The Antarctica Blog

Antarctic Science: Drilling to Discovery

2012-01-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

Last week, scientists with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) returned from a trip to the Antarctic, to help set the stage for drilling into the remote Lake Ellsworth. This is no minor feat. The 7 mile long, one mile wide, 500 foot deep lake is buried under nearly 2 miles of ice!

Graphic from Wired Science

How are they going to do it? In November of this year, the team from the BAS will be using hot water, which remains hot due to geothermal heat that comes from inside the earth. This hot water drill will spray for three continuous days and create a hole just over a foot wide (36cm). The water is sprayed at 2,000 psi and about 190 degrees F (90C). Due to the extremely low temperatures at the lake, the diameter of the hole is expected to reduce its diameter by .6cm per hour, as water refreezes. This leaves scientists with 24 hours from when they finish drilling, to conduct experiments and take samples.

This exploration is very exciting, considering the lake's total isolation. It will be interesting to observe anything that may be alive, as all living things in the lake will have been left to their own evolutionary devices for many thousands of years, with virtually no light from which to draw the energy on which most earthly lifeforms rely.

David Hasselhoff Has Antarctic Hydrothermal Crabs

2012-01-10T04:42:00.000-08:00

Recently, several species have been discovered, in droves,near one of the strangest habitats on earth: hydrothermal vents on the deep ocean floor, near Antarctica. These include new species of sea stars, seaanemones, a very pale octopus and the hairy chested Yeti Crabs. Comically, these crabs were nicknamed bytheir discoverers as “The Hoff", nicknamed after David Hasselhoff. "The Hoff" crabs were found in great piles around the hydrothermal vents with long hairs on their abdomens, instead of their claws. These hairs are used to gather bacteria, which actually digest the output of the hydrothermal vents, that the crabs turn around and eat.

It is important to understand that these creatures live at adepth of 3 miles under water. Mostorganisms are at some level reliant on light for their nutrition. With no light at three miles under water,these animals instead rely on the chemicals of Antarctica’s deep-waterhydrothermal vents for their nutrition. Thesevents put out chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, which are toxic to most aquaticand terrestrial life. But thesechemicals are vital in sustaining the animals that exist at these depths.

This Week in Antarctic Science: Working with Worms

2011-12-26T08:18:00.000-08:00

Agreat deal of recent Antarctic research has examined the effects of globalwarming on the southern most continent’s ecological systems. Previously we’ve noted stories about changesto mosses, and the invasion of King crabs. Most recently though, scientists out of the University of Delaware havebeen looking at the adaptive nature of the Capitellaperarmata, also known as the polar worm.

SinceAugust, the Delaware team undertook aseries of dives into the waters near the McMurdo station to collect thepolychaet polar worms. For two months,divers to collect sediment samples and then sieved out the worms.

Scientistshave been comparing the temperature-adaptive nature of the Capitellaperarmata, with that of the Capitella teleta, the polar worm’stemperate counterpart. By comparingthese two species, scientists hope to gain a better understanding for how achanging polar environment may trigger a genetic response. This in turn should give insight into thegreater impact of climate change on polar ecosystems, and a greaterunderstanding of how Antarctic animals are able to adapt to changingtemperatures.

Would you like endangered sea turtle with that?

2011-12-20T11:04:00.000-08:00

The MSC label will now be applied to swordfish from a longline fishery that catches endangered sea turtles in Florida. How's that sustainable, you say? Well, children, you can catch endangered species (at least 147 loggerhead and leatherback turtles from 2005 - 2009) and still be called sustainable as long as you are reasonably certain that that level of catch won't contribute to irreversible harm to the population. What a high standard! To be pretty sure that you're not contributing to further downfall!

Here's a little quote from the MSC fisheries assessment methodology, which tells third-party certifiers how to score fisheries: "There should be no more than a 30% probability that the true status of the Component is within the range where there is risk of serious or irreversible harm."

Let me provide a little more context. The quote above is for Principle 2 performance indicators, i.e. how the fishery is performing with respect to impacts on habitat and other species. So when a fishery is being assessed to see if it should receive MSC certification, and it catches endangered species, the third-party certifier that assesses the fishery against MSC's standards will try to determine the level of impact on that species. If a fishery is determined to meet the standard quoted above, it will pass without conditions. If there's a 40% probability, it can still pass but with conditions.

I am generally a math and science kind of person, but when you start calling yourself "sustainable" as MSC does you can't fall back on dry assessments of probability and risk. Sustainability, at least in the way it is used in popular discourse, implies a lot of things, and when consumers are looking for the superior environmental choice they're probably not thinking about what level of dead endangered turtles is okay. They're probably thinking that they don't want to be indirectly responsible for the deaths of any endangered species - at least on a regular basis. Unfortunately swordfish longline fisheries catch a lot of bycatch, including turtles. You can marshal all the statistics you want to prove that these catches from one segment of the fishing industry aren't by themselves responsible for continued population declines, but that's really beside the point.

Consumers seeking out sustainable seafood are looking for superior performance. You may say that the swordfish fishery has improved with respect to turtles, that as a condition of MSC certification the fishery's agreed to do all sorts of things it should already be doing like increasing observer coverage, blah blah, blah. None of this changes the fact that consumers are being duped into thinking they're supporting the good guys, when really the superior environmental choice is harpoon-caught swordfish, or another species entirely.

When certification of this fishery was proposed, the Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN) objected, but their objection was not accepted by the Independent Adjudicator/lawyer appointed by MSC to weigh the various arguments. This adjudicator, by the way stated "The CB [the third-party certifier performing the analysis of the fishery] has made the point that although there were a number of significant stakeholders involved in the assessment process including PEW and Oceana, the only remaining Objector is TIRN. This reflects well on the MSC process and the positive contributions of Dayboat in its interactions with the NGOs." Except it doesn't at all, since Oceana, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, the Ecology Action Centre, and the Animal Welfare Institute submitted letters in support of TIRN's objection.

I'm beginning to think no one involved with MSC has good reading comprehension skills. They call themselves the "best environmental choice." Apparently the "best" means up to a 30% chance that you're causing irreversible harm to an endangered species, and means you're not concerned with regular hookings and killings of struggling endangered species. And supporting an objection means you don't support it at all.

This Week in Antarctica - 100 Years of Antarctic Exploration and Science: From Sea to Air

2011-12-15T05:25:00.000-08:00

One hundred years ago, yesterday, Norwegian explorerRoald Amundsen became the first human to to reach the south pole. Today, while technology has certainly made vaststrides, we are still exploring the great white continent, and have much leftto learn.

Obviously there has been great innovation since Amundsen's time, and recently many scientists and explorershave gotten off the chilly ice and taken to the air, with NASA’s IceBridgeProject. Operation IceBridge is the largestever airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice. Since 2009 the IceBridge project has conducted annual 6-week fly-overmissions in the Arctic in March and April and in the Antarctic in October andNovember.

This year one of the biggest highlights for the IceBridgemission was the discovery of a large crack in the Pine Island Glacier iceshelf, which will lead to the separation of a 310-square-mile iceberg into theocean, sometime in the near future. Thegrowth of this 18 mile crack was documented over the course of severalflights.

This month, Scientists, with the Bristish Antarctic Survey,will be sent directly to the Pine Island Glacier to gain a more hands-onunderstanding of how warming ocean currents may be the cause of this breakage.

These missions have allowed scientists to see snow, ice andbedrock characteristics at depths well below the surface. This information will be hugely valuable ingaining an understanding of glacier and ice sheet processes and will helpscientists predicts a glacier’s behavior. This will also allow us to gain a greater understanding of how climatechange may be affecting these areas, and how changes in these areas ripple tothose of us seemingly far away.

Japan sets out for the Antarctic - again

2011-12-07T11:40:00.001-08:00

The continuing Japanese whaling saga is ultimately a tale of subsidies. As reported in The Guardian, the money-losing Japanese whaling fleet got a nice boost this year - from the earthquake/tsunami recovery fund. Soon it will return to the Antarctic to kill some more whales whose meat will sit indefinitely in a freezer. The reason is that one of the towns affected by the tsunami was a whaling port. The article does not specify if the port was involved in Antarctic whaling or local coastal whaling. The whaling program received an additional $30 million in US dollars from the recovery fund. Without this money, the unprofitability of whaling would likely doom it to a quick end.

In fact, subsidies are behind a lot of environmental problems. While most conservationists aren't eager to let the free market completely take over, many will agree that ending subsidies would be a quick way to solve a lot of problems. For an example, destructive high-seas bottom trawling fishing vessels often receive fuel subsidies that keep their operations profitable. If new WTO rules were imposed on fisheries subsidies, we could possibly avoid arguing about how much of the seafloor it's ok to destroy and just sit back and watch deep-sea trawlers slink on home.

It would seem like a no-brainer that subsidies to industries that are causing environmental damage and aren't really making any money are a waste of government resources and should be ended. On the other hand, a case can be made that judicious government investments can help promising industries get off the ground, and I'd be unwilling to condemn all subsidies for this reason. Unfortunately, thanks to the deeply entrenched influence of many lobby groups - farmers, fishers, whalers, oil companies - most subsidies are not designed to help new, environmentally responsible businesses get off the ground. So next time you see that your government is subsidizing something that's not benefiting the public as a whole, let them know how angry you are. Don't let industry do all the talking.

New Zealand - now only 20% Pure

2011-10-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

New Zealand has been billing itself as "100% Pure", ostensibly trading on its reputation as an environmentally friendly country with solid policies for using natural resources wisely. While many people would dispute that 100% number, NZ is far from being as bad as other countries in terms of environmental protection. This past week, however, there were some rumblings in the New Zealand media suggesting that some Kiwis haven't bought into this new tourism marketing campaign. The first article noted that the New Zealand government planned to sacrifice marine protection of Antarctica's Ross Sea in favor of the toothfish/Chilean sea bass fishery. The second is an opinion piece linking the government's poor handling of the recent oil spill, their decisions about the Ross Sea, and the possibility of allowing coal mining in the Denniston Plateau - currently public conservation land. The take-home message is that the slogans are increasingly not supported by action.

It has often been the case throughout history that clever but irresponsible people realized that they could exploit a previously untapped natural resource for a short amount of time and make a lot of money. While tourism to New Zealand isn't quite a pristine resource, one wonders if the current government is taking the same approach to it. Bring the tourists in to see New Zealand's natural wonders even as those wonders are being destroyed. Coal mines are regarded by few as must-see sites. But hey, you'd make great money for a while.

In many ways, NZ does have a great brand. Think of the country and you think of natural beauty, and maybe Bret and Jemaine. It's easy to dismiss marketing and advertising as inherently shallow, but in this instance a little image consciousness could be a good thing. With so many other countries already privileging "development" over preservation - think of the US blasting the tops off mountains to get a little coal a little faster - does it really make economic or global sense for NZ to sacrifice its unique qualities? The world needs countries that can provide credible leadership on global environmental issues. If New Zealand can really commit to being 100% pure, and say no to coal mining and Ross Sea fishing, it can be one of those leaders. This relatively small place could play a constructive role and set an example. Or it could ruin its wilderness and destroy one of the world's last intact marine ecosystems. Which one is a better legacy for the next generation of New Zealanders?

More United Nations

2011-09-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt. Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience.

With respect to the management of fishing and whaling the1982(1994) UNCLOS was three steps forward and one or two steps back. Looking atthe evolution of the fisheries conservation and management provisions in basictexts through the period since the end of WWII it is striking how littleinnovation and critical thought was given to these rules, perhaps because asthe years went by the action was more and more in the hands of diplomats andlawyers and less and less in those of scientists, although much lip-service waspaid to the need for regulations to be based on the best scientific advice. Theword ‘Conservation’ is in the titles and some text of the sections on fishingin coastal waters and on the high seas, but it is not defined. An optimist can see this omission as positive– at least the word is not now tied to exploitation and a very specificmanagement objective, but a positive and modern clarifying definition mighthave been useful. Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) remains the prime objectiveof management (“to maintain or restore populations of harvested species at levelswhich can produce the maximum sustainable yield”), but that is now “asqualified by relevant environmental and economic factors…”. This qualificationwas written to allow states and international organizations to escape from thestrict MSY criterion in such a way as to avoid the need for sustainability, atleast temporarily, and to take more than the ‘optimum’ catch. Theoreticallythat qualification could alternatively be interpreted as taking lessthan the physical maximum in order to improve profitability, but as far as Iknow no state has yet dared to broach that, though the EU Commission might betentatively thinking about it. But a report published two years ago by FAO andthe World Bank – “Sunken Billions” - did point out the huge financialadvantages of going for a net economic maximumby catching a bit less than the maximum but with much less effort and hencecost. A second, but secondary reasonfor the qualification was to allow some flexibility in managing multi-speciesfishing operations, especially when the target species interact with each otherecologically, as competitors or as predator-prey pairs.

Unfortunately the UNCLOS introduces two distinctlyunhelpful ideas, ideas that originated in the US-inspired approach tomanagement, which for decades excluded the possibility of limiting exploitationeffort in terms of numbers and sizes of vessels and their operational modes, onthe grounds that this would inhibit the ‘freedom of fishing’. These are aspecific focus on “allowable catch” and on “levels” (i.e. sizes) of exploitedpopulations, ignoring their equally important structure and composition. Both of these derive from the embrace by the US authorities in the1950s of a simplistic and seriously flawed mathematical model of the dynamicsof exploited fish populations published by Dr Milner Schaefer in 1954 and firstapplied to the tropical Pacific fishery for yellowfin tuna. Neither of thoseapparently restrictive terms is to be found in the earlier conventions anddocuments and between them they have led to very undesirable outcomes for majorfisheries, including the enforcement of huge quantities of dead fish being discardedat sea. Similar flawed management resulted in the large numbers of blue and finwhales being left dead in the Antarctic by the Japanese expeditions – and notrecorded in the official catch statistics.

A positive new theme in UNCLOS 1982(94) – though not yetimplemented anywhere - is the requirement that in exploiting small fish speciesmanagement should ensure that sufficient is left to feed the larger predatoryfishes and, presumably, fish-eating toothed cetaceans and seals. (UNCLOSdoesn’t say it exactly like this, but that is what is meant)

Three new features in UNCLOS provisions for managing theexploitation and conservation of marine living resources are of particularinterest regarding the whales and dolphins. One is that with just a few exceptions(such as the harbour porpoise and its relatives) they are all formallycategorized as ‘highly migratory species’ and therefore their conservation isto be ensured by appropriate inter-governmental organizations. Although it hasbeen widely assumed that as far as the large whales were concerned this meantthe IWC, that body’s name is conspicuously absent from the text. This happenedmainly because a few of the negotiators (Guess who!) wanted to leave open thepossibility that whaling in the North Atlantic might one day be managed by anew rump organization of whaling countries, the North Atlantic Marine MammalCommission (NAMMCO), but it does also leave open other possibilities, includingthe UN Itself or one of its Specialised Agencies, or even a new organizationthat might one day supplant the IWC. Attempts were subsequently made to awardthe IWC a unique conservation and management status in a document entitledAgenda 21, an ‘Action Plan’ that was adopted by the UN Conference onEnvironment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which alsogave birth to Mrs Brundtland’s Oxymoronis Monster, ‘Sustainable Development’.The difference between UNCLOS and UNCED is, however, the difference betweenHard Law and Soft Law.

The second new feature is that all marine mammals aregiven a special status. Articles 65 (EEZ) and 120 (High Seas) say that the general provisions in UNCLOS forfisheries conservation, management and study, such as the MSY formula, “do notrestrict the right of a coastal State or the competence of an internationalorganization, as appropriate, to prohibit, limit or regulate the exploitationof marine mammals more strictly” than provided for in the general rules. Thistells us that an indefinite pause/suspension (‘moratorium’) or even an outrightban on commercial whaling are within international law, but leave open thequestion of whether the IWC or, indeed, any other existing internationalorganization has the competence, under their statutes, to enact the latter. Ithink they do not, and nor does any existing body – except perhaps the UN iself- have the authority to stop the award of Special Permits unilaterally bystates for the unlimited killing of cetaceans for declared scientific purposes.

I hope readers will now forgive me for getting intoUN-lingo for a bit. I think it’s necessary for understanding the pond intowhich the Monaco authorities have plunged. I’m hoping that, like the laghetto (little lake) in my garden it has friendlyfrogs in it but no alligators.

Since the UNCLOS came into force the UN established, in2000, an Open-endedInformal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (referred toas The Consultative Process), and in December 2001, an Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the UnitedNations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 relating to theConservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly MigratoryFish. It is not obvious whether this agreement applies to whales, and theobfuscation about that was, I think, deliberate. It applies to ‘marine livingresources’ – so that includes whales. But about ‘fish’ it says “thisincludes crustaceans and mollusks” except the – legally – sedentary species. Nomention of marine mammals.

