(from "Who's Afraid of Compromise?", Simon Ward, published by ICR, 1990)
Prof. Milton M.R. Freeman
Boreal Institute for Northern Studies, University of Alberta
Introduction
The IWC was established in 1946 to manage commercially-valuable whale stocks; however, for more than two decades it proved to be quite incapable of halting the progressive population decline of the large whales. Thus, in the 1970s, the developing environmental movement in N. America and Western Europe was provided a legitimate cause upon which to base a campaign that came to have widespread appeal due to the very positive image that whales enjoyed in the public mind.
At about the same time, in the early 1970s, due to the progressively declining whale stocks and whaling quotas, many established whale-based industries, for purely commercial reasons, moved away from processing whale in e.g., Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, N. Zealand, Canada and the US. This coincided with growing campaigns by both environmental and animal rights groups to provide the greatest possible protection to marine mammals in general, and such "phenomenologically significant animals" as whitecoat seal pups and whales in particular.
A major political breakthrough for the anti-whaling groups occurred in 1972 at the UN environmental conference in Stockholm, where the US government joined with environmental organisations to promote a moratorium on commercial hunting of whales. Significantly, at about the same time, two pieces of domestic legislation were passing through the US Congress, namely the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972) and the Endangered Species Act (1973).
However, the resolution calling for a moratorium was not adopted by the IWC until 1982. The IWC in 1972 was composed essentially of countries involved with the few remaining whaling businesses. In addition to this consequent pro-whaling sentiment at IWC meetings, the Scientific Committee of the IWC concluded that there was no scientific justification for imposing a blanket moratorium on the harvesting of all whale stocks without regard to whether a particular stock was depleted or healthy. Despite the overall opposition within the IWC to ending whaling, some IWC members did support a ban, especially those Western European countries where the rise of green Parties was influencing the domestic political agenda. However, for the IWC to adopt the moratorium required a three-quarter majority, and in the absence of voting support the US government and environmental groups recruited new member governments who would for their own reasons wish to support either whale conservation or an end to killing whales. Thus the membership, which was fairly constant at around 14 - 17 member countries until 1973, doubled by 1981, and continued to grow until by 1985 the IWC had about 40 members.
This introduction provides the background to a discussion that will focus mainly upon the ideological and informational bases involved in the politics of whale-saving. I will suggest that a series of separate events during the past decade have conspired to shift attention at the IWC from whale conservation (which implies sustainable use) to whale-saving (or stopping whales being killed). Though the sentiment of saving whales is noble in the abstract, in terms of successfully addressing real environmental problems, the means employed at the IWC appear to be most unhelpful as a guide to appropriate international behaviour.
The IWC has, since WWII, moved through three phases. The first, from 1949 to the late 1960s, was the period of expansion of whaling, where largely commercial considerations prompted decision-making at IWC meetings. A second phase was short-lived, during the mid-1970s, when the southern whale stocks were sufficiently depleted to have caused most large whaling operations to withdraw, thereby facilitating the introduction of a science-based approach to regulating the whale fishery. However, the growth in concern about the serious state of the southern whale stocks grew faster than the IWC's ability to take action under its cumbersome decision-making rules. So the mid-1970s ushered in the third period, when considerations of a purely political nature governed the actions of the IWC.
It seems the whole history of the IWC has filled whale scientists and conservationists with despair. A not atypical commentary on the first 30 years' performance of the IWC concludes:
"Each one of the original participating nations of the Commission had an almost unblemished record of voting based on self-interest and realisation of short-term economic gain, until such time as they divested themselves of all or most of their whaling interests. Since which time some of those with the worst records in the early years ... have found it expedient (and inexpensive) to support politically popular conservation measures ..." (Gaskin 1982).
One point I would make is that the political agenda followed by several countries at the IWC is a peculiarly domestic one, where the primary audience being addressed appears to be a national one. As Commissioners represent national governments, that is understandable; however, it raises questions as to the appropriateness of this approach to the management of global common property resources and to international environmental decision-making.
Problems associated with science-based approach to management
The second period in the history of the IWC was short-lived. Why did science-based management have such a short life?
In order to answer this question, it is necessary to consider the tremendous difficulties associated with obtaining good scientific information about migratory and oceanic whale stocks. There is no wholely satisfactory technique for aging all baleen whales, and no agreed-upon way of determining the discreteness of different geographic stocks of the same whale species or even of conducting censuses of whales at sea in an entirely acceptable manner. These and other inadequacies create abundant opportunity for fundamental disagreement among scientists as to the appropriate way of arriving at acceptable estimates of the required biological parameters. Thus the pre-existing disagreements concerning management decisions merely moved from a largely commercially-oriented and economic-based forum to one where, despite an appearance of science-based discussion, the advice proffered was conjectural and still subject to various mission-based biases.
The limitations of science-based management thus relate to questions of the quality of the data-base and the methodologies available, but also, and importantly, to the nature of the forum for scientific discussions and the social and political objectives which the scientists' findings are to inform. Many non-scientists (as well as scientists) remain oblivious to the imperfections of the scientific means used to reach "the truth". Environmental scientists, given the often intensely political nature of their investigations, frequently hold positions that are the opposite to those held by similarly trained scientists serving other masters.
Furthermore, in such public arenas lower standards of proof are asked for and offered. The result is often public statements by scientists that are mere supposition, yet offered as rigorously derived scientific "facts", a class of evidence that has been called "trans-science" (Weinberg 1976).
There is another problem resulting from a scientist's identification with a particular side in a public controversy; that is the frequent co-optation of the scientist by that particular interest group. This may result in the professional or institutional inertia that frequently hinders the search for innovative solutions to difficult management problems (Regier et al 1989).
Management involves more than science
The limitations of science constitute one class of problem encountered in any science-based regulatory agency. Of equal seriousness in the IWC context is the limited technical assistance provided to the IWC to decide important questions in those areas central to management but outside of the strictly biological field. While the Scientific Committee provides expert advice on technical questions pertaining to whale population biology for example, expert advice is not available when matters related to whaling (as a human-centred activity) are under discussion. This is a serious deficiency, preventing commissioners from benefitting from in-depth consideration of matters seriously affecting the well-being of various whaling societies impacted by IWC whale-management decisions. In such circumstances, questions of the effectiveness, credibility and ultimately the relevance, of the organisation as a responsible resource regulatory body will surely be asked, especially in countries with marine-based economics.
In addition, the parameters to many important questions that are basic to whale management are barely defined in the current IWC context: though the IWC has sought to expand its terms of reference, it has done so without building in the necessary technical competence. Lengthy discussions about "inhumaneness" or "cruelty" are carried out in apparent ignorance of a large philosophical and ethical literature relevant to the topic (e.g. Fox 1986). Even the basic question "What constitutes whale conservation?" is not resolved, yet it remains the main goal of the present membership. Is conservation taken to mean, as widely accepted (e.g. in the Antarctic Treaty System), "wise use" ? A related question follows from the existence of several definitions of "wise use", that is, what right does one government have to impose its definition upon others? If "wise use" requires non-wasteful, non-trivial use of whale products, who decides what is "trivial" (or wasteful - or obversely, socially valuable) use?
It is clear in outlining just a few unresolved questions that discussion at the IWC has necessarily moved beyond questions of science, to questions centrally involving culturally-determined subjective valuations. The danger of attempting to resolve such legitimate differences of cultural perspective in a partisan political forum is that, in a voting situation, the majority persuasion can prevail over the minority purely on the basis of numerical strength. Thus, though seemingly by democratic means, minority viewpoints may be over-ridden largely because they are culturally foreign and their validity insufficiently appreciated by the majority. There surely needs to be a careful determination of just cause for exercising the rule of the majority where the majority view is based on a culturocentric perspective of what is acceptable domestic behaviour.
This is the crux of the political aspect of IWC deliberations today. Despite the fact that the IWC is an intergovernmental organisation, meetings provide an opportunity for a government to take an environmental position that will be constructed by its own domestic constituency as "enlightened". Thus a government with a problematic environmental image at home (and possibly abroad), can appease troublesome animal-welfare advocates at home by speaking out against "cruel and inhumane" treatment of whales; a country engaging in unacceptable toxic waste disposal, or failing to conserve its own wildlife may, in addressing a high-profile international issue, find common cause (and thereby deal better) with political opposition at home. The presence of a large Non-Governmental Organisation audience at IWC meetings ensures that a government's public position on each issue becomes known to interested audiences at home, and various governments joining (and leaving) the IWC, and their speeches at recent meetings, provide ample evidence that such domestic considerations are indeed very important.
