¶ Intro / Opening
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
¶ Save the Whales Campaign Origins
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are going crunchy granola even today talking about saving the whales, which Chuck, I don't know about you, but for me, that was like a big part of my childhood. So this is a little bit nostalgic for me.
Yeah, I mean, if you're insinuating I grew up under a rock in the nineteen seventies, that it's not the case.
You did live on a gravel road.
That's true.
We're rocks involved.
I lived among rocks.
But yeah, I mean I would go out on a limb and say that. Well, this article says save the Whales is one of the most successful environmental conservation movements in history. But I'm from my mouth to thine ears, I'm going to say I think the Save the Whales campaign is one of the most effective marketing camp pains across any genre in history.
Well, wow, it was that ambiquitous.
Yeah, it was super ubiquitous. I think you caught more of it than me. Even like the stuff that I call was a little bit of the the after wash. I don't know, like remember that thing you were living well, no, it was still a thing. Yeah, but I think the peak I missed the peak and you were living right through it because the seventies were like when this really
¶ Historic Whale Conservation Efforts
started to ramp up big time. And I'm sure plenty of people out there have heard save the whales, and it is like a pretty ubiquitous slogan used to be even more ubiquitous, like we're saying. But despite that, there wasn't like one person or group that you're like that they started save the whales. It almost just kind of bubbled up into the collective consciousness and a bunch of different groups kind of started doing the same thing, sometimes
working together, other times doing it independently. But the whole goal was to preserve declining whale populations from extinction, and they all were kind of under the same banner of save the whales.
Yeah, and we're going to talk a little bit about the actual saving of the whales. We're gonna talk a little bit about that campaign, you know, slogan, and how that was a thing. But if you want to talk about just the word save the whales, that did not come about in the nineteen seventies that became a thing.
And I mean the phrase dates back to the eighteen hundreds, like the eighteen eighties, but it really became a thing in the nineteen twenties when whale conservation was first a little flicker on the radar of I mean, what would be early conservationists. But in nineteen twenty eight there was a mammalogist group that had to save the whales, meeting
in Washington, DC. And that's when it really kicked off as far as like you know, there were buttons and there was a satirical poem written about how ubiquitous it was in the nineteen twenties and thirties.
So it was definitely a big thing early on.
Yeah, and in those articles, I think Anna helped us with this one. She dug up some articles from the twenties about those meetings and they were saving the whales to the bison populations that almost went extinct, yeah, you know, just a few decades before. So the lesson was learned by some and they're like, these whales aren't going to be around much longer either. And it wasn't just the US. It spread around the world, like other countries started kind
of their own save the whale initiatives. It was clear
¶ The Era of Industrial Whaling
that we were over whaling. And yet despite that, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, whaling was still generally antiquated. It was still the kind of whaling that you think of like New Bedford, Massachusetts, like the salty old sea dog with a peg leg and a spear in his other hand, a pipe, maybe even a parrot like out there whaling with a harpoon that he's using with his hands.
They killed a lot of whales like that, but it was nothing compared to the Austrial whaling that started in like the middle of the twentieth century.
Yeah, I mean they started having you know, literal cannons mounted on the side of a of a ship that would shoot exploding harpoons. And by the sixties they were taking eighty thousand whales a year. Blue whales neared extinction, plenty of others in like grave danger. I am taking my first trip to Nantucket this summer, and that is they have a whaling museum there.
Yeah, that I'm going to go to.
I've never even been to that part of the country really, so I'm eager to go, and not to celebrate whaling, but just as a sort of historical museum kind of thing.
Emily has already said that she won't be going.
No, I can understand that it would be kind of hard to take for sure.
Yeah, but I mean, I imagine it's fairly interesting.
It's just a blip in time, but it's not I doubt if they're trying to sell you on whaling at least a.
Right right, Remember when it's great about Nantucket. That is like to thirty limericks, what enya is the crosswords?
Wow? Yeah, yeah, that's a nice full So a good.
Comparison here is like, like I said, New Bedford, Massachusetts, that area Nantucket, Cape Cod. I guess sure they this was like the seat of whaling internationally in like the mid nineteenth century and over this basically this decade of American dominance of whaling, they took one hundred thousand whales. Now what you're saying is that by the sixties they're taking almost that amount in one year, not a decade. Yeah,
that's how much it had gotten stepped up. And if the people in the twenties in the thirties were worried about whales going extinct before using the kind of antiquated original whaling techniques. This new stuff was really a threat to them.