In 2006 an Ad hoc Open-ended InformalWorking Group on the conservation andsustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond areas of nationaljurisdiction , under the Consultative process, held its first meeting. AUN-Oceans Task Force on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction,established in January 2005, coordinates, at Secretariat level, the work onthese issues of all the Agencies and bodies within the UN-System. On thismatter the work of UN-Oceans now marches together with activities arising fromthe Convention on Biological Diversity through its Marine and Coastal DiversityProgramme.

It was to the 12^th meeting of the InformalConsultative Process (ICP), held in New York on 20 June 2011, that the Monaco proposal for the permanentprotection of highly migratory cetaceans on the high seas was unveiled.

In this series of blogs I have been looking back in 20^thand 21^st century history, then forward to the present to try toclarify what the next steps in ‘Saving the Whales’ might be. I’ll return to thatnext and so perhaps end the series.

Whales, Whaling and the "International Community"

2011-09-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt. Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience.

The proposal by the authorities of the Principality ofMonaco that the United Nations offer ‘full and permanent protection’ to allwhales and dolphins on the high seas would, I suspect, have come as a surpriseto many of those people who are interested in those animals and follow ‘thewhaling controversy. (See details on blog ‘The Monacoproposal’) If they think of it at allmost would have come to associate the arguments about their fate with theInternational Whaling Commission (IWC), with its limited powers and stridentclaims by the pro-whaling factions that it is ‘dysfunctional’ – although, if itis so, it is they that have deliberately made it that way. But the UN has forlong, and in many times and different ways, been involved with whales anddolphins and with whaling. I thought a short review of the history and mainfeatures of that involvement might be useful.

First, however, about the limits of the IWC’s competence.The IWC exists under the umbrella of theInternational Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946 and that conventionexplicitly and deliberately excludes the IWC from having any authority concerningthe matter of killing whales for ostensibly scientific purposes. Then the ICRW does not give any possibility forthe IWC to ban – in the sense of prohibiting any kind of whaling indefinitely.The pause in commercial whaling, of indefinite duration, adopted by theIWC in 1982 (the so-called ‘moratorium’, though use of that term was strictlyavoided in the decision) was formulated in such a way as to permit theresumption of whaling as and when certain conditions had been met; thoseconditions related primarily to the states of the whale populations and theeffectiveness of future management of commercial whaling. There is muchmisunderstanding of what has been viewed as the double, parallel purposes ofthe ICRW and hence the IWC: to conserve whales and to provide for the orderlydevelopment of the whaling industry, with the presumption that we are free tochose between these aims and the priority among them. That is not so. The ICRWis clear: ‘ensure proper conservation and thus make possible theorderly development of the industry’ The requirement that the necessary actionsshould be such as to ensure that depleted populations are allowed to recover ‘tooptimum levels as rapidly as possible’ provides the justificationfor setting catch limits at zero in certain circumstances. In early years the circumstances wereperceived threats to even the continued existence of some threatened species.Next came the protection of populations found to be depleted to below optimumlevels. Finally it came to be recognized that continuing scientific uncertaintyabout the states and potential productivity of those populations fullyjustified long-term – but not permanent- closure of all commercial whaling operations. Lastly, because the negotiatorsof the 1946 Convention omitted to define ‘a whale’ the IWC has for forty yearsbeen in the limbo of uncertainty about exactly what kind of commercial whalingit can regulate or, if necessary, suspend.

The ‘International Community’, in the form of the League ofNations, took an interest in the control of whaling from the beginning ofpelagic operations in the Antarctic in the 1920s. It was urged to do so by thescientists assembled in the International Council for the Exploration of he Sea(ICES) based in Copenhagen and comprised of European Governments, including Italyand Russia. The first regulatory treatywas negotiated under League auspices in 1931 and, with amendments from time totime – especially in 1937 – continued to function through to the end of WorldWar II.

The negotiators in 1946 were in two minds about what ifanything, the baby they were conceiving should be linked to, or even be cradledwithin, the new United Nations system of global inter-governmentalorganizations. The host country and main drafter of the new convention - theUSA – thought the IWC should be placed within the framework of the constitutionof the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO), which had beenestablished even before the UN itself, and structured with a Fisheries Division(itself a controversial decision at the time, pushed by the Canadian delegate,a biologist, Donald Finn, who became its first Director). Others, including theUK and Norway thought otherwise – they saw the IWC as a club of whalingcountries and did not favour the likely openness of a UN body. The matter wasnot resolved in 1946 and the IWC itself was told to decide whether or not itwanted to be a part of the UN system. When decision time came, at the IWC’ssecond meeting, in Oslo in 1950, the USA had changed its mind and the option tobe integrated in the UN system was rejected.

By 1959 the IWC and the Antarctic whaling industry were indeep crisis. The US and UK delegations saw the way out of this as theapplication of modern fisheries science and a renewed commitment to act onscientific advice. They, with the perennial observer for FAO, Donald Finn, puttogether a proposal to appoint an independent committee of scientists toprovide better advice and to negotiate the necessary commitment for action, andin 1960 the so-called Committee of Threewas established, and the commitment made to act on their advice by 1964 at thelatest. Only Japan was seriously opposed to this, although the USSR was hesitant,mainly because it was not a member of FAO. But the FAO engagement was more thansimply to provide for one of its staff – me – to be a member of the newscientific group. FAO offered to provide services and it convened the launchmeeting of the Committee with a group of representatives of member states toorganize the study, arrange for the release of data (much of which was at thetime being held more or less secret by the whaling countries) and providefacilities. It was clear before the 1964 deadline arrived that certaincountries were not going to be willing to honour their 1970 commitment –especially Japan, again -, and meanwhile the situation of the industry wasgoing from bad to worse. Twice in that period the General Conference of FAOexpressed great concern about the way things were going, and twice theDirector-General of FAO, Dr B. R. Sen, a distinguished Indian diplomatpersonally conveyed warnings about the likely consequences. Sen warned the 1963 meetingthat FAO "…could not continue to collaborate with the IWC if thescientific results were used merely to plan the more efficient destruction of theresources…", and urged the Commission "…not to use scientificuncertainty or controversy as an excuse for not acting." When the Comiitte ofThree had finished its work, in 1965, FAO itself took on the responsibility ofmaking the scientific assessments on which the IWC should base its phasing downof a grossly over-capitalised industry.

Although I had not been involved in the whaling issue before1960, and knew little about it, I had been very much involved in the actions bythe United nations to codify the Law of the Sea, especially the Technical(preparatory) Conference held in 1955 at FAO HQ, and the first UN Law of theSea Conference, in 1958, in Geneva. The latter resulted in five conventions,but my concern was the Fishing and Conservation of the Living Resources ofthe High Seas, which eventually came into force in March 1966. This fisheriesconvention was based on a draft provided by the International Law Commission(ILC) that had been established by the Second UN General Assembly in 1947 and instructedto give priority to the codification of the regimes of the high seas and ofterritorial waters, The problem was that the 1958 conference failed to agree ona definition of the breadth of the Territorial Sea somewhere in the range 3 to200 miles.

The ILC draft – put together in the period 1955-56 -contained a provision that:

Articles 52 and 53 - “…states shall adopt measures forregulating and controlling fishing activities … when necessary for the purposeof the conservation of the living resources of the high seas.” And those exactwords were included in Articles 3 and 4 of the 1958 convention. “Fishing”included whaling. That looks fine in terms of promoting ‘conservation’ butthere was a catch:

“Article 50 – “the expression ‘conservation of theliving resources of the high seas ‘ means the aggregate of the measuresrendering possible the optimum sustainable yield from those resourcesso as to secure a maximum supply offood and other marine products.”

These words were was also included in Article 2of the 1958 convention, but with an additional condition:

“Conservation programmes should be formulated with a viewto securing in the first place a supplyof food for human consumption.”

Baleen whaling would conform with that, more or less, but certainlynot the hunts for sperm and bottlenose whales, which were for industrialpurposes and also provision of food for livestock and pet animals.

Thus optimum and maximum became conflated and we haveever since been plagued by this pseudo-synonymy in the management of fishingand whaling. It was emphasized because the US had worked to make the MaximumSustainable Yield (MSY) concept a condition of the US-Japan Peace Treatynegotiations – the San Francisco Treaty came into force in April 1952 -. in orderto exclude Japanese fishing operations from the Northeast Pacific, inaccordance with an “abstention principle”. It is indeed remarkable that in accedingto the 1958 convention, in April 1961 the USAadded a footnote that

“ such ratification shall not be construed to impair theapplicability of the principle of ' abstention ', as defined in documentA/CONF. 13/C.3/L.69, of 8 April 1958. “

My colleague Ms Leslie Busby has reminded me that the 1958conference adopted a Resolution that has long been buried in old files but isof particular interest now. Here it is:

HUMANEKILLING OF MARINE LIFE Resolution adopted 25 April 1958

States are “requested toprescribe, by all means available to them, those methods for the capture andkilling of marine life, especially ofwhales and seals, which will spare them suffering to the greatest extentpossible.(My emphasis)

Itwas not until a Special Meeting of IWC in 1965 that an organization concernedwith the suffering of hunted whales (the Universities Federation for AnimalWelfare, (UFAW)) was able to attend IWC proceedings; it did so in the companyof the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Fauna Preservation Society and theInternational Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). And it was anotherfourteen years before the IWC head Dr Harrie Lillie, representing UFAW,describing the horrors he had witnessed as ship’s doctor on a British whalingexpedition in the Antarctic in the 1940s.

Meanwhile, in the 1960s,, concern about the situation wasgrowing outside the IWC and even outside the UN. This culminated in theproposal by the US and other co-sponsors to the UN Conference on the HumanEnvironment (UNCHE) held in Stockholm in 1972, that the IWC should be advisedto adopt a ten-year moratorium on all commercial whaling. That idea, too,divided those who thought the IWC should be given yet another chance to performits functions and those who though it never would – still being pretty well aclub of whaling nations – and therefore that the UN itself should declare the moratorium.The former group carried the day and eventually, in Stockholm in June and atthe UN General Assembly in New York later in the year the moratorium‘suggestion’ was adopted, the only vote against it being that of Japan. At its1972 meeting, addressed by the representative of the UN Secretary-General, theIWC rejected the UNCHE ‘suggestion’ for a moratorium (some countries such as,especially, Norway, whose representatives had voted for it in Stockholm,vigorously rejected it in the IWC; they accepted the idea of a substantialresearch programme – but didn’t fund it; and went on to design the compromisecalled the ‘Australian Amendment’ or New Management Procedure (NMP), adopted in principle in 1974 and fleshed outin 1975..

The NMP took on the idea of ‘optimum sustainability’ – thereification of greed - in the UN 1958 sense, but the IWC botched it. Instead of seeking a maximum supply of foodfor humans it merely continued the old policy of looking only at the numbersof animals to be killed as well as ignoring the priority reason for allowingcontinuation of commercial whaling – providing food for human consumption.Maximising the weight of the catches by optimizing the biomass ofthe population was written as an option in the 1974 Resolution that launchedthe NMP, but that was never implemented. And the more reasonable idea ofmaximizing or just increasing economic yield (profit) by catching a bit lessthan the maximum number or weight but with much less expenditure as proposed by Canadian and US economists andby Raymond Beverton and me, in the 1950s, was not even considered.

A decade later, when the IWC’s Scientific Committee embarkedon what was to become the Revised Management Procedure (RMP) – which dealtsatisfactorily with two issues - variability, uncertainty and precaution, andavoiding the danger of unintentional depletion – the old errors were repeated.Although by then my work with Dr Christine Lockyer had shown that the averageweights of fin and blue whales in catches had declined by one third from thebeginning of pelagic whaling in about 1928 to its end (as far as the majorspecies were concerned) in the 1970s, the IWC scientists continued to thinkonly in maximum numbers, and not at all in terms of commodity production andeconomic productivity. This was largely the fault of the Commission itself,which decided policy objectives. But not once did the scientists draw theCommissioners’ attention to this factor, as they had at least done in the 1970s– though not listened to. In that early period, and before, the net-economicyield issue was hotly debated in fisheries circles, and I remember the USdelegate to many high-level meetings – Dr William Herrington, himself abiologist by training - arguing, with some reason, that there could never beagreement on an economic optimum because different nations valued differentspecies differently and had differing cost structures. In those days subsidieswere thought to be good because they encouraged renovation of the fishing fleets.But this hardly applied to the whaling issue because practically all whalingoperations were directed to supplying the global oil market and the burgeoningwhale meat market that was 95% Japanese.

As one outcome of UNCHE the UN established the UNEnvironment Programme (UNEP). One of its main and best funded activities wasthe Marine Mammals Project, set up as a joint programme with FAO. I was put incharge of that and from 1973 to 1976 more than 400 scientists collaborated inreviewing what was known about cetaceans, seals, dugongs and manatees. Towardsthe end of the decade, when the NMP was obviously failing- especially regardingthe whaling in the Northern hemisphere, and conservation of the sperm and minkewhales, FAO and UNEP again became active in trying to get the IWC to reformitself. Things began to improve when UNEP, WWF and the Threshold Foundationhelped, in 1979, the newly independent Republic of Seychelles to revive theidea of whale sanctuaries. In parallel with all that, however, the UN had againtaken up the codification of the Law of the Sea for the new era and sought torectify the failures and inadequacies of 1958 and 1960, beginning with Dr ArvidPrado’s historic speech in the UNGA in 1967, on behalf of newly independentMalta. This led eventually to the success of a Third UN Conference on the Lawof the Sea that ended, after nine years of negotiations, with the newconvention (UNCLOS) that was signed in 1982 and eventually came into force inNovember 1994 – the year that the IWC designated the Southern Ocean as a whalesanctuary.. UNCLOS has very importantimplications for the conservation and protection of whales and dolphins.

More about that later.

Welfare, Rights, Respect, Speciesism and Scientific Whaling

2011-09-06T15:27:00.000-07:00

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt. Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience.

Yesterday a friend sent me a marvelous, and immensely moving video-clip. It was about a pair of elephants, clan friends, who had been taken into captivity and separated for twenty years, then brought together again and released from their cages. The video recorded their recognition and reuniting ceremony; it can only be called love. I wished we could similarly see the release of a long-captive orca and its reunion with its wild family.

The cruelty of whaling has long been an intermittent concern of some people who have attended meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The first NGO to attend the IWC as an Observer was, I think, the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) and early on Dr Harry Lilley brought his accounts of the prolonged deaths of fin and blue whales in the Antarctic, seen from his perch as doctor in residence on one of the British factory ships. Later, more joined in – the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals,, the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), Humane Society International (HIS), the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Cetacean Society International and others. They were mostly pre-occupied with the horrors of slow death and the escape of mortally wounded animals. I think they were not always looking at exactly the right bit of the process. The chase, between the sighting and the harpoon launch and bomb explosion is the most stressful for the animal in all hunts, at least those for the fast-swimming rorquals. In human terms it is the torture before the execution. And there is a world of difference between trying to improve the living and working conditions of slaves and abolishing slavery.

Many people who want to live to see an end to whaling have mixed reasons. One of them is not merely that the hunts are cruel, but that they are inevitably cruel; we have no way of making them ‘humane’, and this makes opposition to them qualitatively different from concern about humane killing of domestic livestock, which the apologists for whaling like to pretend is no different from the acquisition of their preferred meat. The apologists also like to assert that the rorquals are no more intelligent than cattle – as if that was morally relevant. But such assertions do make one think hard about moral hierarchies.

It so happened that when I received the video that made me cry, I had been reading an extraordinary book by an Anglo-Nigerian historian, David Oluscoga and a Dane resident in Namibia, Casper Erichsen, entitled “The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism”. In fact it was this book that gave me the idea, expressed in a previous blog, of ‘rescuing’ this quasi-taboo word from the special use of it when written with a capital H. It was not, of course, only the Germans among the European colonialists who in the nineteenth century perpetrated genocides in Africa and elsewhere; the British settlers exterminated the Tasmanian aborigines and the North Americans moving westward were pretty active on ‘their’ continent.

Oluscoga and Erichsen are effective in demonstrating the continuity of the massacres in the new German colony in Southwest Africa with the rise of fascism – Hermann Goring’s dad was one of the governors there, and improvements were made to the concentration camp idea invented by the British to kep the Boers in order. But what struck me was their demonstration of how useful for the pursuit and justification of violent oppression was the philosopher Herbert Spencer’s perversion of Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’ into ‘survival of the fittest. Spenser essentially invented ‘Social Darwinism’ that justified the maltreatment of beings lower in a conveniently constructed hierarchy. Lower orders were perceived as sub-human, at best, whether they were slaves, the poor in the new industrial societies, the blackish people of Africa or members of the Yellow Peril/Menace/Terror. And the boundary between sub-human and non-human was porous. The most shocking thing I learnt from ‘The Kaiser’s Holocaust’ was that in Berlin and other cities, late in the nineteenth century Võlkerschauen (‘people shows’), circuses, zoos, ‘panopticons' (‘see alls’), a variety of human specimens were displayed along with the non-humans. Specialist ‘providers’ enriched themselves by trapping both animals and humans.

