This is episode 190. Im Tommy Serafisnki and youre listening or watching the conservation and science podcast where we take a deep dive into topics of ecology, conservation, and human wildlife interactions. And by the way, its an episode 190. Tell me, what do you think about episode numbers? Apparently I shouldnt be doing them because they are not considered best practice anymore. So do you prefer just plain episode titles without number or do you think that those numbers are useful? Please let me know. And this is good opportunity to remind you that you can leave the comments on Spotify. If you're listening to this podcast on Spotify, you can now leave the comment. And obviously you can always leave the comment on YouTube and you can always reply to the newsletter if you subscribe to the newsletter. And if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, what are you doing? Go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter. The link is in the description of the show. There is so much more in this newsletter than just notification about podcast episodes. Okay, let's go back to today's episode. Today our guest is Peter Corkeron, who is marine ecologist and conservation biologist, and we are going to talk about whales, that is the big ocean going mammals. Okay, of course. Greetings to all my friends from Wales, the place on Great Britain. English language is fun. So anyway, we talk about marine mammals, whales. And Peter is one of the foremost specialists in the world about on whales, working on whales. But we will not talk in general about whales. We gotta have a very specific topic, which is commercial whaling and geopolitics of commercial whaling. And I read Peter's articles in the Internet outlet called commondreams.org, and they were very interesting because Peter was describing very interesting mechanisms that are going on in international whaling Commission and all the countries who are pushing and pulling and want to resume commercial whaling and why this is happening and why some other countries are either, you know, looking other way and allowing this to happen. Now, I need to preface this, that when I invited Peter on the podcast, it was looking like the commercial whaling is just going to be resumed. Right now it's probably looking better, but I guess the deal is not done. And so this is really the main question I'm asking, Peter. Is commercial whaling going to be resumed? And then from there, we dive deeper into details of the subject, why it might happen, and what impact it might or might not have on Whale's population. Very interesting episode. Very unusual and unexpected information that you are going to learn in this episode. So definitely something that is worth listening to if you're interested in whales and whales conservation, if you're interested in marine biology, but also if you're interested in geopolitics. So I think that's enough for this introduction. You have a pretty much good idea. What are we going to talk about in this episode? And so now, without any further delay, ladies and gentlemen, Peter Corcoran. Peter, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm delighted that you accepted the invitation. And we are going to talk about a subject that we probably never had on a podcast. In an entire episode, we're gonna talk about whales, but specifically about the issues around whaling. So let's do what we always do on this podcast, and let's jump right into the deep water. And I need to start with a question that, you know, I'm wondering the answer to that question since I read your article in common dreams. Is the resumption of commercial whaling inevitable?

Oh, no, it's not inevitable at all. And it could be stopped. And what came out of this year's International Whaling Commission meeting was an awful lot better than what everyone was expecting. It was. There was, from what I heard, a great deal of fear and loathing in the conservation community. They were really worried that things are going to go badly, and it ended up not happening, and things went much better than expected, in fact. So it's not inevitable. It doesn't have to happen. It's just something we can put behind us.

Can you just give, like, a quick rundown and like, a background story with whaling in the world, whaling was a commercial activity. It was a part of the industry. Then it was banned. And so what is the current situation that we're in and how we got to the point that we even discussing the potential for resuming of commercial whaling in 2024.

So industrial commercial whaling really kicked off in the late 18 hundreds with the development of explosive harpoon guns and then steam powered catcher boats. And first off, that was in the North Atlantic, and they were all hunted out. And by the early 20th century, people started, or Norwegians in particular, started hunting whales out of the british sub antarctic islands. And that was the beginning of antarctic whaling, which is one of the most profitable wildlife hunts there's ever been in human history, and hundreds of thousands of whales were killed. And it was all extraordinarily badly managed. And then in the 1930s, and people knew that at the time, I mean, there's this scientific papers written from the 1920s and thirties saying, we got to stop this. And they weren't listened to. And actually, the League of Nations that preceded the UN prior to World War Two, they actually tried to regulate whaling, and they introduced some rules, but they were always fought against by several of the whaling nations. And then World War Two came along, which gave a bit of a break for whales because everyone was busily fighting the war and not killing whales. Towards the end of the war, some scientists got together to try and come up with a way to regulate whaling so it wasn't all going to go badly again. And that led to the formation of the National Whaling Commission in, like, a year or two after the war. And it was initially basically a whaler's club, but the aim was to try and do it right, and that's why they had this, you know, it says, you know, the protection of whales and the regulation of the orderly development of the whaling industry, and the thought behind that was, dont overdo it the way we have before. Thats not how things played out. And scientists who were screaming about problems were ignored for a long time, geopolitics ruled. We had things like the Soviet Union engaged in the industrial scale pirate whaling and just places where they slaughtered everything they could. And then, you know, and then the big thing that happened, actually, was the song of the humpback whale, that when we realized, thanks to Katie and Roger Payne in particular, that, you know, there was more to whales than these giant floating tubs of money to be rendered down. And they were more than that. And the humpback song changed people's understanding of what whales are in kind of not intellectually, but kind of spiritually or morally. And that shift of viewpoint had a huge impact. And, I mean, okay, lots of the whales are pretty much wiped out anyway. But that led to the end of, well, what was supposed to be the end of commercial whaling. What it was, was a moratorium on commercial whaling that was agreed to at the International Whaling Commission in 1982 to be put in place in the 1985 86 southern hemisphere whaling season. And that came about, and most commercial whaling stopped. But the IWC was always this kind of gentlefolks club, where you could, if there was a decision that was made and people didn't like it, they could just go, yeah, nah, we're not going to do that. They could have reservation to it. Right? And so Norway has kept hunting minke whales under reservation. Iceland left. The International Whaling Commission, came back and demanded a reservation put in place, which is why they commercially hunt whales, although at the moment, they're not. They haven't hunted this year, despite a permit of being issued to the one company that does still hunt whales, and then the Japanese, for a long time, used the ruse of collecting scientific data as a way to kill whales, and Australia took him to the international court. Justice over that was the. I think it was ICJ over it, arguing that it was misuse of the rules of the National Whaling Commission. The court decided in favor of Australia and New Zealand and Japan had to stop, which they did, and that saw an end to their Antarctic whaling for now. And a big thing with that is that. So the Antarctic is the best place to be if you're a whale. It's much bigger than the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and Baleen whales feed around the poles because that's so productive. So that's the best place to go whaling. But the thing is, the southern Ocean's pretty rough, and if you've been down there sort of buzzing boats around Wales at the pack ice edge is a skill, and also it demands equipment that works properly. And the Japanese had a floating factory for processing whales, and it was getting really old, and the hope was that they were just going to retire it and then go, ah, well, you know, we're not going to do that anymore. That's not what happened. Instead, what happened is they built a new factory ship that's better than the one they had, and it's ice strengthened, which means it can work in the poles. And ice strengthening a boat means that it costs more to build than it costs more to run each year. So they won't have done that unless they're intending to go hunt around the poles at some point. So that's the risk, is that we're going to see a resumption of commercial whaling.

So, international Whaling Commission, as I understand, it's not like a governing body that has any power, it is just an agreement. Did they get that right, that they. It's not like they can enforce anything.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it's like so many un bodies, you know, it relies on countries coming together and agreeing to do things and then going off and do it, doing it like the Paris accords for regulating greenhouse gases.

Is this being driven by profit still? Because you said that. Okay, that was the most profitable hunt of the wild animals, which is surprising to me, but I presume that back in the days, there were a need for the oils that was rendered from whales and. And other things. What we catching whales for now? These days? I presume that the consumption of meat is not something terribly popular. So how big is the market for whale meat? I understand there's a number of questions here, and I'm not so much looking for specific answers for specific questions, more of a like, for pity's sake, why.

Sure, it's a really good question, and it's one of the rabbit holes that everyone's gone down with this, is that I, you know, a lot of whale meat isn't getting eaten. I mean, it used to be. I mean, it was particularly for the Japanese. Post World War Two, the american occupation forces had all these starving people they needed to feed, and whale meat was a great way to do that. And that really brought it back in. I mean. I mean, there are a few small coastal villages in Japan where it is traditional, but for most Japanese, it's not traditional. It's something that older folks now did when they were little kids. But that came about as a solution to a logistical problem of how to feed people. But it's not actually about whether the whale meat gets eaten or not, because, see, one of the big things about the whaling moratorium was it was one of the first really big successes that the international conservation movement had in terms of controlling activities out there in the open ocean. And the fear for some of the big players in international fisheries, and particularly the Japanese with bluefin tuna, is that this is the thin edge of the wedge. And, in fact, there's a guy who's been very prominent speaking up on a pro whaling basis, who's an ambassador for one of the small caribbean states, who has come out and said that actually very explicitly just the other day in a radio interview that, you know, well, they start with whales and then they move on to fisheries. And so this isn't. So it's a bit like whaling isn't about whales. And so it doesn't. While this seems completely counter intuitive, it doesn't really matter that whale meat isn't being eaten because it's not about that. And then the other thing is that, I mean, particularly like Japan and Norway, I mean, their food production systems aren't based on sort of market rationalist, neoliberal approaches. You know, something like almost three quarters of most Norwegians farmers money comes from government subsidies, right? So there their food markets are distorted by subsidies for reasons that those countries see as appropriate for their culture. And so to say that, well, no one eats it, so it doesn't matter is by now, I mean, it was a good argument for a while, but after 20 years, you kind of need to look at it and go, maybe that didn't work. So there's more to it than that. And it's this thin edge of the wedge issue that it's all about more important, more valuable fisheries, which isn't to say that if commercial whaling kicked off again, they couldn't make it worth something, but that's not what's driving it right now.

