Cruising Has Consequences
We must turn the tide.
In the wee hours of opening day of the 2023 Seattle to Alaska cruise season, several Seattle citizens walked along the waterfront placing the following posters in visible locations. They were modeled on the CruiseNOTWelcome campaign in Norway.
Hello cruise passengers. Welcome to Seattle. We live here. This is how it looks to us: You booked passage on a floating city powered by the cheapest, dirtiest fuel available. Particulate matter from the smokestacks takes years off the lives of our neighbors, makes our kids sick, melts glaciers. Thousands of toilets on the ship drain sewage into the open ocean, where it mixes with sulfurous scrubber wastewater, leaked fuel, oily engine residue, discarded plastic, and garbage. The propellers are so loud they confuse marine mammals hunting for food — our local orcas are starving. Yours isn’t the only ship — some days three of them enter or leave the port, each as polluting as a million cars. Drought, flood, forest fire, heat dome — the global climate impacts of burning all that fossil fuel are real, and they’re accelerating. How hot is it where you’re from?
You bought your tickets from a multi-billion dollar transnational corporation that pays shipboard workers as little as $2 an hour. Your vessel is registered in a country it will never visit, to bypass U.S. and Canadian…
