I don’t consider myself an environmental activist by any means. I don’t chain myself to trees or protest outside of oil refineries. I don’t have one of those nifty Nalgene bottles the cool kids are sipping on, but I don’t drink bottled water either. If I can, I prefer to throw my pop cans in recycling.
But I feel pretty strongly about protecting the oceans. People abuse the oceans in some pretty ridiculous ways, from dumping pollutants to shark-finning (a practice in which fishers pull sharks out of the water, chop off the dorsal, pectoral and caudal fins for soup and toss the shark into the water to die). We really don’t know much about what’s going on beneath the surface in the oceans, and people seem to think that makes it okay to pummel them. It’s like closing your eyes when you rifle the cookie jar and thinking it will always be full.
Which brings me to whaling. The International Whaling Commission is in talks right now to extend the whaling 
moratorium declared in 1986. Now that seems like good news for whales, right? Except the IWC did such a poor job designing the moratorium that during the past 24 years 33,000 whales have been “legally” killed. The IWC did so poorly last time that the other proposal they’re considering is to legalize commercial whaling, because that might actually lower the amount of whales harvested.
Now I have little tolerance for inept bureaucracies or for the spelling of the word bureaucracy. (You know it’s bad when the spell checker can’t even guess what you’re going for). But I have not one ounce of love set aside for the governments who continue whaling: Japan, Iceland and Norway. Norway at least has guff to tell the IWC where they can put their moratorium. Japan and Iceland nominally agree to the ban, but claim exemptions for “scientific research.” (And conveniently, whale meat harvested for so-called research can be sold in markets and restaurants).
I really can’t imagine a compelling reason any country on the planet should be whaling. The meat does not make up a key part of any ethnicities diet––it’s a luxury food. But neither does it make up a major part of any country’s economy. It’s just that backwards assumption that because a particular practice is part of a nation’s culture, they have the right to continue practicing regardless of the effects. Like the tigers that are poached or all the fossils that have been destroyed for Chinese “medicine.” Raping and pillaging used to be part of Norway’s culture too, but they’ve had to move on. