day observed on a planet seemingly closer to extinction than ever whether from nuclear annihilation or the climate emergency in part to a speak to the sea spirits the star in captain who gives new meaning to direct action at sea but 1st with everything from pandemics to wars over resources to movements of refugees being catalyzed by climate change can the global promotion of basic human rights avert planetary catastrophe joining me now from vancouver is david boyd the un special rapporteur on human rights and the environment thank you so much measure up of your for coming on just explain that remit human rights and the environment 1st yes so it's basically a u.n. volunteer position they have many of these independent experts and my particular expertise is in the area of preventing adverse human rights impacts from environmental degradation shining a spotlight on instances where this occurs around the world and identifying solutions that can protect the environment and protect human rights now on this show we often talk about the war between different classes that when it comes to

the environment it's often said the richest one percent more than double the poorest 50 percent in terms of emissions we have statistics showing that high income countries response above 46 percent of consumption based c o 2 and just 0.4 of low income who is the media here it's billionaires saving the planet what is the class dimension here. well there's a huge there's a huge class dimension you know the reality as you've mentioned is that. over consumption in the wealthy countries of the global north and really amongst the the one percent of the global elite who live everywhere are the drought one of the primary drivers of the environmental degradation which is then in turn shouldered most heavily by the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world and you know we can talk about facts and figures to wear blue in the face but let me tell you about my 1st country mission as a special rapporteur which was to fiji you know think about fiji but what comes to

mind is a tropical paradise coconut trees beautiful beaches as you were waters but i talk to people i met people in fiji who had been rendered homeless because of tropical cyclone winston this is the most devastating tropical storm to reach land in the history of the southern hemisphere i talked to a 10 year old girl who told me that she's afraid to go to the beach with her family on sundays for their weekly picnic because the ocean seems angry to her this is what we're doing to the world it's having direct impact on people who bear no responsibility whatsoever for causing these problems that are really our fault which makes it our responsibility to come up with the solutions. and i think those little reference is going to be in this new report you're writing for the un general assembly there's a lot i'm. i try and put the stories of people in all of my reports and because i think it's humans are humans are people of stories and so by telling the stories of individuals i think we can put

a human face on these problems that often seem abstract i mean another classic example is air pollution which you know the numbers tell us kills over 7000000 people every year globally a truly shocking figure when you think about it that's over 100000000 people dead because of air pollution in the last 20 years but those are just abstract numbers which are human brains really cannot grasp until you see a photo of a child like ellie kisi the bra the young british girl who died in 2013 because of air pollution a coroner's inquest last year in london for the 1st time in the world found that air pollution was directly responsible for the death of a specific individual and that beautiful child's face will be forever with me and the work that i'm doing to try and prevent the scourge of air pollution yeah we'll row during hasn't been admitted by the authorities as we got through cause the death of instigation continues you see let me collect to be clear about that

action i mean the fact that the united kingdom is not meeting the european union directive standards for air quality is absolutely wrong doing their their failure to clean up the air in the poorest neighborhoods of london is a violation of basic human rights the basic human right to live in a safe clean healthy and sustainable environment requires governments to take action to ensure clean air but you can understand amid going underground when we 1st started this show we were covering am pollution and we found it difficult to accept the 10s of thousands of people in this country where dying because of absolution. well that's not difficult i mean it's basically it's basic well established science we know that we know the mechanisms we know from vast epidemiological studies the the quantity of people are dying you know the world health organization makes it clear the top experts from all of the world's leading medical and scientific academies make it clear these numbers are not in doubt these

numbers are rock solid well you'll find the media here in britain talking about how the boris johnson administration is the world leader in environmental protection and that it's all china's fault arguably you tweeted about the electrical vehicle revolution in china what should the general public be thinking about when it seems that the environment can be used for geopolitical reasons i mean china as far as i can see but capital i mean it's not even up there when it comes to c o 2 emissions the czech republic australia the usa canada saudi they're all way ahead of china and yet all we hear about is china. yeah and that's really that's really feeding feeding a myth that you know china's china china is uniformly terrible the reality is that in china has such a large population that total chinese emissions have surpassed total american

