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to promote whaling."
The foregoing would seem to indicate that there are options available other than go-along/get-along and the Revised Management Scheme. But those alternatives, expressing the will of the people and their representatives in both whaling and non-whaling nations, don't seem to be getting through to the political appointees annually dispatched to the IWC's horse-trading sessions.
With the tide of world opinion and history overwhelmingly against them, the governments of Japan and Norway are on the verge of winning a return to commercial whaling. This is happening for one reason: They have no inclination whatsoever to compromise, and their opponents do.
Cetacean Society International is one of the groups pushing back against instinct to compromise. "Many NGOs, behaving as if they were actually nations with influence," it notes, "have defaulted to the queasy position of supporting the US position and an RMS that limits the killing as much as possible. However, can anyone deny that if the IWC agrees to allow commercial whaling to all members, the future killing will be far more uncontrollable and unenforceable than the past? It is certain we will see decades of species recovery vanish before the killing can be stopped. CSI cannot support any RMS as a matter of principle, and we are convinced that our members did not join us to support commercial whaling."
This is a test case. Twenty-three years ago, the world's dominant species agreed to stop killing another species even though doing so meant foregoing a profit. This agreement was reached strictly on the basis of delayed gratification to secure the enjoyment of future slaughter-based profits. Fifty years hence, we may see a shift in the mindset which accepts a concept such as "The numbers say it may now be safe for us to kill X number of whales from Y species," to one that accepts an idea such as "They all have the right to be left in peace."
For that to happen, a way must first be found to keep the whales around. If we get lucky again and the RMS is narrowly thwarted this week, we might contemplate future alternatives to the path of compromise and collapse. Nothing prevents other governments from engaging in Japan's favorite tactics: Buying the IWC memberships and votes of small nations, threatening to pull out of lucrative trade deals with other IWC member nations unless they vote the right way, etc.
But ultimately, beyond strategy and tactics, a leap is required. We have made such leaps before, based on radical ideas; that people should not own other people, women should be able to vote, wilderness should be protected. Many were angered by these ideas and many arguments were made to the contrary. In none of these instances were all contemporaries ever convinced of the rightness of the action. But in the end, the leap was made.
In a 1991 American Journal of International Law article ("Whales: Their Emerging Right to Life"), Anthony D'Amato and Sudhir Chopra wrote that the policies of international institutions concerned with whaling may someday evolve to the point of acknowledging that "we owe a duty to living creatures in the environment per se, without calculating their utility to future generations of human beings. The dawning of such a sense of duty involves a broadening of humanistic consciousness comparable to the Copernican revolution that changed the Ptolemaic earth-centered conception of the universe to the modern realization that ours is but a minor planet revolving around a minor star in only one of billions of galaxies."
The push for compromise and the establishment of a Revised Management Scheme for hunting whales will not bring about that dawn. In the absence of the vision and the will to enforce a moratorium, impose sanctions and save the whales, instead the day will come when the whaling fleets will expand and the factory ships will invade every ocean on earth. Pirate whaling and smuggling operations -- dispensing with fine distinctions between "recovering," "threatened" and "endangered" -- will thrive concurrently with legalized global trade in whale meat. The transnational interests that have fished down the food chain in every ocean on Earth, depleting one fishery after another in the name of quarterly profit reports, will turn their eyes to the species at the top of that food chain.
Should that day dawn, as it may this week, the conscience of our species, which thirty-five years ago lurched upward in a long struggle up a difficult path, will darken, shudder, and slide back.
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