The Rort

● Watson Foundation rams Norwegian krill trawler in Antarctic waters ♦ Murdoch empire holds 70% of print circulation ♦ Australia gave away $300B in gas — Norway built a sovereign wealth fund ♦ Kerry Stokes: mining magnate, media owner, political donor ♦ Negative gearing costs taxpayers $6B per year ♦ How they killed the mining tax ♦ The revolving door between politics and media

The pirate

Profile 1

Paul Watson is 75 years old. He has been called an eco-terrorist, a hero, a pirate, and a fraud. He co-founded Greenpeace and was expelled from it. He founded Sea Shepherd and lost control of it. He has rammed whaling ships, been arrested on four continents, spent five months in a Greenland prison on a 14-year-old Japanese warrant, and had an Interpol Red Notice issued and then removed. In March 2026, his crew rammed a Norwegian krill trawler in the Southern Ocean. He is not slowing down.

Operation Krill Wars

Breaking

On 31 March 2026, the M/V Bandero, operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, rammed the Norwegian krill trawler Antarctic Sea in Antarctic waters. Aker BioMarine, the world’s largest krill harvester, called it a terrorist attack. Watson, from his houseboat in Paris, called it aggressive nonviolence.

The last tree

02 · 1934–2025

Jane Goodall spent 65 years rewriting what humans knew about chimpanzees, about animals, and about themselves. She had no degree when she started. She named her subjects when the scientific establishment said numbering them was the only proper method. She built a global conservation movement that now operates in more than 65 countries. She travelled 300 days a year into her nineties. On 1 October 2025, she died in California at 91, on a speaking tour, days before she was scheduled to plant trees near the Los Angeles wildfire burn zones. They planted the first one without her, after a moment of silence.

The girl who wouldn’t stop

03 · Born 2003

Greta Thunberg sat alone outside the Swedish parliament on 20 August 2018. She was 15 years old and held a hand-painted sign reading Skolstrejk för klimatet. Within a year, 4 million people were striking in 161 countries. She addressed the United Nations, confronted world leaders at Davos, and became the most recognisable climate activist on earth. In December 2025, she was arrested under the UK Terrorism Act for holding a sign supporting Palestinian hunger strikers. She is 23. She has not stopped.

Her Deepness

04 · Born 1935

Sylvia Earle has logged more than 7,000 hours underwater across more than 100 expeditions. In 1979 she walked solo on the ocean floor at 381 metres in a JIM suit, a record that still stands. Time Magazine named her Her Deepness. She was the first woman to serve as chief scientist of NOAA. She is 90 and still diving.

Seven decades of wonder

05 · Born 1926

David Attenborough has been making nature documentaries since 1954. He turns 100 on 8 May 2026, thirty-six days from publication. For most of his career he showed the world the beauty of nature without editorialising about its destruction. Then, in his eighties, he changed.

The seed keeper

06 · Born 1952

Vandana Shiva holds a PhD in the philosophy of physics. She became an environmental activist after witnessing the Chipko movement in 1973. She founded Navdanya to preserve indigenous seeds and challenge corporate agriculture. Her opposition to GMOs puts her in direct conflict with mainstream science. Both things are true.

The number that became a movement

07 · Born 1960

Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature in 1989, the first book about climate change for a general audience. The number 350 refers to 350 parts per million of CO₂, the upper safe limit for atmospheric carbon dioxide. Earth passed it in 1988. McKibben turned a scientific threshold into a global campaign. By 2025, fossil fuel divestment pledges covered more than $40 trillion.

Cropped out

08 · Born 1996

In January 2020, the Associated Press published a photograph of four climate activists at Davos. Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan activist standing in the group, had been cropped from the image. She was the only Black person in the frame. The photograph illustrated the argument she had already been making. She was 23.

The cleanup

09 · Born 1994

Boyan Slat was 16 when he went scuba diving in Greece and saw more plastic than fish. He was 18 when he presented a concept for passive ocean cleanup to a TEDx audience. He was 19 when he dropped out of aerospace engineering and founded The Ocean Cleanup. By January 2026, his organisation had removed more than 50 million kilograms of plastic from oceans and rivers. He is 31.

The disruptor

10 · Born 1966

Roger Hallam co-founded Extinction Rebellion in 2018 and Just Stop Oil in 2022. He has been arrested dozens of times. In July 2024 he was sentenced to five years in prison for participating in a Zoom call to plan a road blockade. The sentence was the longest ever imposed for peaceful protest in the UK. He was released in August 2025. He is contested within the movement he helped create.

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