Environmental criminals never stops, so neither do we!

Seabirds once numbered in the billions, soaring across oceans as global sentinels of the sea. Today, they are disappearing at a terrifying pace. Nearly 30% of species are sliding toward extinction, victims not of fate, but of crime.

Industrial longlines, trawls, and gillnets kill hundreds of thousands of seabirds every year. Albatrosses, shearwaters, and petrels dive for baited hooks and surface dead — wings spread in futility. Entire populations collapse in less than a generation.

Every slick, every illegal bilge discharge is a death sentence. Oil strips waterproofing from feathers, leaving birds to freeze or drown. This isn’t just collateral damage — it’s chronic, deliberate pollution that kills more seabirds than any other toxin.

Over 90% of seabird species now ingest plastic. Albatross chicks starve with bellies full of lighters, bottle caps, and fragments of packaging. Adults waste away, poisoned slowly by humanity’s addiction to disposability.

On nesting islands worldwide, rats, cats, and pigs feast on eggs and chicks. Entire colonies vanish in a single season. Invasive predators are the leading cause of seabird extinctions in history.

Guano scraping, sand mining, and unchecked coastal development destroy irreplaceable breeding grounds. Seabirds that evolved to return to the same cliff or atoll for millennia arrive to find it gone.

As oceans warm, prey fish vanish. Puffins and guillemots return with empty beaks. Storm surges wash entire colonies into the sea. Low-lying islands are swallowed by rising seas.

This is not “nature taking its course.” It is a ledger of deliberate destruction: poachers, polluters, profiteers, and politicians who shrug at collapse.

But it is not too late. Where seabird protections have been enforced — bycatch-reduction devices, invasive eradication on islands, marine protected areas — populations rebound. The sky can still be filled with wings.

Report the crimes. Demand enforcement. End the silence.

RedQuillSociety.org | Witness. Expose. Defend.

Every bar of dirty gold carries a death sentence. Call it what it is: a crime against nature. Report it. Expose it. Stop it.

They call it mining. What it is, is a feeding frenzy with cyanide and diesel. Across Indonesia, Peru, West Africa and beyond, forests are stripped bare, rivers poisoned, and entire ecosystems erased so syndicates can pull dirty gold from the ground. The Washington Post calls it a ‘mining mafia’ — backed by cartels, greased with corruption, feeding a global appetite for gold trinkets, electronics, and bank vaults.

Here’s the science: gold doesn’t separate easily from rock. Cyanide is poured across crushed ore because it binds to gold molecules. It also binds to life — killing plankton at the base of river ecosystems, contaminating fish stocks, and moving into birds and people through every bite of food. Often mercury is added too, rolled into tiny beads to catch the last flecks of metal. Once mercury enters the body, it never leaves. It damages brains, lungs, kidneys. It crosses the placenta. Children are born with it written into their blood. None of this is an accident. It is the business model: extract the gold, dump the poison, walk away with the profits.

The numbers are staggering: thirty billion dollars a year in illicit gold. Thirty billion bought with dead rivers, sick children, and forests turned to mud. Gold is sold as wealth — but what is wealth if the cost is permanent damage to land and life? That’s not industry. That’s organised crime with a glittering mask. And every ingot stamped ‘refined’ carries a fingerprint of destruction.

Call it what it is — ecocide for profit. And ecocide has no offset. You stop it, or you watch the world turn toxic, one poisoned river at a time.

Don’t let this crime hide in plain sight.

1. Choose wisely — Ask where your gold comes from. Demand recycled or responsibly sourced gold for jewellery and electronics.
    
2. Pressure industries — Electronics and luxury brands use enormous volumes of gold. Write to them. Ask for proof of ethical sourcing. Don’t let them hide behind vague promises.
    
3. Support frontline defenders — Indigenous communities are the first to resist illegal mines, and the first to pay the price when syndicates push back. Follow their campaigns, amplify their voices, and support their protection.
    
4. Report what you see — If you witness environmental crimes — illegal mining, deforestation, poisoned rivers — bring it to Hauntline. Information is power, and silence is complicity.
    
5. Back the fight — If you can, donate to Hauntline. Every contribution strengthens a network that shines a light where criminals thrive in the shadows.

You can’t offset extinction. No trees, no koalas. Simple as that.

“Six hundred hectares of eucalyptus forest. That’s what Glencore plans to flatten for its Hail Creek coal mine expansion in Queensland. On a map, it looks like a neat parcel of land. On the ground, it is a living library — home to one of the last genetically distinct populations of koalas. Thirteen individuals have been counted by drones and thermal cameras, each one carrying DNA that has survived bushfires, drought, and centuries of change.