About the same time an eminent English scientist, one of the fathers of statistical methodology, Sir Francis Galton, wrote to the London Times seriously suggesting that steps be taken to replace the inferior black natives of Africa by Chinese, ‘a race capable of high civilisation’. Galton was a founder of ‘eugenics’- the attempted improvement of the human species by control of breeding. assisted by surgery. He coined the term and also the ominous epithet ‘nature versus nurture. His ideas – one being that

homosexuality is a genetic anomaly – led, in mid-20^th century, to the British authorities chemically castrating (and driving to suicide) the man who was arguably the greatest mathematical biologist of the century – Alan Turing, the founder of the theory of computing and master code-breaker of WWII. But for us, Galton’s great idea was the transformation of the biologists’ concept of ‘a specimen’ to that of ‘a representative sample’. Germans and others in Southwest Africa, thinking of themselves as scientists, measured thousands of aboriginal heads (and collected skulls) in establishing the ‘science’ of phrenology, and vigorously pursued other pathways to knowledge involving killing and mutilating ‘the others’, be they blackish, brown, yellowish or even low-class white. Preceding Galton a German scientist, Alfred Ploetz, in 1895 called his subject ‘rassenhygiene’ (race hygiene) and by 1909 Galton was Honorary President of Ploetz’s Society for Racial Hygiene. Ploetz was also a fan of representative sampling.

We have seen this shift to ‘sampling’ in the progress from what the authority given in the 1937 whaling Agreement for occasionally killing specimens of protected whale species, to the collection of large ‘representative samples’, year after year, by the employees of Tokyo’s Institute for Cetacean research and, for a few years, though on smaller scales by their colleagues in Iceland and Norway.

The Kaiser’s holocaust in SW Africa also led to a back-migration to South Africa and racist ideas attending that movement like a deadly virus fueled the growth and eventual temporary victory of Apartheid there. Before that had been ousted the British were at it again massacring more blacks, the anti-colonial movement in Kenya – the Mau Mau. When it comes to holocausts the British and Dutch have a lot to answer for as well as have the Germans, Belgians (assisted by the Welsh charlatan posing as an explorer, Henry Morton Stanley), and Americans of the ilk of President Theodore Roosevelt who believed that ‘ by the very act of becoming frontier people the whites of America have evolved into a stronger, more virile, resourceful people.’ Here, too, was a connection; by far the most popular reading by th Germans of Africa and America were the ‘Western’ novels of the German writer Karl May.

The west coast of the African continent is swept and nourished by the Benguela Current. Coming up cold from the Antarctic, nutrient-rich, it generates one of the World Ocean’s most biologically productive so-called ‘Large Marine Ecosystems’. The British enclave on the Namib coast, Walvis Bay (Walvis is corrupted Afrikaans for ‘whales’ - walvish), discovered by the Portuguese navigator Bartholomew Diaz in 1487, was a favoured place for European and American whalers in the late 18^th century. It was claimed by the Dutch in 1793, then by the British in 1878, and later became the site of huge and varied fisheries. During their occupation of the Walvis Bay region the Dutch established a whaling station. But the real development was the initiation of ‘modern whaling’ in 1912 by two companies in Walvis bay itself – one Norwegian, one British - and a German-Norwegian one in nearby Lüderitz Bay. These were brought to an early end by the German occupation of Walvis bay at the outbreak of WWI and by the expense of the necessary freshwater., which had to be brought by boat from Cape Town.

Yields in SW Africa were also low in the days when oil was still the main product. This was because the whales being most frequently caught were the newly discovered non-migratory, therefore non-blubbery, Bryde’s whales. They came into their own when the pirate whalers began operating mini-factory-catchers under flags of convenience in the 1960s and ‘70s, producing only frozen Bryde’s meat for the Japanese market.

( The Humboldt Current system – named after Alexander von Humboldt - that sweeps up the South American West coast from the Antarctic has remarkably similar characteristics to the Benguela, providing vast numbers of sardines and anchovies, and Bryde’s whales, to the coastal dwellers of Peru. Alexander was a Prussian naturalist and explorer who worked extensively in South America at the beginning of the 19^th century and is now recognized as one of Europe’s greatest geoscientists. He believed in the harmony or nature and worked hard for the unity of the sciences. Humboldt was the first to suggest that the continents of South America and Africa had once been joined. He was another sort of German: he hated slavery and the conditions which Amerindians and others were forced to endure; he vigorously opposed Germany’s colonial policy.)

In that early 20^th century period whaling was expanding rapidly around Africa – Franco-Norwegian operations off Congo and Gabon, other Norwegian-plus-x off Angola and Mozambique. It remained profitable only in South Africa; substantial numbers of humpback whales were killed, and, after WWII, sperm whales. But the Norwegian historians J. N. Tonnessen and A. O. Johnsen felt constraind to write, in their 1959-70 masterwork: “Of all the whaling grounds in the world those around Africa have been subject to least scientific investigation”. Let us now hope that the inclusion of the western coasts in the South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary proposed by Brazil and Argentina will, when adopted next year, encourage correction of this anomaly, much as the declaration of the Indian Ocean Sanctuary in 1979 did for the eastern African coasts as well as for the Asian shores.

That was a bit of a deviation but, I hope, a useful one. I return now to my main theme of animal welfare, rights and respect. Holocausts and massacres are, I think, practically always about money and physical property even when they are overlaid and superficially justified by theories of hierarchy, stratification and desirable dominance. This was true of the German push for ‘liebersraum’ (living space) in Poland, Lithuania, East Prussia, Alsace-Lorraine, German East Africa (Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi) and SW Africa, and its Japanese equivalent – Prime Minister Matsuoka Yôsuke’s intensely racist Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (formally announced in 1940 but with roots going much further back), as it is for the Icelanders’ attack on the fin and blue whales. A common feature is that there really are no limits to this except capability and circumstance. Christian Loftsson’s and the Icelandic Government’s claims of ‘sustainability’ are thin smoke screens; they will catch just as many as the market will take in the medium term, taking account of the expected export price and the cost of holding excess stockpiles in freezers.

A common feature of the holocaustic mentality is the demonisation of the target. In whaling this now takes the form of accusing the whales of eating the fish and other resources that rightly belong to our species and sometimes behaving badly in other ways – such as by attacking boats from which men have hurled or fired harpoons. The ICR has put a lot of effort into compiling the scanty ‘evidence’ of this, but I think convinced no one else. Similar demonisation by Icelandic and Norwegian whalers has amounted to little more than well-publicised assertions.

When I studied biology sixty years ago not only were taxonomy and systematics hierarchical, they were also judgmental. We spoke of higher and lower levels of evolution, something I don’t think Charles Darwin did. Now we don’t think of the mammals and the insects as being high and low, just different. And Vive la Difference. As researchers now search experimentally for evidence of self-awareness among the non-human animals they have tended to look first at the big-brained elephants, apes and cetaceans, but they have turned also to small birds, and found this feature in the little grey parrot, but not in dogs or cats. Also relatively recent appearance in the evolutionary time-table doesn’t seem to compute, as Mr Spock might say. The group including the self-aware bottlenose dolphin has been around for very much longer than we and the other Great Apes.

The recognition of, first, sentience, then of complex intra-specific (and perhaps inter-specific) communication among ‘animals’, and then of self-awareness must generate respect for them as well as compassion. True respect involves rights, as many human ethnic groups well know. That is why I welcomed the efforts by a few of the humans who know most about the non-human Great Apes to campaign for those species to have their rights recognized in human laws. And we all should especially welcome, most recently, and even closer to my heard, the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins posted from Helsinki in May, 2010 by the organizers – the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) – of an international conference which engaged people who are studying and know much more than most of us about these animals. (Google ‘cetacean rights’ for lots of stuff)

Some of the ten rights specified in the Declaration read as follows:

4. No cetacean is the property of any state, corporation, human group or individual;

5. Cetaceans have the right not to be subject to the disruption of their cultures;

6. The rights, freedoms, and norms set forth in this Declaration should be protected under international and domestic law;

7, Cetaceans are entitled to an international order in which these rights, freedoms and norms can be fully realized.

If I had been there in Helsinki I might have insisted on a right not to be turned into soap, cooking oil, margarine and meatballs, either for humans or their domestic animals (The North Atlantic bottlenose whale was practically exterminated by Norwegian whalers in the 1930s to 1970s for sale of its flesh as food for – mainly – the pet animals of British ‘animal lovers’.)

It seems to me that these statements provide a powerful rationale for support of Monaco’s proposal that the United Nations declare that all listed highly migratory cetaceans be fully and permanently protected when swimming in the high seas. There are, of course, other reasons to support the Monaco proposal and not everyone who does support it will agree with this one; the ideas in the Declaration will take time to be digested and to multiply and become mainstream – as with basic human rights. But the UN is the only organ that can undertake the implementation of the declaration’s hopes in international waters. Nothing that I can find in the all-embracing 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) - could preclude the UN from taking the action in principle proposed by Monaco, nor from seeking to persuade states to take corresponding actions in their bailiwicks. Article 120 of UNCLOS indeed (since it came into force in 1994, incidentally the year the IWC designated the Southern Ocean as a Whale Sanctuary) explicitly authorizes inter-governmental organizations - naturally including the UN itself - to ‘prohibit the exploitation of marine mammals on the high seas’. It is important to note that this provision does not give ownership of the mammals, including the ‘highly migratory’ cetaceans, to the United Nations. It is thus quite different from the provisions in the Convention regarding the effective UN ‘ownership’ of the seabed resources beyond national jurisdictions in the so-called Area, the Common Heritage for the mining of which the UN may issue licenses.

(The late Dr John Gulland and I had the audacity to propose, many years ago, that the UN should take ownership of the Great Whales in order properly to regulate their exploitation and provide for their conservation – which the IWC was manifestly not doing – and devote the proceeds from licenses to research and compliance and, if anything was left over, to pay some of the UN’s other bills. Needless to say few took any notice of us but at least we weren’t both fired from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN in those relatively liberal days.)

Good history is not, I think about repetitions and cycles, nor about catalogues of facts and factoids. It is about not forgetting. In our case, here, about how rights are won; how they are abused or enforced; the consequences of discrimination, by religion, race (whatever that might be), ethnic identity, gender, age, level of wealth, position in a hierarchy - or species. As to the latter, the British psychologist and animal welfare and rights campaigner, Dr Richard D. Ryder, explained it well, in 1973. Ryder defined Speciesism as the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership, and wrote:

“It denotes a prejudice against non-humans based on physical differences that are given moral value. I use the word to describe the widespread discrimination that is practised by man against other species ... Speciesism is discrimination, and like all discrimination it overlooks or underestimates the similarities between the discriminator and those discriminated against.”

The American actor, theatrical producer/director, poet, novelist and pro-animal activist, Ms Phoebe Wray, has called for something similar in just three words:

Share the planet

And many of us always have another three on the tips of our tongues:

Save the Whales

More Aquatic Massacres and Holocausts

2011-08-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt compares whaling operations to other examples of trade in mammal products.

Fra il dire e il fare ce il mare

My son, Tim, reminded me of this old Italian saying when he read my promise of a moratorium on blog writing: ‘Between the saying and the doing is the ocean!’. I was thinking about patterns of killings after writing my piece on the Spice Islands a couple of weeks ago. Another Anglo-Dutch competitive-cooperative episode followed the Nutmeg caper. It was all about reaching Indonesia and Cathay (China) by ship from Northwest Europe without running the gauntlet of Portuguese and Spanish sea-power. Incomplete geography seemed to offer two possible routes, both through the Arctic region – a Northeast Passage and a Northwest one.

In 1607 Henry Hudson, a British adventurer, was employed by a consortium of merchant companies in London – including the English East India Company – to find a Northeastern route. He failed, but found an awful lot of whales, tried again, failed again, then the London companies said ‘Enough, already’. Henry them found employment with England’s merchant rivals, the Dutch East India Company, tried again (in a ship with a mixed crew of Dutch and English who couldn’t talk to each other), couldn’t make it and turned west and tried for the Northwest route. He reached the Hudson River bneary what would later become New Amsterdam – more precisely Coney island -, and went up it thinking it might lead him to China, found that it didn’t, went down to Delaware, then up to the Hudson strait that leads into Hudson Bay. His crew got fed up with this, mutinied, set Henry off to die in an open boat, and went home themselves. A few years later other British and Dutch adventurers went over and, although the riches of Cathay were enticing decided that immediate profit from furs – traded with ‘the aborigines’ – looked like a better deal. They came from many wild mammal species but eventually most profitably from beavers.

Fast forward to 1665. The Restored King of England, Charles II, had just launched the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Two French-Canadian traders, who had been dealing in beavers along the St Lawrence waterway, wanted royal approval to enter the English –controlled territory of Hudson Strait, leading into Hudson Bay, to outflank the other dealers by gaining access to the beavers around the bay. They got it. No-one knew then that the Bay’s area was as much as four million square kilometres and that it did not open, eventually, to the Pacific. The two returned to England without having found a passage to China, told the king about the abundance of furs, and he then sent his cousin Rupert of the Rhine off to what would one day be Canada, as boss of the new Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay, with monopoly powers and no territorial limitations.

The European market for beaver skins was seemingly infinite, but the beavers, though tremendously abundant, were not. The furs were used in fashionable hats and other decorative clothing and especially for the manufacture of felt. In a short time the areas along the edge of the Bay were, as they said “ beavered out”. By the mid-18^th century the Hudson Bat traders begab to move away – southward and westward of the Bay shore, having given the Cree providers the technology to operate in the frozen hinterland. Thus they came more and more in conflict with the coureurs de bois from Montreal, later the North West Company, dealing in beaver pelts further south. Eventually both companies reached the North American west coast, leaving a trail of huge ‘beavered out’ regions. At the coast they met westward traveling (New) Americans, intent on settling, farming, raising cattle and killing bison – misnamed ‘buffalo’ – for their skins. By the end of the century there were hardly any beavers left anywhere nor – by the middle of the 19^th century, many bison).

The hunting of right whales by Basques from the 13^th century followed a similar path. Beginning in the Bay of Biscay the rights were ‘whaled out’ and the hunters steadily moved further afield, eventually reaching the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and discovering cod – just in time. This could happen because of a combination of market, technology, and opportunity facilitated by the absence of law. In this case the technology was preservation of meat by a combination of air-drying and salt, applied both to the baleen whales and to the fish – baccalà, the market was the Hanseatic League of wealthy states in the Baltic region.

In the ‘modern whaling’ era, beginning in Norway in the late nineteenth century, the fin and blue whales, easily accessible from the coastal bases in Norway, were quickly ‘whaled out’. The Norwegians steadily moved down the North Atlantic, to the South Atlantic, then quickly to all other oceans and eventually to the Antarctic, where they had to accommodate themselves to the British who controlled most of the potential bases on sub-Antarctic Islands and the Peninsula. We all know what happened to those abundant whales. Here the decisive technology (apart from powered vessels and water and air pumps) was the chemistry of making soap and margerine from the oil, and later the invention of fast and compact ship-board freezers for the meat.

European exploration of the Antarctic region, driven by curiosity concerning further possibilities of colonial expansions, opened up first the fur seals of the region (for furs) and then the elephant seals (for oil) both of which were ‘sealed out’ well before the whalers arrived. Even penguins were not spared: they were made to walk up planks until they tumbled into vats of boiling water and their oil ‘harvested’. In the Arctic the right whales, spotted in vast numbers by Henry Hudson were soon ‘whaled out’, and on the Pacific side of the Arctic the huge dugong – Steller’s Sea Cow, ten-ton monsters as big as a minke whale - was discovered in 1741 by an expedition led by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering, in the employ of the Russian navy (still pining for a Northwest passage), and described and named by Bering’s resident naturalist, Georg Steller. The sea cow was exterminated within 27 years of its discovery on the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. Oil, meat and skin for leather were the prizes. Fossils show the sea-cow had once been widely distributed and numerous along the North Pacific coasts from Japan to California. A slow-moving , it had possibly been ‘over-fished’ by aboriginal subsistence hunters.

The big ‘Siren’, the sea cow, is the only marine extermination I want to mention – so far there have been few, and none other of them mammals, as far as we know for sure. But what we have in all these mentioned cases is a spreading sequence of massacres that together constitute holocausts. Some of us now are trying to stop the terminating massacres in the false name of ‘sustainable use’, those that complete the holocausts, the ‘Final Solutions’. Such local massacres, leading to near-eliminations, are sometimes described nowadays by another convenient term of fashion – ‘over-fishing’. But that is a distorted use of the phrase, which was coined in the 1930s to mean something like ’reduced to less than an optimum population which could sustain a high continuous catch’. The ‘mining’ of marine mammals doesn’t work like that. The populations are reduced until profit is negligible, the costs become too high, and/or the market contracts for whatever reason. Japanese entrepreneurs now strive to keep the whale meat market alive with an eye to a flourishing future business, and keeping the technology and associated human skills in being. The third necessary element – opportunity offered by weak or absent law or other, ethical, restraints – is in limbo. Apart from the still numerous minke whales (two or three species, in all oceans) that ‘real hunters’ could not be bothered to chase and blow-up until half a century ago, there are now just small groups surviving in a few places, and in some actually increasing again.

I am tempted here to use a phrase I have heard many times in recent days with reference to what we hope are the closing stages of the civil war in Libya: Pockets of Resistance. One of the few is the fin whales of a North Atlantic clan that continue, so stupidly, to feed near Iceland. But, to retain basic optimism about the human species it might be enough to see, day after day, the wonderful images of whales that the Asian underwater photographer, Tony Wu, sends via the Internet to his friends, recently mostly from Tonga: humpback mothers with their calves.

More Madness

2011-08-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt provides more background on mid-twentieth century whaling operations, and the shamefully unscientific positions taken by many countries at the IWC that ultimately resulted in the widespread depletion of many whale species.

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.”

Leo Tolstoy, 1897.

While the Icelanders were killing blue, fin and sei whales through the unregulated post-WWII decades, Denmark was reporting large kills, at about half of Iceland’s rate, in the same period: mostly fins and sei but also the occasional blue whale. These were actually being taken in Denmark’s colony of the Faroe Islands. All the large whales around there were soon obliterated and Faoroes whaling ended with a whimper in 1968. This illustrated the dismal history of most North Atlantic ‘modern whaling’, exemplified best by Norway, and also in, for example Shetland, the Hebrides and even Labrador. The Norwegian entrepreneurs had enormous success from land stations in the early years of the twentieth century; the local stocks were quickly exterminated and bit by bit the Norwegians moved south. By the time of WWII some stocks had evidently begun to increase or regroup, and after the war several oldland-stations were re-opened, and new ones constructed in a number of places to take advantage of the ‘recovering’ whales. They were soon closed again – except in Iceland.

While Christian Loftsson’s crews were ‘harvesting’ blue whales the pelagic whalers in the IWC were plotting to abolish the Baleen whale Sanctuary that the negotiators in 1938 (Article II of the 1938 Protocol to the 1937 Principle Whaling Agreement) and 1946 had thoughtfully designated in the Eastern Pacific sector of the Antarctic. This was an important objective for Japan from the moment it first attended the IWC in 1951. Its antagonism was perhaps understandable: Japan had not been involved in either the 1938 or 1946 negotiations, and this Pacific sector was the most easily accessible part of the Antarctic to Japanese factories; the Europeans all entered the Antarctic by way of the Atlantic, and the Soviets, at that time with only one factory, via the Black Sea, Mediterranean, Suez, Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

It had been mooted at the Cape Town meeting, in 1951, that it would be a good idea to regulate Antarctic catches by regions, mainly to reduce destructive competitions between the pelagic whaling nations. The Netherlands made the outrageous suggestion that at least it would be nice to distinguish between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres – that was one of the only sensible things said by that delegation through those sad years.

In 1952 a proposal was made to open The Sanctuary for pelagic whaling – just for a year, it was said. It was argued that this would take some whaling pressure off the beleaguered baleen whales feeding elsewhere in the Antarctic. This was considered necessary because the Commission still refused to reduce the grossly high overall Blue Whale Unit (BWU) catch limit, notwithstanding pleas by the scientists, along with their calls for limits to be set by species. South Africa said that The Sanctuary had only been designated because no whaling took place there. Others thought it was because there few whales there. The Scientific Sub-Committee was told to look into this and also to consider what to do about the declining blue whales. As a side-show Canada proposed to ban all whaling – including sperm whaling – in the Northeast Pacific, I presume as part of its strategy - shared with the USA - to keep the Japanese out of that region for fisheries (salmon and halibut) reasons; this was effectively a sanctuary proposal but not formally put forward as such and was politely ignored.

Nothing happened about The Sanctuary in 1953; everyone was too occupied with the impending fate of the blue whales. The Scientific Sub-Committee recommended in 1954 (at the sixth IWC meeting, held in Tokyo in recognition of Japan’s resurgence) that the blue whale be protected in the Antarctic and the BWU limit be reduced from 16,009 to 15,000 BWU but the latter did not fly even though all the fleets had only managed to catch 15,300 in the 1953/54 season – it was said the weather had been bad, the legal open season too short. Of course we did not know at the time that the one USSR factory ship was paying no attention at all to any of the IWC rules. In Moscow, in 1955, however The Sanctuary was reopened to pelagic whaling The two British factories, of Christian Salvesen, went there at the opening of the 1955/56 season and reaped their biggest bonanza ever. In Moscow a reduction of the Antarctic catch limit to 14,500 was proposed. voted upon, and lost. But the vote revealed yet another split among the pelagic whaling nations: Norway and USSR in favour, Japan, UK, South Africa, Panama and Netherlands against. The UK said “The position of the whaling industry should be fully taken into account and balanced with scientific requests as far as possible”. The Netherlands was more explicit: “An expensive whaling expedition cannot be operated economically if not enough whales may be caught in a given season.” Yes, indeed!

The Sanctuary was never again closed to baleen whaling. The British success confirmed the area’s potential importance especially to the Japanese operators and, eventually, to the expanded Soviet fleet operating out of Vladivostok. At the 1959 IWC meeting, under strong pressure from Japan, it was decided to extend the opening of The Sanctuary for another three years; in 1962 Japan finally got its way and The Sanctuary was abolished. Whale sanctuaries were not discussed again internationally until 1978 when IUCN decided to organize a workshop on the subject.

Next madness. In 1949, at the very first IWC meeting Norway had come up with a better idea for saving whales than designating sanctuaries or reducing catch limits. As it was inconvenient to reduce the BWU limit its Commissioner proposed that the killing of humpback whales be re-authorised in the Antarctic. Humpback hunting had been thoughtfully prohibited as a feature of the 1946 convention negotiations, because it was clearly, at the time, the most threatened of all species except those few that were already protected, such as the right whales Norway now proposed that a special species quota be set for humpbacks in order, it said, to take the whaling pressure a bit off the blues and fins. The UK and the USSR thought this was a great idea. Australia didn’t and South Africa was doubtful: “The object of the Convention is conservation”; both of them caught humpbacks at their temperate zone land stations and presumably thought the ‘relaxation’, as it was called, would diminish their own catches. The vote was 7:2 (Australia and – surprisingly - The Netherlands against, and the agreed quota was 1250 for the 1949/50 and 1950/51 seasons.. South Africa voted in favour, because it was already, since 1946/47, engaged in Antarctic pelagic whaling; its expedition killed, in 1949/50, 54 humpbacks as well as 451 blue whales.(down from 1185 in 1946/47. The total reported pelagic catch of humpbacks in 1959/50 was 2117 (70% over quota) and that didn’t even include the great number the USSR expedition did not report – it officially reported only 36 that year and zero in 1950/51. Big joke! The legalized pelagic hunting of humpbacks was not revoked and did not cease again until 1963, by which time a further 13,000 had been officially killed.

There is of course much more destructive madness to write about but these are some of the early games most people have forgotten about, if they ever knew. The farce continues in its various acts.

It's a Mad, Mad, Whaling World

2011-08-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt discusses the history of Iceland's whaling operations.

Studying history can make you weep but occasionally despair is temporarily seasoned by merriment. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” wrote Karl Marx. How true!

The Icelandic delegation to the IWC has behaved pretty obnoxiously, sometimes outright aggressively, since the country rejoined the IWC in October 2002 with a fake ‘objection’ (reservation to the commercial whaling moratorium), courtesy of the Swedish Chairman’s casting vote. But it didn’t start there.

Let’s begin with Nice Land, Iceland. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century ‘modern whaling’, Norwegian style, was a controversial subject among the population of Iceland, but eventually, in 1935 the Danish colonial Government licensed a whaling station and also decided that only Icelandic nationals could participate in whaling in the nation’s territorial waters. The company running that station went out of business in 1939. Post-war a new company was formed, Hvalur H/F - owner and General Manager then and now Mr Kristjan Loftsson - and his company converted an old US Navy base into a whaling station. Norwegians trained the Icelanders until the early 1950s.

We are all familiar these days with the revolving door between governments and corporations and the enhanced and practically universal use of that facility in Japanese business and government. As between Mr Loftsson’s operations and the Icelandic Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture it appears to be more like an open archway.

Iceland signed the ICRW 1946 in March 1947, coming into effect in November 1948. A delegation attended the first and second IWC meetings but, I suppose, because the rest of the members were wholly occupied with the real business of pelagic baleen whaling in the Antarctic, Iceland only occasionally sent delegations to the following meetings. Let sleeping dogs lie, they say. Iceland was absent from the third meeting, held in Cape Town in 1951 the first one attended by Japan - and was notable as one of the few countries that had not informed the Secretary, as requested, about its rules and administrative arrangements for the regulation of its whaling activities. Then, in one of Iceland’s absences, in Tokyo, 1954. the IWC banned the catching of blue whales in the North Pacific and North Atlantic, initially for five years. Iceland, supported by its old mother-country, objected to this in absentia (Canada, Japan, USA and USSR objected to the North Pacific ban. This possibly reflected not so much an intention to continue killing blue whales – as was Iceland’s – but the first indication that these four countries intended henceforth to ‘regulate’ whaling in that area among themselves, even if nominally within the IWC). Iceland and Denmark ultimately withdrew their objections to the blue whale ban in 1959, by the time of the IWC’s 11^th meeting, held in London, a meeting that the lawyer-historian Professor Patricia Birnie wrote of as a crucial one, because three of the five Antarctic pelagic whalers – Norway, Netherlands and Japan -had threatened to walk out of the IWC. That year the bans on killing blue whales in the Northern Hemisphere were extended for a further five years. In the decade 1948-1958 Mr Loftsson’s brave men had killed 163 blue whales at an average rate of 14/yr. They had also killed 3000 fin whales (241/yr.), 550 sei whales, 11 ‘protected’ humpbacks and 600 sperm whales.

Having finished off the blue whales Hvalur catchers went on to kill, by 1975, entirely unregulated, another 4000 fin whales (243/yr, what a coincidence!), topped up to 74 sei/yr, and exactly doubled the average annual sperm whale catches, to 99. In 1976 the New Management Procedure came into effect, supposedly setting zero or sustainable catch rates everywhere for each species. Loftsson, the Icelandic Government and its tame scientists had taken great care not to make available to the IWC the essential detailed data for whaling effort on which all NMP assessments depended. Thus there was no hard evidence that the stocks of whales accessible to Iceland had been affected by whaling, All the IWC could then do was allocate catch ‘limits’ at about the average of previous catches – with a so-called ‘safety factor’ for the fin whale - giving Mr Loftsson an average catch of 207 fin whales, 74 sei and 98 sperm whales until the commercial moratorium came into effect as from 1986. In 1986 they caught about the same number of sei whales as they had been doing before the mortorium, but generously halved the fin whale catch, all as ‘scientific specimens’.

The Icelandic scientists advising the Government and, through it, the IWC kept saying the blue whales were increasing. In the Netherlands’ pelagic whaling years the Dutch scientific adviser kept saying the fin whales in the Antarctic were increasing. And Japanese scientists insisted that minke whales were increasing in the Antarctic until, last year, the IWC’s Scientific Committee agreed that there appeared to be fewer of them around to be counted in the third six-year circumpolar sightings survey than there had been during the second one. The repeated refusal of the Scientific Committee as a whole to accept this stuff is a very good reason for insisting that if there is to be any whaling its regulation must be based on genuine international assessments - despite their possible weaknesses - adopted by consensus. The last time there was a serious effort to avoid that imperative was in the assembly by the Commissioners for the US and New Zealsnd, with the connivance of the then Chilean Chairman, of the infamous deal by which all the whaling nations would be awarded commercial catch limits for five or ten years by retaining the moratorium but circumventing it with weasel words.

The assertion that an exploitable wild population is increasing is, for the potential beneficiaries, a signal that it is time to resume its exploitation. This is as true for fin-fisheries and seals as it is for whales. The idea is that if simplistic calculations – few of which don’t deserve to be called ‘scientific’ – indicate that the resumed catches will be no more – in our modern ‘precautionary’ times a bit less - than the population can reproduce then they will be ‘sustainable’, therefore OK. But good management is about taking adequate catches, long-term, from large restored populations. Sorry I’m beginning to repeat myself. The fact is that the concepts of biological sustainability and even the search for optima, were once then reasonably clear, at least to practitioners and even to well-read lay persons. Then Mme Gro Harlem Brundtland came along with her quasi-oxymoronic ‘sustainable development’ and now sustainability has lost all meaning in the general public domain. I’ve recently heard statements about ‘sustainable car production’, sustainable mining, sustainable policies (that’ll be the day, when we can keep ‘harvesting’ policies and there will always be just as many new ones coming along), After two beautiful racehorses died recently during Britain’s dreadful Grand National I read about the coming of sustainable steeple-chasing. Oh my!

The Story of Madness will be continued.

ASW, Depletion and Extinction

2011-08-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt analyzes the history of determining appropriate catch limits in the IWC.

Many outside observers and commentators assume that when the International Whaling Commission sets a zero commercial catch limit for some whale species and putative populations it means that stock has been ‘depleted’ (A term little used by the IWC and undefined) and its existence in some way ‘threatened’. That is not so. The zero limits authorized under the New Management Procedure adopted in 1975 for ‘Protection Stocks’ has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘endangerment’. It was, and still is, an implementation of the requirement of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946 (ICRW) that the IWC act to “achieve the optimum level of whale stocks as rapidly as possible’. That can best be achieved, according to the scientists, by pausing exploitation. Exactly the same consideration applies to the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), the moratoria and the designations of ‘no take’ sanctuaries.

In 1976 the IWC decided, for better or for worse, that the overall ‘optimum’ is attained when a stock is at 60% of its original number before exploitation began, the so-called ‘carrying capacity’ or, in the SC’s quaint and faintly sexist, possibly irreligious terms, ‘virgin’. A supplementary requirement of the ICRW is that this be done in such a way as not to “cause widespread economic and nutritional distress.” As far as commercial whaling was concerned it was thought that this would be met by allowing limited whaling on stocks that were found to be somewhat less than the optimum. The decision was not to set zero limits unless the stock was more than 10% below the optimum, that is 54% of the ‘virgin’. That -10% was the subject of prolonged and rather rowdy controversy when the SC was, at a special meeting in Seattle, trying to decide how precisely to implement the Commission’s 1974 decision in principle. Naturally scientists from the whaling countries wanted the cut-off to be much more than 10% less than optimal, others had miscellaneous views; the decision was largely arbitrary, but the consequences of various options were looked at. Some countries – guess which! – said let’s do the stock assessments, then decide on the cut off, but reasonable caution and natural scepticism prevailed and the various cut-off implications were examined and agreed after simulations had been carried out (admittedly rather primitive ones, given the absence of computers at the time.)

When, very soon after that, it came to looking at Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling the ‘economic distress’ criterion was obviously irrelevant but the ‘nutritional distress’ bit obviously was relevant. So the zero threshold for those activities was shifted down to reflect perceived danger of either extinction or at least possibly irreversible further depletion.

The scientific problem was to know where was that threshold. The scientists thought they knew where was the economic optimum and could estimate it. I was one of them, and I think they were wrong on both counts. But the reality was that if we did not all agree on something there would be no regulation of commercial whaling. Pseudoscientific arguments were offered for 50%, 70%, 80% and we settled on 60%. But where does the threat of extinction loom? In a footnote in the Schedule of the ICRW the Commission has inserted an impossible task for the scientists: “On the advice of the SC (the Commission) shall establish as far as possible a minimum stock level below which whales shall not be taken” and “a rate of increase towards the MSY level (60%for each stock. These last words are unfortunate in giving, as they do, the idea that we humans can tell the whales how fast to breed, how fast to die naturally, and even how density dependent those instructions are to be. So goes international discourse.

The matter was complicated by the Commission’s decision to ask the Secretary to edit the entire ICRW Schedule to get rid of thirty years of legalistic debris. It was decided – quite wrongly, I think – to remove all references to Protected Species on the grounds that the NMP could set zero catch limits. So out of the IWC window went the protection of grey and right whales. But the protected species decisions, from 1931 on, were not about optimization commercial whaling; they were about protecting some seriously depleted species and population from the threat of extermination and if possible allowing their long-term recovery.

As to the Schedule footnote, the first thing to be said is that it reflects the fashionable obsessions with numerical stock ‘levels’ as if it does not matter whether a threatened population consists mainly of juveniles or a mixture of young and old, or whether it has a viable sex-ratio. But, even ignoring that absurdity the second thing to be said is that none of the population dynamics models or theory used by the SC contains the essential feature of any consideration of an extermination process – that is depensation: the consideration that as a population is depleted at some point the stabilizing (negative feedback) processes creating density-dependence go into reverse so that the rate of population change as the population declines further becomes negative (positive feedback) That will have very nasty consequences – not just accelerating decline but possible irreversible collapse

An aside: I have noticed that public commentators on climate change – even those working for the BBC- Goodness gracious! – are quite often using the phrase ‘negative feedback’ to mean a feedback process having negative - i.e unwanted by us, even run-away consequences. If one wants stability rather than collapse or chaos negative feedback is just the ticket. That error is even worse than another popular one: citing the speed of a ship as in ‘knots per hour’ (BBC again, sadly). Close of today’s Pedants Corner.