Yeah, for sure.
¶ Wartime Impact on Whale Conservation
And you know, the seventies, it sort of merged with the post sixties crunchiness to really become a big thing. But going back to the thirties and nineteen thirty on the nose, the League of Nations got together and established the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics just so they could see if it truly was a bison situation. And a year later they're like, yep, it's pretty bad. They're declining
big time. And so twenty two nations signed in agreement at the Geneva Convention that year for the regulation of whaling to put some limits. And that was kind of the first move was in nineteen thirty one.
You know what else I saw too, Something else that saved the whales in the first way the first half of the twentieth century was the invention of the light bulb because people didn't need whale oil for lamps anymore.
Yeah, I mean, I guess we should say that they whiled because that blubber was oil for lamps, and people also ate it. And also, you know, we're not going to not talk about indigenous populations where it's right. You know, they depended on that stuff for sustenance and some still do, so, yeah, that's why they wailed.
Well. Also, that's why some of these early I guess international agreements on conserving whale stocks were created, not because they're like whaling's wrong. They were like, we need to be able to keep whaling in the future, so let's not overdo it now, let's figure out what is a sustainable amount. That's what the earliest agreements were for.
Yeah, let's stop whaling some so we can keep whaling exactly.
So that was the first one.
Thirty one, thirty seven came along and ten nations signed on to another one called the International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling.
Also put some more limits.
It banned blue, humpback fin and sperm whales under certain links. But it was still declining. So in nineteen forty six the International Whaling Commission. They just keep starting these commissions and getting member countries on board and it's really not making much of a difference. And they did that in forty six again with fourteen member nations. But the forty six one, you know, aligned I guess at thirty seven aligned with World War two, so they were like, we
can't go without this oil like at this time. So it just it didn't really have any teeth.
Yeah, not only that they needed like meat, So they weren't in a position. The world wasn't in a position after World War two to be like no, not let's stop taking this meat. Like whale meat fed a lot of people who didn't have access to other kinds of protein from World War two. So yeah, those agreements were kind of like, no, this isn't gonna work right now. And then as things started to ramp up, because now there was a much bigger market that hadn't been there
before for whale meat, like a global market. That's why it became this industrial factory farming like version of whaling, right, So, because there was just a lot more money to be made.
¶ Whale Songs and Public Awareness
So the people who finally started to save the whales campaign of the seventies had a really huge hill to climb, the biggest hill anyone who was against whaling itself ever had to climb in the history of whaling.
Yeah, for sure, but it was, like I said, kind of the right time. Coming out of the sixties. There were a lot more just sort of environmental concerns popping up. The EPA was a little more in the limelight, and it was just there was more awareness of that kind of thing, and there was a big perspective shift that happened that was much much different from those earlier ones like you were saying, where it was like let's conserve
so we can keep whaling. Like this was a legitimate like hey, these things were realizing are intelligent, and that started happening in the nineteen fifties, like finding out that whales were smart. Yeah, thanks to a Navy engineer named Frank Watlington was a really big change.
Well, yeah, he liked to I almost have the sense that it was in his spare time record with a hydrophone the underwater sounds of the Navy, like shooting off bombs, and he accidentally caught some whale songs of some baileing whales, and he was like, this is I've not heard stuff like this before. It seems like there's a pattern to it or a rhythm, or they keep coming back to
like a chorus. I don't know. So he gave it to some marine biologists who actually took it and released it as an album in nineteen seventy Songs of the Humpback Whale and have you listened to it?
Oh? Yeah, I like most of my adult life.
Yeah, it's just so mellow. It's so ambient that you're like, wait, did they add some synth here? And no, it's just nothing but whale songs.
Right yeah, Brian, you know had nothing to do with it.
Right, So I can't imagine this was released in nineteen seventy. I can't imagine between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty how much acid was dropped listening to the album Songs of the Humpback Whale. Man, it was like made for it.
So maybe I think this has got to be fair. Use we can just play a short snippet just so people can can hear a piece.
Yeah, okay, sure, let's give it a shot.
All right, here we go, everybody with Songs of the hump Back Whale on s y sk.
Here is part of the same song played at its natural speed and pitch, just the way other whales hear it. All the sounds are made by one whale, both the high squeaky tones and the low rumbling ones.
Wow. What an album, right, Yeah?
I mean it's the only multi platinum album of animal Sounds, which is completely believable.
Yeah, I can't imagine there's too many more.
Yeah, I mean it actually became a huge hit. It's the only multi platinum album of animal sounds, which I guess now they think about it is completely believable.
Right, But if you just go listen to it's only like a half hour so long. I think it's a It says songs of the humpback whale. There's so many different songs that I'm like, there's got to be different species involved. It's just neat. Just go listen.
Yeah, it's super cool. And the whole point of it all was is that it raised awareness. People were all of a sudden like wait, these like scientists said, I think they're communicating here, and they're super smart, like Chuck would later say in a podcast, And so save the Whales campaign all of a sudden had a kind of different rallying cry, which is like, hey, we're you know, these aren't just big dumb logs floating around in the ocean. These are really super smart animals to be protected.
Right, and so an environmental ease, they became ambassador animals for the ocean as a whole. Yeah, this is now an animal that you can make people care about, and now we have to go get the word out. And by saving whales, you're also going to save everything else in the whales ecosystem that you're working to preserve.
That's right. Should we take a break?
Yeah?
I was about to say the same thing, so gen one, two, seven, eight, not you owe me nine cokes?
Gosh, all right, I'm going to go to the store and we'll be right back. All right, We're back everybody. Uh, after a delay that you don't need to even know about, right.
It's our business.
Yeah? None.
Ye.
¶ 70s Campaign: Boycotts and Concerts
So Save the Whales is kicked off in the seventies, and I think you mentioned earlier on It's it's you know, sometimes it was in parallel with one another. It wasn't like just one group doing this, but everyone got on board with that same the same three words because it was a very unifying thing. And this is sort of
a loose timeline of how it started. And it kicked off in nineteen seventy one when the Animal Welfare Institute got together with the Fund for Animals to officially launch the nineteen seventies version of the Save the Whales campaign, right, and they started doing things like, you know, going to teachers conventions, you know, sending out you know, information and mailers and placing ads and saying like, hey, maybe we should boycott whaling nations that kind of stuff, right.
Yeah, in just a few years they started a pretty big boycott. I think in nineteen seventy four they said no Japanese goods, no Russian goods. Yes, we're even talking about vodka. They had to say that a lot. Yeah, and I think eighteen other groups signed on, and I think five million Americans said yes, no Russian goods, no Japanese goods, Let's save the whales hot damn for real.
They got benefit concerts together. I know, David Bowie in nineteen seventy two had a very headlined, very f famous save the Whales benefit concert.
You know.
Of course Greenpeace would get on board early on, although they would get on board two years after it started with their project Ahab, which was a little surprising.
They're like, no, wait, what about the panda. I thought we were all doing the panda. They're like, that's later, we'll do the panda next. We're going to save the whales now. Finally green Peace came around.
Yeah, and you know, a lot of this early stuff was very just sort of local routes oriented, Like in the mid seventies, the Connecticut Cetacean Society just like literally went from town to town in Connecticut with save the Whales events and places like Mendocino, California had the Mendocino Whale Festival and founded the Mendocino Whale War. So it's like, you know, and this is where whaling is taking place, mainly in these like sort of little small coastal towns.
So it wasn't like, you know, we're going to go to New York City and have this big event like they were doing it where it was going on.
Yeah, and there were like different ways ways of doing this. Some were like we want to go like basically confront whaling ships where they're wailing. Other people are like, let's just we just need to raise awareness and raise money and all.
Like.
It wasn't like this this thing that I'm doing is the right way to do it. It was like, okay, you're going to do that. I'll handle this over here and all together, we're going to save the whales. Even though there wasn't like necessarily a lot of coordination going on. It was just you know, you kind of look to your left and see somebody like trying to save the whales with you, and you just kind of give them like a finger gun and a wink and be like, right on.
Yeah, for sure. I mean they're proposed moratoriums and stuff like that. And we'll get into the weeds about how that actually went down in a little bit. But one of the big things that happened in the seventies was
that T shirt. In nineteen seventy seven, there was a woman named Maris Sidenstecker who had been selling these shirts for like three years, like really successfully since I think nineteen seventy four, and she was sixteen years old old and seventy seven founded because of the success of these T shirts, founded her own conservation group called Save the Whales.