The science is simple, but not simple-minded: koalas need trees. Eucalyptus leaves are not optional garnish — they are the only food the species can digest. No trees, no leaves. No leaves, no koalas. That is not sentimentality; it is biology. And when the bulldozers come, there is no offset, no replacement. You cannot ‘move’ a habitat. Planting saplings on a spreadsheet will not restore a forest a hundred years in the making. Offsets are paperwork. Forests are survival.

But this is not only about koalas. The Hail Creek expansion means more coal, more methane vented from seams, more carbon pushed into an already overloaded atmosphere. Queensland is already facing harsher droughts, fiercer fires, and bleaching reefs. Every mine expansion is another nail in the coffin, another hole punched in the hull of the ship we all share.

The industry will tell you it’s about jobs. But jobs vanish as fast as seams run dry. What remains is deforestation, fractured land, poisoned air, and a population of koalas driven closer to extinction. Call it by its true name: theft. Theft from the land, theft from the climate, theft from every child who deserves to see a koala outside a zoo or a textbook.

You don’t license crimes. You stop them. And this is a crime against nature in real time.”

1. Challenge the greenwash — Demand that governments stop approving coal expansions dressed up as “development.” Write to your representatives, call it what it is.
    
2. Support habitat defenders — Conservation groups and Indigenous custodians are leading the fight to protect koala country. Amplify them, fund them, stand with them.
    
3. Reduce coal demand — Push for renewable energy in your community. Every kilowatt that doesn’t come from coal reduces the excuse for expansions like Hail Creek.
    
4. Refuse offsets as cover — Speak out when corporations claim habitat can be “replaced.” Offsets are a con. Once old-growth is gone, it’s gone.
    
5. Back Hauntline’s work — Report the crimes you see. Expose illegal land clearing, mining expansions, and environmental destruction. If you can, donate. Every contribution strengthens a shadow network dedicated to pulling these crimes into the light.
   

Dolphins used as bait. Sharks finned alive. This isn’t fishing. It’s slaughter. The sea remembers — and so do we. 

Far out in the North Pacific, where distance is meant to hide deeds, a patrol ship cut through fog and found horror in plain sight.

A vessel from a distant-water fleet had been harpooning dolphins — not for food, not for subsistence, but to use their bodies as bait for sharks.

Sentient beings slaughtered to lure in other sentient beings. Cast aside once the hook was set.

The dolphins were not the only crime. Across the fleet, boarding teams uncovered:

• Shark finning — fins hacked off, bodies dumped to drown.
   
• Protected species harvested — the ocean’s rarest life treated as contraband.
   
• Misreported catches — logbooks falsified to hide excess.
   
• Pollution and dumping — plastics and waste poured into the sea.
   
• Destruction of evidence — records shredded, gear concealed.
   

This was not fishing. This was systematic plunder.

The operation was multinational — ships, aircraft, drones, and boarding teams, moving with one purpose: to strip away the cover of distance and secrecy.

The message was clear: the fog of the high seas is no longer a shield. The poachers, profiteers, and their shadow fleets are being watched.

Every dolphin killed is a life lost from one of the ocean’s most intelligent species. Every shark finned is an apex predator removed from a food chain already under stress.

The cruelty compounds the collapse. Remove dolphins and sharks, and ecosystems unravel — prey explodes, fisheries collapse, and the ocean’s balance tilts towards chaos.

This is not incidental bycatch. It is deliberate atrocity, hidden behind distance and profit margins.

We are the watchers in the dark. We bear witness when others look away. When the innocent are used as tools, we will not stand silent.

• Demand accountability — pressure governments to prosecute fleets that use cruelty as a tool of profit.
   
• Close the ports — refuse landing rights to vessels caught in shark finning, illegal bycatch, and dolphin slaughter.
   
• Support transparency — insist on satellite tracking and enforcement of distant-water fleets.
   
• Join the fight — support RedQuillSociety.org to expose, investigate, and push back against the shadow networks profiting from ecological atrocity.

4,300 tonnes of nets pulled from the sea is more than a seizure. It’s a reprieve for the living ocean — and a reminder that crime only thrives when law looks away. 

In just the first six months of 2025, Mexican authorities confiscated nearly 4,300 tonnes of illegal fishing gear and unlawfully caught marine products.

That is not a typo. Enough banned nets, longlines, and contraband seafood to fill a fleet of cargo ships — hauled out of the shadows and off the water in a single season of decisive enforcement.

This wasn’t a handful of rogue boats. This was a coordinated, nationwide strike: from the warm shallows of the Gulf of California to the turbulent waters of the Pacific coast.

Every ton of seized gear is measured not only in weight, but in lives spared.

• Vaquita porpoises — the world’s most endangered marine mammal, suffocating in gillnets.
   
• Sea turtles — trapped and drowned in longlines.
   
• Overfished stocks — given a rare reprieve to recover.
   

Illegal gear is silent genocide in the water column. Pulling 4,300 tonnes of it means untold thousands of animals never faced that fate.

