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endangered species
Losing the Whales: How the Anti-Whaling Narrative Has Failed
The anti-whaling movement has failed to address the issues underpinning international negotiations over whaling, and now faces its greatest defeat.
Sep 16, 2024
Save the Whales. Perhaps the first famous conservation slogan. The end of pelagic commercial whaling was one of the original successes of the conservation movement in international diplomacy. The movement started in the USA, yet now, the two species of whale that are critically endangered are both found in U.S. waters. And we’re about to see the resumption of Antarctic commercial whaling, supported by the U.S. military-industrial-security complex. Crunch time is the meeting of the International Whaling Commission, or IWC later this month. “Lose the whales” is looking more realistic.
To understand how we’ve arrived here, we need to go back to 2010. The year Apple unveiled the first iPad. Taylor Swift released Speak Now. Wikileaks put out the “Collateral Murder” video. U.S. President Barack Obama declared the end of combat operations in Iraq, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the beginning of the USA’s re-engagement with East Asia. In November 2010, President Obama attended the meeting in Japan of APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
While there he had individual meetings with the (then) Prime Ministers of Japan, Naoto Kan, and Australia, Julia Gillard, the USA’s most important allies in the region. At the time, Japan and Australia were at loggerheads over whaling. A few months earlier Australia had started proceedings against Japan at the International Court of Justice that it was, with its “scientific whaling,” in breach of its obligations under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), the treaty underpinning the IWC. Australia won the case a few years later.
The return of pelagic commercial whaling is imminent.
As part of the movement against whaling, on November 5 2010, conservationists organized the “World Wide Anti-Whaling Day.” In Sydney, Australia, a protest was held at the Japanese Consulate. For the media coverage it received, it may as well not have happened. Concerns about Japanese whaling in Australia’s Antarctic whale sanctuary were running high, so this lack of media interest was unusual. However, the press had just covered another whaling “protest.”
On the evening before, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) organized a different action. The video remains available. They set up a fake whale in Sydney Harbor with a generic “stop whaling” message. As the video celebrates, this garnered huge coverage in the Australian media, so the action at the consulate the following day got none. Evidence of the conflict over whaling, between these two major U.S. alliesevaporated just in time for the presidential trip to Asia. Instead, the generic, unfocused “stop whaling” message occupied the airwaves. Organizers of the action at the consulate were livid.
Founded in 1969, IFAW was originally a small and effective NGO. It helped establish non-lethal studies as the way to do science on whales. In 1997 IFAW’s founder passed the organization on to a couple of former government officials, ex-senior managers of Peace Corps programs in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Under their direction, IFAW grew rapidly, including by taking over smaller NGOs internationally. Most conservation NGOs are short of money, and IFAW, suddenly rich, absorbed them.
The person who was heading IFAW’s whale program at the time of the stunt in Sydney Harbor has an unusual background for an employee of a conservation NGO. He was originally a German and Russian linguist with U.S. Army intelligence, enlisting in the early 1980s. After the army he moved to Mongoven, Biscoe, and Duchin (MBD), a company that specialized at infiltrating environmental NGOs for corporate clients, as detailed in an academic paper on their work for the tobacco industry. The title—“[MBD]: Destroying Tobacco Control Activism From the Inside”—tells the story. In a move that was the most radical conversion since Paul on the road to Damascus, he then immediately got the job as head of GLOBE USA, a collaborative of global politicians working on environmental issues. He moved to IFAW in 1996, immediately prior to the leadership changeover there. In 2007, coinciding with a U.S. government decision to come up with a process to “solve” issues in the IWC, he was appointed to IFAW’s new position of Global Whale Program Manager. Unlike other IFAW staff, he had little prior experience with the IWC.
The Sydney stunt is just one example, demonstrating how easy it is to direct media stories. IFAW remains the go-to organization for much of the mainstream media on whaling, and other whale conservation issues. IFAW’s messaging controls the anti-whaling narrative.
The anti-whaling movement has been operating under a set of assumptions over the past couple of decades. These include: whaling is a dying industry running on subsidies; acting forcefully against whaling will encourage a backlash in whaling nations; whaling can be replaced with whale-watching as an economic use of whales; and recently, that the Japanese withdrawal from the IWC was an “elegantly Japanese solution” that meant Japanese whalers would never again engage in pelagic whaling. Note that all but one of these links quote IFAW.
