Selling Whales to Save Them When it comes to commercial whaling, things are rarely as simple as they seem. The fact that it continues, 30 years after the International Whaling Commission (IWC) voted for an indefinite moratorium, suggests that there has been some kind of failure on the part of environmentalists and other opponents of whaling; yet the number of whales being killed by whalers today is a fraction of what it was three decades ago, and a barely noticeable blip when set against the size of the industry at its peak. And although the whaling nations\' self-assigned quotas may be higher than they were a few years ago, the actual catches fall some way short of those quotas.
The one area that has become an article of faith to many observers and participants alike is that the IWC, deadlocked between pro-whaling and non-whaling nations, has descended into dysfunction and an inability to chart a way to a final resolution. But three scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Arizona State University are convinced they have a solution. Writing in the journal Nature last week, Christopher Costello, Steven Gaines and Leah Gerber proposed \"an alternative path forward that could break the deadlock: quotas that can be bought and sold, creating a market that would be economically, ecologically and socially viable for whalers and whales alike. Because conservationists could bid for quotas, whalers could profit from whales even without harvesting the animals.\"
They continued:
In such a system, \'whale shares\' would be allocated in sustainable numbers to all member nations of the IWC, who would have the choice of exercising them, leaving them unused for a year or retiring them in perpetuity. The shares would be tradable in a carefully controlled global market, perhaps with the restriction that members could not trade whale products with non-members. The number of whales hunted would depend on who owned the shares. At one extreme (in which whalers purchase all the shares), whales would be harvested to the agreed sustainable level. At the other extreme (where conservationists purchase all the shares), all whales would be protected from harvest.
As an intellectual exercise, the paper is interesting. As a genuinely good-faith effort to seek a path through the evident quagmire within the IWC it deserves plaudits. As a practical proposal rooted in reality and an awareness of the issues involved in the current whaling debate, however, it misses the mark by a country mile.
To be sure, Costello, Gerber and Gaines anticipate that whale-huggers like me, and pro-whalers for that matter, would have objections to their idea; but their anticipation of the arguments is also misplaced. They write that, for example, a \"fervent anti-whaler will be quick to argue that you cannot and should not put a price on the life of a whale; a species should be protected irrespective of its economic value.\" True, that is certainly one objection. There are other philosophical and ethical concerns.