The rhetoric of many environmental and animal rights campaigns is heavily based on appeals to emotion, but in the "save-the-whale" context, environmentalists found common cause with animal rights groups whose main public strategy is to anthropomorphise terminology. This was earlier very successful in "save-the-whale" campaigns, where "baby seal" is a much more powerful metaphor than "seal pup". The goal of animal rights activists is:
"... to reduce emotional distance between their public and an animal on a far-off ice floe, by making the animal 'almost human'. Making it 'cute and cuddly' helps; making it intelligent helps more" (Lee 1988).
Later I will return to the issue of "intelligence" in whales, for this assertion has proved a powerful weapon in campaigners' efforts to reduce the emotional and cognitive distance between whales and the public. It is a moot point whether this third phase in the history to the IWC should be characterised as one based on politics, or on sentimentality, or on both. In reality, it has been heavily based on both, but I choose to emphasise the political aspects in this analysis.
The term "political" is used to mark the end of the period of attempted scientific rationality in decision-making. Unfortunately, this short second period was not given much chance to succeed; it might yet be possible to manage whales and whaling in a wholely rational fashion, but that seems unlikely in the existing IWC context.
In short, it can be observed that the current majority position at the IWC can achieve its stated objectives (of preventing whales being killed by whalers) by exploiting the uncertainty inherent in all scientific activity, rather than by using science to arrive at progressively more acceptable (or agreed-upon) approximations of reality that could inform management programs. It is this uncertainty, manifest by the not unexpected disagreement on how to interpret imperfect data by the 60 or more members of the Scientific Committee, that provides the justification for inaction by the Commission in setting quotas say, or in recognising the merit of encouraging comprehensive research programs directed to a better understanding of the environmental relationships of whale populations. The delay such uncertainty engenders certainty is a conservative and hence, in the context of some seriously depleted whale stocks, a not unreasonable measure, but when applied uncritically in stands in opposition to all three objectives of the IWC mandate, which are to conserve (i.e. to manage) whale stocks, to regulate whale fisheries, and to oversee the orderly development of the whaling industry. For in these last two contexts, preventing taking of any whales, even in small numbers from abundant and robust stocks, seriously undermine the viability of numerous whaling-dependent communities without any conservation-based justification.
Preconditions for politicization of whale management
The 1970s saw a number of events taking place that helped propel the IWC from a science-based to an intensely political forum. The first was a growing international concern about the state of the environment, which resulted in widespread interest in the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm.
A second consequence of this growing public awareness was the proliferation of new, activist, environmental organisations, including the Green Parties starting to become a political force in Europe.
The Stockholm conference provided a world stage for all those who wanted to appear truly environmentally enlightened, which certainly included most governments of Western industrial nations, who together with big industry were identified as "the enemy" by most environmentalists of the day.
What was needed by environmentally-active governments and non-governmental organisations was a symbol, an identifiable rallying point to focus attention on their new-found concerns and future good intentions. The whale provides a symbol having almost universal recognition and hence appeal. Instantly recognised environmental symbols can have their usefulness embellished by myth creation, because even though almost everyone can identify a whale (or an elephant) few know any biological facts about the animal. But being able to remember the name of the animal/symbol is the necessary first step to accumulating information about it. The more mysterious or mythic the animal can be made to appear, the more interest its name or appearance generates. Information that embellishes the mythic properties of the creature will include various anthropocentric characterisations thereby increasing the public's concern for, and identification with it.
The mass media are, in the present information age, important means of disseminating information and often in sensorily stimulating fashion. Such stimulants may be of either a pleasurable or an anxiety-provoking nature; either focuses the attention equally well. Pleasurable information inputs about whales include such TV programs as Flipper, the distribution of a recording of humpback whale songs by the National Geographic, and a host of coffee-table books with pictures of people interacting with whales, of free-swimming whales, mother-calf pairs, and the reassuring message that as whales are also intelligent beings, we humans are not alone in this world.
