From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre*. How We Learned to Love the

Frank Zelko History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland

In October 1954, Time magazine, with no apparent disapproval, described how a group of American soldiers enthusiastically slaughtered a pack of 100 killer whales off the coast of Iceland. The Icelandic government considered the whales — which Time described as “savage sea cannibals up to 30 ft. long and with teeth like bayonets” — a menace to the local fishing industry and appealed to the US soldiers stationed at a lonely NATO airbase on the subarctic island. Seventy-nine bored GIs responded with enthusiasm, firing thousands of machine gun rounds at the whales until “the sea was red with blood”. “It was all very tough on the whales”, the report concluded, “but very good for American-Icelandic relations”.1 Though the incident was particularly bloody, it was hardly unique. Throughout the 1950s, the US Navy routinely used whales for target practice, pretending that they were Soviet submarines.2 Meanwhile, the Norwegian industry, hoping to tap into a potentially huge market, attempted to inculcate Americans with a taste for meat. Bemused housewives, however, were rarely tempted by “Capt. Seth’s Frozen Tenderloin Norwegian Whale Steak” and similar cetacean delights.3 But nor were they, or any other Americans, outraged by the product. Yet, within less than two decades, the American public’s attitude to whales would change completely. By the mid-1970s, as the first whale-watching tours began off the coast of Massachusetts, the idea of torpedoing whales would have been seen by most Americans as nothing short of barbaric.4 Instead of enthusiastically machine- gunning whales, some Americans were now willing to climb into small boats and place themselves between a fleeing whale and a pursuing harpoon boat, an action which met with widespread approval and admiration. How did the American public’s attitude to whales and whaling change so dramatically in such a short time? This article traces the shift in attitudes towards whaling throughout the twentieth century. Throughout history, people had generally treated whales as though they were little more than particularly large fish.5 Europeans have been hunting them since at

1 Time, 4 October, 1954. 2 Farley Mowat, A Whale for the Killing (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 59. 3 Nancy Shoemaker, “Whale Meat in American History”, Environmental History, Vol. 10, 2 (April 2005), pp. 281-282. 4 Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 460 5 The ancient Greeks, apparently, understood that the whales were not fish, but the Romans thought otherwise. It was not until the seventeenth century that people began to question this assumption. The issue was settled in 1766 when the father of modem taxonomy, Carl von Linné, separated the whales from the fish in his monumental work, Systema Naturae. See Karl-Erik Fichtelius and Sverre Sjölander, Smarter than Man? Intelligence in Whales, Dolphins, and Humans (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 147. 34 Frank Zelko

least the ninth century AD, but did not even bother to describe them until the eighteenth century.6 Whales have furnished humans with an astonishing variety of useful, and, one could argue, frivolous products: meat and fat for hungry populations; oil for burning lamps and lubricating machinery; bones and teeth for grinding into fertilizer or carving into works of art (scrimshaw); and baleen for the painful, constricting corsets that were popular among bourgeois European women in the nineteenth century. Until the nineteenth century, whaling did not, on the whole, endanger the world’s whale population, though there were examples of a few localized coastal species being hunted almost to extinction.7 In 1865, however, a Norwegian whaler, Svend Foyn, invented a device that suddenly, and radically, gave whale hunters an enormous advantage over their pelagic quariy. Foyn developed a barbed harpoon that could be fired from a shipboard cannon and which, on impact, would detonate an explosive charge inside the whale. The primitive and dangerous practice of hunting whales with hand-thrown spears was quickly replaced by the deadly, high tech harpoon, completely shifting the odds in the whaler’s favor. From this point on, the life of the whaler, though hardly enviable, ceased to conform to the Moby Dzc^-inspired image of the courageous hunter dueling with the monster from the deep. The whales, in short, no longer stood a chance.8 The Norwegians continued to be at the forefront of whaling technology. In the 1920s, they brought the assembly line to the high seas with the development of enormous factory ships. Giant stem slipways enabled whales to be dragged aboard, where they could be flensed, boiled, rendered, and packed into barrels. No longer reliant on shore-based processing plants, whalers could now roam the high seas for months at a time, a development that allowed the previously under-exploited Antarctic whale populations to be hunted on a massive scale. By this time, many of the products which had previously been manufactured with whale oil — such as lighting fuel or lubricating oil — had been made redundant by the development of electricity or petroleum-based products. Far from signalling the end of whaling, however, the petroleum era merely provided whalers with faster and more efficient means of pursuing their quarry. Ingenious chemists and entrepreneurs continued to find uses for the whale byproducts in margarine, perfume, pet food and a variety of other commodities. In the meantime, the number of great whales, particularly blues, humpbacks and fins, began to decline precipitously.9 By the 1930s, whaling was a case of a “tragedy of the commons” par excellence. Whalers from Europe, Britain, Japan, the U.S., Australia, and South Africa plied the oceans and hunted whales at will. Despite a massive increase in the number of whales taken, and a dramatic population collapse that was obvious to virtually everyone involved, it made little sense for any individual whaling firm or nation to curb its practices. Every time a whale was killed, the cost, in terms of a reduction

