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Ernest Kao

Gary Stokes can shake up a good drink. His first job after landing in Hong Kong in 1990 following a stint in the Royal Navy was as a bartender at Wan Chai watering hole Joe Bananas.
Stokes also taught scuba diving and worked as a photographer for a time. A career employing “radical” and “direct” action to protect the world’s oceans from poachers and polluters had not crossed his mind.
However, an intimate experience diving with a humpback whale and her calf in Tonga in 2008 proved a turning point, spurring his foray into marine conservation.
In pictures: the tide of trash swamping Hong Kong beaches, the volunteer cleanup and the hidden island dump causing it
“To just think that in two months time, these whales would be migrating south, in range of Japanese whalers, and probably both be killed by harpoons – this made me angry,” he said.
Stokes began researching environmental causes and NGO operations. Eventually, in 2010, he joined Sea Shepherd, a non-profit marine wildlife conservation group. Soon after he embarked on his first mission to Antarctica, helping photograph and document Operation No Compromise, a campaign against whaling. The activists exposed and chased out Japanese whalers.

Once infamous for its bold, high-profile clashes with whalers on the high seas, the organisation has been branded by some as “radical” and comprising “pirates” and “ecoterrorists”. Stokes offers no objections to the first two labels.
“We are pirates of compassion against pirates of greed,” he said.
We are pirates of compassion against pirates of greed
Gary Stokes, Sea Shepherd
But he rejects the ecoterrorists label, saying such people destroy nature rather than protect it.
Stokes believes that, in a radical world full of radical environmental problems, radical solutions are needed.
“Sea Shepherd is a direct action group and we employ radical measures but only as long as they don’t hurt anyone and are within the law,” he said.
He cited a recent example in which Sea Shepherd engaged in a “high seas pursuit” of a fleet of illegal Chinese poachers, chasing them from the Indian Ocean back to the mainland and eventually bringing them to justice.
Stokes continues to document environmental problems from his base in Hong Kong, where he heads the group’s Southeast Asia operations. Over the years, he has helped raised awareness over issues such as the trading of blue fin tuna at trade shows. He also brought to light a massive plastic pellet spill that affected Hong Kong shores in 2012.
The recent deluge of coastal rubbish washing up on local coastlines in recent weeks has again spurred Stokes into action.

Q: The volume of rubbish that has been washing up on Hong Kong’s shores in recent weeks has shocked the public. What’s going on here?
Put it this way, if every year there are 100 pieces of rubbish on the beach, there are 150 this year and this has raised some alarm. Like I always say, when these things happen it’s like the ocean throwing our trash back at us ... Trash washes up on beaches all the time in Hong Kong and it’s usually just Hong Kong trash. This time, the majority is mainland trash. From our investigation, we’ve been able to categorise the stuff into two sources: Pearl River Delta trash – and that’s basically everything from household trash, shoes, plants to polystyrene – and the second type, which is a mystery source, [includes] clear plastic sheets, clear cups, clear bowls, wrappers. There were no big items and this is different from what we normally see. Our theory is it’s coming from somewhere in the Pearl River Delta where they’re sorting trash out for recycling or something because a lot of the plastic cups and items were compressed. We’ve got some leads and we’ve passed them on to the government.