Anxiety-provoking images show the ocean turning red, whalers using large knives to butcher whales, or whales beached and in distress.
The popular Flipper series was subject to reinforcement by a series of books purportedly of a scientific nature, serving to create an image of the dolphin as an "intelligent" creature (e.g. Lilly 1961, 1978). Though these early works on cetacean intelligence are now discredited as works of science (e.g. Prescott 1981), they were influential in allowing the public to form certain opinions which only tend to be countered in the scientific literature, which the public does not generally read. Journalists remain largely unaware of specialist criticism of popular and erroneous science books, so such errors having become accepted as true can take years to correct.
Political action to prevent whale-killing
The leadership role played by the US administration as promoter of the moratorium, in Stockholm and at subsequent IWC meetings, was enhanced by the existence of idealistic domestic legislation, aimed at protecting marine mammals in particular, and all endangered animals and plant species in that country. Section 9 of the Endangered Species Act (1973) prohibited "taking" individuals of any endangered species, and even though 1982 and 1986 amendments have softened that extreme prohibition (animals can be "taken" so long as the persistence of the species is not thereby jeopardised), the position of many environmentalist organisations is to continue to counter the threat of endangerment by advocating the earlier, absolute, no-take approach.
In reality, given the large expenditure of public funds that would be required to give effect to the values enshrined in the Endangered Species Act, it is not surprising that actions derived from this legislation only satisfy the demands of small groups of people who lobby for total protection of a very limited number of phenomenologically significant species. Others have argued that this particular legislative mechanism is both unwise and counter-productive, in relation to concerns about human welfare (e.g. Leitzell 1986) and in relation to assisting in the protection of endangered marine mammal species (e.g. Brownell et at 1989; Tyack 1989).
Unfortunately it is this "failed approach" (see Leitzell 1986) that has been adopted as the model by the IWC, namely a proscription on use, despite the human costs involved, and even when no measurable probability of endangerment to the species or stocks can reasonably be shown to exist. In this statement, "reasonably" refers to common-sense rather than science-derived judgements, for disagreements among scientists often preclude reasonable conclusions being derived by the decision-makers from the conflicting advice the scientists offer them.
The IWC stage is now set for the intensely political debates of the late 1970s and 1980s. There are villains and good guys, there is an international issue (saving the world's whales by means of a moratorium), and there is a well-publicised arena where the environmental activists can further promote their causes and garner legitimation by vicariously taking part in an increasingly public inter-governmental debate. The changes occurring in IWC membership and agenda during the start of this intensely political period have been detailed elsewhere (Hoel 1985). It is important to realise that a potent new ingredient was introduced into the IWC agenda: passion. In earlier times it was not easy to be overly passionate about purely economic objectives, or during debate about changing the quota in respect to one whale stock over another. Indeed the earlier modus operandi was to try to ensure that there were no real losers, as the rules of the IWC allowed any aggrieved party to excuse themselves from being bound by the offending decision; furthermore, dissatisfied members could, and did, leave the organisation.
The cause of the passion was the religious-like fervour with which whale-protection groups and some government delegations advanced their cause. Jungian psychologists can doubtless ascribe reasons for the zeal with which representatives of former whaling powers now championed the cause of saving whales.
In seeking to understand why the IWC imposed a total moratorium on commercial whaling, it is necessary to consider the strategies adopted by those anti-whaling lobbies that successfully mobilised government support for an international ban on whaling and trade in whale products. Anti-whaling organisations have fully utilised the threat of biological extinction as an effective means of persuading publics and politicians to act uncompromisingly in order to reduce to zero the chance that extinction might inadvertently occur as a result of undue delay. Extinction evokes an awful finality, and to delay in that circumstance would be seen as cowardly culpability in failing to avoid a seemingly preventable act of ecocide.
A second strategy has been to endow whales with human-like characteristics, and consequently to render them more allied to humankind than their purely zoological attributes allow.