6 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. vii 7 The Basque whalers of the tenth and eleventh centuries are a notable example. Considered to be the first people to have conducted whaling in a deliberate and organized manner, the Basques decimated the Bay of Biscay’s whale population to the point where whaling was no longer an economically viable activity in the region. See ibid., pp. 42-44. 8 Ibid., pp. 255-265. 9Ibid.,??. 351-363. From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 35

in the whale population, was borne by all, while the benefit, in terms of monetary profit, accrued to the individual whaler or to a single corporation.10 By this time, whaling had become a multi-national industry, fuelled by US, British, and Scandinavian capital. It also reflected the geo-political tensions of the era, as German and Japanese whalers tried to muscle in on an Anglo-American and Scandinavian dominated industry. Amid such developments, and with the belated recognition that the previously common had been hunted to the brink of extinction, the whaling nations finally decided to think about adopting some conservation measures. In 1937, they convened an international conference in London aimed at introducing some form of regulation into an industry that, hitherto, had been rampantly laissez faire. The conference was a breakthrough in the sense that it finally gathered the world’s major whaling interests under one roof. As far as conservation was concerned, however, it was a major disappointment. After calculating how many whales they had killed the previous year, the whaling interests decided to increase their take by 11,000 whales in the following season. This seemed far less like conservation than merely a more rational method of dividing up the spoils.11 The leading conservationist voice of the era was Remington Kellogg, a marine biologist at the United States National Museum. In the late 1930s, Kellogg was largely responsible for getting the whaling nations to agree to a series of measures that would introduce a semblance of conservation to the industry, as well as setting up a regulatory procedure that would form the basis for post-Second World War conservation efforts.12 Just as importantly, perhaps, he also played a vital role in educating ordinary Americans about whales. In a lengthy and lushly illustrated National Geographic article, he attempted to alert the world to the plight of the great whales and to create a sympathetic atmosphere among the general public. “Whales once roamed by the millions in the oceans of the world”, he warned, “but today they may be heading toward the same fate that pursued the once-vast herds of American buffalo [...] The rapidity with which whales have been killed since 1900 is appalling.” Kellogg also foreshadowed the anthropomorphism that would characterize later anti-whaling efforts, telling readers that “many female whales seem almost human in their affection for, and defence of, their calves”.13 The Second World War offered whales a brief respite, with most of the hunting and factory ships being commandeered for naval purposes. According to Farley Mowat, however, there is little doubt that tens of thousands of great whales were torpedoed when they were mistaken for submarines on ships radar.14 After the war,

10 For an elaboration of the concept, see Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, Vol. 162(13 December, 1968), pp. 1244-1249. 11 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 387. 12 J.N Tonnes sen. and A.O. Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling, translated from the Norwegian by R.I Christophersen (London and Canberra: C. Hurst and Company, Australian National University Press, 1982), pp. 460-462; Ellis, Men and Whales, pp. 387-388. Ellis is a staunch preservationist and makes his feelings clear throughout his book. Tonnessen and Johnsen adopt a more “objective” style. However, their work was commissioned by the Norwegian Whaling Association, and their disparaging comments regarding whale preservation organizations such as Greenpeace leaves little doubt as to where their sympathies lie. 13 Kellogg, “Whales, Giants of the Sea”, National Geographic, Vol. 77, 1 (January 1940), pp. 35, 40. 14 Mowat, A Whale for the Killing, p. 54. 36 Frank Zelko

the United States, the pioneering nation in twentieth century conservation, began to exert pressure on the whaling nations to agree upon a set of measures to regulate the whale hunt. In 1946, an International Whaling Convention was held in Washington DC which aimed, according to its organizers, to “conserve whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.”15 This convention led directly to the formation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the body that to this day continues to be the sole regulator of whaling throughout the world. The Commission’s American framers, however, were faced with a classic “tragedy of the commons” dilemma: Why should nations agree voluntarily to join an organization whose prime purpose was to impose limits on the number of whales they could hunt? To allay the concerns raised by this issue, the framers included an “objection” clause in the IWC constitution. In order to dissuade a nation from simply stepping out of the IWC whenever it disagreed with a regulation, a rule was implemented that enabled any nation to file an objection to any clause of which they did not approve, thereby exempting themselves from the measure. The “objection” clause may have held the IWC together, but it also ensured that it remained a toothless tiger.16 The next twenty years saw a dramatic shake-up in the composition of the major players in international whaling. The Japanese, whose factory fleet had been destroyed during the Second World War, were eager to develop a powerful and modem whaling industry. Suffering from a drastic shortage of food, and of meat in particular, the Japanese made a strong case for the immediate resumption of pelagic whaling. General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander of the occupying forces, encouraged this development which, in addition to supplying the Japanese population with much-needed protein and fat, would have the residual benefit of providing the American military with a high quality lubricant produced from whale blubber.17 By the 1950s, Japan’s massive investment in whaling enabled its fleets to scour the waters of the Pacific and the Antarctic in search of blue, fin, grey, sei, and humpback whales. Japan’s re-entry into Antarctic whaling was particularly galling to Australia and New Zealand, who were hoping to exploit the Antarctic whaling grounds but could not keep pace with their recent enemy. The ironic result was that Australia and New Zealand, angered by Japan’s domination of a region they felt was rightfully theirs, began to support stricter conservation efforts in order to limit the Japanese fleets.18 Furthermore, the fact that the Japanese were the only people who actually ate significant amounts of