Q: The government says heavy rain and flooding in Pearl River Delta cities have been flushing all this rubbish out and onto Hong Kong beaches. Do you agree?
Yes. The floods were about two weeks up river that’s why it took so long to get here. In a few weeks time we’re going to get a lot more trash.
Q: What is the best way to deal with it?
It’s one thing cleaning up the trash but more important looking at it and trying to make sense of it. The more important part is the investigation. Where did that straw come from? Trash talks. All the trash that we’ve been looking at have things like addresses, phone numbers or QR codes on them. We are now trying to work out where this trash is coming from. The government needs to work with us NGOs and the mainland to tackle this. In 2012, when we had the pellet spill, we called for an emergency meeting with the government. I said we needed to get around a table and talk it out, solve the problem. We had the government working with NGOs, the public and a state-owned petrochemical company. Who would have thought that would work? This is exactly what we did with the government this time.
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Q: Issues like marine refuse never really end up on the desk of the highest officials, but last month they prompted a high-profile government beach clean-up led by Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. What are your thoughts on that?
The government is taking the issue dead serious now. That, I can definitely say. The fact that CY Leung went down to the beach ... yes, a lot of people said it was just a publicity stunt and in a way, yes, it was ... but he was also sending two very important messages. One was to the Hong Kong people and that was that we need to clean up our mess before we can start blaming other people. The more important message, however, is to China. The message is all of our beaches are covered in your trash, we have an issue and we need your help to sort it out. Yes, it was a PR stunt but for the right reasons, and it was sending all the right messages. At the moment, we have a lot of China trash on our shores, But I can guarantee you that if you go along the coastline along China’s east, you’ll find a lot of Hong Kong trash there too.

Q: Are rubbish-strewn beaches at risk of becoming a new normal for Hong Kong?
Floating rubbish will only be of concern for producers if they look at it as marine litter. In China, it’s not litter to them, it’s just stuff that they’re pushing over the side over a river bank. They’re not actually connecting the fact that this rubbish will end up in the sea. You only have to have heavy rain here and you can go to a storm drain to see what’s coming out. All of the trash on our streets can end up in the sea. Everything leads to the sea. I took a photo with a kid walking down a beach in Pui O surrounded by trash. The sad thing about all of this is that it’s being accepted as the norm, and kids are growing up believing it’s the norm. When I was a kid I would see one piece of trash and be like, ‘Oh my god! Somebody’s being a litterbug’. Unfortunately, with climate change, this will be the way it will go and it will get worse and worse and worse if we don’t stop it one, from entering the water and two, reducing it at source. Look at that man over there [holding a plastic bottle of water with a straw in it]. That bottle is going to be here for 200 years and he could have just asked for a glass of water from the tap, without a straw. We need to change this cultural habit [of convenience and consumption].

Q: Earlier last month, Sea Shepherd raised concerns over the possibility that some of this rubbish was coming from a hillside landfill on Weilingding, an island south of Hong Kong. What was that about?
Since the trash began washing up on our beaches, we started hearing many people pointing to ‘the island’, this mystery island, and that all our problems were coming from there. We’ve been monitoring and seeing what’s going on. Yes, some of the trash from Weilingding may be getting in [to our waters] but there probably needs to be quite a big storm surge for a lot of it to even contribute to just one beach like Nim Shue Wan, let alone the entire coast. That said, this is a legal landfill, but it’s not contained and I don’t think it’s a responsible way for dealing with and managing trash. But marine trash is marine trash, it doesn’t care for borders, whether it’s in China or in Hong Kong.


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How did a Hong Kong bartender end up a radical defender of the environment?

Gary Stokes, director of Sea Shepherd’s operations in Southeast Asia, in Discovery Bay on Friday. Photo: Edmond So

Gary Stokes, Organizer of HK OceanFest 13, poses for picture with a giant inflatable manta ray at the rooftop of The Maritime Museum, Central. 06JUN13

A Sea Shepherd small inflatable is dwarfed by the harpoon ship it is engaging. The 'whale wars' are now in their 7th year and neither side is backing down.

From left, lain Brymer, Gary Stokes and Adrienne Ng with the nets at Mung Tung Wan near Pui O, Lantau. 23JUN16 SCMP/ K. Y. Cheng

Hong Kong's Gary Stokes is campaign photographer for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society who are carrying out anti-whaling protests against Japanese ships in the seas off Antarctia. SCMP Pictures (Handout)

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Sea Shepherd’s Gary Stokes on chasing Japanese whalers and pressuring government officials to help clean up littered shores


Leung Chun-ying (CY Leung)