Making whales even larger (than life)
Earlier the use of myth in embellishing the power of symbols was referred to. Some attributes of whales inspire awe, or at least fire the imagination. Many are large, and their swimming movements are almost hypnotic. When a whale leaps from the water, it evidences great power, and the song of the humpback is melodious and eerie. Though not many people have seen whales in the wild, many have seen trained captive dolphins at oceanaria. These have immense appeal, from the jaw configuration with its appearance of a fixed smile, to the tricks they have been taught to perform. For people who believe their pet dog is intelligent if they can teach it a few simple tricks, it is easy to believe dolphins must be really smart to unfailingly execute such complicated performances. But how intelligent are whales and other cetacea?
One of oft-cited argument, which has gained popular credence, is based on the size and appearance of whale brains. The idea of brain size correlating in some ways with intelligence is more than a century old (Marsh 1886). Marsh's line of reasoning was that as humans are the most intelligent life-form, those brains smaller and with less folded surfaces must belong to less intelligent creatures on a progressively descending scale. Such ideas have long since been discredited by scientists. Brain size does correlate to some extent with body size, so that large animals ordinarily might be expected to have larger brains than small animals of a similar class. As a class of large mammals, the absolute brain size in large whales in a general way reflects their large body mass. But when the body size is taken into account, whales are seen to be not exceptionally well-endowed among mammals: the sperm whale brain is almost the same weight as an Asian elephant brain, but the sperm whale itself is seven to eight times heavier.
The other feature of the cetacean brain that has been taken to indicate higher mental powers is the folding of the surface of the brain. Though humans and apes do have well-fissured brains, so do some of the most lowly mammals, such as the Echidna, the spiny anteater (a monotreme, i.e. an evolutionary earlier egg-laying mammal that predates the emergence of true mammals) and several species of insectivore (e.g. the hedgehog; Mcphail 1982). In fact the folding of the whale cortex is quite different from that seen in the human brain, and closely resembles that seen in hoofed animals such as cattle, sheep and deer (Bryden Corkeron 1988). Microscopic examination of the brain surface indicates that whales have low neurone density and a very thin layer of cortical cells, compared to a much thicker cortical layer in those higher mammals exhibiting external folding (Morgane et al 1986). The brain is as unremarkable as is the trainability of some cetaceans.
Almost any animal can be trained to performed varied and unusual tricks; the secret is the persuasive power of operant conditioning or rewarding trial and error success with food. Using this technique, remarkable feats of behaviour have been obtained in even the lowliest of vertebrates; e.g. pigeons have been trained to alert soldiers to enemy ambush, and gulls have been trained to report downed aviators at sea (Bailey 1986).
Communication among whales is another activity that is used to suggest intelligence. However, the power to communicate varied information in great detail is not a measure of intelligence, for the non-human animal able to accurately encode and communicate the most detailed information is probably the honeybee (Gould Gould 1986). Despite the incredible features of bee's communicative ability, it is well to realise that this ability is wholely innate; bees are experts the first time they attempt the task. This is important when considering the supposed communication abilities of animals; as cetologist D. Gaskin has cautioned, the ability an animal may have in signalling its presence in no sense carries any implication that the signalling has conscious intent or purpose in the brain of the animal, regardless of the fact that information may be conveyed (Gaskin 1982; see also e.g. Caldwell Caldwell 1968; Evans Bastien 1969).
Cetaceans of various species make a variety of different sounds. The male humpback is particularly melodious at a certain time of year, but there is nothing in either the apparent complexity or variability of the song that makes it more complex or variable than the songs of many birds (Winn Winn 1985; Bryden Corkeron 1988), and as with male song-birds, the vocalisations of male humpbacks are believed to be a form of courtship display (Cokeron 1988). The sounds whales make can travel long distances, a function of their low frequency and the transmission properties of water. Until there is evidence of intent, the mere production of sounds, no matter how sonorous, varied or long in duration, in no way indicates a level of mental development. As sight, smell and taste are not well developed senses in cetaceans, and water is an excellent medium for transmission of sound, the very survival and evolutionary development of cetaceans has depended on the elaboration of noise producing, receiving and analysing capacities to compensate for their other sensory inadequacies. Thus we see such varied noise-producing behaviours as breaching, tail-slapping, or jaw-clapping, which appear to serve socially useful communicative functions in some cetacean species (Gaskin 1982).