15 Quoted in Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 388. 16 Kurk Dorsey, “Objection! The International Whaling Commission and the Preservation of Sovereignty (Not Whales)”. Paper presented at the 30th annual meeting of the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, Toronto, 22 June 2000. Used with author’s permission. 17 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 405. 18 Kurk Dorsey, “Conservation and Alliance Politics: The Resumption of Japanese Whaling after World War U”. Paper presented at the First Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, Tacoma, Washington, March 2000. Used with author’s permission. Arne Kalland and Brian Moeran, Japanese Whaling: End of an Era? (London: Curzon Press, 1992), pp. 87-90. From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 37 whale meat ensured that whaling developed a widespread cultural resonance that was not present in any of the other major whaling nations.19 The other new post-war whaling power was the Soviet Union, whose cetologists came to see whales as the ultimate marine resource. Apart from being a cheap source of meat and fat, whales provided the Soviet peoples with medicine, leather, perfume, oil, fertilizer, and animal fodder, particularly for their growing fur industry.20 Aided by massive state subsidies, Soviet and Japanese fleets killed hundreds of thousands of whales in the post-war era, with both nations developing a reputation for flouting IWC regulations and mis-reporting their catches. To a lesser degree, Norway, Britain, the US, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and South Africa also engaged in pelagic whaling, but the massive scale of Japanese and Soviet operations, combined with the growing availability of cheap replacements for whale products, gradually diminished the whaling industries of most of these nations. Nevertheless, the combined take of all the fleets, along with whales taken by renegade operations, such as those of the Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis, ensured that the world’s whale population continued to plummet alarmingly.21 Somewhat naively, the IWC turned to science as an objective arbiter, hoping that all whaling nations would agree to abide by the recommendations of cetologists and population biologists. It soon became clear, however, that many scientists, particularly those from Japan and the Soviet Union, saw their job as justifying whatever number of whales their nations were able to catch. Accordingly, they developed the spurious notion that hunting whales actually benefited the population, since fewer whales meant more food for those remaining. As a result, they argued, these whales would grow faster and larger, breed earlier and more frequently, and would ultimately develop into a fitter and more productive population. The whales themselves could draw little comfort from the fact that laissez faire hunting was being replaced by the econometric logic of scientific conservation. For example, the measuring device that whale scientists developed to allocate and keep track of whaling statistics was, from a whale preservationist’s viewpoint, a mixed blessing at best. The Unit (BWU) was equal to one blue whale, two fins, two-and-a-half humpbacks, and so on. Since it was generally easier and more cost-efficient to kill one blue whale rather than six smaller ones, the BWU ensured that whalers would concentrate their efforts on the largest, and most endangered species, working their way down the list as their numbers dwindled.22 By the early 1960s, the United States was no longer engaged in pelagic whaling, with just a few local, shore-based stations dotted along the coasts of Alaska and

19 Christopher Moreby, “What Whaling Means to the Japanese”, New Scientist (9 December 1982), p. 661. 20 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 417. 21 Dorsey. “Objection!”, p. 6. By the early 1960s, when large blue whales could no longer be found, Japanese cetologists engaged in some creative taxonomy, conveniently “discovering” a sub-species of blue whale which they referred to as the “pygmy blue”, but which appeared to be nothing more than immature blue whales. See Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 427. For an account of Onassis’ foray into pelagic whaling, see Nicholas Fraser, Phililp Jacobson, Mark Ottaway, and Lewis Chester, Aristotle Onassis (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 1977), pp. 115-131. 22 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 392; Dorsey, “Objection”, p.2. 38 Frank Zelko