Now it's, you know, like I'm saying, wow. Because it's the same thing all over again in so many places that people think, think, well, rightly or wrongly, that, oh, this is thin edge, thin part of the wedge, and we're gonna do this. And, for example, with lead ammunition, this example comes to my mind, like, oh, they want a bad lead ammunition because they want to ban your rifles and hunting altogether, right? It's just like, no, what it has to do like, this is not. So. It goes right into conspiracy theories territory. So, in your view, is international whaling commission effective body? There was an article, I think it was, in nature, calling for dismantling IWC altogether. What's your take on this? Is it effective organization and regulations, or whether we should dismantle that and have something else?

Well, to take the bit about the nature paper first, I just thought a lot that was written in that was just completely wrong. And, I mean, nature's demonstrated some real problems with their review process of opinion pieces in the last few years, and this, to me, is just another one. I thought it was really interesting that it came out when it did, because there's clearly a anti IWC narrative being pushed, and one of the concerns was, this is something they're going to do. I mean, there's always been a threat by the whaling nations that we're going to walk away from the initial whaling commission. And, for instance, there's a thing called Namco, which is the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, which is run by a bunch of marine mammal hunting nations in the North Atlantic. So it's Norway, Iceland, and then territories of Denmark. So Greenland and the pharaohs are primary members, and they do the same sort of stuff with, um, other hunts of marine mammals, and. And some of those are atrociously badly managed. You know, there are. There's hunts, I think it's narwhals in southeast Greenland that are clearly. It's clearly over hunted. Again, it's just slightly about old days of whaling being revisited through that process, and there's always been this threat that, oh, we're going to walk away. And again, even at this international whaling Commission meeting, I mean, I went for four days, and on the second day, there was a threat made by someone from the pro whaling block, is like, look, if you go ahead with one particular thing. We're going to walk. And there's always been this, we're going to walk. And the question then becomes, well, how do you make that not happen? And is that the right thing to do to get to the second part of your question, is the IWC working? And I think it does. The problem is, you have two incommensurable worldviews that either whales are the have a value well beyond their monetary value in meat and oil that we need to account for, or they're just another critter to bump off and cut up and use. And it's clash of worldviews that's playing out on a world stage. It's hard to acknowledge that, and it's very hard to reconcile that. The IWC, though, I mean, you know, Japan stopped whaling in the Antarctic because they got called out for fudging the rules. Right? And then the problem becomes, well, if it goes to something else, how would that play out? And however you look at it playing out, I could write a script for how that will mean the resumption of commercial whaling really straightforwardly. And the argument that was made is, like, the whalers don't need people overseeing them anymore, and that's just complete nonsense. You know, there's even, you know, the hunt of minke whales in japanese waters is most definitely not demonstrably sustainable, you know, even at the level of, oh, but by now, we're getting the hunts right. We're not killing too many is simply not true. There has to be international oversight.

Maybe that's something that we should really start this episode with, but there were so many ways to start it. What is the current status of whales in terms of conservation status globally? And I know that there's many species of whales, but if you will, just on average, are they endangered? Critically endangered are some populations that are doing quite well. How that situation looks like, just to have, you know, like, a purely ecological view on the issue?

Well, some whale populations are doing really well. Some are bouncing back, well, from being, you know, almost obliterated by whaling. You keep coming to. Coming back to this, almost wiped out by whaling. I mean, we really blew it. And some populations of whales have come back much better than anyone ever thought they would. So now, off, for instance, off the east and west coast of Australia, there's. We don't know exactly how many, but somewhere between 30 and 40,000 humpbacks off each coast, right. There's a paper out recently showing that there was, you know, 50,000 fin whales in just one part of the Southern Ocean, a small part of the Southern Ocean, on the other hand, there are species that are doing really badly. And so one of the ones that I've been quite involved in is north Atlantic right whales, and, and they're disappearing, and they're well on their way to going extinct. And then there's another whale in the Gulf of Mexico that's, there's probably only about 50 of them, and they're critically endangered as well. And then there's some populations of humpbacks, for instance, haven't come back the way some of the southern Ocean ones have. Some populations of southern right whales are doing really well, and others are barely hanging on. Most of them are doing really well, but a couple aren't. So there's a lot of good that's happening. It's basically, you know, you don't kill them, they don't die. Very difficult science, but that's not true in all cases. And some are doing badly and some are having real problems. And North Atlantic right whales is a complete disaster. So it's variable, but it's not. Whaling is not responsible for those. I mean, that's all fishing and vessel strikes.

Knowing that situation, is this data pertaining to the populations and numbers, is this feeding in any way into the deliberation of international whaling commissions or, you know, whaling nations wanting to exploit populations that are doing well? And then there is an argument. I'm asking a question. There's an argument, oh, they're doing, you know, better than ever in the last 50 or 100 years. Therefore we go and hunt them. Or is their needs and wants of resuming whaling somehow detached from the biological population data?

That's a really good question because, you know, for a long time, it was really easy to say, well, you can't go whaling because there's just not enough of them. Right. But that argument actually doesn't hold up for several species now and several populations of whales now. But, you know, one thing we've seen time and time again when it comes to whaling is it doesn't matter how you play it out. People dodge the rules. There's a leopards never changing their spots problem. And, you know, if, if the Japanese are opposing a complete shutdown of whaling because it's the thin edge of the wedge problem, allowing any whaling is exactly the same thing. Capitulating to the whalers at this point. They'll take that as a win and they'll push it and push it, and we'll end up exactly where we were before with all these things being wiped out. That's just how it's going to go. I mean, we're also seeing the argument made that, oh, there's long term saying, oh, whales are eating all the fish. Well, now it's like, whales have come, but it was serious, you know, and there are people who believe it. And now it's like, well, whales are eating a lot of krill, and we've got a krill fishery now. So, you know, if we're going to do this, we need to manage, quote unquote, manage the whales by, you know, hunting them down. And then, you know, the krill fishery gets overfished, blame the whales, kill more of them. I mean. I mean, you can watch the spiral, you can write the story. And the other thing is that we just can't manage these things. We know we can't. We just always get it wrong. And because there's so much else to the geopolitics of whaling, that to think that it's all about whales is silly. And for me, that's actually the biggest argument against allowing whaling to resume, is because it just always just falls apart.

Yeah, and whales eat all the fish. We might have a time to come back to that because this is like, yeah, it's an interesting one, but I want to stick for a second to what we're talking about. What is your view on the following similar mechanism that I want to describe? It plays out at the moment right as we speak in the EU with the. With relation to wolf protection step protection cells of wolves. And there are strong arguments, and those strong arguments are not only put forward by people who wants to hunt wolves, but also, for example, by organizations who are responsible for very successful wolf restoration projects, like, for example, in Estonia, that allowing certain number of wolves. I was speaking about wolves right now, being hunted is important from the perspective of coexistence, is important socially from the perspective of, you know, giving people something, making them not feel left out, giving him sense of agency and so on and so forth. And these are, like I said, arguments who are put forward even by people who are very successful running very successful national wolf conservation programs. Is it not there, the similar aspect of it, that allowing certain managed, limited, controlled whaling would sort of remove that argument of, oh, you try to ban everything, and then you try to ban fisheries in the vein of, like, give them something so they have, you know, I understand we running straight into, like, social sciences territory, and that will, in the long run have a better effect because they will sort of disarm people who wants to resume commercial wearing wholesale with these arguments. Give them something and protect the whales in the long run. Is that not how it would play out?

Well, I guess the way I see what's happened is we've had something rather like that happen for the past 40 years. And there's always been this attempt to push those boundaries. And I've actually seen stuff written by one of the guys working on norwegian whaling about how our approach is we never take a step back. We always take a small step forward. We push, we wait to see what happens with that, and then we keep going.

You mean people who want to ban whale?