emissions on a year over year basis but of course we have to also consider the here sis the historical context and when you do that when you look at cumulative emissions over time then countries like the u.k. and the u.s. are still out in front but i think what's really important is to talk about the solutions and that's where china is really quite fascinating i mean china leads the world in solar electricity production in wind electricity production in electric vehicle sales in electric bicycle sales in law longest largest amount of high speed electric trains so china is actually i think quite brilliantly seizing this multi-trillion dollar economic opportunity that's presented by the imperative to shift away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy as quickly as possible once you china is no angel china still has a lot of coal fired power plants and is one of the only countries in the world that

is still building new coal fired power plants which i think is actually contradicts their economic wisdom because those coal fired power plants are a disaster from the perspective of air pollution and climate change and are likely to end up being stranded assets from a business perspective as we accelerate the shift towards renewables that certainly the topic of conversation and then they too nation media i should say in the lake district there have been plans in britain to have a new coal mine but what about the impact of war on climate change because britain is sending an aircraft carrier has been to the south china sea had sending weapons to saudi arabia to bomb yemen move a sanctioning countries like china here in britain and of course took part in the bombing of syria and libya and so on why do you think we impact of war on human rights and the environment because obviously there are environmental consequences

seldom mention. well it's a good question i should and you know if you look at it again if we go back to the statistics how many people die every year in conflicts around the world and you'll find that the number is actually an order of magnitude smaller from war and other conflicts than it is from air pollution water pollution other forms of toxic contamination which globally account for you know in the neighborhood of 10000000 premature deaths every year now of course war is environmentally destructive there's no question about that and the amount of money that's being spent globally on you know continuing to advance the latest military technologies nuclear weapons all of these things that you've mentioned think about what the world would look like if countries like russia the united states and china and the u.k. actually invested that money in pursuit of the you the united nations sustainable

development goals and poverty ending hunger and hunger achieving equality ensuring clean energy for everyone addressing the climate crisis the biodiversity crisis you know all a simply pausing military spending until 2030 and investing all of that money in positive human rights affirming environmentally sustainable technologies could transform the world as we know it and as an added bonus reduce the likelihood of people becoming terrorists because of the desperate circumstances in which they find themselves well as you know nato members the nato itself says that the demand putin and she jumping on the enemy and bent presumably on destruction which is why we need to fund the arms industry and the military how how is un special report to you come to terms with what you it is saying about the importance of. changing where the investment priorities. well i try and put recommendations in every report

that i make that say look for example you know when it comes to when it comes to fishing the world spends $35000000000.00 every year on fishing subsidies 80 percent of those subsidies are going into industrial fishing fleets that are that are actually driving fish stocks towards depletion agriculture we spend $700000000000.00 a year on subsidies to agriculture the vast majority of which promotes industrial monocultures that are causing water pollution air pollution biodiversity loss and climate change so you know there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars that i consider low hanging fruit because government's already spending the money instead of spending it on when he that enriches corporations and causes human rights violations and environmental destruction why not repurpose that money in an intelligent way to support the transition to a sustainable future that billions of people are so desperate for we're going to

talk about fishing in in pot too and the british government wants to relax food standards regulations in order to get a trade deal that's that's the reason why what you're saying may not be done and when it comes to people protesting actually the government here is instituting new laws off the back of the extinction rebellion protests here in london to to restrict protest well what have you made of that. yeah i think those are terrible regressive steps that the british government is taking and contemplating i mean the crackdown on protesters is is exactly the opposite of what the government should be doing if the government was actually taking the kinds of action to match its rhetoric on the environment then you know we wouldn't we wouldn't have a need for those kinds of extinction rebellion protests and you know freedom of speech freedom to protest freedom of assembly those rights are jeopardized by some of these regressive moves by that we're seeing by the british government and i