Contradictions in international whale management strategies
This account has so far provided some recent historical background to a consideration of some political circumstances affecting the international management of whales and whaling. Not only have these emotionally charged recent circumstances confounded international efforts to manage, both rationally and equitably, important international resources, but the resulting management decisions include in their ecological consequences serious and pervasive damage to a number of human communities whose social, cultural, economic and nutritional well-being is heavily dependent upon sustained harvesting of marine resources (e.g. Freeman 1988; Japan 1989). A majority of governments actively supporting an end to whaling at the IWC also support the World Conservation Strategy (WCS) or are members of one or more of the international organisations (e.g. IUCN, UNEP) that co-sponsor the WCS. It is instructive to ask: how compatible are these governments' statements and actions at the IWC in favour of an end to whaling, with their concern for other global issues, including the essentially human-centered concerns addressed by the WCS? It is useful to make this assessment in relation to some of the core elements of the WCS, elements that are also strongly endorsed by the Brundtland Report on Environment and Development.
These common elements of the two reports hold that: i) human life depends upon sustainable and equitable utilisation of environmental resources; ii) governments need to promote sustainable development so that they can assure the sustainable livelihoods of all peoples; and iii) governments should recognise and actively involve people at the community level in both developing and implementing sustainable development strategies.
These three elements, following noted futurist J. Robertson's prescient analysis, are the Sane, Humane, Ecological (SHE) option, in which the key to the future lies in attaining balance: balance within ourselves, balance between ourselves and other people, and balance between people and nature. "The only realistic (future) course is to give top priority to learning to live supportively with one another on our small and crowded planet" (Robertson 1978).
The notion of balance between peoples seems singularly absent during IWC discussions. What dominates is a particular culturocentric view, ideologically opposed to notions of cultural pluralism in respect to traditional livelihoods, socio-religious beliefs and food cultures. In addition, the very notion of an overall moratorium on commercial whaling reflects an unbalanced view, one that ascribes a radical treatment without balancing the supposed benefits against the likely costs. International recognition of the need for protection of certain whale stocks had preceded the adoption of a whaling moratorium: for example, the blue whale was fully protected in 1967 and the humpback in 1966, long before the call for a blanket moratorium was actively pursued. The lack of balance is introduced when known human costs (associated with undermining the viability of whole communities, of weakening devoutly-held belief systems, and terminating particular traditional livelihoods, food cultures and social institutions) could all be avoided by allowing controlled harvesting of small numbers of whales from abundant and robust stocks of Antarctic minke whales (which appear to be increasing in number) and North Pacific sperm whales for example. In neither case is there any conservation basis for not so acting, for neither species nor stock is in any sense endangered (Aron 1988).
The Brundtland Commission Report and the State of the World Report (Brown et al 1989) both warn of the environmental costs of sustaining high energy-consuming activities, which, inter alia, include modern agriculture-based food-producing systems. Brundtland also stresses the negative environmental and social impacts caused by displacing economically self-sufficient rural populations, who if displaced ordinarily move into ecologically-unbalanced urban or metropolitan settings. It is these various imbalances that represent the real and serious long-term threats to regional, and ultimately global, environments. On the other hand it seems evident that a more ecologically-sound approach is one based upon the sustainable harvesting of renewable living resources whose continued productivity remains independent of massive inputs of fossil fuels. Using this self-sustaining regime as the basis of producing quality foodstuffs, as well as maintaining the economic viability and social vitality of the producing and consuming communities, entails none of the damaging environmental consequences associated directly or indirectly with deriving sustenance from land-based, fossil-fuel dependent, agricultural food-production systems, or of displacing self-sufficient rural peoples.
