Conservationists and Industry Clash Over Krill Trawling

Rise up sunshine, I'm Koi Wire. This is CNN 10 and today we are going big as in 25,000 miles circumference, planet size big.

Happy Earth Day. The one day where about 8.3 billion teammates share the same home field advantage and same responsibility from the deepest oceans to the highest mountaintops. to baby animals taking their first steps. Today, this show is a reminder that this planet isn't just where we live, it's who we are. We begin in the world's largest ecosystem, the ocean, where some of the smallest critters, like Paperclip Small,

make a huge difference. Antarctic krill. These tiny crustaceans are the power bar of the Antarctic food chain, the primary food source for everything from tuxedo wearing penguins to the heavyweight champ of the animal kingdom. The blue whale. A single blue whale can eat up to four tons of krill in one day. That's like eating the weight of 4,000 medium-sized pizzas per day. But krill are now facing growing pressure from industrial krill operations.

Trawlers are harvesting more than half a million tons of them each year. We went one-on-one with Greenpeace co-founder Captain Paul Watson, whose foundation is working to protect this fragile food chain, and his approach is anything but conventional. The primary purpose for the krill is to convert it into a cheap protein feed for salmon farms around the world. And it's a Norwegian industry primarily as a salmon farms. And this is a Norwegian industry doing the krill uh exploitation.

So for us to have cheap salmon, it means that we're gonna have to starve the penguins and the whales down in the southern ocean. Now your missions, quote, block, harass, do everything we can to stop. industrial krill fishing. But your focus remains on this direct action, nonviolent campaign. How do these missions work and and how effective are they?

Well, fifty years ago I developed a strategy which I call aggressive nonviolence to aggressively intervene but to make sure that nobody g is injured and to stay within the boundaries of the law and the boundaries of practicality. And for the last fifty years we have shut down hundreds of illegal operations. So when the Captain Paul Watson Foundation team arrives, what happens next?

Primarily we focus on illegal activities. The krill fishery is actually not illegal, but we are challenging it on uh the through the United Nations World Charter for Nature, because uh we believe that we have to exercise a precautionary principle here because

There's real diminishment being caused by this. And uh so we feel that we have to get it into court somehow. So what our objective was is first to let's bring this to the attention of the world. So how do we do that? We took our ship up against these monstrous uh

uh krill fishing vessels and uh we gently nudged them. They uh of course they know they're gonna accuse us of ramming them, which we didn't do. We just scraped their paint. But that nudging was in the spirit of what the Plains Indians used to call counting coup to get their attention.

And that photograph of course was to dramatize the issue. And from there we went on to interfere with their nets and uh to s uh you know prevent them from doing their fishing operations with the krill. And uh that resulted in them all fleeing the the On March 31st, one of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation's ships made headlines after deliberately colliding with a vessel operated by Acker Krill Company, one of the world's largest Antarctic krill harbors.

Here's what Aukar Crew Company said about the incident. I hit right around the diesel tank. Uh it went well, but it could have ended differently where you have big st uh I was also very close to our brother, you know, which I Do you have this fear that if if Krill becomes more endangered now, that perhaps these whales wouldn't be able to adapt as they have in the past? You simply can't take that amount acryl out of the Southern Ocean without having an impact, and we're seeing that impact.

That's the diminishment of all species of penguins down in the southern ocean. Um they all rely on krill except for the emperor penguin, but the emperor penguin relies on silverfish, which relies on krill. So everything is connected to krill. The krillfish is heavily regulated, so you can only catch one percent of the biomass. So ninety-nine percent of the biomass is is left to to all the animals.

that are consuming about twenty four percent of the biomass ev ev every year. When we harvest it, we harvest very little and make sure there's plenty of enough krill left for ecosystems and everybody that relies on krill. If someone watching this wants to help but might not know how, what are some things that they can do?

The consumption of farm race salmon is the reason that this is happening. About forty percent of all the fish that's taken from the ocean is converted into fish meal. It's not eaten by people. And uh so this krill thing is in order to replace the diminishment of the fish that they're exploiting, we're gonna r catch the krill and convert that into the salmon food. Basically what we have to do is eliminate salmon farming. It's an extremely destructive industry.

Well, for the last fifty years I've seen the steady diminishment of biodiversity uh in our ocean. And I've been saying o year after year, if the ocean dies, we die. And therefore it's really our responsibility to ensure that biodiversity is not diminished.

