Jim Toomey’s comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon has been going for about 15 years and appears in over 150 newspapers in North America but to raise awareness about the awful practice of shark finning he had to kill off his main character to make a point! Have a look at his TED talk below (concentrate from 11 minutes in)… it’s fantastic.

Imagine you’re in an enormous room and it’s dark as a cave, and you can have anything in that room, anything you want, but you can’t see anything. You’ve been given one tool – a hammer. So you wander around in the darkness and you bump into something and it feels like it’s made of stone. It’s big, it’s heavy, you can’t carry it away so you bang it with your hammer and you break off a piece and take the piece out into the daylight and you see you have a beautiful piece of white alabaster.

So you say to yourself ‘well that’s worth something’, so you go back into the room and you break this thing to pieces and haul it away. And you find other things and break that up and you haul those away and you’re getting all kinds of cool stuff and you hear other people are doing the same thing. So you get this sense of urgency like you need to find as much stuff as possible as soon as possible.

And then somebody yells ‘STOP’ and they turn up the lights and you realise where you are, you’re in the Louvre and you’ve taken all this complexity and beauty and you’ve turned it into a cheap commodity and that’s what we’re doing with the ocean and part of what Mission Blue is about is yelling ‘STOP’ so that each of us – explorers, scientists, cartoonists, singer, chef – can turn up the lights in our own way.

Think about it… think about what’s on your plate and what it’s doing to our planet.

Thanks Saleh!

Bookmark It

This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Conservation and tagged as animals, biodiversity, cartoon, end of the line, fish, mission blue, sea shepherd, shark finning, ted. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.