People want. People want to hunt whales. Oh, people, okay, people want to hunt whales. They're always like, yeah, yeah, no, no. We, we just, we hold the line and when, then we inch forward, right? And so, for instance, Iceland starting to hunt fin whales. And then, oh, let's be fair, an icelandic company basically run by one person hunting fin whales and shipping that to Japan was a bit of a stalking horse for the whalers. They just, you know, they do that to see what happens. Because it's, I mean, in terms of providing food, it's completely trivial. But in terms of seeing, well, who's going to push back on this? You know, that's where it matters. I mean, I spent four years in living in Norway, and, and I find the wolf analogy fascinating because the attitude towards there just strikes me as surreal, you know, so, I mean, basically, they just don't want any of them. And we saw that, too with mediterranean monk seals. There's places where fishermen have argued that, well, the mediterranean monk seals are eating all the fish, you know, and they're almost extinct. You know, it's just ridiculous. So I just don't think that would work because it's not how, it's not how the whalers respond. They see that as weakness and then they exploit that weakness.

I presume that that one icelanding company is making some money out of these whales because, like, what is the motivation of the guy? Right? That's the motivation, I presume.

Oh, he does. Because he believes in it. Oh, really? It's who he is and it's what he's always done. And he feels very strongly about it. I mean, I mean, those sorts of personal things really matter.

Peter, I want to now ask you about something that I found really fascinating. Again, one of your blogs and common dreams. And all the listeners here should really read your articles. You posting on command dreams.org, where you talked about the geopolitics and how USA takes maybe what position they take on weiling because of their military presence in Japan, which is something like. I would never even think about connecting the two. Could you please lay out to us, like, how, what is the relation of us military presence in Japan to whaling?

Okay, well, I mean, okay, so this isn't a particularly popular view in the anti whaling movement, as far as I know, but it's what I reckon is going on. And we saw it before with Iceland going back to the, like, fifties and sixties, when air transport wasn't as good as it is now. Keflavik was a really important airspace spot for the us air force. If they were going to nuke Russia, nuke the Soviet Union back then, and that was a quid pro quo for the Icelanders. Whaling was fine for that. There was about 55,000 us service personnel in Japan, and more than half of them are just in Okinawa. And it's really important strategically for the US to have those military presence there. And, you know, and the comparison I made in the article is it's. I mean, that's almost exactly the same size, those 55,000. It's about the size of the australian defence forces. I mean, it's a lot of people, it's a lot of military presence, and there's been a lot of problems there as well. They've been. It's roughly two felon or two crimes a week for 50 years committed in Okinawa by us service personnel. Well, and some of those have been horrific. And that's led to a strong anti base sentiment there. That. My take is, is the japanese use that as a lever to say, you know, if you want to keep us being here, you leave us load on whaling. My reason for thinking that is that whales just aren't important enough for the US to. Because. So the US has a law that requires if an organisation, if a country is acting to undermine the efficiency, the efficacy of the National Whaling Commission, they're meant to be sanctioned. It's called the Peli amendment to the Fisheries act. And it used to happen. I mean, Iceland had sanctions put on it and Japan skated on that for a very long time. And NGo community thought that all that was about was the bowhead quota for alaskan indigenous Americans, who the Japanese always used that quota as a threat against the US. And this time around, we saw that just skated through just fine. And there's no evidence, and there's a process put in place to get around that being an issue at all. And I guess it's. What I present is a fairly simplistic take on it, that it is this, that it's just about the troops, but it's a bigger geopolitical story. And it gets to the US's two biggest allies in the Pacific and western Pacific, given their US's concerns. And about China, are Australia and Japan. And Australia and Japan have been a loggerheads overwhelming. Right. And when WikiLeaks did the document dump about whaling, it was clear that this was a concern for the us strategic thinking, that they didn't want this unhappiness going ahead between these two important allies. And we're seeing Australia pretty much cave on whaling stuff, although it remains to be seen now how that's going to play out of. So, yeah, I mean. I mean, to me, it's. When I say the whole whaling story isn't about whaling, it's about these much bigger issues that are about how we sort of manage, how we deal with each other in the world. And the US military is really important to the US.

We said it on this podcast many times. The moment wildlife gets politicized, it's the end. It's just losers. It always. Losers are like all of us, because if wildlife is losing, then, in fact, we as a humanity are losing. What do you mean by that? Australia cave in on whaling.