California. The massively subsidized Japanese and Soviet juggernauts, along with the traditionally powerful Norwegians, continued to dominate international whaling, forcing smaller operations, such as those of Great Britain and the Netherlands, to retire their fleets, thereby allowing Japan and the Soviet Union to snap up their equipment and BWU quotas. As whaling’s economic significance diminished in such countries, their governments suddenly began to take conservation more seriously. In 1960, as the hunt threatened to get completely out of control, the IWC appointed a scientific sub-committee to evaluate the world’s stocks. The committee concluded that blue whales were endangered and could not withstand more hunting. The IWC soon placed a ban on hunting blue whales, but without reducing the overall BWU quotas. As a result, whalers simply increased their focus on the next largest whales — fins and seis — in order to maintain their quotas.23 By the late 1960s, even the tenacious Norwegian whalers were finding it difficult to compete with the Japanese and Soviet operations. An increasing number of former whaling nations began to join the US in calling for stricter conservation measures, but given the voluntary nature of IWC membership, combined with the lack of a punishment mechanism for breaching regulations, there was little these nations could do to control the Japanese and Soviet fleets. Nevertheless, conservationists and various anti-whaling groups, particularly in the United States, continued to maintain pressure on the whalers. They scored an important public relations victory in 1972, when the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm passed a resolution recommending a ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling. At the 1972 IWC meeting, however, only four of the fourteen whaling nations supported the UN moratorium.24 By the following year, however, the whalers suddenly found themselves increasingly isolated at the IWC. During the intervening period, the US had passed the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which restricted whaling to Native American tribes and banned the importation of whale products into the United States.25 In addition to this act, whalers also found themselves under scrutiny from the newly-created environmental watchdog, the Convention in Trade of Endangered Species (CITES). Despite these pressures, however, the Japanese and Soviet whalers exceeded their 1973 quotas by over 3,000 whales each. It was at this point that IWC rulings were finally given some teeth by an obscure piece of American legislation. The Pelly Amendment to the Fisherman’s Protection Act enabled the US to embargo all fish and wildlife products from any nation that “diminishe(d) the effectiveness of an international fishery or wildlife conservation agreement”.26 The Japanese, in particular, stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of seafood exports if the amendment was invoked.

23 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 403. 24 The four nations were the US, Britain, Mexico and Argentina. Japan, the USSR, Norway, Iceland, South Africa and Panama voted against the resolution, while Australia, Canada, Denmark and France abstained. See David Day, The Whale War (London & New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 31. 25 Tonnes sen and Johnsen, Modem Whaling, p. 674; Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 304. 26 Quoted in Day, Whale War. p. 32. From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 39

The growing American-led pressure on international whaling soon persuaded various nations to jump on the conservation bandwagon. At the 1973 IWC meeting, the vote was eight votes to five (with one abstention) in favour of a moratorium on commercial whaling.27 Despite the fact that conservationist forces were now in the majority, they still did not have the numbers to compel the IWC to adopt the moratorium. Any restrictive IWC ruling required not just a simple majority, but a three-quarter majority vote. The Japanese whaling industry’s response to the conservationist pressures was to recruit Brazil, where they owned and operated several whaling stations, to the IWC, a move that successfully staved off a three- quarter pro-moratorium majority at the 1974 IWC meeting. Nevertheless, international pressure, combined with the US threat to invoke the Pelly Amendment, forced the anti-moratorium nations to accept a new, pro-conservation regulation called the New Management Procedure (NMP). Rather than allowing industry interests to dictate hunting quotas, the NMP would adopt strict scientific quotas designed to ensure that whaling would continue on a sustainable yield basis. While the NMP placated the conservationist voices on the IWC, anti-whaling advocates soon exposed its inadequacies. The Japanese and Soviets exploited legal loopholes in the NMP, enabling them to exceed their quotas by many thousands of whales. They intentionally “misunderstood” rulings, unilaterally issued themselves with “scientific” permits, and hunted unclassified species, such as orcas. They also made a mockery of the IWC independent observer scheme; the Japanese fleet had two Soviets on board as “independent” observers, while the Soviets had two Japanese.28 The Mexican delegate to the 1974 IWC meeting summed up conservationists’ frustration with the Commission’s inability to reign in the whalers: This Commission will be known to history as a small body of men who failed to act responsibly in terms of their very large commitment to the world, and who protected the interests of the few whalers and not the future of thousands of whales.29 Although there were bitter disagreements among IWC members, there is little doubt that, by the 1970s, the commission had been thoroughly inculcated with the doctrine of scientific conservation. Even the Japanese and Soviet whalers had accepted the need for restrictions and limits. Disputes, for the most part, revolved around numbers: what was the world’s sperm whale population? How many sperm whales could be hunted without causing irreparable damage to the species? Was a moratorium necessary in order to ensure a sustainable future harvest? Beyond the confines of the whaling industry and the IWC meeting rooms, however, whales were coming to represent far more than a mere marine resource. For many Americans in particular, whales and dolphins had become cultural icons. As well as representing a unique form of intelligence, whales symbolized an idealized form of ecological harmony, particularly among those whose environmentalism was infused with counter cultural mysticism. Such an outlook

27 The four moratorium supporters from the previous year were joined by Australia, Canada, France, and Panama. Denmark abstained. Day, Whale War, p. 32. 28 Ibid., pp. 32-34. 29 Quoted in Tonnes sen and Johnsen. Modern Whaling, p. 673. 40 Frank Zelko

