Lucy Lawless—a.k.a. Xena the Warrior Princess—Occupies a Shell Oil Drilling Ship

From 174 extremely windy feet in the air, Lawless tells me how her crew of Greenpeace volunteers plans to stop the Noble Discoverer from getting to Alaska.

Lucy Lawless aboard the Noble DiscovererCourtesy Greenpeace

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Update: Lawless and five Greenpeace activists were arrested on Monday, Feb. 26.

Lucy Lawless is illegally seated atop a 174-foot derrick rising from a drilling ship off New Zealand’s western shore, and she really, really doesn’t want to talk about Xena: Warrior Princess. The ship is called the Noble Discoverer, but Lawless has rechristened it the Ignoble Destroyer. It used to be called the Frontier Discoverer, and before that the Discoverer 511, and sometime before that, the Jessica. It’s a nearly 50-year-old ship, built for offshore drilling, and its owner, the Noble Corporation, has leased the ship to Royal Dutch Shell. This weekend, the Noble Discoverer is scheduled to head out on a 6,000 mile journey to the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska’s northwest coast, to break open the ice and suck out some of the 26.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil estimated to await in the Arctic’s outer continental shelf. That’s why Lawless left her house very early Thursday morning, her three kids still asleep, drove to Port Taranaki in Wellington, walked straight up the Noble Discoverer‘s gangplank along with five other climbing experts and Greenpeace volunteers, and scaled its massive derrick.*

The business about Xena is that Lawless actually hated working on that show: hated the costumes, hated the dialogue, hated the fight scenes. When it’s suggested that boarding a sea vessel and climbing its nearly 200-foot tower with messages about injustice sounds like exactly something the Warrior Princess would do, Lawless is curt: “I’m not Xena. She’s not me. I was just doing a gig.” She’s not up there as Xena, with the winds whipping around her head and peanuts and freeze-dried space food to eat, some water to drink, and a few hammocks for six people. She’s up there as a 43-year-old mom scared for her kids, and roiling mad. 

Still, she allows, working on the show involved a fair bit of harness work—there were magical flight scenes and lots of leaping battles—which came in handy today. 

There’s a lot of reasons to worry about offshore oil drilling, but the special concern with Shell’s venture in the Chukchi Sea is the way the ice melts and freezes each year along that part of the Alaskan ice shelf. Basically, the only window for cleaning up an oil spill, should one occur, is from mid-summer to roughly December of each year. Say the Noble Discoverer were to experience a Deepwater Horizon-style blowout toward the end of the window one year, sending an undersea rush of crude into the ocean. The ice would likely freeze over before the well was fully repaired, letting crude oil gush out for half a year or more until the ice thawed again and the leak could finally be fixed and plugged up. A top manager of a private oil-spill response company in Canada told the Canadian Parliament in 2010 that containment booms, the floating plastic fences trapping huge pools of oil made familiar through all those aerial photos of BP’s Gulf blowout, could be rendered useless in the Arctic winter. “You can’t lay boom on ice,” he said. “You can’t recover oil from the surface, because it’s hampered by the ice or under the ice, so it’s quite a different scenario, and there is really no solution or method today that we’re aware of that can actually recover oil from the Arctic.”

For its part, Shell says the Chukchi Sea fleet will include an icebreaker vessel equipped with a special “capping stack” developed to serve as a primary response tool in case of a blowout along the Arctic shelf. The capping stack would land on the failed blowout preventer, effectively slamming a manhole cover down on the open well. By the time the company submitted its Chukchi Sea oil-spill response plan (PDF) to the Interior Department at the end of last month, the capping stack system had not yet been fully tested—a Houston-based company was still building and testing the design, according to Shell’s own report. Still, the department rubber-stamped the plan three weeks later, and Shell’s Alaska exploration manager was ecstatic, calling it “another major milestone on the path to drilling in the Alaska offshore this summer.” 

Lucy Lawless’s kids watch the Discovery Channel a lot, and she says it makes her heart hurt that on every other show they see, some species is vanishing or threatened. She’s gotten media calls on her cellphone all day, and she told the AP that her “sole biological reason for being on this planet” is to ensure those kids can flourish. “They can’t do that in a filthy, degraded environment,” she said. “We need to stand up while we still can.” She’s worried that even if Shell’s fleet makes it to Alaska and never blows a single valve, it’ll still pump tens of thousands of tons of pollution into Arctic skies, and global warming from the greenhouse gases and black carbon released by the fleet will melt off even more snow and ice in the polar regions. “Deep-sea oil drilling is bad enough, but venturing into the Arctic, one of the most magical places on the planet, is going too far,” she said.

By 1:30 p.m. in New Zealand, one of Lawless’s compatriots had been arrested by the five police officers who’d boarded the ship; the arrestee was one of the volunteers who’d stayed down below while the others climbed. For their part, the Noble Discoverer crew kept to themselves during the whole affair, and Lawless says no words were exchanged between occupiers and occupied. The hashtag displayed on the Greenpeace activists’ banners, #SavetheArctic, was multiplying across Twitter, broadcast to TV by local news copters hovering around the ship. Lawless’s kids were probably at school, and everyone was probably talking about what their mom was doing. She was starting to get a headache from the adrenaline comedown and tired of questions about what kind of car she drives (a Prius) and what she’s doing to reduce her own carbon footprint (flying less). She hoped to nap soon, given that there’s no telling how long she and her friends will be stuck on the derrick. It’s Shell’s move, she says—when Shell agrees to suspend its Arctic drilling program, they’ll consider coming down. She thinks back again to her Xena days, and admits there were some fun parts. “Like having someone around to brush your hair all the time,” she says. “This is much less fun than being on a show, but it’s much more important.”

Correction: This article previously stated that Lucy Lawless’s children were all boys. She has two boys and a girl. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate