ASW, Depletion and Extinction

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

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 modern economic conditions with those of the past. 

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.

Back to the Future

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 some background on Japan's political strategy at the IWC.  

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.

The Mass Sacrifice of Whales to the God Mammon

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, gives background on the true depth of the destruction caused by commercial whaling.

Originally I thought to write about the Great Massacre of whales in the Antarctic, from about 1910 to the mid-1970s. But that word seems now to be used mainly for instances in which numbers of humans are deliberately killed and mutilated, rather than for sustained killings that are aimed at exterminating entire populations. The original Greek word was descriptive of the killing of non-humans so I thought it reasonable to rescue the word from its typical use as the mass killing of Jews, Communists, Russian prisoners of war and other dissenters in the expanding Empire of Nazi Germany. The Ancient Greek holocausts were dedicated to a variety of pagan Gods, the Nazi effort to The Final Solution, the onslaught on the whales was carried out in homage to the God Mammon.

Can the UN help the IWC clean up its act?

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, which has also been posted at on the website of the International Whale Protection Organization, discusses a proposal made by Monaco at the annual IWC meeting held in July 2011.

A couple of months ago the delegate of Monaco to a UN Working Group that is reviewing the Law of the Sea - who happens also to be Monaco’s Commissioner to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) - made an important proposal to the U.N. This was to declare full and permanent protection for all the whales and dolphins (‘cetaceans’) that are designated in legal terms as Highly Migratory Species – which is nearly all of them – when they are swimming in off-shore waters, the ‘high seas’.

That idea appeals to me and I hope it happens. One reason is that the last time the U.N. got involved it forced open some doors to rational action that had long been closed within the IWC. That was in 1972, when the first global gathering on the environment was held in Stockholm, the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE). As a direct result of that, the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) called upon the IWC to declare a ten-year moratorium on all commercial whaling; amazingly even Norway voted for that. It took the IWC ten years to get around to declaring the moratorium but it acted immediately on a few other suggestions. One was to hire a proper secretariat, including a scientist – from 1948 to 1973 the IWC was served only by one British civil servant in London, part-time. Other proposals were that much more scientific research be undertaken – that was acted upon but not with much enthusiasm or money – and that catch limits be set annually and separately for each species of whale and each region of the world. The scientists had been pressing for that every year since 1950, to no avail. Most of the whalers, but most stridently the Japanese, said that would be administratively too difficult; their crews were used to the lumpen quota of ‘Blue Whale Units (BWUs). By 1975 separate limits for each species, in each ‘management area’, and for both factory-ship and land-station operations, had been set.

Since the mid-1970s the IWC has been labouring without an agreed definition of what is a whale? The negotiators of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946 (ICRW), to which the IWC owes its existence, forgot that. – they also forgot to define ‘whaling’. They did make a list of the names in the main European languages of the most common species of the big whales, but it was not a part of the Convention and had no legislative status. When the IWC began setting annual catch limits, in 1975/76, the Canadian, Danish and Japanese whalers and their supporters in governments were anxious to avoid catch limits being set for the pilot whales, belugas, beaked whales and narwhals being caught by their nationals; as far as Denmark was concerned that was in The Faroes and Greenland. They grasped the entirely false idea that the list of language names somehow defined a legal whale. The Norwegians tried, but failed, to get on that bandwagon by saying they also had never thought of minke whales as ‘real’ whales. But Latin American members of the IWC did jump on it, for entirely different reasons: they were then fighting for recognition of their highly controversial claims of national jurisdiction over 200-mile-wide swathes of ocean adjacent to their coasts (which now all nations of course accept) and they said that the smaller cetaceans were all coastal creatures so were under their stewardship and no business of the IWC. That was doubly untrue, first because the ICRW explicitly applies to all waters, coastal or not, and second because the so-called ‘small cetaceans’ are also mostly migratory in the biological sense, if not all so vigorously as the big ones.

Another absurdity in all this is that several of the ‘small cetaceans’ are as big as, or even bigger than, the minke. In fact Japanese ‘small type’ coastal whaling in the Northwest Pacific has long been for two species – the minke and a bottlenose called Baird’s beaked whale. When the 1982 moratorium was applied to the minke they simply increased their catches of the unregulated Baird’s whale. Catches of the closely related bottlenose whale of the North Atlantic are regulated. Norway was present at the 1946 negotiations so that species is named in the ICRW, in Norwegian, English, French etc. Nowegian whalers practically exterminated it, for sale as pet food, to Great Britain. Japan, being a defeated, occupied country was not present in Washington in 1946 so there are no names in Japanese in the infamous Table of Nomenclature, so they were let of the hook as far as their bottlenose and pilot whales were concerned.

This triple nonsense has crippled the IWC for nearly half a century because it is presumed that for its decisions to be valid they can apply only to species for which there is a consensus that they really are ‘whales’. The Monaco suggestion divides, as we say, the sheep from the goats – separating the coastal from the offshore waters. The Latin Americans have nothing to worry about because everyone now accepts the 200-mile limits, and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) already defines almost all cetaceans (except the few truly coastal (and fresh-water) species) as Highly Migratory. In addition, being marine mammals, they are subject to a special regime in which total protection from exploitation can formally be prohibited.

If the Monaco proposal becomes accepted, perhaps embedded in a Resolution of the UNGA, then the IWC might open its eyes and decide to deal sensibly with the conservation of the medium- and small-sized whales. But, as in 1972, there might be other good consequences. The IWC cannot control so-called ‘scientific whaling’; the ICRW specifically and absolutely excludes that and numerous majority resolutions, passed year-after-year criticizing it, have no effect. In fact they have in a way made the situation worse because the tactic of Japan has usually been to make some cosmetic changes to their plans and so give the appearance of taking notice of the concerns of others. Firm action by the U.N. might possibly correct this. Even a compromise in which some whales could be killed for serious scientific reasons by specific consent in each case of the world community of nations, would be much better than the present ‘right’, under the ICRW, for any Government to award to its nationals unlimited ‘scientific’ catches, of any species, anywhere, and not subject to any of the many other existing regulatory provisions such as protection of nursing mothers and their calves, and juveniles.

An increasing number of countries are now opposed to commercial whaling, of any kind, anywhere, as a matter of principle – connected with animal welfare concerns, the perceived ecological roles of the cetaceans in marine ecosystems, the other hazards they now all face (including especially collisions with ships, entanglement in fishing gears, contamination by persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals) and the values of whales to humans through whale- watching operations and serious basic scientific research. Those countries might not be entirely satisfied with protection on the high seas, but then we have in the IWC frequently been faced with the problem of the best being the enemy of the good and, anyway, many countries already give full protection to cetaceans in their coastal waters. And an advantage of UN action is that this could open the doors wider for other Agencies of the UN system – such as IMO - to act more effectively to ameliorate those new hazards.

IWC meeting implodes, world yawns

If you couldn't tell from the excellent posts from our guest blogger Sidney Holt, the situation at the International Whaling Commission is a mess. A really big mess. But it got taken to a whole new level this year when Japan staged a walkout to prevent a vote on the proposal to create a sanctuary in the South Atlantic, which was strongly proposed by a strong bloc of Latin American countries. Without the countries that walked out, however, the meeting didn't have a quorum and couldn't hold a vote. Aren't parliamentary shenanigans fun? Ultimately this kind of behavior isn't really that surprising to those who follow this issue. It's still disheartening that countries can't even decide to protect species in their own backyard without being thwarted.

I suppose on the bright side the UK succeeded in getting its proposal to require members to pay their membership fees directly from a bank account. There have been repeated allegations that some countries pay these fees for others in exchange for votes, and the UK aimed to create a paper trail to make this more difficult. Hopefully it will cut down on corruption.

What is particularly galling is the idea that by expecting the meeting to actually function and do something, some government representatives feel that the Latin American bloc was harming "progress." As the BBC article states, despite massive efforts to reach compromise between 2008-2010, it all came to nothing at the 2010 meeting. So what are countries who want the IWC to actually start helping whales supposed to do? Wait until the pro-whaling nations finally decide enough progress has been made to hold votes on issues? Whatever the whalers and their supporters want, it's clear that they have no interest in true compromise - otherwise they would not so blatantly expect to be fully catered to without offering any concessions in return. Sometimes in international fora like the IWC, countries have complicated, long-term strategies for accomplishing their goals. From the outside it can look like inaction even though progress is being made. Based on the opinion of Dr. Holt, who represents our organization at IWC meetings, that doesn't appear to be the case. Without some big changes, it seems most likely that the IWC will be dysfunctional for a long time.

The Minke Debate

I suggest trolling the blogosphere, when you get a chance, specifically to look at how people are actually somewhat divided on the issue of whaling.

In this recent post from Greenpeace, they have put together a petition to pressure Obama to enact trade sanctions on countries that allow commercial whaling. This is to remind him to make good on his promise to help reform the IWC. In another post, Robert Bennett of fish4travel appeals directly to individuals by asking would-be tourists to boycott Iceland until Icelandic whaling stops.

One can find dozens of other similarly minded blogs and articles. Where is the division? While people generally accept that the hunting of certifiably endangered whales should be illegal, some support the hunting of Minke Whales.

According to this post put up by ‘Dr. M’ of the Deep Sea News, the issues surrounding Iceland’s whaling practices are not scientifically based but more ethical. He sites that in 2003 Iceland took a total of 562 Fin, Sei and Minke whales compared to Japan’s nearly 13,000. Dr. M points out that since then Iceland's whaling has significantly decreased as they concentrate more and more on Minkes. He goes on to argue that while Fin and Sei whales are endangered, we simply do not know enough about Minke whales to make any conclusions on their population numbers. He says that there are some studies where Minke whales have actually been seen in some areas in great abundance. He argues that one should stay away from eating endangered whales because there is sound scientific evidence of their population numbers, and that this is not necessarily the case with Minkes. When it comes to Minke whales, there is not enough evidence to say they are endangered with absolute certainty, thus the same rules regarding hunting should not apply to them.

Deficient data aside, in this realm it is safest to assume the worst and act on the premise that Minke whales may be endangered and they deserve the same protection as Fin, Sei and other protected whales. To assume the best possible scenario with no regard for the equally possible worst is simply irresponsible.

That there is any debate on this at all can be shocking at times. Surely the anti-whaling community is aware of arguments like those addressed above. While the world’s anti-whaling community is much larger than their opposite, these days this does not necessarily make them louder or more powerful. This debate highlights why a continued great effort is still absolutely necessary in order to push the world away from whaling, for good.

A New Use for Blue Whales?

So I thought this was pretty cool…and potentially diabolical! According to this Article the power of blue whales can be harnessed for evil deeds! As many of us know, blue whales have perfect pitch. Blue whales create a sad song that always hits the same low note, 16.02 hertz.

This puts the whales in the infrasonic range which can be very dangerous to humans. It’s been demonstrated that tones below 20Hz can cause changes in human blood pressure, breathing and balance. It can even bring about feelings anger or depression and in some cases cause visual hallucinations.

The evolutionary advantage of emitting this tone for other whales is unclear. But, I can think of no sweeter method for swaying future IWC proceedings, than using this mind-bending whale-song. Now to bring enough krill to the next meeting to lure in the whales - muahaha!

Big week for whales

As the big IWC meeting gets underway this week, people are getting nervous about what will happen - and may not even be sure what they want to happen. The moratorium on commercial whaling was one of the great conservation successes of the 20th century. It was widely supported by all but a few - several nations even gave up whaling. But years of continued whaling and increasing contention over remaining whaling have led many people to conclude that we need to be open to a resumption in commercial whaling. It must be a mark of the singular intelligence of the human race that just a few decades after we stopped slaughtering creatures that reproduce slowly (because we had so thoroughly depleted their populations) it is decided that we are now going to manage them sustainably using catch limits decided on the basis of, oh, well, who knows? And this will lead to a reduction in whales killed, even though other countries that used to kill whales are now saying that if everybody's ok with whaling again that they want to jump in too.

We can barely manage anything sustainably. Ask the recovered populations of Newfoundland cod. Oh wait! You can't - fishing stopped years ago but the population never bounced back. A while ago, the conservative writer Rich Lowry wrote in favor of saving the whales. Surprisingly, the main thrust of his argument is that whales are special and deserve special protection. A lot of whaling proponents will blast the hypocrisy of those with this "whales are exceptional" outlook. If you eat one animal you can't criticize anyone else for eating another species as long as the population is managed well, so the argument goes. Lowry doesn't address this issue much, merely noting the senselessness of whaling in the 21st century:

Why protect whales? They should be preserved as befits anything else that evokes wonder; they are the mammalian equivalent of the Grand Canyon or of the giant redwoods. They are also incredibly long-lived creatures with a sophisticated social structure, closer to chimpanzees than to cattle.

