PLU should take stance on whaling

Ethan Jennings - jennined@plu.edu Mast Op-ED Columnist

As long as I’ve studied at PLU, the university has been equally proud of its Norwegian heritage and its commitment to the environment on an international level. And why not? Norway ranks among the world’s most democratic nations and has been a major force for peace and negotiation since World War II.

As to environmentalism, well, look at it this way—Earth will survive what we do to it, but we may not.

However, there is a point in which these two commitments, both of which seem core to PLU’s identity as a university, conflict, and that is the practice of whaling.

Norway, along with Iceland and Japan, practices commercial whaling (technically, Japan does not, though its harvest of whales for “scientific research” is commercial in scale and practice). It harvests only the northern variety of Minke whale, the second-smallest baleen whale and the most commonly harvested whale nowadays. The Minke is not endangered, but is listed as “near threatened” on the widely respected International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List.

Norway harvested 592 whales in 2007 out of a population of 107,000 northern Minke whales, according to wikipedia. This is a number comparable to its annual harvests since it resumed commercial whaling in 1993 after a five-year halt, Proponents of Norwegian whaling argue this is a sustainable number.

Opponents, including myself, say that commercial whaling of all kind is a potentially devastating threat to the global ecosystem and that the practice must cease. Further, I find PLU’s apparent indifference to the practice troubling.

I could write a book on the vital roles whales play in the ecosystem, but for the sake of brevity, let me just say that evolution does not tend to favor animals that waste space, fulfilling no purpose in their environment. Considering how massive even the smallest of whales are, it seems apparent even in layman’s terms that whales are a vital part of the ocean’s ecosystem.

Consider, then, that commercial whaling nearly drove multiple species of whales to extinction until the practice was mostly ended by international treaty in the mid-20th century.

Many species, including the blue whale, the largest living animal on Earth, may have been too depleted to ever recover, and even relatively stable species like the Minke are still hugely depleted from estimated pre-whaling levels.

Whaling isn’t the only pressure on whale species, either. Global climate change threatens their food supplies, forcing species to struggle to survive.

Also, consider that the impact of whaling on the Norwegian economy is negligible­—vastly lower than the impact of the fossil-fuel industry on the U.S. economy, which any number of people at PLU actively support dismantling.

Some whaling proponents defend whaling as part of Norway’s cultural heritage. On the other hand, no one defends the United States’ rampant over consumption of natural resources as a U.S. cultural heritage. Why is another country’s negative impact on the environment any more excusable?

Finally, the moratorium on whaling is fragile. Japan wants free reign to commercially whale (the threat of U.S. sanctions keeps it from doing so), as do other countries. If Norway keeps maintaining that the practice is sound, how long will it be before the floodgate breaks and the people of the world hunt whales to extinction with the same reckless abandonment they exhibit toward the rest of the environment? Considering how much of the world depends on the ocean for survival and how huge a role whales play in that ecosystem, I don’t think we can afford to take the chance.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask that PLU consider the issue—maybe even take a stance on it. I certainly don’t mean to infer that they’ve been attempting not to. It seems more a problem of apathy and inattention. Perhaps even a conference would be nice—who knows? Get the dialogue going.