Existing rules and regulations can sometimes be impossible to understand without an understanding of the history of the issue. I’ve only followed ‘whaling’ as an issue for a few years and have never felt I really understood the determination of the Japanese whalers to exploit every loop hole to keep whaling, including through their ‘scientific whaling programme’.
This morning I was sent a link to an article by Richard Black entitled ‘Did Greens help kill the whale?’ with a potted history of the environmental campaign against whaling going back to the early 1980s. Black suggests that, “the environmental movement pushed too hard; that its strident calls helped to alienate Japan at the very point where it was prepared to abandon whaling.”
There is also mention of Japanese resentment that they were being blamed for bringing some whales close to extinction when the UK and USA had historically caught far greater numbers and the push by US fishermen in the late 1980s to exclude the Japanese from access to US waters.
Read the complete article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6659401.stm
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.