The more significant current problems however, appear to be global warming, ozone depletion, loss of agricultural soils and sources of drinking water, rising sea levels and a steadily deteriorating global food-security situation (Brown et at 1989). The loss of biodiversity is an important (though far less human-life threatening) problem, but here attention rightly focuses on tropical rainforest destruction, for most of the world's biodiversity is to be found in those incredibly rich and diverse ecological systems. Marine mammals appear to be among the least threatened biological groups when considered in global context (Clark 1989), which is to be expected as the offshore marine environment is far less liable to experience serious habitat alteration than are terrestrial environments, and of course it is habitat loss (and not hunting) that represents the greatest threat to animal species' survival. Very few whale species are seriously in danger of extinction at the present time, though many are at lower population levels than in earlier times. Depletion, however, is not in itself necessarily an endangering circumstance, despite misleading statements to the contrary by whale protection advocates. The species of cetacean that are truly endangered are those threatened by loss of critical habitat, such as various river dolphins with very restricted geographical range (Brownell et at 1989). Large whales on the other hand, often with feeding and breeding populations dispersed over the world's oceans, are well adapted to their relatively stable and unchanging habitat, and in several instances (e.g. gray, bowhead, fin and humpback whales) show remarkable resilience in recovering from seriously depleted population levels. If regional populations, despite protection, fail to recover to earlier levels, this will likely reflect current ecosystemic reality, namely the dynamic and complex changes that occur in any natural ecological system and which necessarily prevent a return to an earlier community composition no longer adaptive in the altered circumstances. Factors preventing a complete rebound are natural and in most cases biotic; the important ecological conclusion is that despite change the biological community (albeit altered) nevertheless continues to exist.
Conclusion
The decision of the IWC in respect to banning sustainable whaling (whether commercial or not has no ecological significance) is both environmentally and socially destructive, and hence ecologically unsound, and as a consequence directly contradicts the prescriptions of the World Conservation Strategy, the conclusions of the Brundtland Commission of Environment and Development, and of various international conferences recently held to consider ways of limiting climatic warming. If this is the case, why does the IWC act in this counter-intuitive and ecologically unsound manner?
It appears that the IWC approach to whale management is based upon a 1970s approach to marine mammal protection the US has abandoned at home but promotes abroad. This model is not in conformity with current internationally embraced conservation goals that importantly stress human-centred, sustained, rational use of renewable resources. Apart from these particular shortcomings, it might be asked what other costs or contradictions appear to be associated with these IWC actions ?
As the global environmental agenda in the 1990s moves increasingly to mobilise economic and other resources to counter the very real threats to survival and well-being of significant numbers of people, the passion and excitement of the 1970s' "Save the Whale" campaigns will presumably assume their rightful places in the history of environmentalism.
The growth of the human population from five billion to perhaps 10 billion will occur in the lifetimes of many people alive today. That growth will exact a large toll in life, including human life, as the quality of existence for millions of people will, quite likely, decrease. Along the way to the new equilibria almost every animal and plant species will be subject to change in population abundance and distribution and very many biological species will, as a consequence of human demands on the environment, become seriously reduced, or even extinct. In these circumstances, to place biological resources, for purely personal and sentimental reasons, into idealised and sacrosanct categories outside of ecological reality should not be a serious goal for any enlightened conservation organisation endeavoring to achieve significant environmental objectives (see e.g. Fitter 1986).
It seems imperative that in the not too distant future vastly improved technical competence as resource managers and more environmentally benign values and behaviours as consumers and electors will surely be required of humankind. In such circumstances the management and sustainable utilisation of marine resources will necessarily be based on values other than those underlying decisions made during the first 40 years of the IWC. It is inevitable that politics will play a part in future debates surrounding whales, and indeed all other resource management issues. The hope is that more balance, in the form of greater tolerance, respect and appreciation of other's cultural perspectives and needs will characterise future discussions. As important as biodiversity is to the maintenance of ecological process in the biosphere, so is cultural diversity important to the ongoing development and vitality of the noosphere and with it the long-term survival of humanity. Hopefully the activities of the IWC in 1990s will more fully reflect appreciation of the need to embrace a more ecosystemic view of environmental problems, or as has been argued elsewhere, "a revolutionary change in the way of doing international business - a shift in focus from environment in a political context to politics in an ecosystem context" (Valentine 1988). It is of course central to the ecosystem approach that social, economic and environmental interests are integrated in ways that represent a significant advance over today's inadequate and fractious single-issue approach to whale-management.
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