Yeah, she had a small ad and Rolling Stone, just this recurring ad and that's how she got the word out about the T shirts. And then one other thing I saw about her. She was named Maris Sidenstecker the second because her mother was Maris Side and Stucker. The first. No, that's unusual but pretty cool. Huh.
Yeah, usually that would be junior.
Well, you just don't usually see that with women. It's mostly men.
You know, Well, it's because men are the only people who think their name means something.
Well, sure, the and Stecker women stuck their thumb in the eye of the patriarchy, is what they did.
Oh, you put it on this building or on my parking spot.
So let's talk about some of the tactics they took. Like I said, you'd look to your left, look to your right. All these people are taking these different approaches to it. It's all about saving the whales. One of the easiest ones is to just kind of go to the kids, because, as we'll see, if you can go to the younger generation, that's like the long game that you're playing, But it's also the one that's more likely
to pay off. If you teach little kids that whales are smart, that they live in families, that they care about their babies just like your mom cares about you, those kids are going to grow up to see whales is not something that you kill for blubber or meat, but something that you need to protect from people who want to kill them for their blubber or meat.
Yeah, for sure, So that was you know, that's kind of the starting point. I think is just educating the children. The children's we already talked about obviously, you know, public events like concerts and protests and boycotts. The merchandising, like the T shirt, Like that's not just like hey, let me make the shirt, like bumper stickers and shirts and buttons are a big part of any kind of movement like that.
Yeah, one thing you mentioned, that Bowie concert. I saw somebody was writing about it and they said like this was the concert that made David Bowie like a superstar, like he was on the rise, and that that concert was where he turned the corner.
Hmm, what year was it?
Seventy two? Okay, it was supposedly a pretty good concert. He had lou Reid on stage and they played Sweet Jane and like two other songs I've never heard of. Yeah, it seemed like it probably was pretty cool.
I wish I could have been there. That's a big regret for me as Bowie.
He's on the short list of dudes I never got to see and had a chance to, you.
Know, he's on the time Machine list.
Uh Yeah, like a really regrettable one because he was around him playing shows that you know, I never was, like, no, I'm not going to go to that, Like, but it wasn't like, you know, Queen stopped playing shows. That's another one on my list. But they could stop playing shows in Atlanta when I was I don't even think they played there after. I was like seeing concerts, so you know.
I see, I see. So that's not as regrettable as Bowie.
Yeah, because I had the chance to see Bowie and did not take it.
I understand.
That's like he's never going to leave us, is what I thought, right.
¶ Greenpeace's Mind Bomb Photography
Bowie will never die rules, Bowie lives.
Yeah, very sad.
So one of the tactics that actually kind of emerge from this greenpiece is like, we need to catch up. We got to come up with our own kind of brand of doing this, and they came up with a term for it. They called it the mind bomb, which is basically like, now, yeah, it is very corny and nowadays you're like, well, yeah, that's of course you're gonna do something like that if you're you're an activist campaigning,
you know, to say, save an animal. The mind bob was basically like showing people unfiltered photographs of what is actually going on. Yeah, and that's what they did They released a lot of photographs to the press internationally of whaling in action so that people could see how brutal it was. They made it no longer just a concept that people heard about save the whales, Save the whales.
Now they can see for themselves why people were saying save the whales, because they were being brutalized by humans.
Yeah, and those those one particular advance that they went on that kind of started it all and was in newspapers all over the country.
I was in April of nineteen seventy.
Five aboard the Phyllis McCormick boat. Twelve activists got on the boat and they spent a couple of months out at sea trying to find some whaling boats. Finally, in June they caught up with a Russian fleet off the coast of California and just kind of followed it around for a little while, like using bullhorns and loud speakers to in Russian to beg them to stop killing whales, played like blast music at them and stuff, and that
wasn't working. So eventually they were like, all right, we need to step it up just a little bit, and so they got on those little rubber speedboats like the little raft boats, and followed it around like a lot closer that you could do in those boats, and took some pretty horrifying pictures that made a like these close up pictures of harpooning whales made a big, big difference in the campaign.
Yeah, I saw, just like that Bowie concert being where he turned to corners. Supposedly, this is where the same the whales effort really turned to corner too. Like it
was again international news. There were plenty of newspapers that put it some of the pictures on their front page, and like it just really kind of captured people's attention, and so that whole mind bomb idea really kind of took off and spread not just from Greenpeace, but you know to other groups not just animal conservationists, and green Peace continued on. The ship that I grew up with that they used to do this with was the Rainbow Warrior, remember that one.
