale meat, riot police clashing with protesters at the film distributor’s home in Japan, heated testimony before Congress on marine mammals in captivity and the disposed evidence of recent tragic deaths that would compromise an eight billion-dollar captive industry that continues to exploit wildlife.

The Cove is the first documentary produced by the Oceanic Preservation Society, a nonprofit organization that I founded five years ago to raise awareness of the myriad problems facing our oceans — and hopefully inspire legions of like minded activists around the world to join the effort.

The Cove is a secret area in a Japanese national park, ironically a nature preserve, where thousands of dolphins are slaughtered every year — more than anywhere else in the world. What happens there is but a small example of the dangers facing the world’s oceans, including the critical issues of overfishing, increasing pollution from fossil fuels, mounting toxicity, human predatory greed and the exploitation of intelligent animals for our entertainment.

And unfortunately, not everyone wants you to see this movie. At Yakota, an American Air Force base in Japan, The Cove has been banned. In response to this censorship, OPS has blogged about it, sent out messages to our supporters, participated in interviews that reached a global audience and took out a prominent advertisement in Stars and Stripes offering free copies of the film for the first 100 people to respond. OPS is not a large operation. As a matter of fact, our team could fit comfortably in a MINI Cooper. But we are trying to start a sea-grassroots movement to save the oceans, and we are gaining momentum.

Cover-ups and Controversy

In October of this year, the OPS team learned that one of California’s most popular sushi restaurants, The Hump in Santa Monica, was selling endangered whale meat. Using covert equipment developed specially for The Cove, we videotaped and recorded the sale. Scott Baker, one of the world’s top cetacean DNA experts, confirmed that the meat was from a sei whale, and we presented the evidence to federal agents with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (As of 2006, the sei whale population was still one-fifth of the pre-whaling populations and so remains internationally protected.)

Unfortunately, we later learned that to make a legal bust, one that establishes a “chain of custody,” a federal agent must be present. Although small, the OPS team is spread out across the country, so getting the team back together to conduct another mission was both logistically difficult and expensive. The special meal, omakase (chef’s choice), cost us more than $1,000 on the first attempt.

Only after our film was nominated for an Academy Award did we find ourselves reunited in Los Angeles — a perfect opportunity to recreate the sting among pre-Oscar celebrations. While some of our team dressed for our first Oscar party, hosted by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, others hustled to the Santa Monica Airport with federal agents to bust The Hump.

Had the chef seen our movie, he might have recognized the same characters who broke into a secret cove in Taiji, Japan, sitting at his table and scrutinizing his every move as he carved up meat from an endangered whale. But he likely would not have recognized the federal agents with us, who, armed with conclusive evidence, were then able to shut the restaurant down within 10 days of the sting. Amid a tidal wave of bad publicity surrounding that restaurant, we discovered evidence of several other area restaurants selling contraband meat. Investigations are ongoing.

A few weeks later, Charles Hambleton, OPS’ director of covert operations, and I flew to Seoul, South Korea, on another whale-meat sting. Scott Baker, the same DNA expert who worked on the previous operation, and his colleagues in Korea had discovered another ring selling illegal Japanese whale meat. Ironically, the restaurant was in the same building as the foreign press club, but remained unnoticed by the media for quite some time. Together, we recorded transactions and analyzed the meat of sei, minke and fin whales, as well as one Risso’s dolphin.

Baker published a paper in the scientific journal Biology Letters using the evidence from our stings as grounds for demanding increased transparency through the Japanese DNA registry and the International Whaling Commission. We have yet to see a response from the Japanese delegation or the IWC indicating their commitment to the transparency that would allow the world community to track the source and distribution of illegal whale meat throughout the world. However, after the paper was published, South Korean police raided the Seoul restaurant, and charges are pending.

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 4 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »