Four Fish (27 page)

Yet while Mitchill’s reputation certainly suffered after the humiliation of the trial, the whale’s standing began to rise. The trial lingered in the popular unconscious, and the first inklings that suggested that the whale merited exceptional consideration began appearing in print. A sperm whale’s ramming and sinking of the whale ship
Essex
(the inspiration for the novel
Moby-Dick
) in 1820, just two years after
Maurice v. Judd,
gave the impression that whales had agency and had identified humans as their enemies. And in the 1820s, the common practice of harpooning a whale calf and waiting for mothers to gather around it so that multiple kills could take place was criticized publicly. The idea that whales even had intelligence was broached. In
Trying Leviathan,
Burnett relates how a book called
A Whale’s Biography
came out in 1849 and the following year in Honolulu the newspaper the
Friend
ran a letter to the editor from “Polar Whale,” address “Anadir Sea, North Pacific,” in which the cetacean writer identified himself as hailing from “an old Greenland family” and “pleaded for ‘friends and allies’ to ‘arise and revenge our wrongs’ lest ignominious extinction descend upon his ‘race.’ ”

But these flashes of sympathy were negligible compared to the ruthless expansion of the whaling industry and the effect that expansion had on a naturally sensitive order of animals. It is an essential truth of ecology that big animals tend to be the scarcest because of the scope of resources they must command. They are kings of sorts, considerably less numerous than commoners. Local populations of whales were therefore easily extirpated. And when they were, whaling fleets journeyed to the far extremes of the globe in search of untapped schools. When even those far-flung populations started to show declines, humans may have for the first time gotten a glimpse of their destructive potential. Whereas once the seas seemed inexhaustible, the decline of whales on a global basis showed that it was indeed possible to overexploit the oceans and drive a creature (and an industry) to commercial extinction.

Ultimately, though, it was not just whales’ scarcity that led to the end of the first era of whaling; rather, it was the appearance of cheaper, more easily obtainable whale-oil substitutes that changed the rules of the market and spared the remnant populations of “oily” whales. Petroleum oils made sperm-whale products commercially irrelevant long before they were made illegal in the early 1970s.

What is more significant, though, to a discussion of the future of fish, particularly big fish like tuna, is what happened during what is known as whaling’s second era—the time during which humans moved from using whale oil to light their lamps to using whale oil and other whale parts for a much wider scope of applications, including fertilizer, lipstick, brake fluid, and even human food.

This second phase of whale exploitation began in the 1870s. During this more aggressive phase, steam- and later diesel-powered vessels, explosively launched harpoons, and compressed air flotation devices were developed that enabled whalers to hunt a whole new range of very large, even more naturally scarce species. Before these inventions came along, blue whales and fin whales were too fast to catch and would sink to the bottom if killed. After these technological breakthroughs, the largest creatures ever to live on earth were killed instantly with exploding grenade tips, secured to artificial flotation devices, and brought to market—giant rafts of fat and protein fit for a range of industrial purposes. Postwar Europe was particularly drawn to the use of whales. Indeed, if you are from Europe and born before 1960, no matter how much of an environmentalist you may consider yourself, there is a high likelihood that you have eaten whale. In the 1940s and ’50s, while European agriculture was still recovering from World War II, whale fat was regularly rendered and put into margarine and other oil-requiring foodstuffs. Even if you abstained from margarine, there was a good chance that whale still made it into your body indirectly—the meat and bones of whales were used as fertilizer to grow vegetables.

There were even bigger plans for whales. Increasingly, as postcolonial unrest and Cold War competition for favor in emergent African, South American, and Asian nations grew, significant attention was paid to figuring out a way to alleviate hunger in those countries. Before the agricultural advancements of the Green Revolution came online, economists feared that the world was on the brink of a Malthusian collision of population growth and food shortages. Some agronomists suggested that whales could become a significant protein source for the impoverished Third World. Collaborations between nuclear scientists and marine biologists were even proposed whereby tropical atolls, blown up by nuclear testing, could be used as giant corrals for the commercial farming of whales.

But all this optimism about the potential of whales was quickly checked by the reality of the drastic decline in whale populations. By the 1930s, cetacean numbers were so low as to provoke three successive international agreements. By the time these agreements were raised up to the level of a convention in 1947, participating nations deemed that these measures were necessary in order “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.”

It is important to note here that nowhere in the convention that led to the creation of the International Whaling Commission was there mention of conservation of whales for the sake of their special-ness. Rather, as with all things from the sea in earlier days, conservation was seen as necessary for the sake of future exploitation
.
Just as opposition to slavery was once argued from an economic point of view, the antiwhaling movement had its origins in financial motives. Like abolitionism, it had to develop a second,
moral
prerogative to spur an appropriate response from man. And, as with abolitionism, the debate took place around the issue of intelligence.

The beginnings of whale conservation for the whale’s sake alone dribbled out of studies of whale communication. Dr. Roger S. Payne is a Harvard-trained biologist who did his preliminary work on echolocation in bats and owls. But a desire to enter the field of conservation biology led him to apply to the sea what he had formerly studied on dry land. “I wasn’t doing anything that was directly related to problems that I, as a biologist, am deeply and bitterly aware of,” he recalled, “which have to do with the destruction of the wild world by people. So I thought, if all you’ve had in training is the chance to work on the acoustic worlds of animals, what animal could I work on that needs my help?”

Along with the researcher Scott McVay, Payne began studying the “songs” of humpback whales and over time developed a theory that not only do whales communicate with one another in a complex and ever-evolving way, but that in certain species (blue whales and fin whales) whale song could be transmitted across the entire breadth of an ocean. The theory was alternately embraced and attacked within the scientific community, but in 1970, when Payne released an LP entitled
Songs of the Humpback Whale
, the public itself became the greatest adjudicator of whether or not whales were intelligent. The album, which was followed by a sequel that included jazz “duets” between a humpback whale and the saxophonist Paul Winter, sold 10 million copies and today is still the biggest-selling wildlife recording of all time
.
Payne’s whale-song recordings went on to underscore numerous popular ballads, including John Denver singles and David Crosby and Graham Nash’s 1975
Wind on the Water
album.

Other researchers, like the New Zealander Paul Spong, who had developed a series of communication experiments with two killer whales named Skana and Hyak, brought the whale-conservation movement into the political arena. Spurning the classic noncommittal stance that scientists are supposed to take in relation to politics, Spong banded together with early anti-nuclear-testing activists and helped form Greenpeace. According to Rex Weyler, an early Greenpeace member and unofficial historian of the organization, it all came down to the little inflatable boat and the big Soviet whaling ships. “I would suggest,” Wexler wrote me, “that the precise moment the Save the Whales movement entered the popular unconscious would be July 1, 1975.” On that day images of a small Greenpeace Zodiac poised between a breaching whale and a Soviet commercial whaling vessel in the Southern Ocean were broadcast around the world by Walter Cronkite on CBS News and on other major media outlets. That image remains to this day the enduring image of the Save the Whales movement and one that helped to create a substantial conservation lobby within the International Whaling Commission.

Even though the International Whaling Commission was intended to be a fisheries-management organization, over the course of the seventies and early eighties environmentalists pushed it into playing an international environmental-protection role. This was ultimately codified in a landmark agreement that took place in 1982. For the sake of those countries that were only grudgingly brought to the whaling negotiating table, the agreement was given three years to be put into effect and expressed not in environmental or ecological terms but rather in the language of fisheries management.

From 1985 forward, the International Whaling Commission declared that throughout the world there was to be a “zero catch quota” for whales. In other words, a complete and total world moratorium on hunting an entire scientific order of animals. It was the broadest and most far-reaching act of kindness humanity has ever bestowed on another group of species
.
Though contested and embattled and fraught with disagreements that result in violations, this kindness has persisted. The whaling moratorium remains in effect to this day.

 

 

 

I
n the summer of 2006, an editor from the
New York Times’
opinion page e-mailed and asked me if I would like to write a short article on whether people should continue to eat fish. “We were wondering if you’d be interested in writing an essay whose basic argument would be that we should get our Omega3’s from somewhere else and just not eat fish anymore because of all the problems fishing causes,” the editor wrote. “Or, alternately,” she continued, “an essay arguing that we shouldn’t feel guilty eating fish despite all the problems it causes.”

I considered this question for a long time and conferred with many people on both sides of the issue. In the end I decided to try to track a middle course, saying that yes, we should still eat fish, that it was important that we still regard the ocean as a living source of food and not just a place to dump our garbage. However, I stipulated that a few basic guidelines should be followed to find a balance between human desire and ocean sustainability. I covered the usual topics one comes across at sustainable-seafood conventions: That one should favor fish caught by small-scale hook-and-line fishers because of the lower impact on sea beds and underwater reefs. That when choosing aquacultured fish one should choose vegetarian fish, like tilapia and carp, because of the lower strain they put on marine food webs. When it came to tuna, though, I offered no triangulation whatsoever, because in my view there simply was no compromise possible. “Don’t eat the big fish,” I declared toward the end of the editorial. “Dining on a 500-pound bluefin tuna is the seafood equivalent of driving a Hummer.”

But two weeks after making my high-minded pronouncements, I found myself at a family dinner party at an upscale Manhattan restaurant. The appetizer choice on the prix fixe menu was either a mini-sirloin steak or bluefin tuna carpaccio. It would seem the choice should have been simple. I had my principles, and I had expressed them quite publicly. But unlike the earlier moment in Norway when I successfully kept myself from ordering whale carpaccio, this time, nearly without hesitation, I chose the bluefin. I quickly scarfed it down and nearly forgot about the delicious paper-thin slices after they had been washed away with a glass of pinot grigio. I turned to my twelve-year-old daughter, who had ordered the sirloin steak, and asked her how her food was. She had just read my
New York Times
op ed in draft form. “Hypocrite,” she said coolly.

In my feeble defense, I am not alone among seafood writers in my sampling of bluefin. In several of the fish-in-danger books I’ve read over the course of researching my own fish-in-danger book, the intrepid author inevitably visits Japan’s vast Tsukiji fish market and marvels at the giant carcasses of bluefin tuna being put up on blocks for auction. After condemning the trade, the author in question slips into a side stall and has one last delicious bite of bluefin tuna before promising never to eat it again. My guess is that if these authors were served whale carpaccio, they would, like me, have no trouble refusing. In the modern world, whales are simply not considered food, while bluefin tuna is judged an acceptable delicacy.

But based solely on numbers, the whale carpaccio is the carpaccio of choice. The whale on my menu at that restaurant in Bergen, Norway, was most probably a minke whale, an animal whose population in the wild, after the moratorium was put in place, has grown to over a quarter million animals (estimates vary widely, with some putting the population at close to a million). Norwegians have partially withdrawn from the whaling moratorium and now conduct “scientific whaling” for research purposes. Some of those research subjects end up in restaurants as whale carpaccio.

But judging Norway’s dubious moral position vis-à-vis whales becomes increasingly problematic when those countries doing the judging are nations that fish bluefin tuna. The most pessimistic estimates indicate that the population of North Atlantic bluefin may have already imploded beyond the point of recovery. Some scientists place the total number of giant bluefin spawners in the Western stock of the North Atlantic at a mere nine thousand animals, or, in food terms, about 43 million individual slices of sashimi—enough for every adult American living along the bluefin’s migration route to have one last bite.