The American whale oil industry: A look back to the future of the American petroleum industry?

The American whaling industry rose from humble beginnings off Long island to become an international giant. In its peak year, 1846, 735 ships and 70,000 people served the industry. As whale stocks and reserves decreased, whalers were forced to go farther and farther from their New England home ports. Voyages became longer, and risks on required return-on-investment became higher. The easy money of Atlantic and Pacific whaling was no more: the only remaining profitable ventures were to Arctic and Antarctic waters. Many ships returned empty, if at all. in 1871, most of the Arctic whaling fleet was crushed by early winter ice and lost. This calamity, in conjunction with the long-term diminishing whale stocks, the diversion of investment capital to more profitable ventures, and the discovery, development, and refinement of abundant petroleum crude oil, struck the death blow to the American whaling industry. By 1890, only 200 whaling vessels were at work, and by 1971, no American commercial whaling ship sailed the world's oceans.It is apparent that no single event caused the final, rapid decline. However, a single calamity, in an already stressed industry, that was self-insured and commercially interlinked, precipitated the end. Today's American petroleum industry, although adopting some principles of the American whaling industry, also has embraced other activities such as work process reengineering and customer alliances, which may preempt, or postpone, a similar catastrophic demise.     

Management and conservation at the International Whaling Commission: A dichotomy sandwiched within a shifting baseline

The International Whaling Commission's (IWC) Scientific Committee provides important advice to the IWC on a large variety of cetacean species, sub-species and populations and the issues affecting them. Cetaceans are facing increasing, non-whaling-related threats, and the Scientific Committee (SC), in accordance with the Commission's requests, has strengthened its conservation-oriented research work. A selection of the reports of the Scientific Committee from between 1986 and 2012 was assessed for its: (i) fundamental research; (ii) management; (iii) conservation; and (iv) administrative content, and to identify potential trends over time. Recommendations and their urgency were also examined, as implied from the language used by the SC in its reports. The analysis showed that the work of the Scientific Committee has increasingly been oriented towards conservation issues over the period reviewed, but at the same time this conservation work has received little funding. Increased support for conservation-related research projects is warranted to promote the long-term survival of cetaceans. Based on this review of the content and focus of the Committee reports, the analysis suggested that its issued advice be made clearer, whenever possible, and governments are urged to give due consideration to this science-based advice particularly when urgent conservation actions are needed. In addition, more consistent funding of the IWC's conservation-related research should be pursued to improve international conservation outputs regarding cetacean populations.     

Lessons in precaution: The International Whaling Commission experience with precautionary management

The precautionary principle (PP) only represents a new approach to managing uncertainty in so far that it requires proponents of an activity or substance to provide evidence that the activity/substance is harmless, as opposed to the more traditional “trial and error” approach that has instead placed the burden of proof that something is harmful on its opponents. This article critiques the PP as a policy making tool for managing uncertainty, focusing on the epistemological problems it raises, before then using the International Whaling Commission's experience with precautionary approaches to wildlife management to demonstrate the principle's limits and weaknesses when applied in a highly politicised policymaking environment. The article concludes that while the PP offers some benefits for managing uncertainty, its vagueness and openness to broad interpretation can also result in its application creating, rather than limiting, risks and uncertainty.     

Policies governing the distribution of by-products from scientific and small-scale coastal whaling in Japan

The Japanese government is committed to resuming sustainable commercial whaling, both on the high seas and along the Japanese coastline. To this end scientific whaling programs are supported with public money and the byproducts of the catch are distributed to the public and utilized in a variety of ways. Here we review the policies which govern how these byproducts are disseminated within Japan, as well as how the population as a whole makes use of whale resources. Possibilities for the future, if and when the international moratorium on commercial whaling ends, are also discussed.     

The international whaling regime post 2007

Japan's delegation to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) must have gone to the 2007 meeting in Anchorage believing that the prospects of at least the commencement of the process leading to the overturning of the moratorium were better than they had been since 1986. The passing of the St. Kitts and Nevis Declaration at the 2006 Meeting, the gathering momentum of their Normalisation agenda, and their own determination to compromise some of their own agenda in the interest of harmony within the IWC, would have formed the basis of this belief. The reality was totally different. There was no compromise by the anti-whaling group within the meeting who also regained the simple majority position which had been lost in 2006.     

Compromise in the IWC: Is it possible or desirable?

It is widely assumed that a compromise position must be reached between pro- and anti-whaling groupings within the International Whaling Commission. This assumption is based on the belief that the Commission will collapse in the absence of any such compromise, and has been the driving force behind a number of compromise proposals in recent years. This paper argues that the fundamental positions of the two groups are so different, and that both groups are getting enough from the current position as to make it unattractive to either group to make any serious concessions toward a compromise position.The suggested solution is for the two groups to “agree to disagree”; using the resulting improvement in goodwill between them to focus on cooperation on those aspects of whale conservation on which they can agree.     

Modernisation of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling

Modernisation of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) has long been proposed by some contracting states and outsiders as a way of resolving the “Whaling Dispute” within the International Whaling Commission (IWC); however, both sides of the debate have traditionally been unconvinced that they would gain enough benefit to make the process worthwhile.     

Balanced harvesting: The institutional incompatibilities

Balanced harvesting is the name of a newly proposed approach to fishing which promises the extraction of high and sustainable fisheries yields while maintaining the structure of the ecosystem from which those yields could be obtained. This is to be achieved through exposing all components of ecosystems (from zooplankton to top predators, including seals, sea birds and marine mammals) to a fishing mortality proportional to their size-specific productivity. This study briefly analyses the incompatibility between balanced harvesting (and its implications) and the stated missions of two major organizations, FAO (which stresses the need of selective fishing in its Code of Conduct for Sustainable Fisheries) and IUCN (which maintains the Red List of Threatened Species), but which have issued reports or organized conferences promoting balanced harvesting. The study also demonstrates the incompatibility of balanced harvesting with the recently reformed Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union. While balanced harvesting appears partly compatible with declared fisheries policies of a few countries, e.g. with regard to whaling, sealing, and indiscriminate biomass fishing, it is not only incompatible with the basic tenets of fisheries science, but also with the vision, gradually emerging globally, that marine organisms such as marine mammals, sea turtles, sea-birds and other fauna have an intrinsic value and right to life that should not be undermined by more of the indiscriminate fishing which currently shapes much of our interactions with the oceans.     

Whale watching, the Buenos Aires Group and the politics of the International Whaling Commission

Whale watching is now reputed to be a $2 billion a year industry. This industry has the potential to impact the politics of whaling, specifically the moratorium on all commercial whaling in three ways: by creating political and economic counterweights to whalers, by countering claims about who may legitimately manage whales and to what end and by transforming views about whales and whaling both within whaling states and beyond. This article examines whale watching in Latin America and the Caribbean and the alliance of Latin American and Caribbean members of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) known as the Buenos Aires Group (BAG). The BAG group has emerged as coherent group opposing the ending of the moratorium and championing the views of whale watchers. The article finds that whale watching creates a politically important interest group in an area lacking whaling operations; it argues that these regional opponents of whaling provide a counter weight to charges that opposition to whaling is exclusively the providence of rich, urban citizens of developed countries and draw upon politically powerful frames in justifying their opposition to the lifting of the moratorium. Finally, it finds limited evidence that whale-watching is associated with a rise in general concern for marine mammals in the region. There remains the question, however, of what the future of whale watching in the region will be over the longer term.