Most nations write laws about sustainable fishing. Few enforce them. Mexico’s crackdown is more than an enforcement win — it is a political statement:

• Against organised poaching networks that profit from shadow fleets and black markets.
   
• For ecological sovereignty, asserting that marine heritage is not for sale.
   
• As a precedent, proving that industrial poachers can be confronted — if governments choose courage over compromise.
   

Globally, illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing strips an estimated 26 million tonnes of fish from the oceans every year. It costs coastal nations billions. It devastates ecosystems. It starves small-scale fishers.

For once, the tide turned the other way.

We applaud Mexico’s operation not as an anomaly, but as a model to replicate. Enforcement at scale, applied with teeth, is what the oceans desperately need. Because laws without action are only paper shields.

• Demand accountability at home. Push your own governments to seize illegal gear and prosecute poachers, not excuse them.
   
• Support transparency. Track imports. Demand seafood supply chains free of IUU fishing.
   
• Protect the vulnerable. Amplify the plight of species like the vaquita, whose survival hangs on such actions.
   
• Back the fight. Support RedQuillSociety.org to expose and pressure for enforcement worldwide.

Greed stripped 125,000 sea cucumbers from the seabed. The fine was a million. The cost to the ocean is beyond measure. 

If you think environmental crime wears only the face of oil barons or logging cartels, think again.

Sometimes, it looks like a sea cucumber.

In British Columbia, commercial harvester Siu-Man Choi has been fined $1,027,372 and sentenced to six years in prison — one of the longest jail terms ever imposed under Canada’s Fisheries Act. His crime?

The illegal harvest and sale of more than 125,000 sea cucumbers between 2018 and 2020 in waters near Prince Rupert.

This wasn’t a few extras over quota. This was organised environmental theft: falsified records, illegal logs, and a coordinated black-market scheme that undercut conservation programs and defrauded the public trust.

To most Canadians, they’re anonymous lumps on the seafloor. To the black market, they’re gold — fetching hundreds of dollars per kilogram, particularly prized in parts of Asia for culinary and so-called medicinal value.

That incentive is enough to ignore quotas, smash regulations, and strip ecosystems bare.

Sea cucumbers aren’t charismatic. They don’t leap like salmon or charm with wide eyes. But they are keystone custodians of the seabed.

• They recycle nutrients.
   
• They oxygenate sediments.
   
• They maintain balance in ecosystems that fish, crustaceans, and coral depend on.
   

Remove them, and you don’t just lose an animal — you lose the janitorial system of the ocean floor. What follows is sediment suffocation, biodiversity collapse, and a slow, invisible death of marine life.

Environmental crimes are notoriously hard to prosecute. But this case mattered:

• A six-year jail term.
   
• A $1 million fine.
   
• Forfeiture of a nearly $2 million vessel.
   

The ruling delivers a rare signal: the ocean is not a buffet for opportunists. When you rob it, you will be held accountable.

This isn’t just about one man or one species. It’s about recognising that crimes against the “uncharismatic” — sea cucumbers, clams, kelp — carry the same ecological weight as those against whales or eagles. Quiet crimes do not mean victimless ones.

The war for our oceans is fought not only on the high seas, but in logbooks, harbours, and courtrooms. The damage is ecological, generational, and often invisible.

• Support enforcement. Demand that governments prosecute environmental crime with the same seriousness as financial or violent crime.
   
• Don’t dismiss the small. Educate others on why humble species like sea cucumbers matter.
   
• Strengthen monitoring. Push for citizen science and Indigenous-led patrols to safeguard coasts.
   
• Join the fight. Support RedQuillSociety.org to expose crimes the industry prefers to bury in silence.

The ocean is not a landfill. Two hundred thousand radioactive barrels say otherwise. Justice begins when silence ends.

Between 1946 and 1990, more than 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste were deliberately dumped into the Northeast Atlantic by European nations — including France, the UK, and Belgium. Each barrel was filled with nuclear detritus, sealed in cement or bitumen, and dropped into the abyss, over 4,000 metres down, some 600 kilometres off the coast of Nantes.

The rationale then? Out of sight, out of mind.

But the ocean does not forget.

In June 2025, the NODSSUM scientific mission led by CNRS, Ifremer, and international partners launched to find and assess the barrels. Using high-resolution sonar and the autonomous underwater vehicle UlyX, they will map 6,000 km² of seafloor.

They aim to answer urgent questions:

• Are the barrels intact?
   
• Are radionuclides leaking into the deep?
   
• What has four decades of corrosion done at 4,000 metres down?
   

Water, sediment, and marine life will be sampled for traces of radioactive contamination. This is science not for curiosity, but for survival.

Radionuclides don’t stay put. They travel through water, accumulate in sediments, and biomagnify through the food chain. The abyssal plain is not a tomb — it is part of the living ocean. Leakage here could poison ecosystems we barely understand, with impacts reaching far beyond the drop zone.