As to the nutritional needs of aboriginal whalers and their families and societies, approaching thresholds for total extinction is clearly not in their interest: they don’t want to go out hunting for rare animals. A rational level – if we really must go on talking about just numbers – is, I suppose, somewhere between that abundance where depensation sets in and the pretty arbitrary level set for the NMP, and which, incidentally, is more or less replicated in the high-tuning version of the RMP agreed by the IWC (but not used by those whalers – Icelandic large-type fin and Norwegian small-type minke - who now claim to be applying the RMP on a national basis. The question to be put, I suggest, is: What minimum abundance and appropriate population composition makes it worthwhile for aboriginal people to continue their traditions. And, of course, that depends on the changing state of their societies and the availability of other nutritional choices as much as it does on the whales. The subsistence whalers, and the whale-watchers, using as they sometimes do the same whale populations, need the same thing in order to continue their old and new traditions in peace if not harmony: not too few whales, not too many, but just right.

Un Piccolo Divertimento

2011-08-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

I have been mugging up on the relations in the 17^th century between the Kingdom of England, Scotland and Wales (not yet ‘United’ because Northern Ireland had not yet been ‘integrated’) and the Republic of the United Netherlands. Being a republican myself I have long been fascinated by the economic, scientific and artistic vigour of that daughter of the liberation movement of the people of the Netherlands from their Spanish and Frankish oppressors. A revolutionary republic that can produce the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, the astronomer and mathematician Christian Huygens, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who founded the science of microscopy by squinting at protozoa, can’t be all bad.

It all started with my looking up trains to Lowestoft, in Suffolk, England, where I plan to attend an ICES workshop on fish population dynamics in October. That bustling, ugly town (there are still some interesting old bits, though, with narrow lanes – scores - running down cliffs to the flats – the denes - where hundreds of Scottish fisherwomen used to pack herrings in barrels of salt for export to the Soviet Union) was not so long ago a major fishing port – herring gill-netting and plaice trawling mostly. It’s just a few miles from the beautiful little seaside town of Southwold where I lived when I worked at the famous Lowestoft Fisheries Laboratory – at least that was its name until Mrs Thatcher’s bureaucrats changed it to the un-memorable Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science and chopped its budget. Southwold was once a major port for the Royal Navy, then one stormy night its river moved – no harbour left. Southwold is now the home of Adnams brewery, makers of the best Real Beer in England, in my opinion. Off Southwold was fought, in 1672, the first great sea battle of the Third Anglo-Dutch war (The first big battle of the Second Anglo-Dutch war was fought off Lowestoft. Dutch historians say the Republic won; the British say the Anglo-French joint navy won. Whatever. One outcome was that a lot of Dutch sailors, finding themselves in the cold North Sea, swam ashore, married local English girls and built houses that look just like those in Amsterdam. I forget what the third war was all about, but the first was over the herring fisheries of the Southern Bight. Oh, yes, the second was provoked by the English because the Restored Charles II wanted his nephew William of Orange to rule the Netherlands, and the third led to William of Orange becoming King of England and the Netherlands.

So, what’s all this to do with whaling, you may reasonably ask? Pacienza!

During the century or more that the English and Dutch were sparring in the North and adjacent Seas, their Dutch East Indies and English East Indies Companies were slugging it out in the region of the spice islands, in the Moluccas, part of what is now Indonesia. The Dutch company had moved in first, aiming to secure a monopoly in the immensely valuable spice trade – nutmeg, mace, cloves and cinnamon, just like the Norwegians down in the Antarctic early in the 20^th century with their ‘modern whaling’ technique. The Dutch certainly didn’t want to share the trade with the pushy English, and many heads fell in discouragement. Basically the Dutch won and eventually the English went elsewhere. But while they were both operating in that part of the world they had a common objective of pushing out the Portuguese (who had themselves earlier pushed out the Ottoman traders), Spanish and Chinese – sound familiar: German and Japanese whalers pre-WWII, several others after it? The point was that it was essential to limit, even to reduce, spice production in order to support their high market prices in Europe. There was attempted control of whale oil production in the 1930s, controlled, at first essentially by companies, not governments. The strange thing is that while all that was going on there happened to be Japanese mercenaries around; one of them fell into Dutch hands and got very, very badly treated in ways not to be recorded in a public blog. What were they up to? Looking for whales?

One Dutch idea was to uproot all the nutmeg trees on some of the Banda islands. I suppose the Antarctic equivalent would be to decide to exterminate, say, the humpback whales, or perhaps all the species in just one Southern Ocean sector to maintain the price of oil from blue and fin whales. The spicers even had a sort of Blue Whale Unit to take account of the differing prices of various types of vegetable matter in one big spice bag. Eventually the Dutch company, which issued loans and fancy bonds and accumulated huge debts, approached bankruptcy and had to be bailed out by the immensely wealthy Republic (‘too big to fail’), a process that led fatally to the decline of the Republic and its eventual extinction. Meanwhile the English had gone elsewhere in their growing Empire and planted spice trees on some of the nicest warm islands – nutmeg on Grenada and Zanzibar, cinnamon on Mahé, Seychelles. Sound familiar again? The Seychelles colony also did very nicely with vanilla, but that came from an orchid unique to Mexico. One neat territorial exchange at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch war was that the Dutch got the nutmeg island of Run and the English got New Amsterdam and renamed it New York. Unscrupulous Connecticut traders were said to whittle fake nutmeg nuts out of hard wood. Such ingenuity has Homo sapiens economicus.

Ah, yes, I now remember: Lowestoft is famous not only for its kippers but also for its fine porcelain – technology brought by the Navy from China - and as the birthplace of one of England’s best modern music composers – Benjamin Britten.

Let's take a look at ASW

2011-08-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt analyzes aboriginal subsistence whaling (ASW) in the context of the IWC.

The IWC gathering in Panama next June is likely to be dominated by consideration of so-called aboriginal subsistence catch and strike limits for Denmark, Russia, St Vincent and Grenadines and the United States., even though for most of us the agenda items on the participation of civil society and the South Atlantic Sanctuary are far more important (Thank goodness we don’t have to deal with any pretence by Iceland that its illegal hunt for fin whales is for ‘subsistence’, though its whalers are at least ‘aboriginal’ in the sense that the place is thought to have been uninhabited before the Norsemen colonised it). Japan will surely, as usual, try to use this farce to squeeze ‘concessions’ especially from the US, and if by chance it decides – for economic, logistic and political reasons not to go down to the Antarctic this coming season to collect scientific samples then we can be sure it will demand a quid pro quo for making such a sacrifice – probably the long-sought legitimization of coastal minke hunts in the Northwest Pacific.

We must hope that the inter-governmental consultations to take place before the Panama meeting to decide what is a quorum in the IWC will have been fruitful, but I wouldn’t bet on it. One legalistic point of practical interest is that in agreeing to a Convention parts of which can be amended by vote of members participating in a meeting, and without specifying in the primary text a quorum, the negotiators opened a way in which a formal treaty can be modified by a minority of the Parties to it. In the early days of the IWC, even when there were far fewer member states than now, several Parties failed to turn up at some annual meetings. Although in browsing through old Verbatim Records of Plenary Sessions (after they became available; for many years they were ‘classified’) I did not find challenges to the Chairman’s call to vote regarding a quorum, but some successful binding votes were surely taken by a minority of Parties.

As I noted in a previous blog the existence of aboriginal subsistence whaling was explicitly recognized – and permitted by being exempted - in Article 3 of the 1931 Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, but limited to operations using neither powered vessels nor firearms, and from which products could not be transferred to ‘third persons’. This exemption disappeared from the 1937 International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling. That Agreement is applicable, however, only to factory ships, land stations and catchers, and ‘catchers’ are defined specified types of ‘ships’. But the subsistence whaling that anybody knew about was carried out by boats, not ships, even though by then there were aboriginals with powered boats and firearms. So an upgraded form of ASW was not regulated by that Agreement and aborigines were not prohibited from killing grey and right whales and their calves and lactating females.

The 1946 ICRW had the same lack of specific reference to ASW, and the same protective regulations, but – crucially – now, in the new part of the instrument – the Schedule – which could be amended by the IWC rather than by a diplomatic conference of all Parties as before. However, at the very end of the 1946 negotiating conference the Soviet delegate, Dr Alex Bogdanov, reminded everyone that grey whales were being caught off eastern Siberia by a catcher – a ship - on behalf of the aboriginals, since they used to catch right whales until European and American whaling fleets massacred them, and greys were too dangerous to hunt with local boats. Thus that subsistence whaling for aboriginals would be prohibited by the new convention. The solution was to insert a special provision, an exemption, in the launch Schedule. And there it remained. Aboriginals elsewhere continued unhindered to kill whales for subsistence from boats. Alex later became a good friend during the UN Technical Conference on the Law of the Sea held at FAO HQ in Rome in 1955, at which I was a member of the Secretariat and he one of the two in the USSR delegation. My wife Judy, who liked giving parties for visiting diplomats and scientists, persuaded Alex and his co-Delegate, Dr Peter Moiseev, to teach us all how to perform ‘Cossack’ dances; I remember that the Japanese delegation, practiced in the kind of dancing geishas do with their customers, were quite good at that. Although I was not dragged into the whaling issue until five years later, I learned from him a lot about Soviet attitudes towards inter-governmental fisheries research and management organisations. I was also intrigued to learn that the huge Soviet fisheries research organisation, VNIRO, headquartered in Moscow, was managed by two co-Directors (then Bogdanov and Moiseev, both eminent internationally respected marine scientists) who alternated administrative responsibility and research time. That seemed an admirable arrangement.

But I digress. The mess that began in the mid-1970s arose directly from the adoption of the New Management Procedure (NMP), in 1975. All whale ‘stocks’ and species had to be classified and awarded either a positive or a zero catch limit. One right whale, the bowhead, was still being hunted by US nationals, aborigines in Alaska. The IWC Scientific Committee, assessing that stock and concluding it was depleted under the NMP rules, and proposed – as they had to - a zero catch limit which, if applied, would end American subsistence whaling in the Arctic. Some participants thought the simple solution would be to ignore this and simply let the US Government act by setting a catch limit for its nationals. That would, however, have opened the door to other IWC Members unilaterally giving their nations special catch limits, possibly with other rationales than preserving aboriginal rights. Since hardly any delegations wanted the NMP to bring to an end at least that particular subsistence whaling the solution would be to relax the NMP provision that the limit would be zero if the stock was assessed to be below its original number, whatever that might have been. (A side-show was that the SC had under-estimated the current numbers. The Alaskan whalers pointed out that many of the bowheads spent time under the ice, unseen by scientists – they knew that from the bumps in the ice surface caused by the re-freezing of breathing.holes made by the submerged whales bumping their hard heads).

Unfortunately this ‘solution’ had other, maybe unforeseen, consequences, as is the way of the world. No one thought much anymore about the means by which subsistence whaling was carried out, nor try to legislate that the products would not enter commerce; all the attention was given to the meaning of ‘local consumption’, the unfortunate, undefined phrase slipped into the 1946 Schedule – hopefully to keep a check on the USSR. Later, Greenpeace and others revealed that at least some of the products –‘only the offal’, the Russians said – were being consumed locally, by captive foxes) Some whaling countries argued that the phrase meant ‘within the national territory’. Denmark went a bit further, justifying the export of ‘subsistence’ products to the mainland from Greenland on the grounds that Greenlanders attending college in Copenhagen ‘needed’ their normal diet. ’Need’ was a key word in deciding, in cases qualifying for the aboriginal relaxation of the NMP, just what the catch limit would be – and, later, what species would be included. I remember in those days being served a fine minke steak in a Copenhagen restaurant, and I swear I could not have been mistaken for a hungry Greenlandic student even if I had been wearing a seal-skin jacket.

Unfortunately the implementation of the decision to replace the NMP by something better – as was sorely needed by the 1980s – made matters worse. The aboriginal subsistence exemptions could not easily be fitted into the new rules, and the Commission did not even instruct the Scientific Committee, in developing those, to try to do so. Instead the Committee was told to embark on specifying an entirely new procedure just for subsistence whaling, and that has since then taken up a great deal of scientists’ time. In the meanwhile the Commission abandoned the pretence that these engaged in ‘subsistence whaling’ were necessarily ‘aboriginals – the whalers in St Vincent and Grenadines killing humpback whales are descendents of the colonists who exterminated the aborigines!

The Kingdom of Tonga gives me a nice example with which to end this little history. I visited the islands years ago with Dr Paul Spong to present to the King a painting of a humpback whale by Larry Foster, a well-known artist in California; I hope it’s still hanging in the Royal Palace. The monarch wanted an end to humpback whaling in his realm. The whaling was conducted by men in the Cook family, descendents of a cabin boy who absconded from a British sperm and right whaler in the nineteenth century. Paul and I drank a fiery coconut liqueur with these nice people, whose front door was framed by the jaw-bones – or maybe it was the ribs - of a very large humpback. Tonga was not then a Party to the ICRW 1946. They have since stopped and their ‘whaling’ now is running one of several whale-watching enterprises for tourists. The family cannot, of course, be pure aboriginals. Now I would wonder if it would be appropriate for someone in the IWC to propose that DNA swabs be taken to determine true aboriginality: the IWC could maintain a database of those who are allowed to kill whales for subsistence, local consumption, etc...

The US Federal Government spends quite a lot of money on scientific research on Arctic whales the results of which are used to justify whatever are deemed to be subsistence ‘needs’, but which are valuable in themselves. The Danish Government, on the other hand does very little. The shame of the essential irrationality of discussions about the regulation of subsistence whaling is that they are surrounded and contaminated by other considerations that have little if anything to do with either whaling or subsistence. By far the worst case is that of Greenland where it is now permissible to kill minke, fin and humpback whales (I doubt that any real subsistence whaler would be able successfully to hunt, in Arctic waters, the huge, nimble and negatively buoyant fin whales, by ‘traditional’ methods, although a few islanders in Indonesia (not a Party to the ICRW 1946) still know how to do it, in the tropics from motor-less, gun-free catamarans. But then some of the Greenlanders are using ships for their hunts rather than the skin kayaks shown in the tourist brochures.

One problem we now face has almost nothing directly to do with whaling but a lot to do with Denmark’s relationship with its partially-self-governing colony. Denmark needs Greenland as an extremely important window to the warming, eventually largely ice-free, Arctic Ocean, as well as some control over the newly opening Northwest Passage. The European Union needs Denmark as its window to the Arctic, because the one Sweden offers is narrow and inconvenient. The European Union countries Parties to the ICRW 1946 have for years had problems with Denmark’s pro-whaling policy, which has gone far beyond merely upholding the interests of Greenlanders. For the moment I’ll keep to myself my guesses as to how the new developments will affect the positions of the EU members as a putative bloc in the IWC.

Prohibitions and Permissions

2011-08-24T10:07:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt summarizes the history of the shift from permitting whaling to prohibiting whaling.

The approaches by companies and governments to the problems of facilitating the ‘orderly’ conduct of the whaling industry, ensuring its future if possible, and conserving the whale resources for the sake of human society and for their own sake, have evolved through the century of existence of ‘modern whaling’ with powered vessels and cannon firing harpoons. The ideological and procedural evolution has been from a dominance of everything is permitted except that which is prohibited to everything is prohibited except that which is permitted. Negotiation of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) in 1946 marks roughly a time of transition.

This is evident from the references in Article V.1 that define what the International Whaling Commission (IWC) can and cannot do. It is empowered to adopt regulations (a) to ‘fix’ both protected and unprotected species; (b) both open and closed seasons: (c) both open and closed waters including the designation of sanctuary areas. Other provisions are mostly permissive: (e) fix the times and methods of whaling, (f) fix types and specifications of gear, apparatus and appliances which may be used. In practice most regulations draw on two or all three of the a-b-c permissions/prohibitions, and even also on d and/or e – such as not killing humpback whales in a certain area and at a certain time, and not using factory ships.

The basically one dimensional Prohibition measures that have continued in one form or another for most of the IWC’s history are for (a) – Protected Species and something not originally provided for specifically: the protection of calves, sucklings and mothers accompanied by calves., and sexually immature animals, although this was mostly in practice referred as (d) : body size limits, that were always in place for all species except the minke whale.

All right whales were designated as Protected in the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1931 of the League of Nations. This convention applied only to baleen whales , and whaling by aboriginals for subsistence was specifically excluded from its provisions. .The definition of such whaling was, however, quite different from what it is legally taken to mean today – no motorized vessels or firearms could be used, and products could not be sold or traded with third persons. The area to which the convention applied was defined as “all waters of the world, including the high seas and territorial and national waters”. At that time nations that were in a position to declare territorial Seas all held to a three nautical mile zone, as defined in 1702 by the Dutch Jurist Cornelius Bynkershoek on the basis of a calculation by an Italian, Ferdinand Galiami, of the parabolic trajectory of a cannonball. I presume that ‘national waters’ here means ‘internal waters’, that is those waters landward of the baseline from which the territorial sea is established. They differ from the territorial waters in that no ‘innocent passage’ by foreign-flagged ships is tolerated through them.