You know, Australia's come out and said, when Japan now start going to kill fin whales. And the other thing about this, Japan set a quota for 59 fin whales in its local waters. And that's a lot more important than people realize. And there's a few reasons for that. One is that fin whales were where the real money was in antarctic whaling in the 20th century. I mean, nearly as many fin whales were killed as blues, humpbacks, and sei whales combined, like 900,000 fin whales. And again, going to that point about we take a small step forward, we see how the response is. What Japan's done is dipped a toe in the water in terms of killing fin whales. And there's a few things behind that. One is finns are bigger, right? So they're easier to kill because they're easy to hit. Like minkies, apparently. You know, whalers don't, didn't kill minkies in the past because they just weren't worth the effort. And you got to have really good weather to kill minky whale because they're so small, right. You can kill a Finn in much rougher weather, but at the same time, they're bigger and stronger. And, you know, if you go right back, I think there was a report in. I think it was one of Shackleton's expeditions, one that puts me that someone wrote about being at a whaling station prior to World War one. And the whalers at the time didn't like going after blue whales because they were just too strong for the boats. Their engines weren't powerful enough to land them. Right. I mean, these are big, powerful animals, needs to be remembered. So killing a fin whale and then landing it and processing it, the advantages are, as they're big, they're easy to hit. The disadvantages are, is they're bigger and stronger and so, you know, you got to kill them, right. But then you get a lot more meat out of them as well. Right. So there's huge advantage to that. And, you know, this stuff's really obvious. And what we saw from the australian government was the environment ministers saying, oh, oh, that's. Isn't that terrible sort of thing? And that's a far cry from, you know, one point we had Peter Garrett. I don't know if you know who he is. He was, he was the environment minister. He was also. He was the lead singer for Midnight oil. And he was a committed environmentalist and he believed really strongly in stopping whaling. Right. And again, it's clear from the WikiLeaks dump that, you know, he was a bit of an outlier in the australian government because everyone else was obsessed with these geopolitical issues rather than the whales themselves. And, you know, so the current australian government isn't setting the world on fire in terms of. That's a bad analogy, isn't it? And I mean, it is hitting the world on fire with opening new coal mines, but it's not doing a great job on a whole lot of environmental issues. And given how they are about China, I can't see how they're not going to just toe the US line, which.

Is allow Japanese to do whatever the heck they want because we want to be left alone with our, you know, geopolitical and military bases and stuff like that.

Wow.

Do you think that the US, through their military personnel or some other ways, are pressurizing NgO's who are fighting against the resumption of whaling? Because surely they not stoked having those organizations around, right? Because those NGO's then are going head on against the national interests and that's a serious stuff.

Oh, yeah. And in fact, I know someone who's been going to IWC meetings for decades and she told me when she started going, some guy from the State Department came up and was prodding her in the chest saying, you don't get it. Girly, this is about national security. Whoa. You know? Yeah, yeah. It's a bit like another thing I've got in common. Dreams is a piece about elephants. Because there was that belief that ivory was the white gold of jihad, and it turned out it wasn't true at all, but it got the us military and security community interested in this stuff and. Yeah. And then they just engage. And I found that was really interesting because I used to work at NOAA, and at the time we had. When I was there, at one point, we had someone from the State Department who happened to be around. They're talking about some stuff, and they're talking about how when at the time, it was secretary of state Clinton came back from a meeting and said, what's this about ivory being involved in supporting terrorism? And apparently she went to the national security community, and they were just like, we don't know. Because the bottom line is that if it's not geopolitical, these folks aren't interested. I mean, animals don't matter to them. You know, it's these interactions among countries that matter to them. And they're like, don't ask us. Go ask the NGO community. So there's always been this pushback, and we've seen that play out in a bunch of ways, overwhelming.

Yeah, I'm sure the listeners of this podcast now going, wow as well, because that's kind of like an unexpected, or at least not often talked about side of, well, protecting oceans and protecting the whales, in this case. Peter, tell me, in articles I read, probably in your articles, I read the statements around that we failed, like, the current ways of managing whaling is failing is not sufficient. Well, maybe, but how to square that with what we just said or what you just said? Like, in what way? You could have better measures to protect Wales if you're banging your head on serious geopolitical national security stuff, is it even possible? Or is it like, no matter what you do, you're gonna be against this? Not insurmountable, but at least very hard to surmount problem.

I think we can do it. I mean, there's no point throwing our hands in here and going, oh, this is impossible. It's all beyond us. And I think a really good example is what's happening with Paul Watson at the moment. You know, he's in prison in Greenland. The Danes are going to send him off to Japan, where he'll probably spend the rest of his life in prison.