Given the new Japanese quotas for killing fin whales, the new ice-strengthened Japanese whaling factory ship, and the call to shut down the IWC, these assumptions are mistaken. Whaling is just one part of much bigger geopolitical machinations that revolve around the U.S. military maintaining its Japanese bases in the face of pubic anger there at the appalling behavior of some service personnel. And then the Japanese government uses access to bases as leverage to winning on whaling, in order to maintain their control over management of other, more important, pelagic fisheries.
Further, the anti-whaling movement has failed to heed warnings of problems in their midst. These were clear after Wikileaks released documents revealing the dealings between the U.S. IWC commissioner, and the Japanese government in 2009. Also clear from the Wikileaks cables is the way in which Australia and Japan’s relationships were impacted by whaling, and how this was a concern for the U.S. government. The NGO community treat this as irrelevant.
That U.S. IWC commissioner? Prior to her return to government, Monica Medina, also ex-military, also worked at IFAW.
On the Wikileaks documents, IFAW’s whale program leader wrote a blog post back in 2011. It includes: “...as I stare back at his face on the WikiLeaks homepage, that Julian Assange—who doesn’t look so well—is on a one-man mission, that the job he is tryin’ to do on us is about something other than saving whales or even promoting transparency in government, and that he really doesn’t much like us—as in U.S.”
The return of pelagic commercial whaling is imminent. The anti-whaling movement has failed to address the issues underpinning international negotiations over whaling, and now faces its greatest defeat. A major NGO focusing on whaling—one to whom many media outlets turn to for comment—has a track record of employing former U.S. military, and military intelligence, staffers. (And not just for whaling). Have these intelligence professionals failed to comprehend the geopolitical issues driving negotiations over whaling?
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Lead Ammo Harms Wildlife and Undermines the Mission of Our National Parks
Banning lead from our national parks would be one of the single biggest conservation advances in a generation.
Aug 27, 2024
Earlier this month, a California condor, the first of its kind to hatch and take flight in Zion National Park, died of lead poisoning just shy of its fifth birthday. Shockingly, one of this condor’s siblings was earlier found to have the highest recorded lead value ever documented in a live bird over the entire 28-year history of the condor release program.
Lead poisoning remains the leading cause of diagnosed death among California condors. About 90% of condors trapped and tested during this past year had blood lead levels indicating lead exposure. As scavengers, condors ingest lead shot from carcasses of animals killed with lead-based ammunition.
But condors are not the only victims. Lead is a leading threat to all national park birdlife, especially bald eagles, hawks, and other raptors. Lead fragments from spent shells contaminate the entire wildlife food chain.
It’s time for decisive action to protect the wildlife that our national parks were created to preserve.
While most parks by law do not permit hunting, a significant number do. Of the 429 national parks, 76 allow various types of hunting—recreational, subsistence, or tribal hunting. These parks (the largest of which are in Alaska) cover more than 60% of land within the entire national park system. In addition, more than 85% of parks with fish (213 in all) are open for fishing with lead tackle.
The impact is devastating. More than 130 park wildlife species are exposed to or killed by ingesting lead or prey contaminated with lead.
These wildlife deaths are preventable. Since November of 2022, Interior Secretary Deborah Haaland, the cabinet officer overseeing the National Park Service, has had a proposed rule sitting on her desk that would end the use of lead-based ammunition and fishing tackle in all park units. Despite this, no action has been taken on this rule-making petition.
In contrast to the Park Service’s total inaction, its sister agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, (FWS) has declared that “lead ammunition and tackle have negative impacts on both wildlife and human health.” The FWS has taken the first tentative steps to reduce or eliminate the use of lead ammunition by:
- Imposing partial bans on lead ammunition in certain refuges where new hunting opportunities have opened up;
- Phasing out of lead ammunition on three refuges newly opened to hunting; and
- Developing a pilot program to reimburse hunters for using lead-free ammunition.
Though these steps do not constitute a complete ban on lead ammunition, they represent a significant step forward, especially considering that nearly 80% of wildlife refuges and other management districts offer hunting and fishing access.