should just mention before we finish the the refugees caused by going to the nation wards and climate change what have you made i don't know maybe even of the biden ministrations that detaining tens of thousands of children on the border there is that also under the remit of human rights and the environment. well yes it is because we're seeing an increase in migration you know migration is a very complex topic obviously action but you know climate change all of these environment related problems are increasing levels of migration in regions all around the world you know we're never going to be able to adequately deal with these problems at the border we have to take the actions to prevent these problems and undertake these kind of what scientists are calling for rapid systemic and transformative changes in our energy system in our agriculture system and in our economies in order to prevent what really could be

a tidal wave of migration in the future if these mormon i'm in ames continue to worsen just finally has a robot that i want to ask this because i know that you're interested in international law legislation which arguably i don't know with some countries will pay attention to how can you compete as a special report to with according to open secrets on all claiming $110000000.00 was spent lobbying voile in gas and 2020 can you compete against vested interests like that with your reports to the un general assembly. for one for example yes we can because we have the power of science behind us we have the power of youth behind us we have billions of people who are desperate for a green and clean sustainable future and what we need to do you know you mentioned the oil and gas industry but frankly what we need to do is do exactly what the world health organization international treaty does with the tobacco industry which is requires governments to keep tobacco companies out of lobbying for health for

health legislation we need to keep oil and gas companies out of lobbying for energy and climate legislation that would make the path forward much straighter much faster. and special thank you after the break we'll be speaking to netflix is the spirity star captain paul watson about saving the oceans to save humanity.

brushy west relations are in tatters at this point there is no reason to believe they will improve anytime soon it appears that washington is determined to force moscow to take the meat this is delusional this will never happen we live in the most dangerous of time. welcome back to this earth day edition of going underground well as violence returns to northern ireland the aftershocks of wrecks that don't look like they're going anywhere anytime soon this after a so-called shellfish war between the u.k. and e.u. of a fishing rights but the netflix documentary sea spirity advocates saving the oceans by leaving them alone sea shepherd found captain paul watson who stars in the film joins me now from new york catterall watson thanks so much for coming on going on the road tomorrow is earth day we just spoke to the un special rapporteur on the environment media obviously will continue to be talking about 26 in glasgow

the paris climate deal you believe that one key to saving the human species from extinction is in our oceans. well the ocean is a life support system of the entire planet and it provides a food we eat it provides the oxygen that we breathe up to 70 percent of it and it also regulates climate and temperature so as i said it cost 21 if we want to address climate change then all we have to do is leave the ocean alone we need a 50 year moratorium on heavy gear industrialised fishing operations we need to stop dumping plastics and pollutants into the ocean we need to give the ocean time to repair the damage that we. brought onto it well of course the way the media in nato nations has been covering this is great strides in being taken in say taking plastic straws to pay president was i know it's one of the themes in c. spirity on netflix which you appear in a cage of expound on one of the themes in the film about the power of public

relations and marketing and. corporate mole being in the debate over the environment but right now of course you're seeing this the you know the fishing industry is putting a lot of money and effort into trying to discredit c spirity the issue of plastics in the ocean that you referred to yet you have plastic straws are problem that 1000000000 so put into it but it's less than one percent of plastic who should see a greater percentage of that really comes from marine debris from the fishing industry that's what we find on the beaches everywhere and. you know that's never really been talked so i think this is one of the things that the film has brought up to light is that this is a beat your source of that plastic pollution and you see it as a priority that the fishing industry is hiring p.r. firms to subvert the debate so that the public at large don't understand it i mean you often friendly tuna in that fill in what you can forgive people for thinking

that that mock on the tuna can mean something. well mark palmer you know earth island institute himself said we cannot guarantee that no dolphins are killed to catch that tuna and you can't. there isn't observers on every vessel and the fishing industry has been notorious liars over the year as to the impact of that all that by catch. just for instance the french trolley plead alone kills $10000.00 dolphins every year in the bay of biscay you know it's and one of the major causes is a guild that does drill the operations per se ners they go after tuna they actually encircled the dolphins on on purpose we call it fishing on porpoise because they know that by finding orcas on the surface of the tuna underneath and yes they do make efforts to you know to back on the back down procedure to for things to get the dolphins out but generally in their quest for profits it's they don't really