The next instrument, the International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling (1937) added the grey whale as a protected species. There are other fundamental changes. It applied also to sperm whales, it applied both to factory ships and catchers based at land stations but it defined the area to which it applied as: “all waters in which whaling is prosecuted by factory ships and by catchers”. I think the simplification of this formulation probably resulted from the fact that the three-mile limit was no longer universal; the range of defensive shells had long surpassed that of cannonballs and several states were already interested to extend their defensive zone to six or even twelve. It is important, however, to bear in mind that such extensions did not normally signal a special interest in the actual coastal waters except with respect to navigation, customs controls and so on; they remained defensive.

The same phrases define the geographical competence of the IWC under the ICRW 1946. But, in fact, there is a universal assumption that it applies to all places where whales are to be found – or at least where whaling has been prosecuted at some time – regardless of whether whaling is now being prosecuted there. Naturally, the huge extensions of national jurisdictions that have been claimed and, mostly, recognized, – up to 200 nautical miles and in many cases beyond that – have made this universal definition of competence difficult to sustain, or rather it can only be sustained by a different argument. The extended jurisdictions have less to do with coastal security than defining areas of direct economic and social interest to the coastal states. The spokespersons of some states – I particularly have in mind Iceland and Norway – behave as if the whales in their EEZs belong to those states, even though they are party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea which classes all the whales (indeed practically all the marine cetaceans) as Highly Migratory Species the exploitation and conservation of which are the responsibility of competent inter-governmental organizations in cooperation with coastal states. Such deliberate mis-representation of their status plagues all efforts to secure a future for the whales and, for that matter, the whaling and the whale-watching industries. In the days of 3nm (now 12nm) territorial limits virtually all modern whaling took place on the High Seas. Practically all whaling and, I think, all whale-watching, now takes place in areas of national jurisdiction except in the Antarctic, where the Antarctic Treaty has put all national claims on hold and where factory ships continue to operate offshore collecting ‘scientific specimens’, and in contradiction of the decision by the IWC in 1979 to prohibit all pelagic whaling except for minke whales. In any revision of the ICRW 1946 these big changes in views about ownership of marine resources and freedom of the sea surely have to be taken fully into account.

The ability to declare their EEZs as off limts to whalers is, of course, a double-edged sword; whaling nations such a Iceland are ready to welcome whaling in their jurisdictions regardless of the internationally-declared status of the whales temporarily within them.

The protection of immature whales had been removed from the application of the 1937 Agreement.. This is not surprising as throughout the 1940s the average lengths of blue, fin and humpback whales in catches had been declining and it is sure that an increasing proportion of immature whales were being taken either deliberately or unintentionally. However minimum size limits were now set (blue 70 feet, fin 55 ft, humpback and sperm 35 ft) and at the time these were thought to approximate to the average size of attainment of maturity – in the case of the sperm whale presumably of the females; the crucial difference in this species between puberty and effective sexual activity then being unknown.

In 1937 two entirely new provisions were introduced, having very important implications for us now because they were taken practically unchanged into the ICRW 1946. One was the prohibition of factory ships in the Southern hemisphere operating north of 40ºS; the other the unqualified freedom of any Party to issue special permits for its nationals to kill any whales for scientific purposes. This last was to allow the killing of Protected Species and also protected stages such as juvenile whales and calves as well as in plaees out of bounds to certain types of commercial whaling operations. The former measure was not to designate a vast protected area in a back-handed way – although later commentators said it gave some protection to whales on their breeding areas (so long, I suppose, as they kept well away from land stations) – but to minimize interference between the factory ships and the land stations outside the Antarctic.

The 1937 Agreement went further than the 1931 Convention in trying to ensure that dead whales were fully utilized, with distinction between the rules for oil production and production of commodities for direct human or animal consumption (The 1931 conventionsaid that at land stations “adequate arrangements shall be made for utilizing the residue after the oil has been extracted”.)

It is, I think, worth noting that the 1939 Agreement had the double purpose of seeking “to secure the prosperity of the whaling industry and, for that purpose, to maintain the stock of whales” – conservation clearly being for one economic and social purpose. (No ‘purpose’ is specified in the 1931 convention). The objective as stated in the Preamble to the ICRW 1946 is subtly different; it seeks ‘orderly development’ rather than ‘prosperity’; perhaps they had already given up hope of long-term profit. More cynical observers were later inclined to think the IWC’s objective was to effect the orderly run-down of the whaling industry instead of a chaotic extinction.

An important Protocol to the 1937 Agreement was adopted in June 1938. One new idea was to allow land stations to apply shorter minimum size limits than had been generally provided before (blue 65 ft, fin 50 ft, sperm 30 ft) “provided the meat is to be used for local consumption as human or animal food”.) The other was to prohibit factory ships from taking baleen whales south of 40ºS from 70ºW westward to 160ºW, initially for a period of two years. Although it was not called so at the time this was what later was labelled The Sanctuary. A protocol of June 1938 extended this prohibition for another two years. This was signed by practically all countries engaged in whaling except Japan and Portugal, as was the 1937 Agreement itslf. Although the prohibition was of factory ships there were no land stations in those latitudes, nor physical possibility of their being set up in future (And, of course, no ‘aborigines’ bent on killing whales). In fact the absence of safe harbours and necessary freshwater supplies in these latitudes was one of the incentives to develop factory-ships; the other was to escape taxes and license fees imposed by the British authorities At the time some delegates were unsure whether their countries had the power to make such declarations regarding parts of the High Seas and, if they could, whether they could enforce the regulation. They went home pledged to talk to their governments about this but WWII interrupted such legal debate.

A protocol of March 1946 introduced a new idea: a limit of not more that 10 catches per factory ship. At the same time the season limits were greatly widened; this was of course a response to the post-war world shortage of fats and oils.

The protection of baleen whales in sectors of the Antarctic (Areas I and VI in IWC terms adopted in the 1938 Protocol was written into the Schedule of the 1946 Convention and the area labeled as The Sanctuary. That was the first time the term had been used in formal international instruments since the League of Nations Report of 1930. It had, however, been used in national legislation concerning whales: that of the authorities of Western Australia before World War I, to protect what were thought to be breeding grounds from the operations of catchers based at land stations in the region of Albany and Norwegian Bay. Evidently the rationale for this was entirely different from that in the 1938 Protocol and the 1946 Convention, which was to give some protection to whales that were moving latitudinally through their extensive feeding grounds. The Sanctuary was opened to whaling in 1954, at first temporarily and then permanently.

A protocol to the 1937 Agreement dated 15 June 1944 for the first time specified a limit to the permitted catch of baleen whales by factory ships in the Antarctic south of 40ºS during the first post-war season (1944(45) of 16,000 Blue Whale Units (BWUs), defined as one blue whale or two fin whales or 2.5 humpbacks or 6 sei whales. This provision, which was calculated as about two-thirds of the pre-war average reported catch, was extended to the 1946/47 season by the Protocol of November 1945, and then into the ‘launch’ Schedule of the 1946 Convention.

By 1943 the British and Norwegians were already planning their post-war resumption of Antarctic pelagic whaling. They had two questions to answer: how to prevent any other countries re-engaging in this industry, and how to share the production between the two of them – for this latter they had two formulae but both awarded Britain a bit less than 50% of the oil and Norway correspondingly more. They did manage, by various ploys, to stop Sweden, Argentina, Germany and Italy but as is well known failed as far as Japan was concerned, thanks to General McArthur. They tried but failed to stop the Netherlands (after all it had the powerful and immensely wealthy Unilever Corporation behind it). They could of course not do much about the USSR.

In all the discussions among companies before the war the BWU had been the bargaining chip for agreement on company quotas. Although it was based on oil production the ratios among species was changed from time to time in accordance with variations in oil production methods and sources; the overall recovery rate did not exceed for a long time about 80%. The starting point was an estimate of 110 barrels of oil (six barrels equal to one ton) from a blue whale. The rigid BWU system was biased when the average sizes of blue and then fin whales declined before later whaling had much effect on the sei whales; it was wildly wrong when production preferences moved from oil to meat: six sei whales produce much more, and better, meat than one blue whale. That production change helped ensure the rapid demise of the sei whale stocks.

Returning now to the permission-prohibition shift it is worth looking at the evolution of attempts to change the basic management principles after the UN intervention of 1972. The New Management Procedure (NMP) of 1974-75 dangerously straddled the two ideologies. It said that every stock must be classified and on that basis each of them would be awarded a zero or a non-zero catch limit for the coming year. But that flew in the face of the ICRW 1946 decision rules that commonly led to no decision being taken, or the decision taken being objected to by the Parties, thus nullifying the decision. This had also plagued the pre-1972 arguments: several times there was no agreement on a BWU total and it was unclear whether that meant the limit of last year would apply, or there was no limit or (very rarely! the default limit must be zero. By the late 1970s, nearly all the stocks that had not been declared ‘protected’ under the NMP because they had been found to be depleted, were ‘unclassified’, with arbitrary non-zero catch limits. The RMP was designed to change that, fundamentally. Catch limits would be zero unless non-zero was scientifically justified, with adequate and automatic precautionary rules. If a whaling country was exploiting a stock with a non-zero limit, and did not produce the required survey and other data, the limit would automatically be reduced and then default to zero. The result is clear: all commercial whaling is prohibited until a specific exception can be justified under rigorous rules.

Sanctuaries do that, except that they stay closed at least until scientific research shows that all depleted stocks in them have recovered and damaged ecosystems have restored themselves.

When the Republic of Seychelles moved in 1979 to have the IWC declare the Indian Ocean as a sanctuary in accordance with Article V.1(c) of the ICRW 1946 it also declared its own huge, newly declared, EEZ as a protected area for all cetaceans and also marine mammals generally – in case there were any dugongs surviving there - and it encouraged all other Indian Ocean coastal states to do likewise; some did. The Seychelles proposal was intended to protect those sub-populations of whales that feed, migrate through and breed in the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Hemispheret. However, a political compromise to obtain the necessary votes terminated the sanctuary at 55ºS; this was only corrected when the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary (SOWS) was declared fifteen years later. We now have the unexpected situation in which all the ‘IWC whales’ are protected (insofar as the IWC can offer protection) in their feeding areas, and some of them also on their main migratory paths and on breeding grounds. All this is rough and ready because we know that not all whales breed every year in the same ocean sector – and very recently we learned - to everyone’s surprise - that some of them occasionally venture into the Northern Hemisphere.

Adoption of the Brazil-Argentina proposal that the IWC designate the South Atlantic as a sanctuary would protect more of them en route and when feeding. I think this is especially important because it is in the southern Atlantic sector of the southern hemisphere that intensive modern whaling, by factory ships and from sub-Antarctic island land stations as well as land-stations in South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina had the greatest impact on whale populations and caused the deepest depletion, only surpassed when the pelagic fleets moved into the Indian Ocean, both from their North Atlantic and their North Pacific bases.

Brazil, Argentina and Chile have all declared their EEZs closed to whaling. The proposed new sanctuary reaches the South American and African coasts and would be contiguous with the SOWS. Brazil includes its EEZ as within the proposed IWC sanctuary but Argentina, Chile and others would havee the right to decide later whether to do likewise. In any case protection by coastal states may go well beyond the species limitations at present operated by the IWC, as well as prohibiting also the transport of dead whales and whale products through their waters. The Brazil-Argentine proposal rightly takes a long-term view of conservation and protection: it provides for review after twenty years and every ten years thereafter. All the indications are that it will, if voted on in Panama next year, attract a bigger simple majority than it has in previous years, and have a good chance of binding adoption by a three-fourths majority, bearing in mind that abstentions do not count in IWC voting and several countries are likely to ‘abstain’ or tactically absent themselves if the desired consensus is not reached.

CITES - Better Still

2011-08-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

My good friend Peter Puerschel, who has been attending the CITES Standing Committee meeting in Geneva about which I wrote, ‘observing’ on behalf of IFAW, has clarified and put me right on a few things. Peter is always meticulous and prompt.

Norway changed its vote to favouring transparency, on a Point of Order, saying its delegate had not understood what was going on. That reminded me of an occasion long ago when I was attending a huge conference in FAO in Rome, when the delegate for Ecuador stood up, waving his arms at the interpreters all in their little boxes, shouting “When I say ‘no’, I mean ‘yes’ ”. Pandemonium! Two hours of procedural debate. Changing your mind publicly is a no-no in inter-governmental discourse and getting permission to do so normally requires itself a two-thirds majority vote. The delegate of Ecuador could, and did, try to blame the interpreters, but Norwegian diplomats – and even Norwegians generally - usually speak English better than most Brits. That excuse won’t wash this time.

Anyway the revised CITES vote was more than satisfactory. Only two others now favoured the Kuwaiti move – Dominica and Botswana (A real pity about Dominica; they have been quite good in the IWC lately). The Latin Americans who had supported Kuwait – Colombia and Costa Rica - abstained this time, along with three others including Japan. Roll call was 3:8 and the NGO observers were allowed back inside.

Peter clarified that the membership of the Standing Committee is 15 and they represent regional blocs, but delegates from many other Parties to CITES were attending, without votes.

This matter of transparency will be a major item at next year’s meeting of the IWC. Action on a UK proposal strongly supporting more transparency, presented in Jersey last July, was postponed in order to break a deadlock over the perhaps more pressing matter of stopping the corruption arising from some countries paying their IWC dues in bundles of cash or cheques drawn on private bank accounts. We all know what will be Japan’s position on transparency – it is even opposed to translucency - but it will be interesting to see what Colombia and Costa Rica do. Will they break from the Buenos Aires Group (BAG) consensus in favour of transparency?

Up the Norse!

2011-08-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt provides information on the topic of transparency in international meetings, which can sometimes be hard to come by.

It is nice to be able to write something good about Norway. Let me explain.

A few days ago the Standing Committee (31 pf 175 Parties) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was discussing the threats to elephants from the ivory trade, involving especially China. Kuwait proposed that representatives of ‘Civil Society' (code for NGOs) be excluded from the room. A vote was taken, giving seven votes to Kuwait’s proposal and six against, with two abstentions – a half of the members of the Committee didn’t show up, apparently. The NGO Observers were thrown out. This naturally caused a huge row, on a matter of principle. That led to another voting round, and apparently Norway changed its position from ‘throw out the NGOs’ to ‘let them back in’, and several more countries abstained. In trooped the observers, smiles all around.

I have no idea why Norway shifted. Maybe the delegate was told by Oslo that ‘This very democratic country supports transparency’. Or he – or maybe a she – had doubts, couldn’t sleep, suffered a crisis of conscience...Qui sa?

Several things about that event are more worrying. The Latin American members of the Standing Committee voted with Kuwait, against transparency, yet the same Latin Americans in the International Whaling Commission say they strongly favour transparency and NGO involvement.

Anyway, in the IWC we are used to the weirdness of Norway’s voting actions. – like its invention of the position of ‘not abstaining but not voting’. I have yet to find any old hand who understands the difference. But my hope is that if and when the Latin Americans’ proposal for a South Atlantic whale sanctuary is voted upon in Panama next June Norway will have the sense to break from Japan’s demeaning stranglehold, and deep hatred of what the IWC calls ‘closed waters’, and support it.

Norwegians As Whalers: Once Like The Parson’s Egg – Good In Parts; Now Wasteful, Deceitful And Apparently Unprincipled.

2011-08-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

Norwegians, having invented ’Modern Whaling’, and sharing a near monopoly with Britain in the Antarctic in the 1930s and late 1940s, led in proposing rules that they claimed were to promote conservation. That was partly true though, as ever, the other driver was profit, and measures to limit the catches of blue, fin, humpback and sei whales in the Antarctic were driven by a need to limit production of whale oil in order to support its price. They ultimately failed largely because new arrivals Japan and Germany wouldn’t play, and other – fish and vegetable – sources of oil for margarine production were arriving.

Norwegian companies, and eventually their Government, advocated the full utilization of the carcasses of killed whale and required, for example, that factory-ships carry equipment for extracting oil from the skeleton and muscle (before whale meat became a viable commodity) as well as from the oil-rich blubber, and that the muscle be reduced to marketable ‘meal’. Some of the Norwegians also wanted to end the use of dead blue whales as buoys and ships’ fenders.

Current Norwegian hunting for the ‘small’ minke whales in the North Atlantic is about the most wasteful form of ‘modern’ commercial whaling ever. ‘Small’ is a misnomer – each whale weighs up to ten tons. The industry and Government like to call this ‘small-type whaling’, which conjures up the image of brave little boats operating close to shore. No way! S-TW is defined as killing any of a short list of ‘small’ whale species (bottlenose whales, pilot whales, white whales, as well as minke) using powered vessels and cannon-fired harpoons with explosive heads. These operations used to take place throughout the North Atlantic Ocean, up to thousands of miles from home ports. Now, because of extensions of national jurisdiction by Canada, Denmark (Greenland) and others it is limited to the Northeast and Central North Atlantic, including the Arctic.

