‘Save the whales’ was one of the signature phrases of my childhood, a mantra which entered the lexicon almost as completely as it infiltrated its way into the public consciousness. Growing up in the 1970s, I was in no doubt that saving the whales was an imperative so morally incontrovertible that its only dissonance was the disbelief that anybody could disagree with it.
Nearly three decades after the slogan first adorned bumper stickers, the phrase carries a nostalgia reminiscent of the idealism of the 1960s, the innocence of the socially progressive policies of the Whitlam government or with the anger of that same government’s dismissal. Saving the whales—like the days before the internet dominated our lives or the time when the world was divided into Cold War spheres of influence—seems to belong to a distant, and altogether less complicated world.
A worldwide moratorium on the hunting of whales has been in place since 1986, largely in response to those same ‘Save the whales’ campaigns across the globe. The ban on whaling was the initiative of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a body formed in 1946 to address the 1930 finding that 80 per cent of the world’s great whale species were on the brink of extinction. It took 56 years to muster the requisite political will and to form the international alliances required to put in place a regime with binding worldwide effect.
It has taken just 22 years for the international consensus to begin to unravel. Facts as to the current status of whale populations can be difficult to come by, so highly charged is the debate. On 18 July this year, the International Environment Investigation Agency stated that the outlook for whales is ‘increasingly bleak’ because of ocean pollution. Other dangers faced by whales—climate change, noise pollution, strikes by ships—pale into insignificance, however, alongside what is known as bycatch (the entanglement of other sea creatures in fishing nets) which kills 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises every year.
Within this context of the ongoing perils faced by whale populations, there are two primary threats to the 1986 moratorium and hence to whale populations across the world: the use of loopholes by whaling nations to continue commercial whaling and a shift in the balance of power at the IWC.
According to Susan Lieberman, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Species program, loopholes in the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling