We are in Hobart, Tasmania Australia. It’s early springtime, about the same temperature as when we left in British Columbia, Canada. Nice.
It will be the last IWC meeting for Helena and myself. We’ve brought two of our young colleagues, Shari Manning and Mark Worthing with us, to introduce them to the scene, passing the baton as it were. Collectively, we represent the US NGO Dolphin Connection. It’s an honour to be supported in this important work.
My mind drifts back to 1975, when I first attended an IWC plenary meeting. It was in London, at Riverwalk House, the headquarters for Britain’s Soviet spies. David Cornwall (John Le Carré) might have been there, though not visibly. I had come to London at the end of a long journey, across Canada with the Greenpeace Whale Show, to Iceland where I was introduced to Norway’s Age Jongaard, who introduced me to Einar Vangstein head of the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics in Sandfjord, who allowed me to peruse the log books of whalers. There, I determined where and when Russian whalers would be operating off the California coast, passing this information on to Greenpeace’s Bob Hunter in Vancouver by mail. The confrontation happened on the last day of the 1975 IWC meeting, though not widely known until Walter Cronkite’s CBC News broadcast a few days later which showed a harpoon flying over the heads of Greenpeace protesters in a little zodiac vessel and striking a sperm whale. It was a shot that rattled the whaling world.
Friends of the Earth led a demonstration outside the 1975 venue which featured coffins symbolic of the slaughter of whales. When the meeting broke for lunch, I sat with some of the attendees. When they left, I was alone. Glancing down, I spotted a red delegate’s badge, put it on an walked through security into the meeting, where I hung out at the back, trying not to be noticed. I was in, and have been “in” ever since except for 1976 when I was on the Greenpeace vessel James Bay, engaged in another confrontation with Russian whalers, and 1982, the year the moratorium on commercial whaling finally passed. I didn’t go that year because I was sure we had the votes needed for a 3/4 majority. I’ve attended many though not all meetings since including meetings of the scientific committee, and more recently the conservation committee, which Japan resisted being established. I have the longest institutional memory of anyone present at this meeting. I have many memories, but my favourite is of Georgio Pilleri, the Italian neuro scientist standing before a display of sperm whale and human brains at a scientific committee meeting in Cambridge, pointing at the human brain with a long pointer, exclaiming “Nada, nada”. It connected with my first glimpse of an orca brain, Moby Doll’s, the first orca captured by the Vancouver Aquarium immersed in a huge glass jar of formalin, nearly 4 times the size of the human brains in jars in the shelf above, which looked puny in comparison. My first thought was, what on Earth does this creature do with this brain?
I digress. There is serious business to be done here. I’m pretty sure Japan will control a blocking minority of votes, so expect the proposal for a South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary to fail once again. I might be wrong, though, as some of the African and Caribbean countries whose votes Japan has controlled in the past are under pressure from their NGOs to change and support conservation. The same may apply to Pacific Ocean states that are very aware of the threat of rising oceans from climate change. One interesting sideline to this will be the dance the US makes in order to avoid the words climate change appearing in the report of the Commission. At the subcommittee meeting of the Conservation Committee, the US went out of its way to avoid mention of climate change in the report. Unable to immediately get its way, it joined a small working group[ on language. I’m not sure of the outcome. Another interesting topic will be a possible new name for Aboriginal and Subsistence Whaling, to bring it in line with the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Austria suggested “Aboriginal/Indigenous” at the sub committee meeting but it was not agreed to. Yet another interesting topic will be finances.. The IWC simply doesn’t have the means to do all the work on its long list. Discussion of ways to cut costs included not using business class travel to meetings. If I have a chance to speak as an NGO intervener, I’m going to suggest establishing an IWC endowment fund. $100 million USD would provide $3-5 million USD annually, enough to support the many important jobs the IWC is doing – issues affecting whales, like stranding and entanglement. It could even support business class travel to meetings, or at least premium economy. Impressively, the Scientific and Conservation Committees are collaborating well. Small cetaceans have finally made it to the IWC’s list of concerns, and there are many. An Extinction Alert is being set up to warn of imminent danger, though the precise mechanism has yet to be agreed.
The Hobart meeting will also say farewell to the Commission’s long time Executive Secretary Julie Creek, who like me and Helena, is retiring. It will be difficult to replace her.
Fifty one years ago, the IWC was little more than a whalers’ club which met annually to carve up the whale pie. It has changed, radically. Japan’s departure in 2019, though a financial hit, has opened the door wider to the IWC’s focus on cetacean and ocean welfare. These are vitally important jobs in a world that has relied on stability for millennia and is now facing increasing disarray.
One of the most interesting aspects of this meeting will be, who will show up? We know Grenada will be there because of an email message inadvertently shared in which Grenada asked for confirmation that its dues have been paid. As Grenada will be there, this means that Japan’s blocking votes will probably be there too. But what of the pro whale countries? Rumours have it that attendance is too costly for some, and that ambassadors of some, rather than Commissioners who know the issues, may attend. This is unlikely to threaten the moratorium but it could prevent progress on important issues. How the IWC will get around the problem of Climate will be a challenge. I hope if course that the Commission will tackle it head on, despite the orders the US delegation will be under,
We shall see of course. Meanwhile, the air is a pleasure to breathe in Hobart..
By Paul Spong