Oh yeah, and by the way, for a second there a minute ago, I thought you were going to say, like the Bowie thing, this is where photography really.
Took off, right exactly in nineteen seventy five.
Yeah, I was like, oh, man, is that what's coming? Yeah?
I totally remember the Rainbow Warrior. I didn't know you grew up on that boat, but that's pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah, my dad was a mate. He was a Madiyah a Rainbow Warrior for many many years. We had to basically peel him off of the deck and be like, go get a different job, so he became an HVAC engineer.
Eventually, we need shout out Australia because they had a green Piece affiliate called the Whale and Dolphin Coalition that was, like you said, kind of doing the same thing. They were like, hey, this is a really effective deal, so let's get out there. And we didn't say why. I thought it was corny and mind bombs because they would blow people's minds.
Exactly with their pictures, for sure, and they did. But again it is a very corny way to put it.
¶ Sea Shepherd's Anti-Whaling Tactics
That's right, But that would be stepped up even more because you know, green Peace gets a little more aggressive, and then there's always one more like the Brad Pitt group in Twelve Monkeys. That's like, nah, they're not even taking it far enough. We need to actually, well, I guess sort of engage in sabotage.
Yeah, this one I associated with the nineties of the Sea Shepherd. They were a conservation society founded I think in nineteen seventy seven by a guy named Paul Wattson you have been a Green Pieace member. It was like, you guys are corny, I'm out of here, or I'm gonna do something like actually significant, not just follow whalers around and take pictures. He followed whalers around and tried to sink their boats by ramming his own boat into them.
And he was so successful, Chuck, that I propose we do a short stuff just on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society itself. They have sunk a lot of boats.
Yeah, he said, mind bombs are effective. Real bombs are more effective.
Pretty much. I mean they used at least one bomb on I think a ship called the Sierra, right.
Yeah, Well, they rammed the Sierra a couple of times with their boat and damaged it. And then a few years later, no, I guess one year later. That was seventy nine, and nineteen eighty is when they planted an underwater bomb and sank that thing.
And like you said, many others.
Yeah, And just to be clear, Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society, they've never injured a single person. They've never been indicted for breaking any law. These are pirate whaling ships. They're operating completely outside of the bounds of international agreements where they're hunting endangered species that are off the table. They're taking whales that are young that shouldn't be taken. They're like taking more than they're supposed to.
Like it's a it's a big deal that these people are out there and that's that's why he's targeted them. And he said that in an interview. He's never lost a lawsuit that's been brought against him either, so he's feeling pretty good about what he's doing.
Yeah, and they you know, this wasn't like, hey, we're gonna I mean, it was definitely awareness, but like it it put an actual dentt in the whaling industry, Like they sank two of Spain's five only five whaling ships. Yeah, and if I had a better math brain, I could figure out the percentage, but that's probably forty something.
So Yeah. Another thing that he did he would put out bounties on other pirate whaling ships. There was one called the Astrod, and the owner of the Astroid eventually just sold it because he couldn't trust the crew anymore that they weren't gonna sabotage it and take twenty five thousand dollars reward because he definitely wasn't paying them twenty five thousand dollars, right, And then there was one other thing that had this direct impact on whaling as an industry.
Just him being out there sinking ships made whaling ships insurance rates go sky high. So there were some there like I can't afford the insurance anymore. I'm gonna stop doing illegal whaling.
That's right.
And he also he had that great line about mind bombs not being as effective as real bombs. He also had one about loose lips, and I think you can just fill in the.
Rest, that's right.
So they're making a lot of headway, you know, sinking these ships and raising awareness. But you know, we mentioned
¶ Save the Whales in Pop Culture
early on like just how big of a ubiquitous thing this was in the seventies, and it was like a legitimate pop culture phenomenon. I mean, it was right up there with like where's the beef in the nineteen eighties, ironically, as far as like slogans that people knew and wore on shirts and put in songs like Judy Collins and Kate Bush both sampled that songs of the Humpback Whale
as you know, awareness and because it sounded cool. There was a Save the Whales board game in nineteen seventy eight, and we can tell you firsthand, if you have made it to board game territory, then you're part of pop culture. Yeah.
