Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas

Preface

xix Preface Over the past dozen or so years, when I have mentioned to someone that I have been writing a book on whaling, the reply frequently makes mention of Mystic, Connecticut, or New Bedford, Massachusetts, or maybe Moby Dick (yes, I have read it; no I don’t really recommend it). In most people’s minds, whaling still conjures up the allegedly romantic era of wooden ships and iron men cruising the Pacific or nudging into the icy Arctic Ocean. There is nothing romantic about this book (except that my wife and I met while both of us were in London doing research). Instead, this is a book about international efforts to make whaling sustainable in the twentieth century, from the earliest suggestions that regulation was necessary before the First World War, through the signing of whaling conventions in the 1930s and the creation of the International Whaling Commission in the 1940s, to the modern era of the commercial moratorium. This is also a book with many moving parts. I have attempted to learn how diplomats, whalers, scientists, fisheries regulators, environmentalists , and consumers from a variety of countries valued whales; how they understood the nature of whales and the whales’ environment; and, therefore , how and why they responded to one another in formal and informal negotiations. By necessity it is an international history. Nations from each continent were involved, although admittedly South America’s and Africa’s roles were generally small, and the focus of attention for most of the century was one of the least national places on earth, the seas around Antarctica. Because the seas are open to all, and the southern sea in particular is far from any law, the diplomatic efforts to regulate whaling were complex and slow moving. While I do not devote many pages to discussing xx Preface the biology and ecology of whales directly, I have kept in mind that nature is hardly static. Ecosystem dynamics alone could wreak havoc with any scientist’s or whaler’s expectations for a particular whaling season. The archival sources for this book reflect the different constituencies. Material comes from the national archives, including foreign ministries and fisheries ministries, as well as other agencies on occasion, in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Norway, and the United States. The foreign ministries in New Zealand and Norway were particularly helpful in allowing me access to fairly recent files that made the last chapter and the epilogue possible. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Cambridge, England, also allowed me access to its files. Beyond the organizational records, I relied heavily on the material saved by a prominent scientist, Remington Kellogg of the Smithsonian, and those of the Salvesen whaling firm, housed at the University of Edinburgh. While I did not gain access to Russian or Japanese archives, there has been enough published from both nations, as well as diplomatic correspondence in other nations’ files, for me to feel confident that I have captured their positions. It also helped that the Japanese got back into whaling with the help of the US occupation authorities, and those records are all in the US National Archives. As to the environmentalists, they have left their own informal archives in letters to governments and the IWC, innumerable books, and newspaper advertisements and stories. Ultimately, this book deals with three specific, ongoing concerns in whaling diplomacy: sustainability, sovereignty, and science. From the start of the century, those who knew the history of whaling believed that whalers would always follow a pattern of finding a large stock of whales, ramping up catching, and fairly quickly driving the stock to commercial extinction—too few to bother hunting. Generally, knowledgeable observers wanted to negotiate some sort of agreement that would make whaling rational, by which they meant roughly what in the early twenty-first century would usually be called sustainable: it would not be rational to hunt so many whales that the industry would collapse. Into the middle of the 1970s, the central question about whaling was how much to restrict catching to ensure more catching in the future, and the winners were usually those who wanted fewer restrictions. The unwillingness of whalers and their governments to sacrifice some short-term profits helped set the stage for the rise of an anti-whaling coalition, which eventually concluded that Preface xxi even if there could be sustainable whaling, whaling was itself unethical and hence should end, unless undertaken by aboriginal peoples, and even that right was in dispute...