represented a dramatic shift away from the Moby Dzc£-inspired image of whales as vicious leviathans of the deep. This transformation in the way Americans viewed whales can be traced back to the late 1930s, when a group of scientists and entrepreneurs opened the Marine Studios (later Marineland) aquarium in St. Augustine, Florida. The aquarium’s curator, Arthur McBride, perfectly represented its twin missions of conducting cetacean research and turning a profit. McBride was undoubtedly a talented scientist, being the first to deduce that dolphins used their acoustic senses for navigation. He was also, however, a keen promoter who was not above ditching scientific rigor for sentimental anthropomorphism if he felt it would attract more people to the aquarium. In a 1940 article in Natural History, McBride introduced dolphins as our “most ‘human’ deep-sea relatives” whose “astonishing habits, observed at Florida’s Marine Studios, reveal an appealing and playful water mammal who remembers his friends and shows a strong propensity for jealousy and grief’.30 By strange coincidence, McBride’s article was published in exactly the same month — January 1940 — as Remington Kellogg’s piece in National Geographic (discussed above), which also strayed into anthropomorphism in its efforts to alert the public to the plight of the whales. Marineland closed its doors for the duration of the Second World War, but reopened at war’s end. In 1954, another Marineland was opened in Palos Verdes, California, and its success spurred the development of several mammoth Sea World theme parks throughout the country. The stars of these aquariums were the clever and playful bottle nosed dolphins, whose tricks, cute vocalizations, and apparent delight in interacting with humans, won the hearts of millions. In 1964, the Seattle Aquarium exhibited the world’s first captive killer whale, an event which spawned a succession of articles in major magazines and newspapers, as well as a series of captive killer whales at the various Sea Worlds. Sea World was primarily run as a business, and devoted little time and few resources to scientific studies. Instead, it concentrated on training the whales to entertain the large number of people who poured through the theme parks’ doors. Such performances did little to educate Americans about how cetaceans lived in the wild, but they undoubtedly contributed to a sentimental view of whales that groups such as Project Jonah and Greenpeace would later exploit.31 The sentimental anthropomorphism inspired by Sea World was perpetuated throughout the 1960s and 1970s by popular films, books, and songs. The movie, Flipper, and the subsequent television series of the same name, featured a tame dolphin as a clever and courageous pet — a kind of aquatic version of Lassie — who frequently saved the day whenever his human friends got themselves into deep water. In his fantasy novel, The Day of the Dolphin, French author, Robert Merle, created a scenario where dolphins were trained to speak with humans and to save the world from nuclear devastation.32 Such fanciful stories were clearly inspired by the work of John Lilly, whose cetacean research had led him to conclude that,

30 Quoted in ibid., p. 435. Original article in the January 1940 edition of Natural History. 31 Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 435. 32 Merle, The Day of the Dolphin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969). In 1973, Mike Nichols directed a Hollywood film based on Merle’s novel. From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 41

eventually, humans would be able to communicate with whales and dolphins.33 Roger Payne, a scientist at , supplied further evidence to bolster the theory that whales and dolphins had sophisticated communication systems similar to our own. Using a primitive hydrophone, Payne recorded the vocalizations of humpback whales near Bermuda. His analysis of the recordings led him to conclude that the sounds were, in the truest sense, songs; discrete phrases repeated over and over and sometimes lasting for up to thirty minutes. Payne produced a record, Songs of the , which introduced millions of people to the animals’ haunting sounds, which, in the context of the rapid demise of the species, could easily be interpreted as cries for help.34 Payne’s recordings inspired folksinger Judy Collins to record “Farewell to Tarawathie”, a New Zealand whaler song, using the humpback songs as her accompaniment. Among the writers who sought to promote the idea that whales were a uniquely intelligent species, and one that was under threat from human exploitation, few were as articulate or prolific as Scott McVay. An administrator at Princeton University, McVay had become fascinated with whales as a result of studying Moby Dick in college, and he devoted nearly all of his spare time to popularizing them and alerting people to their plight. In a 1966 article in Scientific American, McVay outlined the history of the IWC and wrote a stinging critique of its practices, essentially accusing it of being a cozy club for whalers rather than a regulatory organization that was genuinely interested in conservation. “If essentially unrestricted whaling continues”, he wrote, “the only surviving stock [...] is doomed to become a monument to international folly. Only sharply reduced annual harvests and protective regulations that are both enforceable and enforced offer the possibility that the last of the great whales will survive.”35 McVay attended several IWC meetings as an observer, and his presence only served to confirm his pessimistic view of the commission: “The most desirable goal of all, a ten-year moratorium [...] seems beyond the capacities for cooperation and restraint of the nations present at the (IWC) meeting.”36 By 1971, McVay was couching his anti-whaling arguments in a language that reflected the holistic outlook and moral ecology that had suffused many elements of 1960s environmentalism: Our survival is curiously intertwined with that of the whale. Just as all human life is interconnected [...] so have we finally begun to perceive the connections between all living things. The form of our survival, indeed our survival itself, is affected as the variety and abundance of life is diminished. To leave the oceans, which girdle seven-tenths of the world, barren of whales is as

33 Lilly, Man and Dolphin, p. 21. See also. Lilly. The Mind of the Dolphin (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1967). j4 Roger S. Payne and Scott McVay, “Songs of the Humpback Whales”, Science, Vol. 173 (3997), 13 August 1971, pp. 585-591; Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 436. Bob Hunter, who led Greenpeace into the anti-whaling movement, recalls giving a lecture on whales during which he turned off the lights and played Payne’s recordings. When he turned the lights back on, half the audience was in tears (though he also admits that half of them were probably stoned). Author’s interview with Hunter, 14 July 2001, Toronto. 35 McVay, “The Last of the Great Whales”, Scientific American, Vol. 215, 2 (August 1966), p. 21. 36 McVay, “Can Leviathan Long Endure So Wide a Chase?”, Natural History, Vol. 80, 1 (1971), p. 40. 42 Frank Zelko

unthinkable as taking all music away [...] leaving man to stumble on with only the diyness of his own mutterings to mark his way/7 Such pronouncements, linking human survival with that of whales, became increasingly common throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s and were instrumental in casting whales as the great symbol of 1970s environmentalism. Folk legend, Pete Seeger, summed this view up perfectly in his ballad, “The Song of the World’s Last Whale”: If we can save Our singers in the sea Perhaps there’s a chance To save you and me.* 38 The depiction of whales as paragons of ecological virtue was complemented by the increasing number of studies portraying them as super-intelligent aquatic beings. In 1972, two Swedish scientists, Karl-Erik Fichtelius and Sverre Sjölander, published a book with the provocative title, Smarter than Man?, in which they systematically compared the human brain to those of whales and dolphins in an effort to draw some broad conclusions about their comparative intelligence. The dolphin’s cerebral cortex, they found, is larger than ours, has twice the number of convolutions, and 10 to 40 per cent more nerve cells. The section of the cortex devoted to motor skills was considerably larger in humans than in dolphins, but this merely meant that “the dolphin has more cortex left over for the higher mental processes than we do [...] The surprising conclusion of (our) comparison is that the dolphin brain could be superior to ours.”39 This did not mean, of course, that whales were more intelligent than humans, at least in the sense that we understand the concept of intelligence. However, the authors speculated, it was possible that our definition of intelligence was simply too narrow: A little thought will tell us that what we take such pride in — our capacity to adapt to new situations and to use previous experience to solve new problems — is an ability that harsh selection called forth in a naked ape turned predator. And this ability is suited to the Ufe of such an ape, even if it has also lent itself to the invention of whaling ships, hydrogen bombs, and concentration camps. With a little imagination one can actually conceive of a different type of intellectual activity than ours. And it need not necessarily be the case that our form of intelligence is the most appropriate form for whales as well.40 The ultimate ode to this new cetacean construct was Mind in the Waters, a collection of articles, essays and poems assembled by Joan McIntyre, the leader of the whale preservationist organization, Project Jonah. The volume included a variety of works from cetacean experts in various fields. Sterling Bunnell, a medical doctor who also taught evolutionary ecology at the California College of Arts and Crafts, echoed the work of Fichtelius and Sjölander, arguing that since j7 Ibid., p. 72. Also see McVay, “Stalking the Arctic Whale”, American Scientist, Vol. 61, 1 (1973), and “Reflections on the Management of Whaling”, in W.E. Schevill, ed., The Whale Problem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). 38 Quoted in McVay, “Can Leviathan Endure”, p. 36. 39 Fichtelius and Sjölander, Smarter than Man?, pp. 36,40. Emphasis in original. 40 Ibid., pp. 144-145. Fichtelius and Sjölander were strongly influenced by the work of ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, who used evolutionary theory to explain behavioral traits. See Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966) and Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1969). From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 43

humans had evolved primarily to recognize and avoid danger, it was “difficult for us to understand intelligent and non-manipulative beings which are so well adapted to their habitat that the survival considerations of finding food and avoiding danger have been much less of a problem for them than they have been for us”. Bunnell also offered some thought-provoking ideas about the difference between human and cetacean communication. The cetacean auditory system, he argued, is predominantly spatial, like human eyesight, and is designed to process much simultaneous information. Thus whales and dolphins could communicate a whole paragraph of information in one elaborate instantaneous hieroglyph. Therefore, Bunnell reasoned, “for them to follow our pattern of speech might be almost as difficult as for us to study the individual picture frames in a movie being run at ordinary speed”. It was possible, he continued, stretching his argument to the breaking point, that the cetacean communication system was even more complex than our own, only in a very different way. According to Bunnell, another important indicator of intelligence was the extreme playfulness and humor exhibited by both captive and wild cetaceans. “Despite its low status in puritanical value systems”, wrote Bunnell, “play is a hallmark of intelligence and is indispensable for creativity and flexibility. Its marked development in Cetaceans makes it likely that they will frolic with their minds as much as with their bodies.”41 John Sutphen, a Connecticut physician with an interest in whales, argued that whales and dolphins probably had a far more sophisticated emotional intelligence than humans. Since echolocation is three dimensional, “one dolphin scanning another dolphin does not just receive an echo from the other’s skin but from the interior body as well”. Therefore, apart from immediately recognizing if another animal was ill, cetaceans would also “be constantly aware of a considerable portion of each other’s emotional state”. “What sort of candor”, Sutphen mused, “might exist between individuals where feelings are instantly and constantly bared? It would be irrelevant to hide, to lie, or to deny one’s feelings.” Cetaceans, it seemed to Sutphen, were not only as intelligent as humans, but quite possibly morally superior. Sutphen’s analysis abandoned the conservative caution of much scientific discourse, even going so far as to suggest that whales and dolphins possessed a culture.42 In his contribution to the volume, Scott McVay attempted to disabuse his readers of the “old square-rigged notions about whaling” that continued to “linger like a gauzy pink haze” and which “abound(ed) in contemporary writing”. The romantic image of the whale hunter, he declared, “has begun to pall, for the whale has no more chance than a bull in the ring as it is scouted by helicopter, scanned by sonar, and run down by mechanized ships designed to travel three knots faster than a finbacks’s top speed”. The renowned marine biologist, Victor Scheffer, who was chairman of the presidentially appointed Marine Mammal Commission of the United States, urged the IWC to look beyond mere conservation measures and to consider whaling as an ethical issue. “The esthetic and educational values of

41 Bunnell, “The Evolution of Cetacean Intelligence”, in Joan McIntyre, ed., Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins (New York and San Francisco: Charles Scribner’s Sons and Sierra Club Books, 1974), pp. 57-58. 42 Sutphen, “Body State Communication Among Cetaceans,” in Mind in the Waters, pp. 141-142. 44 Frank Zelko

whales alive”, he contended, “are greater than the values of (the products) which might be derived from their carcasses.” Like many other anti-whaling advocates of the era, Scheffer espoused a moral ecology that embraced biocentrism. “Morality”, he argued, “extends beyond ordinary humaneness, or the prevention of pain and terror in the animal, to a consideration of the simple right of the animal to live and to carry on its ancestral bloodline.” Even an unreconstructed traditional conservationist such as Lee Talbot, the senior scientist on the president’s Council of Environmental Quality and the scientific advisor to the US delegation to the IWC, was willing to flirt with the rhetoric of holistic ecology in the service of the whales. “The time is past”, he declared, “when we can equate conservation with maximum sustained yield, or when we can base management of a living resource simply on our economic ‘need’ for its products. We are slowly coming to the realization that maintenance of the health of the habitat is a prerequisite to the survival of a species [,..].”43 The most eloquent contributions to Mind in the Waters, though it could also be argued, the most speculative and sentimental, came from Joan McIntyre herself. With equal parts holistic ecology and New Age romanticism, McIntyre decried the Cartesian worldview that denied feelings, imagination, awareness, and consciousness to other creatures. “It seems that in our craze to justify our exploitation of all non-human life forms”, she declared, “we have stripped from them any attributes which could stay our hand.” Try, she urged her readers, “to imagine the imagination of a whale, or the awareness of a dolphin. That we cannot make these leaps of vision is because we are bound to a cultural view which denies their possibility.”44 According to McIntyre, the plight of the whales needed to be understood as part of a broader trend of human beings’ relationship with the natural world; indeed, it was this very bifurcation between nature and culture, and between the mind and the body, that lay at the root of the problem. In the water, the cradle of cetacean consciousness, the distinction between the mind and the body had been dissolved: “Without the alienating presence of objects and equipment, with only the naked body encasing the floating mind, the two, split by technological culture, are one again. The mind enters a different modality, where time, weight, and one’s self are experienced holistically.” In the sea, she continued, “the world can be thought and experienced simultaneously — not broken down into categories that stand for experience rather than experience itself’.45 After reading McIntyre and the other contributors to Mind in the Waters, one is left with the image of whales and dolphins as exemplars of ecological virtue and holistic consciousness. These are creatures who are totally in tune with their environment and with each other; who possess advanced systems of communication and construct “thoughts” from acoustically derived images; whose brains are larger than ours and have a greater degree of grey matter left over for the higher mental processes, rather than for simply manipulating objects. With this in mind, it is all the more shocking for the reader to learn that a whale is killed every

43 McVay, “One Strand in the Rope of Concern”, p. 225; Scheffer, “The Case for a World Moratorium on Whaling”, p. 230; Talbot, “The Great Whales and the International Whaling Commission”, p. 236. 44 Mind in the Waters, p. 8. 45 Ibid., p. 94. From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 45