make. it's not 100 percent and the amount of by catch up on the internationally on fishing is well over between 20 and 30 percent of everything that's caught is strong back dead and for instance shrimp for every hilo of shrimp that's taken to the sea $22.00 kilos of something else is s. to be destroyed the process yeah and the bycatch is the theft that's caught with the tague hit the fish population really yes when you look at bottom trawlers what you have is this gigantic net which is being dragged across the bottom taking absolutely everything and destroying the structure on the bottom in the process this is like if you were to take a giant net across the serengeti and just so scoop up every living animal like zeta zebras you know cheetahs lions everything scoop it all up and only are trying to do is catch impalas for example everything else dies. obviously we're not him advising

anyone to catch him pollers either but sea shepherd just explain what the organization is i understand it works with so many countries across africa and latin america over here we've been having a debate about fishing and breaks it you know working with the british government. well we don't tend to work with any of the well the european or western nations everything because they generally tend to be the problem right now or working left or can countries whose waters are being plundered by european and asian fishing fleets we've been invited in there because they don't really all have the resources to counter that. those problems for example we hear a lot about somali pirates now piracies emerging in the gulf of guinea and everything why is this these people are pirates for say they're impoverished fisherman who's had their livelihood taken away by the industrialized fishing operations that came in and plundered their their resources and they're forced into

that situation so the real pirates are those industrialized fishing off or asians we're talking about super trawlers we're talking about a 100 mile long gill net 200 mile long long lines giant per centers we're talking about $100000000.00 bessel center out there that are exploiting the resources of the ocean this is not your your mom and pop operations of little guys going out and bush this is a giant mechanized industrialized operation it's all short term investment or short term gain they really don't care about the future of the fishery they're going to extract the maximum amount of profit now not just reinvested francis mitsubishi right now has a nuff bluefin tuna in their warehouses to provide the market for the next 10 years if they don't catch another fish they can still provide the market but they won't do that because if bluefin populations rise the about commodity the fish in their warehouses goes down scarcity translates into higher prices and say it goes extinct now they've got

a prices commodity in their hands and they'll just get the profits and put it into something else computers whatever they're going to invest it there isn't really fishermen anymore they're corporations but they use that fisherman is the symbol one to him and 3 they would say they they fish on the market but i mean when you're implying that basically he is capitalism and. self that at the core here and as for somali pirates arguably one of the big propaganda have loads has been our so-called mainstream media's demonizing these are somali pirates similarly. against what you are saying the same and they the b.b.c. hear blue planet too it was about norwegian herring boats protecting the environment the savior of the environment and and in fact. it showed that fishing is something that can be done sustainably and can be a great contributor to. survival as a human species. i haven't seen very many cases sustainable fishery to me the word

sustainability is it is just a marketing term everything is sustainable these days that's how you market but. life in our ocean has been diminished you know i was raised in a fishing village in eastern canada and over the last 60 years i have witnessed diminishment and know all of my boy ages and all of the world oceans i have seen munition is there for anybody who wants to see it we don't need the facts and figures and statistics that are being put out by the industry all we have to do is see it in our own eyes what happened in the north where we caught it crashed what happened or drop the of the new zealand it crashed what happens as we remove a species and then we just move on to another species and species which were once considered well like for instance target back in the fifty's sixty's i was a garbage nobody but now that's a push by you know a london restaurant you know it's because we've adapted to that diminishment for instance chilean sea bass it's not from chile it's not

a best at sea and hardy compared to go into space and it's an endangered species but by putting that name on it they make it more marketable and the problem isn't that machine industry is really intent on making as much profit as they possibly can and no matter what the cost to the ecosystem yeah i think the big fish in him go over to find the patagonian to fish wasn't in danger and they you saying that they know the truth is that you expose it seems to happen or they are mentally incompetent and don't realize what they're doing is in danger and well more than he has only the fish themselves but if the theme and only the big fish corporations are incompetent i think they know exactly what they're doing trying to maximize maximize profit when they have to let me see the personnel of this can bummer to have children as. they look into their turns i say i'm destroying the planet so you won't be able to live in it. when you're a. i asked an alaskan bushman one time i said look for no other reason protect the