It is mostly ‘pelagic’ whaling, which is defined not by where it happens, such as in the open ocean, but by where the whales are processed – on board a vessel rather than on shore. There are two kinds of pelagic whaling. One kind uses large factory ships onto which dead whales can be hauled – up an open stern ramp these days, the whales having been chased and killed by a group of fast, armed catcher boats, collectively forming what the whalers have always called ‘an expedition’. The other kind of pelagic whaling employs only catchers, larger than those attached to expeditions and constructed in such a way that the dead whales can be hauled into deck over the side, where the prime meat is butchered and the rest of the carcass slid back to the sea to feed the sharks and crabs or simply to rot. When their huge ‘expedition’ industry in the Antarctic failed, in the 1970s, Norwegian operators tried this extremely wasteful form of whaling in the Antarctic, to continue supplying Japan’s whale-meat market, but that failed, economically and for operational deficiencies.

In 1972 Norway, its delegation guided by a fine scientist who later became head of the famous Marine Research Institute in Bergen, voted in favour of the UN proposal for a 10-year moratorium on all commercial whaling. Naturally they backed away from that when the idea was put to the IWC, where the aggressive Ministry of Fisheries prevailed. A decade later the IWC itself voted for a moratorium, from which the Government opted out by registering an ‘objection’. When the IWC’s moratorium came into force in 1986, Norway – which was by now out of the Antarctic, I think for ever - paused briefly its ‘small-type’ killing of minke’s in the North Atlantic, did a little ‘scientific’ whaling’, in the style with which we are familiar through Japan’s much larger operations in the Antarctic and North Pacific, but then resumed full-scale commercial minke whaling. Why? Before the end of the Antarctic operations the pelagic whalers had become engaged mainly in producing frozen meat, mostly for the Japanese market, and the smaller scale North Atlantic operations were also largely serving that profitable market. However, decisions under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) were now impeding export and import of whale meat, even though the whaling nations could – and, mostly, did – register ‘Reservations’, similar to the IWC ‘Objections’.

However, domestic politics was the real name of the game. The Labour Party politician, Gro Harlem Brundtland, wanted to be Prime Minister of Norway as well as pursue her later famous global ’environmental’ game through the UN processes. To do that she needed a few votes from the north of her country. The whalers gave them to her. In 1985 the scientists at the Bergen Institute had treacherously gone along with the view of the rest of us in the IWC Scientific Committee that the minke whakes in the NE Atlantic were depleted and ripe for protection – zero catch limit until recovered.. The Commission agreed. Mrs Brundtland punished her scientists then by moving responsibility for scientific advice to the IWC to the Statistical Institute in Oslo, where her friend Dr Lars Walløe was a biggish cheese, and who set up a rump ‘international’ panel of ‘independent’ scientists to demolish the Scientific Committee’s work. They failed, but never mind, Norway could continue whaling under its objections both to the Protection Stock classification and the moratorium.

This all looked rather bad for Norway, a country with a good moral and scientific reputation to protect – and Gro Harlem trying to construct her ‘Green’ reputation – so it was announced that its whaling under objections would be conducted under the rules set by the IWC’s Revised Management Proceudure (RMP), which had been accepted by the Commission but not yet implemented because they couldn’t agree on measures, such as international inspectors and penalties for transgressions, to ensure compliance with the rules. That was OK for a couple of years but then there was agitation from the whalers and engaged politicians for bigger catchers. So Lars’ crowd began to ‘modify’ the RMP to provide higher catch limits, but inevitably – of course – at higher risk of accidental further stock depletion. ‘So it goes’, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote pungently wrote in Slaughterhouse Five.

Dr Walløe even went so far as to let one of his clever hired hands go off on a sabbatical leave to write something to show that my scientific work – which, let me now admit it, was behind the 1985 decision to protect the minke whales – was faked, me being ‘a radical conservationist’. The extraordinary thing was that this gentleman began by trying to discredit the scientific adviser to the Dutch delegation who, in the 1960s, thought that the depletion of all species in the Antarctic, then collapsing rapidly, was grossly exaggerated. So, said our Norwegian friends, the Dutchman was merely, and corruptly, serving with his opinions the Dutch Government, which was struggling to get sufficiently high catch limits set to keep its one pelagic expedition in business. So I must have been behaving in the same way but in the opposite direction. It did not seem to occur to him that he could equally be accused of playing the game of which he accused me and the long-gone Dutchman, because everything he wrote supported the official Norwegian position on whaling|

Norway, once the most progressive and perceptive of the big whaling nations, now opposes the wishes of all the Latin American nations, members of the IWC, for the South Atlantic to be declared a whale sanctuary. Norway has, I’m sure, no interest in resuming whaling in the temperate and tropical South Atlantic; it was last there before the first World War. So this opposition is purely ideological. Yet when the declaration of international whale sanctuaries was first proposed in the League of Nations, in 1930, Norway was enthusiastic for them. I fear that at least five of its great marine scientists, all once holders of very senior positions and all held in great esteem, globally – Fridtjof Nansen (Oceanography and Arctic exploration), Johan Hjort (all fields of marine science and more), Gunnar Rollefsen (cod and more), Johan Ruud (whales and more), Gunnar Saetersdal (fishes, whales, oceanography and very much more) are sitting in heaven wondering whatever happened to their once intellectually vigorous and progressive country.

Compassion and the Need for It

2011-08-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

One death: Harry Lillie’s account.

“Southern Harvester was at Leith harbour, South Georgia. Her sister, Southern Venturer, [The two Salvesen factories - SJH] was making ready ‘to travel through the Straits of Magellan, to spend six weeks hunting sperm whales off Peru, in the plankton- and fish-rich Humboldt Current. It is the haunt of the small female Sperms with their young as well as the big males, and where these creatures have been seen to gather round a stricken harpooned comrade regardless of their own safety.’ Jack Flynn, one of the electricians, is speaking from his armchair. ‘Well, Doc, there won’t be many more years of Caronda [Mount Caronda overlooks S. Georgia – SJH] or South Georgia if this whale-killing goes on the way it is. As many wasted this year as ever, left out to rot with flags stuck in them. It’s wicked, but each factory is worse than the next. Those folk that attend whaling conferences should come right down here and see for themselves, but they just take anybody’s word for what goes on. ,…And wait, Doc, till you see what happens to whaling now the Blues are getting more scarce. They’ll bawl to be allowed to kill humpbacks again, but kick like hell at the suggestion of your ten years of protection for the Blues. I tell you, they’re oil mad.’”

It is hard and painful to compress Lillie’s blow by blow description of a hunt for fin whales, but I’ll try. They see a school of fin whales, feeding. “While still a mile away we dropped to half-speed for engine vibration would quickly scare them. But they seemed to sense something strange and disappeared for three minutes, to come up farther to port. They were still not running away but had stopped feeding.…It is a thrilling sight to see great whales at this close range. As we closed in one whale came up fast, broke surface with the whole head and lower jaw out of the water almost in the foam of our bow wave; too close in for the gun to be trained. Our next one broke surface ahead and slightly to port at thirty yards range. The only reasonable target was the back and the side, as he arched himself and paused an instant on the dive. Again the crash of the gun, and this time with a horrible sickening slap the heavy 160-pound harpoon disappeared in the creature’s side, followed a couple of seconds later by another as the grenade head burst inside. – ‘fast fish’ – The great animal quivered at a stop for two or three seconds, when I thought he had been killed. But a moment later the initial shock had passed and he had started for the depths with the one-and-a-half-inch diameter foregoer rope racing out over the pulleys, followed by the two- inch diameter main whale rope.

“Three hundred fathoms before the strain slackened, and well over a quarter of a mile away a spout went up as he surfaced. Down again, and the traveling tell-tale line pulley on the foremast, connected to some tons of heavy springs built into the bottom of the catcher, was the indicator of the strain on the rope. And as it retreated up the mast again when the pull slackened, the winch in the hands of the catcher’s chief engineer started winding in.

“The whale had obviously been hit in the intestines, which invariably results in extreme agony in a mammal. We were being towed away now at about two knots, and as time went on with the whale weakening, the catcher hauled herself nearer and nearer until the gun could get to close range again loaded with a second harpoon. Down he went in his continuing efforts to break away. Up again at shorter and shorter intervals while blood ran from the wound hole. The harpoon had pulled partly out, as usually happens with the stress, but four, blunt, swivel, spreading barbs behind the head of the harpoon held below the tough outer blubber and there could be no getting rid of it.

“Forty minutes passed and the straining of the stricken whale went on, until at length, with a second explosion, another harpoon was sunk into it, nearer the head. The whale went down in another dive…The spouting now was getting much weaker and a crimson tinge of blood spread through the fine spray of the next blow. Then darker until a five-foot jet of almost pure blood rose from the widely dilated blow-hole. The next jet was only three feet, then just a sickening bubbling. The great animal turned on its side – dead. Fifty-five minutes from the first harpoon.”

For relief from this horror let me repeat Harry Lillie’s dedication, remembering that on this voyage he had seen some of the crew drowned, thrown over-board by the lurch of a fast-turning catcher:

“This book is dedicated mainly to all those creatures of the wild, the human ones too, who have worked so hard, suffered so much, and so often died, in providing the material that may perhaps inspire others to come along too in the battles ahead.”

It is, I think, worth noting that the current Icelandic hunts for fin whales differ in no important respect from those described by Harry Lillie in British Antarctic whaling.

Thoughts about Cruelty and Carelessness.

In 1949 Alice Morgan Wright returned home from the UN Conference that year at Lake Success, not long after Dr Harry Lillie’s first voyage on Balaena. She wrote:

“That great child, the United Nations, though growing in grace and wisdom, still takes hold of things by the wrong handle, some of the earnest but fumbling efforts being the Declaration of Human Rights; for in this we humans have asked everything we could think of for ourselves, but nothing for those undemanding comrades who share with us out habitations and our burdens throughout the world. Their rights should be declared no less urgently than our own.” And then, finally: “After listening for three weeks to those papers, and learning how ignorance and greed and waste constitute a menace greater than the atom bomb to our survival on this planet, one came away shivering and on tiptoe, treading on a crust thin as eggshell and constantly growing thinner…Nor was the protection of the animals presented at any time as an object of concern except to its intellectual or material advantage to mankind… Ask ourselves if there are not resources to be conserved which transcend the material ones; the beaurty of sunlit wings against the sky, of unhurt living creatures swift glimpsed in field and forest…we may ask ourselves if these are not of greater worth than anything which may be derived for us by science from their dead or exploited bodies.

Predators par excellence, deficient in logic as in loving kindness, we have judged it good to increase the number and length of human lives until the pressure of population threatens its own extinction on the unexpanding surface of the earth. And we are doing this at the cost of countless cruelty to the other sentient races of creation”.

There's Deals an' Deals

2011-08-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt analyzes the various proposals for a "deal" between pro- and anti-whaling countries.

In blogs I wrote after the IWC meeting in Agadir, Morocco last year I voiced concern (http://www.mywhaleweb.com) about the continued presence, within the walls of the International Whaling Commission, of the Trojan Horse containing the ‘elements of a ‘deal’ that was being touted at an inter-sessional IWC meeting in Florida and at the Agadir meeting, where – thankfully – it failed to attract sufficient support. There are still those who like the idea of a capitulation by conservationists (unusually, the supporters of law and order in the ocean realm) and I wonder now what ‘elements’ are still lurking in there and may be secretly re-grouping.

So I thought to get in first, publicly, with my suggestions for a fair deal, that is one that would be a fair compromise, not legitimising illegitimate practices as did the original mother-lode. So, here goes:

Demands for action by the Objectionables (that is the three nations that continue commercial whaling in defiance of what are supposed to be valid and binding IWC decisions – Japan, Norway and Iceland:

1. Withdraw your objections to IWC decisions. That means, for Norway, your objection to the 1985 decision that the Northeast Atlantic minke whale stock was depleted and classified as a Protection Stock (PS) with zero catch limit until such time as it may be shown to have recovered.

For Japan withdraw your objection to the inclusion of the minke whale as being one of the species protected by the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary (SOWS).

2. To Iceland: withdraw your invalid, so-called ‘reservation’ to the 1982 global moratorium on commercial whaling. You only got it through by virtue of a casting vote by the Swedish Chairman of the IWC at the Special Meeting of the IWC in Cambridge at which you were re-admitted to Membership of the IWC, where he was following the general policy of the Nordic Group of IWC members. A majority of IWC Members (if one excepts Japan’s Vote Consolidation Project crowd) have filed formal objections to that ‘reservation’, regarding it as entirely invalid, flatly contrary to the provisions of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946 (ICRW) under which the IWC exists.

3. All Objectionables to withdraw their reservations to Appendix I listings of the whales under CITES, which prohibit international trade in all commodities procured from those species.

4. Japan: cease, immediately, all commercial killing of minke whales and others in the SOWS under the guise of conducting scientific research, and marketing the meat from those already killed.

5. All Objectionables and their allies to cease blocking the efforts of Latin American and other Southern Hemisphere countries from declaring the South Atlantic as a whale sanctuary. When it come up at the next meeting in Panama, as is scheduled, either vote for it or at least abstain from voting or adopt the occasional Norwegian tactic of simply leaving the room.

In return the Unobjectionables would offer to do the following:

1. Support, or at least abstain from opposing, proposals for opening commercial whaling for fin and minke whales by Iceland, minke whales by Norway and minke whales by Japan, and setting annual catch limits in strict accordance with the Revised Management Procedure (RMP) as was accepted by the Commission in accordance with the consensus advice from the Scientific Committee. That means not by using the unacceptable Norwegian unofficial version of the RMP that allows whalers to kill several times more whales in the first years of its applications than would the official and tested RMP. If you still want to ‘adjust’ the RMP parameters then you first have ensure that any modifications are thoroughly tested by the SC and that the amended, retuned version is then adopted by the SC by consensus.

2. Refrain from proposing any more whale sanctuaries for the time being.

3. Stay quiet for three more years about the need for the IWC to regulate the killing of medium-sized cetaceans that are undoubtedly ‘whales’ in common understanding, that is to say the narwhal, beluga, the pilot whales and the bottlenose whales other than the already protected North Atlantic species.

In return the Members of IWC that are also members of the European Union might agree to warmly welcome Iceland into the EU AND refrain from seeking to expel Denmark from the EU for allowing the continued killing of narwhals, pilot whales and belugas, and marketing export of commodities from them in and from its dependent territories.

I have heard rumours of another suggestion that could be examined with the Commission’s usual thoroughness and sense of quid pro quo. That is to allow Japanese scientists to kill minke whales, and perhaps also Bryde’s whales in the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary. As a reward for their refraining from sampling minke whales in the Antarctic within the SOWS. As Ms Hisa Anana, an adviser to the Government of Japan on the whaling question, whose minority report advocated cessation of ‘scientific whaling’, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, according to reporter Andrew Darby writing from Hobart : “I think they have gathered enough scientific data”.

Of course the old Nisshin Maru, which won’t do much longer for work in the Antarctic, would make an excellent, if small, mother-ship for the Somali pirates operating in the Sanctuary, though I think they are harassing the whales that gather around the Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) that abound in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Republic of Seychelles.

Point 1 above – re-authorizing some renewed commercial whaling under stringent conditions - goes against my deeply held prejudices: I think that the inevitable cruelty of the commercial hunts is the single, undeniable argument for the complete and permanent cessation of all commercial whaling. After so much talk about animal welfare in the IWC it is, I think, worth recalling what the hunts with explosive harpoon heads are really like. Dr Harry Lilly, who traveled on board a British factory ship, as medical officer, in the early days after the end of WWII, provided a graphic and most disturbing description. In his 1955 book about his experiences, “The Path through Penguin City”. This wonderful book has long been out of print but I have a copy and I intend to recall part of Lilly’s account in my next blog, along with a moving statement about our relationship with the animal kingdom by a perceptive and compassionate American woman, Alice Morgan Wright, when she returned home from a UN General Assembly at Lake Succees, NY in 1949. (Before the UN moved to its shiny new HQ in Manhattan.

Sensitive readers may want to forgo reading Blog 9. But for those who do, please be aware that Lillie’s harrowing account of a fin whale chase and kill by a British vessel in the Antarctic so long ago differed in no substantial respect from what Icelandic whalers are doing right now to the same species in the North Atlantic.

'Because we can'

2011-08-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

'Because we can' - That’s what a young, masked looter in London told a TV reporter when he was asked ‘Why are you doing this?’ The second part of his response was made pointing across the Thames from Lewisham on the South Bank to Canary Wharf, one of London’s financial nuclei, on the north: ‘They make lots of money and stuff without working, why shouldn’t we, who also haven’t got jobs?’

In a way that is what Japan’s ‘scientific whaling’ in the Antarctic has been about – Because we Can. There has been much media talk about this matter saying there is a huge loophole in the commercial whaling moratorium declared by the International Whaling Commission in 1982. There isn’t. And ‘Why does the IWC give quotas for that?’ It doesn’t. And ‘Why doesn’t the IWC put a stop to it?’ It can’t. This all arises from the simple fact that one of the purposes of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946 was to provide an umbrella for an IWC but it has other purposes, nothing to do with the IWC, including legitimizing unregulated killing of whales for science, just what is ‘science’ being decided exclusively by the killer.