Unfortunately, wildlife protection does not appear to be a high priority for National Park Service Director Chuck Sams and his leadership team. Earlier this year, he approved questionable hunting practices, such as killing bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens, using dogs and artificial lights to hunt black bears, and shooting swimming caribou from motorboats across more than 22 million acres of Park Service administered lands in Alaska.
These are not the actions of a conservation-focused agency.
Banning lead from our national parks would be one of the single biggest conservation advances in a generation. Such a move would place the Park Service alongside 26 states and countries that have already banned lead ammunition.
The ecological stakes are profound. It’s time for decisive action to protect the wildlife that our national parks were created to preserve.
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The Dangerous Politics of Climate Engineering
The idea that humans can manipulate the Earth to reduce the risks of climate change relies on and perpetuates a futile sense of human control and domination over our planet.
Jul 21, 2024
Climate scientists around the world are now projecting warming of at least 2.5°C within this century. As U.S. and other wealthy governments fail to phase out fossil fuels, investments in climate engineering—technological interventions to manipulate the climate—have been increasing.
We’re seeing this play out in real time in Massachusetts. This August, a team of researchers plans to dump 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide into ocean waters just south of Martha’s Vineyard. Next summer, they intend to dump a staggering 66,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine. They call it the “LOC-NESS” experiment, and it’s intended to test a new geoengineering technique called “ocean alkalinity enhancement.” They plan to make ocean waters less acidic, causing them to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They hope if alkaline substances were dumped at truly massive scales it could offset a portion of human caused emissions.
There are many serious concerns with manipulating the ocean environment in an attempt to address climate change. Sodium hydroxide is a dangerous substance that causes chemical burns on contact with humans or marine life. The dumping locations are home to at least eight endangered species, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. This experiment will alter the ocean environment, creating new risks to many already threatened marine species.
Rather than supporting manipulations of Earth’s systems, humanity needs to deploy existing solutions that center ecological integrity, environmental justice, and human rights.
Dozens of reputable studies also cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of ocean alkalinity enhancement. At least two gigatons of alkaline material would have to be dumped continuously by every bulk carrier and cargo ship in the world in order to capture only 4% of current CO2 emissions. Additionally, mining on the scale the project requires, as well as transporting the mined materials to ships for dumping, likely causes more greenhouse gasses to be emitted than it removes from the atmosphere after it’s dumped in the ocean.
The idea that humans can manipulate the Earth to reduce the risks of climate change relies on and perpetuates a futile sense of human control and domination over our planet. This false sense of control emerges directly from the technological optimism of billionaires who are enthusiastically advocating for more geoengineering research, like those funding the LOC-NESS project. In addition to wasting money that could instead be used to fund wind and solar projects already proven to reduce emissions, climate engineering diverts attention away from the equitable phaseout of fossil fuels that is urgently needed to avoid further climate catastrophe.
The scientists involved in the LOC-NESS experiment say they are not advocating for immediate deployment of marine geoengineering—just to develop the technologies and information that society may need in the future if we do decide to geoengineer. However, the history of multiple technological advances shows that after a technology is developed, the scientists involved lose control over what happens next. This disconnect is clearly demonstrated in the film Oppenheimer, when the U.S. military comes to transport the nuclear bomb away from Los Alamos. In a telling moment, Oppenheimer asks to be kept up-to-date about when the technology will be used. The military general responds with a clear message—the job of the Los Alamos scientists is done and they will no longer be involved. As the saying goes, history tends to repeat itself.
Despite the powerful influence of those advocating for climate engineering, concerned citizens around the world are mobilizing against it. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has established an effective moratorium on geoengineering, making exceptions only for small-scale research projects conducted in a controlled environment—which the LOC-NESS experiment is not. Indigenous People in particular have led resistance to many geoengineering experiments, which frequently target Indigenous lands for deployment.
Rather than supporting manipulations of Earth’s systems, humanity needs to deploy existing solutions that center ecological integrity, environmental justice, and human rights. Recognizing that climate chaos is a symptom, and not the core problem, is essential for effective transformative change. We must oppose projects like LOC-NESS and focus on guiding our world toward a healthy, just, and sustainable future.
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