twelve minutes, “the living tissues blown into agony by explosive harpoons”. Compounding this brutality was the fact that almost all the products made from whales — things such as chicken feed, cattle fodder, fertilizer, car wax, shoe polish, lipstick, cosmetics, margarine, cat and dog food, and feed to raise minks and foxes for fur coats — could be synthesized or substituted from other sources. The future of the whales, McIntyre insisted, was inextricably bound together with our own: “in saving them we can create a model of international action that can demonstrate a way to save ourselves and the rest of the earth we cherish.”46 This, clearly, was not the language of scientific conservation. Once whales are viewed in this way, notions such as quotas and maximum sustained yield become irrelevant, indeed, abhorrent. Preservation was the only viable course of action; the only way to save the whales was to abolish whaling, not merely control and regulate it. For people such as McIntyre, the logic of scientific conservation could be as absurd and harmful as laissez-faire whaling. Take, for example, the ideas of Gifford Pinchot, a biologist and the son and namesake of the man commonly viewed as the father of twentieth century conservation. Pinchot felt that both world hunger and the extinction of the great whales could be prevented by simply turning whales into the cattle of the sea. His ambitious plan involved pumping deep-sea water into tropical lagoons in the Pacific Ocean. This would spur the growth of phytoplankton — great masses of aquatic algae — which would in turn be eaten by zooplankton such as krill. The most efficient way to convert this mass of stored energy into protein and fat for human consumption was to “farm” blue whales in the lagoons. In this way, the great whales, like the American bison before them, could be simultaneously saved and savoured.47 There is little doubt that Pinchot was genuinely concerned with the possibility of the blue whale’s extinction. Nevertheless, to those subscribing to the Mind in the Waters worldview, the idea of turning whales into semi-domesticated stock was possibly even worse than hunting them on the open sea. If the Blue Whale Unit, the New Management Procedure, and raising blue whales in lagoons for human consumption were the best that scientific conservation could do, then clearly, scientific conservation was grossly inadequate. How could one, after all, equate an intelligent and sensitive creature such as the whale with the doltish cow?48 Yet it was exactly here that the tension between anthropomorphism and deep ecology became apparent. If whales deserved to be spared the harpoon because of their intelligence, their awareness, their consciousness, then abolition was the only solution. If, however, one also accepted that whales were part of a broader ecosystem, then, no matter how harmoniously they lived within that system, it was hard to argue that humans should not be allowed to hunt them. After all, whales themselves were hunters, and one of the key tenets of deep ecology is that no creatures, including humans or whales, are sacred. From this perspective, arguing that no whales should be killed, particularly if they were not endangered, was as

46 Ibid., p. 224. 47 Pinchot, “Whale Culture”, Perspectives in and Medicine, Vol. 10, 1 (Autumn. 1966). 48 At least one well-known cetologist, David Gaskin, suggested that the bovine comparison was, in fact, entirely appropriate. There is little evidence, he wrote, “of behavioral or social complexity (in whales) beyond that of an ungulate herd”. See Gaskin, The Ecology of Whales and Dolphins (London and Exeter, NH: Heinemann, 1982), p. 151 46 Frank Zelko

absurd as arguing that it was morally wrong for orcas to kill seals, which they did regularly. It was a philosophical dilemma that groups such as Greenpeace would grapple with for years to come. For example, in the late 1970s, the United States government permitted Inuit tribes in Alaska to hunt the endangered bowhead whale, justifying the decision on the grounds that such hunts were part of the tribes’ cultural heritage. From its inception Greenpeace had been closely associated with Native Americans and had incorporated the myths and symbols of various tribes into their “warriors of the rainbow” image. The bowhead hunt forced them to choose between their uncompromising preservationist philosophy and their commitment to indigenous peoples. In the end, animal rights trumped deep ecology. Although the preservation of human cultural values, Greenpeace conceded, was obviously important, native cultures had already been seriously eroded by the impact of other cultures and by “the inexorable advance of the Technological Age”. Whether they liked it or not, Greenpeace insisted, native cultures the world over had to accept the fact that change was a “cultural constant”. For the Inuit, Greenpeace argued, “the end of the bowhead hunt is properly seen in the cultural context as one of many important changes. It will not destroy the culture, rather it will further modify it.” Once the hunt ceases, they predicted, it would “remain an important part of native cultural history [...] to be recalled in dance and legend rather than in the act itself’. Eventually, the Inuit would develop a different relationship with the bowhead, viewing it “as neighbour and friend, an object of curiosity and affection, rather than food”. Greenpeace, therefore, remained implacably opposed to the killing of any whales under any circumstances. “Short-term cultural priorities”, they insisted, “cannot be permitted to over-ride the valid scientific and ethical grounds for calling an immediate and complete halt to the hunt.”49 Such ethical dilemmas dog the issue of whaling to the present day. The Japanese, for example, continue to advocate the hunting of what they feel is a sustainable resource. It is hypocritical for anti-whaling nations such as Australia, they argue, to sanctify whales at the same time as engaging in the inhumane practices that are inherent in industrial meat production. Among pro-whaling Japanese politicians and businessmen (there is by no means consensus on the issue throughout the nation) the anti-whaling movement is viewed as merely the latest in a long line of western efforts to limit Japan’s access to natural resources. For their part, anti-whaling nations and organizations can rightly point out that constitutes an invented tradition — and one with a recent vintage. The combination of an overcapitalized industry and a political gerrymander means that a small number of Japanese whalers are able to have undue influence on Japanese politics, thereby convincing the government to support the industry through large subsidies while simultaneously inculcating the population with a taste for whale meat by, for example, including it in school lunch programs. In the end, the rigid preservationism of organizations such as Greenpeace, while understandable in its historical context, may have been responsible for prompting a more tenacious response from pro-whaling forces than might otherwise have been the case. The fact that the majority of people in countries such as the US and Australia hold

49 Paul Spong, “In Search of a Bowhead Policy”, Greenpeace Chronicles (November 1978), p. 2. From Moby Dick to Environmental Cause Célèbre 47 views that are sympathetic to Greenpeace’s position on whaling merely underlines just how dramatically attitudes to whales have changed over the course of the last century.