Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas by Kurkpatrick Dorsey (review)

Whales and Nations examines the efforts of twentieth-century diplomats to regulate the global whaling industry through international conventions. It provides a succinct history of modern whaling from its origins in the fjords of Norway to its demise in the krill grounds of Antarctica. It offers valuable insights into the development of scientific research on cetacean biology and the emergence of scientific techniques for estimating whale populations and numbers, and it provides an in-depth look at the many attempts to create an international regime designed to make the whaling industry sustainable. Dorsey relies primarily on the traditional tools and methods of historians—archival records, government documents, scientific research, journal and newspaper accounts, and public debates.

A pioneer in the field of environmental diplomacy, Dorsey is keenly aware of the difficulties that beset all efforts to protect commercially valuable resources, especially in the “global commons” of the world’s oceans. He argues that diplomats made significant advances against heavy odds, in that they managed to impose restraints (closed seasons, length and weight minimums, ocean sanctuaries, factory inspectors, and full-use practices) on an industry that was cutthroat, wasteful, and rapacious. Without the international treaties and protocols of the 1930s and 1940s, whalers may well have annihilated the blues, fins, seis, rights, humpbacks, and other commercially valuable whale species before a global moratorium could come to the rescue in the 1980s. To be sure, this backhanded compliment is an odd way to measure the effectiveness of the International Whaling Commission (iwc), the agency established in 1946 to enforce the conventions; its “success” consisted of protecting remnant stocks after the whaling industry had self-destructed from decades of over-hunting. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that today’s diplomats have not succeeded in imposing effective restrictions on other fisheries and that, as a result, many ocean species are facing commercial extinction, with little prospect of a global moratorium on the horizon.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its nuanced analysis of the diplomatic interplay among the whaling powers—notably, Norway, Great Britain, Russia, Japan, the United States, France, and the Netherlands—as well as many lesser powers that are often overlooked. Future scholars will be hard-pressed to add anything new to Dorsey’s well-researched analysis of these diplomatic parlays. The book would be stronger, however, if Dorsey had included a chapter devoted exclusively to the economic side of the industry (a topic that he handles only in scattered fashion). One of the chief obstacles to regulation, after all, was the enormous cost of constructing and maintaining a whaling fleet. Since these fleets made money only when they were on the hunt, whalers fiercely resisted all attempts to restrict the hunting season or to cap the annual kill rates, even as they recognized the ecological need for catch limits to secure the industry’s long-term viability.

Commercial whaling was also deeply tied to the fats industry; most blubber was turned into margarine and then consumed by Europeans. There were a wide variety of other oils—coconut, palm, peanut, and soybean, among them—that were just as suitable for margarine production and far more sustainable. But Unilever (the British company that dominated the fats market) liked to have large quantities of whale oil on hand to flood the market whenever the price of vegetable oils began to climb.¹ Both the whaling fleets and the fats manufacturers conducted their own economic diplomacy outside the framework of the nation-states (just as the oil-and-gas industry does today on global warming), thus warranting a more central role in Dorsey’s otherwise superb exploration of whale diplomacy.