Save the Whales Campaign

Yet we’ve scoured them from the seas

By the 1800’s humans were seriously engaged in whaling, seeking the lamp oil which could be boiled from the whales’ fat and the ‘corset stays’ which could be fashion of its baleen.

In the classing whaling novel Movy Dick, published in 1851, its author Melville speculated “But still another inquiry remains…. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.” Melville went on to speculate that it was unlikely due to the limits on sailing vessels.

That changed in the 1900’s. Whaling vessels switched from sail power to diesel power, and became faster than the whales themselves, made of metal, and able to travel to far seas without relying on the winds. These ships sported harpoon cannons. Once struck, a whale could not escape, and died an agonizing death.

Whaling fleets expanded. Not to the degree which would be necessary to take a reasonable amount of whalemeat every year forever, but to the degree necessary to wipe whales entirely from the sea.

Why would this be? Wouldn’t it have made sense for the whalers to only take whales to the degree that the annual take was optimized, as a permanent resources?  Well yes it would have, but what actually happened was an aspect of the “tragedy of the commons”. Each whaling nation felt it was in competition with the others. If one didn’t kill all it possibly could, someone else might, and thereby get more. So it was considered more important to optimize current kills than to care about the future.

And there was another perverse wrinkle: whales reproduce very slowly, only having one calf at a time which requires years of care.  Yet money invested in the bank increased more quickly. From a purely business point of view, it made sense to efficiently and methodically wipe out whale species one by one, bank the profits, and scrap the ships. And that’s what was done.

It was carnage for the whales doing the 1900’s except during WWII, when humans concentrated on killing one another. After WWII, the whalers redoubled their efforts. Japans whaling fleet was expanded at the direction of Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the cheapest way of supplying meat protein to a defeated nation. (which is the “tradition” many Japanese became accustomed to).

In 1949, a “conservation” body was formed by whaling nations, called the International Whaling Commission (IWC).  Its ostensible purpose was to provide oversight for intelligent utilization of “the whale resource”. It utterly failed at that. Rather, it gave a scientific veneer to what was being done anyway. Some nearly-eradicated whale species were “protected” on paper, but remained targets of opportunity for IWC member nations.

Since whales seemed so large and alien, scant thought was given to making the process humane, and in fact it was terrible; it was likened to killing a horse by throwing spears into it while it was forced to drag a heavy wagon.

This was done very systematically: the slower whales such as humpbacks, rights, and bowheads were already commercially extinct (meaning there weren’t enough of them left to be worth looking for). So in addition to huge floating “factory ships” which could process whale bodies in huge numbers, the harpoon ships were designed to wipe out one species and then another. First the blue whales were targeted and driven nearly entirely from the seas. Then those killer ships were scrapped and a smaller version sent after the fin whales. After the fin whales were depleted, the same thing was done for the Sei and the Brydes’ whales. Well over two million great whales were killed in this way.

And still the killing goes on.

These days, we understand that whales are intelligent, social animals which are – to the extent we have tested their smaller cousins – self-aware beings in the same sense as humans. Many people are inspired just to catch the sight of one.  And many nations have agreed that they should not be killed at all.  Humans have thrilled to the sound of whale songs, and been amazed at what science is slowly learning about their lives.

Yet this realization came very late for the whales, and too late for many. The large species of great whales are so reduced in population that they can barely find one another – in seas jammed with human noise like ships and sonar – to mate in sufficient numbers to offset deaths. They’re entangled in ubiquitous fishing gear, disoriented by human noise-blasting, and impacted by human pollution and by ingesting indigestible plastic debris.

And the whaling didn’t stop. Beginning in the ’60’s, two IWC member nations – Japan and the USSR – collaborated in a calculated fraud to target “protected” whales. Exchanging observers bilaterally, they kept a real set of kill numbers they showed each other, while turning in bogus records to the IWC. Whales were depopulated by their fleets down to nearly nothing, and it was only discovered long after the fact when the USSR fell and a courageous scientist turned over records he had risked his life to preserve.

Indeed, the last third of the 20th century was about sneaky, covert, and illegal whaling, and that continues. Japan set up networks of whaling stations and ships around the world to find the last pockets of whales, shoot them, and discard the bodies except for the choice meat cuts which were shipped to japan through dummy corporations, coordinated by the Yakuza and the large whaling companies working as one.

In the 1990’s, DNA analysis of Japan’s marketplace found it awash in meat from endangered species which had in theory been “protected” since the 1940’s. This sleazy trade continues, and is obscured by meat from Japan’s so-called “research” whaling, a rationale believed by no one, in which factory processing ships and harpoon ships conduct whaling “business as usual” and call it research.

Yet this isn’t the greatest threat to whales.  It isn’t the punchline.

The biggest danger is that we’re changing the seas, quickly, to seas in which whales cannot exist.  Whales require conditions such as those they evolved in, and our generation of CO2 is rapidly changing them to seas which won’t support the great whales. Or dolphins, seals, or large fish.  Our oceans are acidifying faster than at any time in the history of our planet, due to excess CO2 dissolving from the atmosphere. In just a few more decades of “business as usual”, skeletons of calcium carbonate will become impossible in many parts of the seas, knocking gaping holes in the food webs which support whales’ existence. The heating, increasingly stratified oceans will instead favor jellyfish, worms, and toxic bacterial slimes.

So ironically, the things we ultimately need to do to “save the whales” are the same things we need to do to save ourselves from irreversible climate catastrophe. We just need to do them sooner.