ROGER PAYNE AND THE FIGHT FOR WHALES

As the President and founder of Ocean Alliance, Dr. Roger Payne has been a spokesperson for whales for most of his life. But he wants you to know that it’s not the obvious threats to whales — commercial whaling and ship strikes that will lead to their extinction, it’s pollution. This has been the focus of our work for the last two decades, from the five-year Voyage of the Odyssey, sampling sperm whales around the globe, to our expeditions in the Gulf of Mexico for the last three years since the BP Oil Spill. And he’s had enough of politics getting in the way of protecting the environment:

“Five hundred years from now no one will care if the red states or the blue states triumphed in the last election, nothing which takes place in Washington D.C. or in the capital of any country in the world matters in the least, except even the smallest kind of change, which involves the environment. That’s what matters.”