Whale-savers' year
Charles Foley
San Diego 'WHALE HUNT!' reads a huge sign on the quayside. 'See! learn! about whales before it's too late!' The little blue-andwhite excursion boats at the end of the pier are doing a roaring trade. Before the season is over, thousands of Californians will have put down $3 to sail out of San Diego's glittering Mission Bay for an hour's leviathan-spotting. Fleets of sailboats, private and commercial, aeroplanes, even a large silver dirigible will carry the sightseers out to the Pacific for a glimpse of a barnacled back or a mighty fluke. They are rarely disappointed.
It's the time of the annual migration. Each winter, some 11,000 legally protected California grey whales pass by this coast on a pilgrimage of 6,000 miles from the Bering Sea to breed in Mexico's warm lagoons; and more than half a million Californians turn out to watch them. The creatures are following a migratory path a little more to seaward each year to avoid the crush. Such a flotilla of boats followed them south that last season the Mexican government barred all sea traffic from Scammon's Lagoon, a favourite mating ground. The whale, having been hunted almost to extinction, is now in danger of being loved to death, at least in this country.
The largest creature ever to inhabit the earth Ca mammiferous animal without hind feet'—Melville) has become the darling of the counter-cultural intelligentsia. Songs of the Humpback Whale, a record album, is a best-seller. Demonstrators, poets, bumper-stickers denounce the world's last two serious whaling nations, Japan and Russia. A recent paperback, The World of the California Grey Whale, sold more than 10,000 copies (at $4 apiece) in its first three months. The administration of California's Governor Jerry Brown is as enthusiastic as anyone: it has declared the whale a Symbolic 'state mammal,' and in November Mr Brown, the thirty-seven-year-old exJesuit seminarist who made a strong run for the White House this year, sponsored a day-long happening entitled 'California Celebrates the Whale.' Several thousand People came to hear singers such as Joni Mitchell and Country Joe McDonald, poet Gary Snyder, and recordings of the eerie, Melancholy voice of the whale itself. It was, s,aid an organiser, 'the biggest-ever gathering of whale-savers.' Governor Brown told the faithful that the survival of our cetacean neighbours 'symbolises our own.'
Precisely how dire the whale's plight is, no one knows: it's certainly bad. After eight centuries of hunting there may still be some two million alive around the world. It's thought that the population has been more than halved since massive whaling began. A few species have become extinct, and the mighty blue—the largest animal ever to share our planet, bigger than four dinosaurs—is gravely threatened. Cruising in an area of the Antarctic that was once the blue's favourite habitat, the US research ship Hero could count only a handful of the great beasts. The right whale is also on the threshold of extinction.
The bowhead, humpback and grey whale become scarcer year by year, and the remaining four main species--fin, sei, sperm and Bryde's—are at their lowest count in history.
The United States, Britain and other former whaling nations realised long ago that the slaughter was self-defeating: each year the number of animals fell, while the cost of killing them rose. The International Whaling Commission, a sixteen-nation regulatory body, last June made a small concession to the whale by setting the killing quota for 1977 at an all-time low26,699, as against 32,578 last year. But the IWC is powerless to enforce its quota rules. And Russia and Japan, whose fleets take 90 per cent of all whales caught, find ways around them. The biggest single loophole is free-for-all whaling by seven nations that refuse to join the IWC, Peru, Chile, China, South Korea, Somalia, Portugal and Spain. In fact, whaling industries in most of these countries are owned or supported by Japan. The Nippon Hogei Co, for instance, owns the biggest Peruvian station, responsible for killing nearly 2,000 whales annually—many on the endangered species list. Japanese merchants select the choicest cuts of meat for Tokyo restaurants. Other Parts of the whale are used to produce lipstick, margarine, bicycle saddles, industrial oil; but very often the remaining meat, blubber and bone are simply tipped back into the ocean.
'The IWC is toothless, totally discredited,' says a sPokesman for Friends of the Earth, a conservation group. 'It bows to political pressure constantly, and for years it has refused to consider a ten-year moratorium on whaling, which has United Nations backing and is the only way to save the whale.' If the IWC cannot or will not stop the inexorable decline of cetacean populations, who will ? Only, it seems the protest groups. They've certainly upset the Japanese, who complained recently that the anti-whaling campaign was 'contributing to international tension and damaging trade relations with North America.' Dr Robert White, of the US Commerce Department's oceanic division, says the protesters have been 'enormously effective' in keeping the slaughter down to something near the IWC guidelines.
The Greenpeace Foundation, headquartered in Canada, but with many chapters in the US, claims it has saved more than a thousand whales by sending small boats between the whales and their pursuers. The whalers then have to risk an international incident: their 250-pound, grenade-tipped harpoons could easily blast Greenpeace's rubber dinghies and their crews out of the water. By sailing into the firing line, says Greenpeace president Robert Hunter, protesters have directly spared the lives of a hundred whales, while another thousand or so were preserved because Russian and Japanese fleets stayed out of North American waters to avoid a confrontation.
In the Californian port of Mendocino, an environmental group is doing the same thing on a smaller scale. Killer ships are often seen hunting within the twelve-mile limit, and the group not only sends out boats, but broadcasts directly to Russian ships. A Russian-born Californian woman, known locally as 'Mendocino Rose'— shades of World War Il's Tokyo Rose— broadcasts Russian music and appeals to Soviet sailors to end their whaling days and defect to the US. Thousands of whaleconscious Californians also boycott Japanese goods. In Mendocino liquor stores you may find notices announcing that `No More Saki will be Available Until Japan Stops the Killing.' California cares about dolphins, too: so many of these smaller cetaceans were being massacred by US tuna-fishing boats that the courts in November banned use of dolphins in tuna harvesting for the rest of the year and confined the fleets to port. Dolphins like to swim with tuna schools, and are used by fishermen to spot the migrating fish. Each year, tens of thousands of dolphins are trapped in tuna nets, where they suffocate or are crushed to death.
All this costs everyone money. The tuna fishers say they're going to lose $22 million. The Japanese whalers say their $150 million a year whaling industry has been badly hit. The Greenpeace people say this year's expedition cost them $250,000 and they're about $150,000 in the red, despite numerous celebrity benefits, and donations from all over the country. As for the remaining whales—whose role in the highly complex plankton economy of the oceans could be crucial to earth's oxygen supply—they may breathe just a little easier.
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