(from "ISANA" No. 14, 1996)

Bruce Fein
Lawyer/Freelance Writer

It is threatened with pollution from environmentalists who seek to cloak their moral or cultural prejudices in the garb of a discipline evocative of reason, empiricism and nonpartisanship. A recent example is the certification of Japan by the late Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown as subverting the conservation objectives of the International Whaling Commission by taking a submicroscopic number of non-endangered minke whales for scientific research.

That certification last Dec. 11, which could trigger trade sanctions against Japan, smacked more of science fiction than of science.

Environmentalists would have the public believe that all whale species are threatened by extinction. The minke whale, however, seems an inarguable exception. The Commerce Department then captained by Mr. Brown issued a U.S. International Whaling Policy paper in November 1995 that estimated the minke whale stock in the Southern Ocean at 760,000. Japan's anticipated scientific research harvest of a few hundred would approximate 0.05 percent of that flourishing population. The Commerce Department policy paper also estimates the North Pacific population of the minke at 25,000, which would be depleted by a tiny 0.4 percent with Japan's announced research harvest of up to 100. Unless the minke whale species en bloc has taken a vow of celibacy in hopes of entering the priesthood, the trifling scientific harvests of Japan will leave the stock undisturbed. Indeed, in 1993 the Scientific Committee of the IWC unanimously concluded that a limited commercial harvest of the minke would not diminish population stocks, and that the prevailing IWC moratorium on commercial harvests affronted science. When the IWC nonetheless persisted in the moratorium, the committee chairman resigned in protest because its reasons "are nothing to do with science."

Mr. Brown's upbraiding of Japan for research whaling also seems self-defeating. As Douglas Butterworth, a member of the Scientific Committee, has explained, such "research whaling is providing key information on stock structure which is necessary to develop long-term management plans...."

The most plausible motive for Mr. Brown's readiness to pollute science is courtship of the environmental vote. Whales are fetching and popular mammals. Herman Melville's Moby Dick commands more awe and respect than Capt. Ahab. And Greenpeace and sister proselytizers for a pristine planet brilliantly propagandize that all whale species stand at the abyss of extinction.

That Mr. Brown has embraced pseudoscience to assail Japanese research whaling of the abundant minke is underscored by his concurrent haloing of aboriginal subsistence takings of genuinely endangered species. The Commerce Department's policy paper notes that the Unites States, Denmark, Russia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines receive subsistence quotas for native whalers with a long history of whaling for cultural and nutritional purposes.

Those quotas for species whose populations are precarious - such as the bowhead, gray and humpback whales - are numerically more dicey than the Japanese research takings of the minke. Yet the department is lyrical about the former hunts, and chirps: "The United States strongly supports the aboriginal whaling tradition. It is particularly important that the rest of the world be aware of the nutritional necessity and cultural significance of the Alaskan Eskimos subsistence whale hunt. Respect and understanding are vital to ensure that the right of Alaska Natives to hunt whales for subsistence is recognized and accepted worldwide. The United States works hard to ensure that this issue is properly understood within the IWC so that our relationships with other countries that do not have aboriginal hunts do not become strained over this issue."

Like Mr. Brown, the green propagandists have desisted from flagellating aboriginal whale hunts. Aboriginal life seems harmonious with their "back to nature" fetishes, in contrast to the more sophisticated research whaling of the Japanese.

Environmental frets are neither invariably ill conceived nor invariably justified. They deserve careful scientific scrutiny on a case by case basis, not the supersonic prejudgments of the Queen of Hearts in "Alice in Wonderland." And on that score, special care must be taken to avoid the subordination of science to further a political or other non-scientific agenda.

The history of science is replete with instances where intense popular prejudices like the contemporary environmental dogmas contaminated results. William Broad and Nicholas Wade recount in "Betrayers of Truth" a flawed scientific assertion in the 1800s that skull volume is a measure of intelligence and that skull size proved that whites were superior to blacks and Western Europeans superior to Jews, findings that fit the prejudices of the day like a glove. The perpetrator of the fraud, Samuel G. Morton, openly juggled the data on skull sizes to obtain the results he wanted. The juggling went unremarked for more than a century until 1978 when Harvard paleontologist Stephen Gould showed that on Morton's own evidence all races in fact have approximately equal skull volumes.

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