Do you think they're going to send him to Japan?

Well, at the moment, it looks that way.

Okay. Let's back out for a second for folks who don't know who Paul Watson is. Can you, maybe you can give us a little bit of a lay down, because I think he came to prominence with the series called Whale wars, where Sea shepherd was blocking and taking direct actions against japanese whalers. So if you can just for the folks, give, like, a very quick brief who Paul Watson is and how he ended up in prison.

Oh, sure. So Paul Watson was originally with Greenpeace, and he felt their approach of bearing witness nonviolently wasn't enough, and so he went into more nonviolent direct action. And so Sea shepherd went down and confronted whalers in the Antarctic, which apparently made for great reality television. And there was a show, whale wars, on that. And then over time, and there was a lot of pushback against that. And he's been arrested a couple of times and always managed to skip through things. A us judge referred to sea shepherd as pirates. And then a couple of years ago, he kind of got thrown out of the organization that he created in a sort of palace coup. And so he then set up the Paul Watson foundation. And Sea shepherd now works more with governments to provide logistic support that the governments can't offer themselves out on the water. And so the Paul Watson foundation went back to confronting whalers and also confronting, for instance, the people engaged in the grind in the Faroe Islands. And then they were actually on their way. They're going to go around the Northwest passage to Japan to get, you know, to confront this new japanese mothership processing fin whales. And when they pulled in to refuel in Greenland nuke Captain Watson was arrested on an Interpol red warrant, whatever that everyone thought had gone away. And so now he's in prison waiting to be extradited to Japan for that. And to me, I think the thing that that hasn't come out about that is to go back to the WikiLeaks release, is that before sea shepherd encountered all these problems with us law and particularly over their status as a charity in the US, and these things that happened that broke sea shepherd from what it was. There was this, one of the cables that was released was about how the then us person for the National Whaling Commission, someone called Monica Medina, was talking to Japan about what Japan was saying, you got to do something about sea shepherd. And she's like, yeah, yeah, we'll look into it. We'll see if the IR's can get onto it. And so to me, this is a great example. I mean, everyone's looking at what's happened with Paul Watson and making analogies to what happened with Julian Assange, with WikiLeaks and all that time he spent locked up. And the thing that no one's raising is, yeah, there is a bigger geopolitical story to this. He's as much a pawn of geopolitics as Julian Assange was, and this is why this is happening. And I think, you know, because people are pretty appalled by what's happened to him, and I think there's a chance to use something like that to a. Get him released by putting pressure on Denmark to say, really? You really want to be a part of this? And to make people more aware that there is actually a much bigger story going on here than. Than just, well, wow, meat isn't getting eaten.

Yes. Yes. Wow. You think it was like a coup, really? He didn't just resign because he was disagreeing with what Sea shepherd was doing. Do you think he was kicked out?

Yeah, I think he was kicked out. I don't know a lot of the details, but that, from the outside, that's what it looks like.

Wow, this is very eye opening episode. I'm already glad we're having that conversation and that more people will understand what's going on, that this is like a way bigger conservation story. Would you say that overall, the anti whaling movement has failed? Would that be your assessment? And then. Yeah, I shouldn't ask what then, but I presume that that might be what you say. And so what should we do? Like, what is the better way of protecting whales?

Well, I think, you know, up until recently, it was fair to say that, you know, where the anti whaling movement had gone had been reasonably successful. And, yeah, the argument is. The argument was, look, whaling's just gonna die out, and so the best thing we can do is not say too much and not cause too much of a fuss. And the other thing is that it's really easy to do things in such a way that triggers a nationalist response from people who are whaling, because it looks like you're picking on them and their country and them as individuals. So you end up with an anti anti whaling movement rather than a pro whaling movement. But the problem is, is that because this new factory ship has been built, the Kangemaru and the Japanese have at least three catcher boats that can work the Antarctics and that can work the Antarctic and can work fin whales. And what we don't have right now is the Watson Foundation's boat over in Japan, sending back footage of what's going on. And one thing there's an article in the BBC recently about how Greenpeace got those original photos of putting a zodiac in front of a whaling ship between whales and what a huge impact that had. But the other thing that that's meant now is there's kind of an expectation that if you're going to have environmental action, you're going to be there, and there's going to be footage on the ground, footage on the water of what's going on. And if that doesn't exist, the story kind of goes away, because we have the concentration span of a Nat these days. And one thing that putting Paul Watson in prison has done is, as we saw with WikiLeaks, is that the organization has to go from focusing on what it always did focus on to getting out there, showing what the whalers are up to and all the rest. And instead, it's about getting him out of this predicament that he's in, that he shouldn't be in. Right. And so I can't see how that happened completely by accident, that it looks like the whalers are going, okay, it's time for us to make our move. And that being so, what the anti whaling movement needs to do is look at that and go, okay, what we've done to now isn't enough, and we have to start coming up with different approaches. And that's the reason why I wrote those pieces in common dreams. I mean, this isn't really what I do. I do whale science and dolphin science, and I'm much happier doing that than this sort of stuff. But we're at the point now where we need some change. And one of the things is, through a variety of odd experiences in my life, I've been confronted with examples of how this geopolitics stuff interferes with conservation. And so I think it's time that we brought that out. And I think just doing that and starting to focus on it and pushing it will make a difference, because I think people will be appalled by that.