It's about time we all collectively realized the truth of this argument. Humans are not calculators. There's no point in having the cognitive abilities to appreciate the wonders of nature, and at the same time pretending that killing a domesticated farm animal is the same as killing the largest animal ever known to have existed. We all know that deep down it isn't. It isn't 100% logical, and there's emotion involved, but so what? The vast majority of people aren't going to want to eat penguin meat unless the little waddlers start invading our shores and trying to peck us to death. No one's going to approve the building of a shopping complex in the Grand Canyon regardless of how many jobs it would create. Because part of having a large brain is evaluating emotional factors and practical factors when considering an issue. Even IF this new IWC plan adds back in some scientific protections for the whales, it will still be incredibly senseless to support it. The essential message will be that nothing in nature is exceptional - it's all just widgets, a resource to extract, and we just have to figure out the right way to do it.

You don't have to spend your every free minute hiking or looking at pictures of baby animals on the Internet to realize what an utterly horrifying and soulless point of view that is.

Undercover reporter reveals Japan's IWC bribery scheme

There have been rumblings for years about how Japan has used its wealth to buy votes in its favor at the IWC. Now a UK paper has come up with damaging evidence of the extent of the vote-buying scheme. Not only has Japan been trading foreign aid for votes, they give envelopes of cash and call girls to delegates at IWC meetings. I wonder if this will make any difference at this week's meetings on the Future of the IWC? Or will countries to continue to buy into the idea that whaling nations deserve some sort of reward for their bad behavior?

Given the recent goings-on in Japanese politics, it seems that the country would be better served by a focus on issues that affect more than the tiny sliver of the population that either eats or benefits from the sale of whale meat. And we at ASOC are still trying to figure out how a whale sanctuary can still be a sanctuary when commercial whaling is allowed in it.

Rewarding bad behavior

The commissioner of the IWC announced a compromise proposal yesterday that somehow both allows commercial whaling and keeps the moratorium on commercial whaling. Confused? I am. What's happening is that whaling happening under the auspices of Iceland, Norway, and Japan will be brought under IWC control (if you can call it control when their governments are really calling the shots) while whaling remains prohibited for all other countries. The idea is that by making some compromises and getting these whaling nations to agree to IWC regulation, there's a better chance they'll reduce their catches and ensure that catches are not causing undue harm to whale populations. To which I have to rely, a la Gob Bluth "COME ON!" These countries have been skirting international norms through various means for a long time - Norway lodged a formal reservation to the moratorium on commercial whaling, Iceland left the IWC and upon returning also lodged a reservation, and Japan pretends that it is whaling for scientific purposes. Before the moratorium, Norway refused to acknowledge scientific data showing that northern minke whale stocks were in decline and instead insisted on arbitrary catch limits based on the needs of whalers rather than on facts. The situation is no different today. The catch limits proposed in the compromise aren't based on data reviewed by IWC's scientific committee but rather science provided by the whaling countries. Oh, and though the compromise deletes the regulations that currently keep all catch limits at zero, it does not eliminate the provision designating the Southern Ocean as a whale sanctuary. Yet somehow it also allows whaling in the sanctuary. All in the expectation that this will give the IWC more "control." Have they read anything about any international marine resource issues ever? Did they notice that Japan helped torpedo scientifically warranted protections for endangered species at CITES? Have they noticed the sharp decline in fish populations in the North Sea? Yet they expect that these countries will behave themselves when it comes to whaling, listen to scientific advice, and maybe even agree to phase it out? Even though widespread, well-publicized fishery collapses have failed to convince governments to manage resources responsibly?

I'm not holding my breath.

Understanding the IWC

One of the great challenges of working on international environmental issues is trying to understand the various international agreements that govern international whaling, trade in endangered species, the Antarctic, etc. Having attended an Antarctic Treaty meeting last year I can say that without having the same experience as my colleagues at ASOC I have a hard time figuring out all the politics and subtle issues that influence each country's position. Likewise the developments in whaling over the past few weeks have been a little difficult for observers of the International Whaling Commission to accept - New Zealand and the United States going along with plans by whaling nations? Insane. How did we get to a place where countries that are in the minority of world opinion are able to dominate the IWC? Lucky for us Sidney Holt, ASOC's representative at IWC meetings and expert on whaling issues, has been providing some excellent historical background over at the IFAW whale blog. You'd be hard pressed to find someone better-suited to report on all the intricacies of the IWC over the years, as Dr. Holt has had a front-row seat to IWC operations in multiple capacities - as a scientist, as a member of a government delegation, and as an advocate for whale conservation. Check it out!