fish recruit your children so they'll be involved in it and he looked at me and said you know what in 5 years my mortgage is paid not that i couldn't give it why do people like that have children now switching to i guess but if we really loved our children we would be very concerned about the future and you know we chased the patagonia to push portugal under 110 days from the coast of antarctica to ecuador a west africa the longest pursuit of a poacher in maritime history and that bessel that one vessel had taken 60000000 dollars worth of tools bush off the tory coast the net that we pulled up from and complicated was 72 kilometers long and late 70 times colder into kilometers from that it took us 110 hours to pull that net. and that's just one ship and there's there's $4000000.00 fishing vessels out there and every day they're operating and a good percentage of all i would say of probably 20 percent of them are poachers or

they're fishing illegally unregulated i'm reported i mean it is dangerous for fishermen as well i mean we shouldn't underestimate then things berthing doesn't make the point that the workers on these big conglomerate ships well the accusation allegation is that treated like slaves. yes absolutely. chased under the captain of the under sank his own ship after $110.00 days pursuit because he was running out of fuel he had nowhere to go he sank it to destroy the evidence on board we had to rescue the crew 42 crew members and a good percentage of them were pretty much paid nothing and we helped to get them back to their homelands in indonesia but we boarded that thinking ship and got the evidence of the captain ended up going to prison for 3 years in the company is fine 17000000 euros which they never paid of course you know there are american fishing boats that come into the port upon a little and the crew onboard who are not american citizens can even go ashore they're paid maybe $3400.00

a month to work on these american boats but they cannot go ashore because it would be illegal for them to do so but american fishing boats are not hiring american citizens to go out and do this work they're hiring people from these from indonesia or the philippines from places like that and although that's not slave labor it's certainly exploited labor yeah well the big shipping firms say that the way they organize their labor is up to international standards ilo standards as of one just finally there's an investigation here a sort of spy corpse investigation it's cooled by the infiltration of green movement by secret service personnel here from m i 5. from m i 6 how do you add things you haven't stopped infiltration of your organization by secret service agents as well provoked into or the people trying to undermine your movement. or are really can turn a concern of their filtration and we have been infiltrated in the past had one

engineer i know who i won't say which agency was involved but it was a good engineer but we don't have anything to get jane we don't have what we don't have anything to hide we're not we're not doing anything illegal we operate within the boundaries of the law and within the boundaries of practicality. and there's certainly no possibility for anybody to be a provocateur because they the vessels operate with a chain of command but the captains of the officers and everything like that so no one crewmember can do something that's going to cause. an incident like that but as far as infiltration we're simply not concerned with that at all in fact we're tracking some incredible talent on a business one of our captains is a former chief of staff of the italian navy is an apple and we're getting a lot of people who are retired various and if used around the world and who are joining us because they see that we get results for what we're doing countable watson thank you and that's of the show will be back on saturday with one of the academy award nominees just ahead of this he has run

a virus also has it all he would until then don't forget to subscribe so you know when the strike. happened and then on the phone if i was going to count. the food. bank at the full moon to see it on the plaza this way got set up for hard not to think i know how disappointed this moment than what i planned but i went and i don't think it's too much and i think. this is the only thing that we do is losing because everybody fights his way. through and to confront the film without a visible face we're going to hit the rabbit hole and leave it at the for the

moment on the. what i think is this is the fun that is i want to come from. a. lot of my approach and warns western nations against confrontation saying that moscow's response will be asymmetrical and hard if its red lines are crossed the president also compared those who provoked russia to jungle book characters. usually with all sorts of little jackals run a room with shoe just like in the kipling story how to gain favor with the rule of . mass rape and child murder and ongoing trauma a damning new report sheds.