This isn’t history. This is active risk.

For decades, governments treated the deep ocean as a dumping ground, hiding barrels in trenches and calling it “disposal.” They gambled on corrosion timelines longer than human memory. That gamble is now coming due.

Let’s call it by its true name: ecocide sanctioned by the state.

This mission is a first step — but only that. Scientific surveys must lead to political accountability. Those responsible were not just careless. They were deliberate.

The Red Quill Society exists to track crimes like this. To publish what others bury. To remind the world that silence is complicity.

• Report what you see. If you encounter evidence of dumping, concealment, or contamination, send it to us.
   
• Support accountability. Pressure governments to release full records of nuclear dumping operations.
   
• Back the fight. Support RedQuillSociety.org — from legal challenges to media exposure, we’re working to turn concealment into consequence.
   
• Spread the story. Crimes thrive in darkness. Share this case until it cannot be ignored.
   

Migration is survival written in the sky. Turning it into target practice is not heritage — it is crime. And crimes must be stopped.

Every year, millions of migratory birds trace ancient flight paths across continents. Journeys that have been flown for millennia. Journeys that connect ecosystems from Africa to Europe to Asia.

But over Lebanon, those routes become killing fields.

According to an exposé by The Cool Down, hunters armed with shotguns target flocks not for food, but for sport and social media clout. They film the carnage, pose with bodies, and post them online. It’s not subsistence. It’s slaughter for likes.

94% of the birds killed are protected species. Endangered raptors such as the Egyptian vulture, already on the brink, are gunned down in numbers they cannot withstand.

Fines, when they exist at all, are insultingly small — as low as $5. That’s not a deterrent. That’s a hunting fee disguised as law.

The science is clear: migratory birds are essential to ecosystems. They control pests, disperse seeds, fertilise soils, and serve as indicators of planetary health. When migration corridors become shooting galleries, ecosystems collapse across entire regions.

This is not heritage. This is not culture. It is industrialised poaching masquerading as tradition. The digital age has only sharpened the cruelty, turning mass killing into performance content. Killing for clout. Likes as trophies.

When law turns a blind eye, cruelty becomes spectacle. And once a species like the Egyptian vulture is gone, no fine, no law, no apology brings it back.

At Hauntline, we track environmental crimes wherever they surface — in forests, in oceans, and now in skies. Migratory routes do not respect borders. Which means accountability must also cross them.

• Report what you see — If you encounter footage of bird slaughter online, don’t just report it to the platform. Report it to us.
   
• Pressure governments — Demand stronger enforcement and higher penalties for wildlife crime. $5 fines are an insult to extinction.
   
• Withdraw support — Call out platforms that allow cruelty content to flourish. No ad revenue should be built on blood.
   
• Support the fight — Donate at RedQuillSociety.org to back investigations, legal challenges, and media exposure that hold criminals to account.
  
   

You don’t ‘fine’ genocide. You don’t ‘offset’ slavery. And you don’t let ecocide walk free. Scotland just reminded the world: crime deserves consequences. 

While most governments are still holding “talks about future plans to maybe consider thinking about protecting nature,” Scotland has done something rare: it put teeth to paper.

Under legislation now being drafted, corporate executives and public officials could face prison time for ecocide — the deliberate, large-scale destruction of the natural world.

Not fines. Not PR campaigns. Prison.

For decades, environmental destruction has been treated as a cost of doing business. A company poisons a river? Pay a fine. Bulldoze a protected forest? Issue a press release. Kill thousands of fish, or birds, or people downwind of a spill? Apologise, rebrand, and move on.

But ecocide is not an accident. It is calculated harm — the deliberate choice to put profit before people and planet. By criminalising ecocide at the highest level, Scotland is drawing a line: nature is not property to be destroyed. It is a common trust, and wrecking it is a crime against humanity.

If passed, Scotland will be the first UK nation to enshrine ecocide law. It would join a growing movement across Europe and beyond to make environmental destruction prosecutable alongside war crimes and crimes against humanity.

And it matters because laws set precedent. What happens in Edinburgh can ripple outward to Brussels, The Hague, and beyond.

Let’s be clear: no corporation “accidentally” deforests a continent, no executive “accidentally” dumps toxic sludge into rivers, no minister “accidentally” greenlights oceans turned into landfills. These are choices. Choices with consequences measured in lives, cultures, and futures.

And choices like that deserve more than fines. They deserve cells.

• Support ecocide law globally. Write to representatives, demand similar legislation in your country.
   
• Name the crimes. Stop calling destruction “incidents.” Call it what it is: crime.
   
• Back the fight. Support RedQuillSociety.org — investigations, media campaigns, and pressure that turn rhetoric into enforcement.
   
• Share the precedent. Scotland’s move is a wedge. Widen it.