So what would be, like, three point action plan that you would implement if you have power and influence and that you could implement whatever you want? What would be the three actions?

I mean, I'd push the line that I've just said about there's this bigger story to what's happened with Paul Watson, and also he's being accused of throwing stink bombs or something, as compared to, I was saying, about 50 years of two crimes a week by american service personnel in Okinawa. I mean, the two. It doesn't match up, does it? So it's one, the other thing is that there have obviously been us personnel inside the NGO community, and the NGO community needs to recognize that that's happened and they need to get them out again. The common dreams pieces have more on that. And I think making people aware that, you know, there is, it is this bigger story that, you know, and there's more to stopping whaling than simply being out on the water around the boats, too, because that means that everything else you've done hasn't worked. And it requires pressure. And it requires more pressure than they're applying to make change.

Yes, that's, that's for sure. And you making excellent points, Peter, and we are going to link your, your pieces from common dreams into in the show notes, like as always, so folks can get in there and click on those links and read their articles and we raising awareness of that. I'm delighted for this conversation. Peter, just to wrap this up, given everything that you said, given that conservation is entangled in complex and difficult geopolitics, what are your predictions for the future for commercial whaling, but more importantly for the whales? How in your, if you look at your crystal ball, how do you see this playing out in 10, 30, 50 years time? Is it really going to die out eventually? Only takes much longer than we hoped for, or is it something that we're always gonna be there? Like, how do you see this play out in mid to long term?

Well, I don't think it's gonna fizzle out. I think for it to stop, we have to view it the way the whalers do and go, we're not taking a step back. This is it. And once we get to that and we address the root causes and we address the things like the thin edge of the wedge issues that are raised, then I think the next meeting of the International Whaling Commission, we could have the end of commercial whaling. That's doable. Might be optimistic, but it's doable. But I think that's the way forward to recognize that we've tried having it fizzle out now for nearly 40 years and hasn't happened. So it's time to go. What's the next approach? What's the big change we can make to see this stop? And the world will be a better place for that for sure.

And how do you see whales and whales conservation? Do you think that we will continue to see recovery that potentially will buy some time to withstand some increased, potentially commercial whaling, or do you think that is likely that we're going to lose some populations?

Well, I think we're going to lose some whale populations, but that won't be down to commercial whaling, that'll be down to other problems. But, you know, I mean, when I started doing this, I helped out on humpback surveys in southeast Queensland and we'd sit there for days and see a couple of whales and people walk up and say, what are you doing? And say, we're counting whales. And you get this. Come on, kids, let's just leave the nice people alone. And now, you know, they're everywhere off eastern Australia and it's a much better experience for people for that for six months of the year, you know, it's just, they're now part of life. There are whales, you know, southern right whale mothers come with their calves into Sydney Harbour occasionally. I mean. I mean, this is wonderful. And we're getting to share the world with whales again. It also means we're going to, you know, recognize they're big and that there's times when that presents risks to us. But, you know, we can do this and we can have a world without whaling. We know we can do it because there's places where we've had them come back and probably come back to the point where the increase is going to start slowing down pretty dramatically soon. And that's wonderful. And it's much quicker than anyone ever thought it would be. So we know we could do it. It's a matter of will for all of us to do it and also a matter of identifying what the real problems are and tackling them head on.

Peter, thank you so much. It's been incredible conversation, very educational. Much appreciate your time.

It's been an absolute delight being on. Thank you so much.