All articles
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Look what the FAD dragged in
Greenpeace has long been concerned about the bycatch caused by the use of Fish Aggregating Devices, or FADs, with purse seine nets. This fishing method is a deadly combination of a floating object, left adrift for weeks or months, and a huge encircling net that takes everything in the vicinity. Original Blog post by…
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Super-trawlers are feeding on EU fishing subsidies.
In banning supertrawlers from our waters for two years, the Australian Government has sent a strong message to the bloated and subsidised European fishing industry. This Op-Ed first appeared in The Australian 24 Sept 2012 Fishing in Europe is governed by the EU’s law on fishing, known as the Common Fisheries Policy. It has been…
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How Australians banded together to stop the super trawler
How it all happened: It all starts back in West Africa, where super trawlers had destroyed fisheries and left locals without jobs. 13 March 2012: Greenpeace highlights the plunder of super trawlers in West Africa. March 2012: The Government of Senegal bans all foreign trawlers following outrage from fishermen that all their fish had…
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Stop the Margiris and spare the oceans
We Australians love a local link. When big news happens around the world, instinctively the first thing we check is whether an Aussie was involved. But, this time around, the story is coming to us in the form of the imminent arrival of the 142 metre long Margiris super trawler. The Margiris is the second…
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Super trawler threatens coastal communities from Perth to Brisbane
Press release – 6 August, 2012Call for super trawlers to be banned across AustraliaSYDNEY, 6 August 2012: As the Magiris super trawler steams toward Australian waters, Greenpeace has today escalated the issue, calling on the Gillard Government to ban all super trawlers from Australian waters. “This is an opportunity for the Gillard Government to say,…
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Guest blogger Callum Roberts: Future oceans
Imagine a world, not very far in the future, where families shun the idea of a seaside holiday because the sea is too unpleasant to visit, perhaps even dangerous. The beach is heaped with rotting green seaweed and bodies of jellyfish litter the strand. Getting in the water you risk illness; even the air might…
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Opposition rising to fading whaling industry
Whale conservation has lost out to the fading, but still defiant pro-whaling forces, at this year’s International Whaling Commission (IWC) annual meeting. The meeting in Panama City had initially offered the world hope that the IWC would actually help to save whales, not whalers, after the Latin American nations proposed the creation of a whale…
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One boat coming to Australia that we should fear
Australia is about to have one of the world’s biggest fishing vessels – from a fleet that has a track record of obliterating fish stocks around the world – enter its shores. Blogpost by Karli Thomas, 01/02/2012 Rather than being afraid of the damage it will cause, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority has doubled the…
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Protecting Antarctica, the heart of the ocean
For many people the Antarctic is little more than a far-away frozen region, literally at the edge of the world; with sterile glaciers, icebergs and colonies of not-so ‘Happy Feet’ penguins, buffeted for much of their lives in the extreme Antarctic wind. Blogpost by Veronica Frank, Greenpeace International – May 21, 2012 The ice-covered waters…
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From Cronulla to the Kimberley
Last week, treasured Australian writer Tim Winton delivered this powerful speech (read the full transcript here) to parliament in Canberra calling for protection of our vital oceans. While oceans give us life, we plunder them of fish and choke them with pollution. To cure our oceans crisis we need to create large areas of marine…