Apparently I was reading about the rules players are they cooperate rather than compete with one another to save the whales?
Like games?
I mean, that's definitely like difficult gameplay to come up with. I would guess.
Yeah, they couldn't be like, all right, he's going to play the whaler.
Right exactly? Everybody hates me.
Yeah.
What was the pinnacle of the whole thing? Though, Chuck? It came in nineteen eighty six.
Oh yeah, as everyone who's listening to the show knows, I know nothing of Star Trek, but I did know the plot at least of Star Trek. What is that for the voyage home, which is when the crew Captain Kirk and his crew went back to save the whales.
Yeah, so that's I mean, yeah, a little game and a Star Trek, not a Star Trek episode an entire Star Trek movie dedicated to saving a whale. Saving the whales. That was a pretty big deal. So yes, this thing spread grew a tasta size, became part of just the regular culture. There are comic strips that mentioned it, just the casual mentions of it, the way it came up. When you look back at it, you're like, yeah, this
was everywhere. I remember there's a Simpsons where Lisa develops a crush on Nelson Mounts and she goes to visit him at his house and he has a poster on the wall that says Nuke the whales. Yeah, and she goes, nuke the whales. He's like, got a nuke something, save the nuke touche.
Yeah. I remember wearing We had Hippie Day in high school once a year where you you know, pretty self explanatory, and there was a picture of me, I believe, in the yearbook wearing my little hippie outfit and my prop was a little save the whales sign. So it was you know, I wasn't stepping out and trying something original by any means. It was like super And this was the mid to late nineteen eighties at this point.
Right underneath it said Charles W. Bryant shows off his hippie outfit. Also, he's the best all round boy.
It probably said something like that, except for the last part.
Yeah, that was a big That was a big surprise for you.
Those yearbook captions.
They were pretty bad.
Yeah.
I remember we had a yearbook in high school where they misspelled tomorrow on the cover, say Tomory. It's a t MMO r RW too many ms, too many, yes, too many ms. I have my hands over my eyes right now because I'm just cringing thinking about it. Like they were. This was printed distributed before anybody noticed, like they were done.
That is on the editor in chief.
And on the the teacher.
Yeah, the school sponsor.
¶ The International Whaling Ban
So okay, so I think we've established save the whales. It spread throughout pop culture. People's sympathies like definitely started to go toward the whales. But where the rubber meets the road is whaling going to stop. You need to go to the people who oversee stuff like this, like
entire governments and national bodies. And just like they did in the thirties, they went back to the International Whaling Commission and said, hey, guys, what do you think about just stopping this, and the UNS a great idea in the IWC said no.
Yeah, I mean I think the first try was they proposed a ten year moratorium on whaling.
What year was that, I don't have that in front of me.
It was nineteen seventy two.
Okay, yeah, so that was seventy two.
The next year, in seventy three, the UN Conference on Human Environment basically said, yeah, ten year moratorium. The IWC rejected it, and then the next year, in seventy four, the AWI called for a boycott of Japanese and Russian goods, and that same year eighteen other conservation groups got on board with that boycott. But again it would take I think until nineteen eighty two before they got back to real like voting on moratoriums.
Yeah. So basically in nineteen yeah, nineteen eighty two, the IWC, the International Whaling Commission basically said let's tick up this vote again. I could not find what prompted this, so I just have to assume it was just a general
awareness of saving the whales. So they voted again on a moratorium and it actually passed this time, and so they said, well, we'll give everybody four years to get ready but in the nineteen eighty six season, the quote was that the catch limits for the killing for commercial purposes of whales from all stocks any kind of whale. That's just me adding that parenthetical shall be zero. No whales going to be killed in the nineteen eighty six
whaling season, and it passed. Twenty five nations said yeah, seven said nay, yeah, And it came into effect in nineteen eighty six, and the thing was chuck. It was originally just going to be a temporary measure, and just like in the tradition of the IWC and other whaling commissions, the point was to allow the whale stocks to replenish themselves so you could get back to whaling. But they never lifted the moratorium. It's just continued indefinitely.
¶ Whale Populations Recover, Whaling Continues
Yeah, for sure. Should we talk about some of these stats and then take our second break.
Oh my gosh, we haven't taken our second break. We have not Okay, yeah, definitely.
All right. So it had a big impact.
Obviously, these moratoriums at its peak in the nineteen sixties, I think I mentioned they were killing about eighty thousand whales a year.
