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

In 1972 Reader’s Digest published an excerpt from Canadian author Farley Mowat’s A Whale for the Killing, which told of his experience with a fin whale trapped in a cove near Burgeo, Newfoundland in 1967 and how local residents chose to torment the whale rather than rescue it. As Kurkpatrick Dorsey observes, Mowat expressed and helped popularize sentiments that gained currency during the 1970s and 1980s: “people are fundamentally pretty ugly, but whales are pure. People could redeem themselves, though, by saving the whales” (p. 216).

This understanding of whales was a new one. Throughout most of the twentieth century, “the dominant idea about whales was that they were strange and interesting, but they were first food and energy for humans” (p. 10). Dorsey illustrates how, from the early 1900s, whalers took advantage of new technologies that enabled them to hunt the last great cetacean populations in the Antarctic seas and reap profits from industrial demand for their oil. Even before World War I, some contemporaries had noted that whalers were following the familiar cycle of finding a lucrative whale stock, rapidly increasing catches, and depleting the resource until hunting was no longer profitable. A desire to prevent a recurrence of this pernicious pattern spurred the international efforts to regulate whaling that are the topic of Dorsey’s rich and informative book.

Drawing on an impressive array of archival sources from Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Norway, and the United States, Dorsey reconstructs the history of whaling diplomacy: its beginnings in the early twentieth century, the signing of international conventions in the 1930s and creation of the International Whaling Commission (iwc) in 1946, and the eventual passage of a moratorium on commercial whaling after 1982. Dorsey organizes the book’s highly readable narrative around the themes of sustainabil-ity, sovereignty, and science.

Throughout the twentieth century, as Dorsey shows, enlightened observers pursued agreements that would facilitate more rational exploitation of resources and make whaling sustainable. The goal was not to save whales, but to curtail hunting so that the industry would not collapse. Whenever discussions centered on conserving whales for future use, however, those who wanted fewer restrictions generally won out.

Like Dorsey’s previous scholarship, Whales and Nations reminds us that ecological processes, including whales’ migratory patterns, inevitably transcend human-constructed political boundaries. Defining such boundaries, moreover, proved especially difficult in maritime environments. From the beginning, therefore, efforts to limit whaling hit on the issue of national sovereignty. Would nation-states forfeit power over their whaling fleets on the high seas? The iwc’s objection system, which let member countries opt out of rules they considered particularly onerous, presented a way around this thorny question, but rendered effective regulation more difficult.

Science played a particularly ambivalent role in whaling diplomacy. On the one hand, as Dorsey explains, people who wanted an international regulatory framework for whaling deemed science absolutely necessary for making good decisions. On the other hand, available science seemed woefully inadequate for making them. For this reason, scientific knowledge and its inherent limitations shaped the outcomes of environmental diplomacy concerning whaling.

After decades of negotiation, which Dorsey covers in much detail, the iwc in the 1970s turned to advocating quota schemes based on scientific management in order to conserve whale populations. But by that time, Mowat and growing numbers of other whaling opponents had come to believe that it was fundamentally unethical and had to cease. This idea of whales as environmentalist icons proved hard to reconcile with the significance of the whale hunt to indigenous peoples, who saw it as an integral to their cultural heritage. More troubling, as Dorsey points out, saving the whales because they were special creatures that deserved protection under all circumstances offered little guidance about how to treat everything else in the ocean.

Taken together, this array of factors made it impossible to forge a sustainable...