Thom Yorke releases his new track Hands off the Antarctic for Greenpeace's campaign to protect the Antarctic Ocean, increasingly threatened by human activity.
Hands off the Antarctic is the new track released by Thom Yorke, frontman of Radiohead, and written in collaboration with the environmental non-governmental organisation Greenpeace.
The track serves as the soundtrack to a video made with black-and-white sequences of Antarctic landscapes and wildlife, gathered during one of the NGO's research expeditions.
"Hands off the Antarctic" is a clear call for the protection of the Antarctic Ocean, which is increasingly falling victim to climate change, pollution and human activity.
"There are many places on this Planet that are meant to stay pure and wild and not to be destroyed by the passage of humanity," Thom Yorke said. "This track is about the need to stop the relentless march of that passage. Antarctica is a true wilderness and what happens down there concerns all of us. That is why we should protect it."
The track supports in particular the #ProtectAntarctic campaign launched by Greenpeace for the creation in the Antarctic Ocean of one of the largest protected areas on Earth: a marine sanctuary of 1.8 million square kilometres in the Weddell Sea – an area five times the size of Germany – to protect penguins, whales and the other species that live in Antarctica from pollution and the ever-growing industrial fishing industry, which is inexorably encroaching even on areas that should remain pristine and untouched.
The protected area would in effect "ban industrial fishing vessels that are plundering krill, the tiny crustacean on which the Antarctic Ocean's food chain depends," as declared by Frida Bengtsson, head of the new campaign.
So far two million people around the world have responded to the call and the proposal will shortly be on the table of the governments meeting in Tasmania, Australia, between 22 October and 2 November, as part of the Commission on the Antarctic Ocean.