In twenty twenty.
Three, the IWC estimated that eight hundred and twenty five whales, down from eighty thousand, were killed by you know, obviously only nations that object to the moratorium, and we'll get to those after the break. And also this we should point out, this doesn't include sort of the indigenous subsistence whaling that continues, or I think kind of leaving that alone, right.
Yeah, I mean that only total three hundred and sixty eight across four different indigenous groups in three different countries that year. So all told, there was about twelve hundred whales killed, and like you said, down from eighty thousand.
Yeah, and since nineteen seventy eight, blue whale populations have increased about eight point two percent per year, bowhead about three point seven per year. Humpbacks I mentioned in Act one were close to extinction. I think in the nineteen sixties there might have been as few as five thousand, and those babies are back over eighty thousand.
Now.
Yeah, So let's take our breakschalk, and we'll come back and talk about how whaling still continues unfortunately.
All right, we'll be right back.
All right, we're back, and I think we kind of alluded to it a couple of times, but we are not indigenous whaling using traditional methods for subsistence is in no way in the crosshairs of basically anybody who is opposed to whaling. Right, they don't even have crosshairs, Like people actually use the whales that they kill to feed themselves throughout the winter and stuff like that. Right, nobody's really got problems with that. It's commercial whaling, that industrial whaling.
That's what everyone has a problem with, and it's still going on. Some stocks that actually did come back have started to become depleted again. And the way that it's going on is because some countries said, we're lodging an objection and we aren't going to comply with the whaling moratorium. Those countries were Iceland, Norway, and Japan, I should say
are because they're all still doing that. And rather than Japan saying we're just going to whale for commercial purposes, they for some reason hid behind this one exception that was made in the moratorium that you could kill whales for scientific purposes, ostensibly to study them to help preserve the whales, basically, right, And Japan's like, yeah, every whale we kill using all of our commercial fleet, we're just studying that for science and that's just not what they've been doing.
¶ Modern Whaling: Low Demand, Subsidies
No, which is super shameful. And here's the other thing is there's two big points we're going to kind of hammer home. Here is in twenty twenty six, not many people at all are eating whale meat, and they aren't making a lot of money doing this.
So they've done studies.
Only two percent of Norwegians reported eating whale meat at least once a month. Consumption of whale meat in Japan is one percent of what it was from its peak in the nineteen sixties. And so in two six, Green pieces like, we need to get some independent research together.
So they commissioned from the independent Nippon Research Center a study that found that ninety five percent of Japanese people very rarely or never eat whale meat, and they're stockpile they have a stockpile of uneaten frozen whale meat, and it doubled between two thousand and two and twoenty twelve.
So like it's this old it seems like it's this older generation of nostalgia kind of digging in and all of this younger generation is just like just you know, once they die out, like no one's eating this stuff.
Anymore.
Yeah, theyre probably won't be whaling in twenty years, is one way to look at it. Unless there's some weird revival of a taste for whale meat among younger generations, doesn't seem likely. There's really the younger people are not into whale meat. The older people are because it's nostalgia food that takes them back to their childhood. And you know, post World War or two, when people ate a lot
of whale meat. Norway's basically the same way Norway, so few people eat whale in Norway that basically one hundred percent of Norway's whale catch is exported to Japan. And yet you said, right, and Japan is like they have that stockpile. The reason they have a stockpile is because the Japanese government subsidizes its whaling industry to the tune
of fifty million dollars a year. So that means that if you whale, you have a total guarantee that the Japanese government will buy the whale meat that you come and sell them, and the Japanese government just basically puts it in a freezer. So those whales died for nothing except for a handful of people that make some money. And like you said, the amount of money that we're talking about is relatively paltry when you're talking about an entire global industry.
Yeah, there was.
In twenty eighteen, the US Naval Institute put out an article that said, the global revenue, like the entire world whaling industry revenue is about thirty one million bucks in twenty twelve, And this is going, this is really going to drive it home. Norway's largest whaling company made a gross revenue of one point three million dollars, and they, along with the lobby and the government, spent about four times as much on campaigns to try to get people
to eat whale meat. Then they even netted with their nation's largest whaling company.
