Steve Shallhorn, my former boss at Greenpeace Australia Pacific and a man whom I admire, has, I fear, looked straight through a forest to focus on one particular tree.

His suggestion in Crikey yesterday that ITS Global may have taken on the Japanese whalers as a new client may or may not be an accurate guess. But it is not relevant.

Khalil Hegarty’s piece in Crikey on Wednesday was not about the whales. The details of the piece, sprinkled liberally as usual with half-truths and distortions, were a side-show to the main event: the ongoing campaign to discredit and undermine the environment movement.

ITS Global, and its Managing Director, Alan Oxley, are world leaders in the anti-environment cause. Their view has always been that the best way to achieve the goals of their clients – unfettered logging across PNG and the region, building the Tamar Valley Pulp Mill, slowing action on climate change, etc – is to place their opponents in as bad a light as possible.

This means that spreading misinformation about Greenpeace’s whaling campaign, as detailed by Steve Shallhorn yesterday, is entirely relevant to ITS Global’s work for the Malaysian logging giant, Rimbunan Hijua, for whom Greenpeace is a bete noir. Whaling is, we hardly need reminding, a far higher profile campaign than logging. So any mud that sticks to Greenpeace over whales is likely to have a bigger impact on Greenpeace’s capacity to campaign effectively for sustainable logging than any mud thrown directly at them over forestry.

To take a further step back, Oxley and ITS Global are strongly focussed on slowing and undermining effective action on climate change. Taking a pot-shot at Greenpeace over whales could help discredit one of the strongest and most public climate campaigning organisations on the planet.

Indeed, it might not be a stretch too far to suggest that ITS Global actively sought out the consultancy on the Tamar Valley Pulp Mill not only to help get the Mill built, but as an effective avenue for attacking and undermining the Australian environment movement.

Having said all that, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that an organisation that works for some of the world’s greatest environmental vandals had taken on the Japanese whalers as clients. But they don’t need to be working for the whalers in order to find it useful to help them.

Tim Hollo is Communications Adviser to Senator Christine Milne, and former Greenpeace communications officer

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Southern Ocean …

Thomas Hunter writes:

Now that the Sea Shepherd’s postmen have been returned to the Steve Irwin, the anti-whaling protest in the Southern Ocean may again focus on the Japanese attempts to meet their whaling quotas, and the efforts of protestors to stop them.

Throughout the hostage drama between the Sea Shepherd and Yushim Maru No. 2, the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza stayed in pursuit of Nisshim Maru, the factory ship of the Japanese fleet.

“The Nisshim Maru is now in its seventh day of not whaling, which is pretty good news for us, and pretty good news for the whales,” Greenpeace spokesman Dave Walsh told Crikey this morning from aboard the Esperanza.

“We’re still well away from the area they planned to be whaling and we’ve been outside that area for several days now. They sailed north for several days but have now turned around and are heading back toward the whaling grounds. They are yet to meet up with the rest of the fleet.”

Walsh says that there has been no contact between Greenpeace and Nisshim Maru since the pursuit began, but “as long as the factory ship is not with the catcher boats, there could be no whaling. The catcher boats have no ability to store whales. They can kill them but they will start decomposing in the water pretty quickly.

“The season they have is around 100 days long, and ends when the Antarctic summer begins ending and the sea ice begins building up again. On average, they would need to be killing 8.5 minke whales a day and a fin whale, which is huge animal, every second day. After six days, that’s around 51 minkes they haven’t been able to get their hands on. From our point of view, that’s great news.”

Walsh added that it was impossible to speculate what the Nisshim Maru was planning to do. The Esperanza doesn’t have any reports on where the rest of the Japanese fleet is, and has no way of monitoring the communications between their vessels. Walsh expects that the Nisshim Maru will soon meet up with the catcher boats, which is when the Greenpeace crew would begin “peaceful direct action” to defend the whales.

“That will involve putting ourselves in our boats in front of the harpoon ships to appeal to the better nature of the guys with the harpoons to not try and shoot a human.”

Greenpeace, however, would not release its location. “We don’t give out our coordinates as a matter of policy. It will have different impacts in different projects. Greenpeace works in other situations outside whaling. It’s just a decision we have made. There is no need to give out our coordinates. It could be argued that in this case with the Nisshim Maru we don’t need to do that, but we just choose to keep it simple.”