Misunderstanding about this goes far beyond those who worry about the effectiveness of the IWC - its dyfunction, as some like to say. The drafters of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), followed by those who wrote the reports from UN Conferences on the environment, especially that held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. – The Earth Summit as it was called - all wrote that the whales are a global resource the conservation of which should be protected by an unnamed inter-governmental body (in the hard-law UNCLOS) case, and specifically by the IWC in the case of the soft-law document Agenda 21 from Rio. Then and at other times delegates from all countries ignored the fact that a few of their representatives, negotiating in 1946, had decided to give the new IWC very limited powers. Those limitations, and severe operational strictures, in the end guaranteed the Great Massacre I have described before.

The draft treaty text they were all looking at in 1946 was largely the work of n admirable American scientist-diplomat named Dr Remington Kellogg. Much of it came from various agreements reached between whaling companies and governments in the 1930s; one of those was that it should be acceptable to kill for scientific purposes individual whales of what were then designated at fully Protected Species – the several ‘right whale’ species and the gray whale. Kellogg and the United States were adamant that there must be a standing Commission, which eventually became the IWC, to enact and monitor the rules they were making, an idea was strongly opposed by the companies and some of the governments negotiating in the 1930s. I often think of Kellogg as I think of President Woodrow Wilson, who in Versailles in 1919, during the ‘Peace’ negotiations, proposed the establishment of a League of Nations – precursor of the UN – and then lived to see it come into being (and, incidentally have a considerable effect on whaling) but with his own country, the USA, not joining. In the more recent photographs Dr Kellogg and President Wilson look similar – and tired!

The negotiators of the ICRW 1946 had their hands and feet tied. The US Government was looking at the time to inter-governmental management organizations, established under conventions, to regulate fishing, especially on the high seas (at the time territorial waters were only three or six miles wide.) The US fear of the failure of the IWC in 1959 was focused on a possible ‘domino effect’) a political paradigm of the time) on the numerous regional and specialized fisheries bodies that were important to the US in its global fisheries strategy – which included keeping such bodies out of the UN system.

In 1946 it was unclear how these bodies would evolve. For example it was contentious whether or not they would have scientific staffs and conduct research or rely entirely on the efforts of member states or a mixture of the two. In the 1946 negotiations the matter of how decisions would be taken by the new Commission and in what circumstances they would be binding was controversial and difficult to resolve.

One possibility, favoured by several delegations was that decisions would be taken by a two-thirds majority of a quorum, as is the rule in many organizations. This arithmetic was not, however, acceptable to the four countries then engaged in Antarctic pelagic whaling – Norway, UK, USSR and Netherlands, - since it would not do if, say, three of them were to gang up against the other. In these circumstances a three-fourths majority found favour. In addition an opt-out rule was to be inserted, what is called the objection procedure. It is not unusual for provision to be made in international treaties for ‘reservations’ to certain provisions or decisions. (It is a very important feature of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that acceding governments cannot declare any reservations or object to valid decisions, though in the latter case a proper appeal process, through a special tribunal, is provided for). But in the ICRW case it would allow opting out of a decision taken by a large majority. However, in the ICRW it has another, more important, meaning. It was supplemented by a provision that if anyone lodged an objection all other states would be given a chance also to object even if they had voted for and previously accepted the decision. That way valid decisions could be completely nullified, and they often were, subsequently. Furthermore, it was made easy to leave the IWC, with just a time delay, and on several occasions some whaling countries did do that – for example Netherlands and Norway – and others threatened to do so – particularly Japan, repeatedly.

The 1946 negotiators ensured that it was impossible for the IWC to allocate annual catch limits to particular nations’ operations; the US delegation was particularly insistent that any such provision would negate the ‘freedom of the seas’, which was sacred. The unintended effect was that countries whaling in the Antarctic agreed amongst themselves what each of them ‘needed’ to pay their costs in the coming year, added the figures together and then would not vote in the IWC for any different number, and if others did then they lodged objections. In 1946 was suggested that international observers, appointed by the IWC as well as the national inspectors, be placed on whaling ships but that was considered inimical to sovereignty and likely to be expensive. Finally, the ICRW made it impossible to set international limits to the amount of whaling power to be deployed, such as numbers of factories and catcher boats and the size and power of catchers. Thus regulation primarily by setting numerical catch limits was made inevitable. There was some talk of limiting commodity production, as the companies had sought to practice pre-war, but this was impracticable because of the diversification of commodities and the changing and variable efficiency of, for example oil extraction from bones and muscle as well as from blubber. It took a quarter of a century to effect some change involving appointment of international observers, and formal agreements on catch shares but only outside the IWC and only for baleen whale catches in the Antarctic. The USSR did propose limits to the numbers of pelagic expeditions and their catchers, but only in its own interest and not very pressingly; its proposals were summarily dismissed by the other whalers though the idea got some support from FAO.

All these flaws and loopholes were of course well-known to the IWC Members. One might wonder ‘Why did the Parties to the ICRW not amend it? They could do so, through a diplomatic conference agreeing on a Protocol subject to ratification by all Parties. Some small, but rather trivial amendments were made that way – for example defining helicopters attached to whaling operations as participating vessels. There were three serious sequential attempts during 1977 at fundamental amendment – all three diplomatic conferences, in Copenhagen, Reykjavik and Lisbon failed, this last so quickly that when I arrived in Lisbon to represent FAO, a few hours late, it has already adjourned! An idea for another, in 1978, was not followed through because of uncertainties about the evolution of the law of the Sea through the UN process. Interesting features of this effort were that in addition to draft texts produced by some Governments, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) provided the one that got most support in general – it came from a legal working group in which I was pleased to participate – and the effort to resolve the failure in 1946 to define ‘whales’ or ‘whaling’. On the former the USA pressed for a revised convention to apply to all marine cetaceans, others naturally wanted the status quo to remain. On ‘whaling’ the non-lethal ‘use’ of whales through whale-watching, which is now big and global, was then in its infancy and geographically limited. The Government of Japan still insists that consideration of whale-watching is not within the competence of the IWC, but in 1977 many people already had a different idea. I was happy with Sir Peter Scott’s suggestion (taken into the UK position) that since bird watchers called their hobby ‘birding’, and that was generally accepted, whale watchers could properly call their activity ‘whaling’ so no change to the ICRW was needed.

Help Us Protect the Deep Sea

2011-08-16T15:33:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, ASOC is a member of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC). Specifically, the DSCC’s goal is it to regulate and eventually bring an end to deep-sea fishing.

Deep sea fishing vessels catch deep-dwelling fish, particularly with bottom trawls that are often the length of a football field. These trawls bulldoze their way across the deep ocean floor destroying nearly everything in their path.

This September is critical for the deep sea as the UN General Assembly is holding an open review of implementation of resolutions adopted by the UNGA (The UNGA review workshop will be September 15-16, and the sustainable fisheries negotiations will follow in November or December). As with previous years, the DSCC has held its own parallel review and this report finds that fishing states are falling short of their deep sea obligations set by the UNGA.

During this crucial UN meeting on ocean protection, the DSCC will be directly addressing decision makers, urging them to protect the deep sea that is our common heritage.

Please read more about the DSCC at their homepage, here. Also, take a look at their blog here.

You should also watch this video taken from the "Planet Earth" series. It very well outlines both the beauty of the deep sea as well as the dangers it faces.

Back to the Future

2011-08-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

Let me return to the Great Massacre, in which I have now also enlisted the iconic sperm whale along with the Great Baleens. Those who perpetrated that have left the scene, just as the English city looters drifted away with their booty and sold it for better things. Some are still hanging around, perhaps hoping to pick up a few remnants.

Japanese ‘scientific’ whalers and their supporters in the bureaucracy and the political circus are now doing that – hanging around. They remind me of vultures cleaning up after the lions’ feast. Are they pursuing the Final Solution, with their eyes on the ‘little’ minke whales? If not, what are they doing, or rather why are they still doing, at considerable cost to the Japanese taxpayers, what they have been doing since 1987? And following the classic tactic of demonizing the survivors – they’re immoral, eating our fish, breeding too fast, spoiling the lives of their bigger brethren. The parallels would be risible were they not sad, even pathetic.

I think that is not quite the story. I think the Japanese whalers truly believe in ‘sustainable use’ of whales while knowing more deeply, from real experience, that ‘mining’ is really the way to go, moneywise. Biologically ‘sustainable harvesting’ of minke whales in the Antarctic is never going to be economically sustainable for operations from the temperate Northern hemisphere, no matter how much the product price is pushed up. And they know it.

The Government of Japan made what would seem to have been an economically sensible decision when they agreed to withdraw their Objection to the commercial whaling moratorium when it came into effect in 1986, in return for a promise from the USA that they would be allowed to fish, at least for a while. under license, in the US Exclusive Economic Zone in the Northeastern Pacific. Then US fisheries policy changed. They were actually ready for that because they had already made ‘scientific’ emergency plans, and had also practiced them in the Indian Ocean and Central West Pacific in the 1970s. One remarkable thing about this episode is that in the 1950s, when the Peace Treaty was being negotiated with Japan, the Americans had invented the MSY-optimum-management criterion precisely in order to keep the Japanese fishing industry OUT of the Northeast Pacific! Getting agreement to be allowed to fish in the Northeastern Pacific could have been regarded as a political success for Japan, as well as a profitable one. But there you go, that’s international politics.

I believe the Japanese strategic wizards thought they would be able to get the whaling moratorium lifted within a few years. They certainly tried, but they had made a huge miscalculation about how world opinion was changing about whales, the marine environment and the Antarctic. And the limitations of scientific research to reveal how, if at all, the depleted stocks were recovering. But the industry’s eyes were looking ahead to the time when, they hoped, there would be enough fin whales, and perhaps also sei and humpback whales, around to make pelagic whaling profitable again, especially for a national enterprise that had gained a de facto monopoly of such an industry, one that requires great knowledge, experience, special skills and specialized hardware for its successful prosecution. They had possibly also been misled by their own favored scientists who had consistently claimed that the whales were not so depleted as others thought, and would recover faster than others thought. However that was, Japanese business, having a reputation of looking further ahead than ’Westerners’, decided to pursue an unprofitable ‘scientific whaling’ scheme for as long as it took, and practically regardlsss of the costs, which would one day be recovered provided the market for whale meat could be kept ‘healthy’. With the idea of lifting the moratorium earlier than would otherwise happen the Government engaged in its costly Vote Consolidation Project, bringing into a the IWC a raft of other Governments from countries not having the slightest interest in or knowledge about whaling or research on whales but willing to give loud voice to ‘sustainable use’ of every living thing that moves, and to cast votes accordingly.

Now came the eventual, inevitable crunch: an ageing factory ship (that is in any case too small and ill-equipped to achieve the acknowledged goal of full utilisation’ of the larger whales), new maritime regulations for Antarctic navigation, rising fuel costs, a diminishing domestic market and no hope of an export one, the forthcoming case of Australia against Japan in the International Court of Justice about whaling and, to crown that, persistent harassment by environmental activists such as Greenpeace International and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, with crew members from all over the world – including Japan itself. It is not surprising that at least one member of a panel set up to advise the Government about Japan’s future whaling policy, Ms Hisa Anan, has said the ‘scientific whaling’ should end; ‘we have enough data’, she said. (Interview with Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reported by Australian journalist Andrew Darby, 12 August 2011).

Whether Nisshin Maru will go to the Antarctic again this coming 2011/12 summer is still an open question; perhaps the decision has not yet even been taken in Tokyo. In case they do Sea Shepherd says they will be down there waiting for them, with three or four ships. I presume cost estimates, matched with expected (hoped for) short-. medium- and long-term benefits will be the deciding factors.

I hope it doesn’t turn violent. Some noisy people in Britain now want the police to use water cannon against street protesters, in a show of ‘zero tolerance’, as they did in Northern Ireland and do in Chile and a few European countries, and as Japanese whalers have regularly used against Greenpeace and SSCS. All the evidence goes to show that such responses escalate violence on all sides. Very few want that.

Size Matters

2011-08-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

Last time around I promised to write about growth.

In his recent fine book, ‘Mismanagement of marine Fisheries: (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Dr Alan Longhurst discusses the significance of the little-appreciated fact that fishes differ from terrestrial and aerial vertebrates by growing throughout their lives. That actually provides the rationale for the Theory of Fishing that concentrates on the fate of cohorts of fish that are exploited by fishing gears during some period of their natural lives, with individuals increasing in weight as they age, and dying at various rates from a number of natural causes. Through the years of commercial whaling the myth has grown that whales do not grow much, if at all, once they have reached the size at which they become liable to being harpooned, what we call ‘recruited’. In fact they all do grow, and I think the evidence is that they grow throughout their lives (though of course at a diminishing rate). The vertebrates that are somehow bound by gravity – terrestrial mammals, bats and birds for example - can continue to function only by limiting their growth, whereas the fishes and whales defy most of the restrictions of gravity. (I’m not sure what to think about frogs and dinosaurs!)

Scientists studying whales and whaling have misled themselves by looking nearly always at the animal’s length – which is understandable considering the practical problem of weighing an animal that might reach up to one hundred, even 150, tons. The problem is in the perception of cubes. A whale that has increased in length from one time to another by, say 4% - which may be barely noticeable – has increased in weight by nearly 13%, which would not only be noticeable if you tried to lift her, but is a difference to be valued in tons and dollars, or pounds or Yen as the case may be. I mentioned in an earlier piece that the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics (BIWS) regularly warned the IWC that the average lengths of catches of baleen whale species were steadily declining. In the years before the application of the discipline of population dynamics to whales this was considered to be evidence of possible ‘over-fishing’; now it would more likely be taken as an indication that fishing/whaling was measurably affecting the size of the ‘stock’.

There is a widespread misunderstanding among lay writers about fisheries problems, and even some less-numerate scientists (thankfully a diminishing crowd) that the progressive reduction in average sizes of landed animals is caused by fishermen selectively catching the biggest individuals. That is rarely what happens. Anglers might want the biggest possible individual but commercial fishermen want the biggest possible weight of total catch so long as the smaller individuals in their catches fetch a reasonable price or are at least marketable. The observed ‘shrinkage’ normally arises from the fact that the exploitation is relatively unselective in itself, but the exploited population is replenished every year by a cohort of initially small individuals, thereby reducing the average size of fish – or whales – in the catch the following year.

During the 1970s, when sperm whales were still being caught in large numbers, by Soviet pelagic expeditions as well as by land-based whalers in Western Australia, Spain, Chile and others, I decided to look at the sperm whale catch statistics. In this species size is doubly important. The males are two to three times heavier than the females; among the baleen whales the females are a bit bigger than the females, which is very unusual among the vertebrates. The male sperm whales migrate deeper into the Antarctic than the females. But the sperm whales feed also in the warmer waters further north, and do that by diving deeply – often very deeply – to eat squids and deep-water fishes. ‘Recruitment’ had seemed to be occurring at a smaller size relative to the size they would attain in the very long-term, than in baleen whales. I was interested in particular in what might be the implications of setting, for the sperm whales, a management objective of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) by weight instead of by the ‘traditional’ maximum number. The results astonished me.

But first let us look briefly at the sperm-whaling industry. Between the two World Wars, after the collapse of the once huge and global ‘Yankee’ whaling industry of the 19^th century (caused by the new use of mineral oil for city street lighting rather than the collapse of the stocks of whales), not many sperm whales were killed; edible oil from baleen whales was far more profitable. But after WWII, especially during the ‘cold war’, sperm oil became valuable again, this time as an industrial lubricant with strategic significance. A total of about 30 thousand tons of sperm oil was produced during the 1930s, nearly half of it from the southern hemisphere by ‘pelagic’ factory-ship operations (they were not prohibited – as was baleen whaling – from operating outside polar waters.) From 1949 to 1978 sperm oil production totaled nearly half a million tons, less than a quarter of it by pelagic operations, and most of that by the USSR. The land station catches were by many nations in both hemispheres (including some, such as Portugal, that were not at the time members of the IWC) , feeding a global oil market centred in Germany and supplying especially the USA. Tooth ivory was a nice little by-product earner. A moratorium on all sperm whaling was declared by the IWC in 1981 after several years of very difficult negotiations. Until then half a million sperm whales had been killed, post-WWII.

What I found, using the IWC’s preferred population model of the time. was that a successful MSY(weight) management aim would result in 3-4% more sperm oil produced every year and, more importantly, would take one third less effort (measured as days-work by catcher boats in the season) to produce. The bad news was that to allow the greatly depleted females to increase from the presumed MSY(number) level to the better MSY(weight) level would take more than 50 years. I would not now stand by the detail of those numbers (which I published in 1976) but I think the general picture is correct. So much for the fetishistic ‘sustainable use’ so beloved by whalers but also, unfortunately, by some ‘environmentalists’. More about that next time.