Right, So, and it's not like if they were making thirty one billion, that'd be a different thing. Forget the whales. They're making a bunch of money. But like this should be so easily overcome. Any reasonable person that seems like who cares about animal life would be like, guys, what are you doing. You're killing whales for thirty one million
dollars a year. Just stop. We can't find anything else to do, right, And Japan seems to oppose it because they resent the international pressure that's been put on them over the years. Yeah, Norway seems to oppose it because they have some non indigenous coastal communities who have a tradition of whaling that they're just basically trying to keep
this custom alive for these small coastal communities. And again, like I understand some people make their living like this, but it's not like this is an amount of money that could be subsidized in other ways by the government that could spare the whales lives while also employing people at the same rates that they're being employed by the whaling industry.
Yeah, and Japan spite is not a good reason to keep whaling. It's true, like we don't like this international pressure. Everyone's trying to get us to stop that. So we're not gonna stop it because just because you want us to. I know, Norway, I think they eventually stopped in recent years subsidizing the whaling industry, and I think in past years that was about half the entire value of the annual catch. So it's gonna definitely be going down in Norway.
And you know you got enough in your freeze, are Japan? So like if you want to eat it, eat.
That, right, Yeah. I mean, it's just it's bizarre, and it doesn't seem like the Japanese. It doesn't seem like something that would do.
But it is an interesting conundrum from what everything I know about Japanese culture and people. But you know, I guess this is you know, a small part of that culture.
You know.
Yeah, everybody's got a little spie to them.
Right, I mean, I know I do.
¶ Beyond Whaling: New Threats Emerge
So. Unfortunately, even if we just completely eradicate whaling, which again I predict is gonna happen in twenty years, within twenty years, God, I hope I'm right, there are other threats to whales that have become like even bigger, Like global warming is a big one. By catch, so like a lot of whales die because they end up in nets that are meant to catch other stuff like tuna, so that I think a lot of them die that way more than are hunted. And then ghost fishing. Remember
we did an episode on ghost fishing. Yeah, that's a big problem for whales as well.
You know, Ordinarily, in the past, Josh I would have said, well, in twenty years, we'll let you know. But if I'm still doing the show at seventy five years old. That I'm not going to say something has gone really right. That means something has gone really wrong. Okay, officially, fair enough, I'm with you on that one. I'm not announcing my retirement, but I'm not gonna do this till I'm seventy five.
Okay, all right, I'll hold you to that. Seventy two, seventy three.
No one wants to hear Abe Simpson.
So I guess that's it. One challenge for conservationist now, Chuck, I have to say is like you can't just say stop global warming, stop by catch, stop ghost fishing. There's all these different things. Before it was stop whaling, and it was very successful. Like you said, it's often compared to the ozone layer being tackled. The whales were definitely saved, but there's still now other problems that we have to work on too.
Yeah.
I mean, if you had, you'd have to have a T shirt collection about bycatch and global warming and everything else. Save the whales really just encapsulated everything nicely.
Or yeah, or you could put it all on one T shirt, but you just walk around with a magnifying glass to hand to people. So they could read your T shirt.
Yeah, or maybe it just says equals and then on the back save the whales.
Nice. Nice. I think that's it. Chuck just kind of dropped his mike. You couldn't hear it because Jerry edited it out, but I heard it, and that means it's time for listener, ma'am.
All right.
We also took another break while I reattached my mic and I'm going to read this one. Hey, guys, near the end of your recent Middle Class episode, you discuss greenwashed recycling programs, and Chuck, I'm sad to say and confirm that your instincts regarding car battery recycling are correct. I've sent you an investigative piece by The New York Times which uncovered the reality of the recycling of batteries, namely that they are collected, shipped on freighters to another continent,
and then gnually broken down by an exploited workforce. Rather than true recycling, it seems more of a resource harvesting, where many of the components are smelted down in ways that pollute the surrounding area and cause a lot of illness. Sadly, I'm not sure where this leaves any of us as to a better alternative when replacing our batteries.
That is from Gabby, who says thanks for many years of learnings and companionship man.
Why is everything so evil?
I know it's sort of sort of not a great time to be alive.
You know, I've kind of come to the same conclusion, Chuck. Very interesting time to be alive, But I think I would trade interesting for stable and calm and happy and yeah so evil.
Yeah that's the T shirt.
Equals save the Josh.
That's right.
Well, if you want to be like Gabby, thanks a lot, Gabby. If you want to be like Gabby and send us an email, that's a total downer. We're open to those kind of things. You can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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