Thursday 25 March 2021

Joanna Lumley urges “Stop the Blasts”

Oh I do love Joanna Lumley. She’s such a lovely and enthusiastic host of trips to this part of the world, to the Caribbean, on trains from Peking to Paris.

Like all celebs, she’s also an “activist”. But darling Joanna picks her activist fights with care. A few years back it was the awful treatment of retired Gurkhas. She won that fight and good on her.

Now it’s the issue of underwater blasts; he blazing that’s done on the sea floor where they mean to build an offshore wind turbine. She’s not against offshore wind power..Heaven forfend! But there are ways of doing it that cause much less damage to marine life, especially marine mammals..

She needs to win this fight as well. I just saw her in German DW TVspeculating that the blasts may be the cause of the mysterious beaching of dolphins and whales — their lose their sonar locating sense. So join up Stop the Blasts”!

/Snip

Joanna Lumley has urged Boris Johnson to stop the “needless” detonation of wartime bombs at sea because it can cause deafness and even death in vulnerable whales and dolphins.

In a letter to the prime minister and his fiancee, Carrie Symonds, who is a conservationist and animal welfare campaigner, the actor describes underwater explosions used to clear ordnance ahead of windfarm construction in the UK as “truly shocking in scale”, with a “devastating impact” on marine mammals.

Her intervention came after a report last week said that noise pollution in the ocean was being dangerously overlooked.

In the seas around Britain, an estimated 50 detonations are carried out every year, but this figure is likely to increase as a result of the quadrupling of offshore windfarms as part of Johnson’s pledge to power every home using wind energy by 2030. [Read on…]