Alright, if you thought Earth Day views were good from your backyard, try this one from the moon. Would you look at that? The Artemis II crew astronaut Reed Wiseman captured this stunning Earth set, our planet dipping below the moon's horizon. He described it as

Watching a sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos. And the wild part, it wasn't some giant space camera. He snapped it through a tiny window with his iPhone. You can even hear his fellow astronaut Christina Cook snapping away too. Capturing iconic images released by NASA that remind us from up there there are no borders, no divisions, just one glowing fragile, beautiful home.

Now to some Earth Day Hope served extra cute. In Southern California's Big Bear Valley, a pair of internet famous bald eagles is welcoming some new additions this spring. Jackie and Shadow are now proud parents, times two. They are the Valley's only year-round bald eagle residents. They've been the stars of a live stream for years.

Earlier this month, viewers got a front row seat to Nature's Reality Show watching their Eaglets hatch over Easter weekend. Now, mom and dad, they have their talons full with this puffy pair of siblings known as simply chick one and chick two so far and that's where you come in. The nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley is hosting a naming contest for the chicks with proceeds going to help protect their habitat.

Students at a local elementary school will peruse the list of names to pick the finalists. Last spring's hatchlings were dubbed Spirit, Sunny, and Gizmo. I may be biased, but uh rise up in sunshine, have a certain ring to them, don't you think? Pop quiz hot shot, which of these has the highest electrical conductivity of any metal, nickel, iron, silver, or aluminum?

If you said silver shine bright, one common use for silver is in electric circuit boards due to its conductivity, but some parts exposed to oxygen are usually swapped for gold because it doesn't tarnish.

As easily. Extra pop quiz, Hotshot. What do your broken refrigerators, old cell phones, and mystery drawers of tangled chargers have in common? They're all part of one of the most pressing pollution problems on our planet: electronic waste or e-waste. Mountains of it, from broken microwaves to busted TVs, pile up landfills each year. And as our love for shiny new tech grows, so does the e-waste we leave behind. A recent UN report says that more than 62 million tons of it.

was generated in 2022 alone. That would fill about one and a half million dump trucks, bumper to bumper, that would circle the equator. But one company is using an innovative approach to help curb the crisis. literally dissolving the waste with special chemicals. DCL uses deep eutectic solvents, or DES for short, to dissolve the precious metals found in so many circuit boards and other electronics.

They say it allows them to recover things like gold, copper, and palladium from e-waste in a sustainable and efficient way. They say the process is also more eco-friendly than traditional e-waste recycling through processes like smelting, which consumes large amounts of energy and can release hazardous chemicals into the environment.

Today's story getting a 10 out of 10. A group of high schoolers proving you're never too young to make waves or protect your coast. Oysters play a huge role in marine ecosystems by providing food and protection for fish. Students from St. Patrick Catholic High School in Biloxi, Mississippi are partnering with the Coastal Conservation Association to apply what they learned to this project.

Attaching oyster shells to sheet metal that once belonged to an old shrimping boat. This student-made reef will then be deployed near Ship Island. The finished product will be a part of a permanent reef site and expand the oyster ecosystem. Those students don't just talk about change, they build it. Congrats to our Your Word Wednesday winners, Miss Alzheimer, Jackson and William and our friends at Chambly Middle School in Chambly, Georgia. The word of the day, Peruse.

a verb meaning to read or examine something in a thorough, detailed, and careful manner. I see you bulldogs We have some Earth Day shout-outs today. And the first one goes to Mrs. Fast at Franklin Middle School in Yakima, Washington. Thank you so much for this hand-embroidered needle point piece.

And uh Mrs. Fast, right now it's a necklace, but we have a perfect spot for you and this on our wall of friends. All right, this next shout out goes to Mrs. Suffol, Mrs. Suffol, and Miss Gibson at Jessup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. They're students. are in charge of a huge recycling initiative, and they sent us this recycled paper project and a very Earth Day appropriate shirt.

Thank you so much from classroom lessons to real world impact. This is what Earth Day is all about. Let's go out and do our part. Recycle something. Pick up a piece of trash, plant some seeds, or just tell someone who's taking care of our planet, thank you. Keep rising and keep shining, sunshine. I'm Coi Wire and we are CNN 10.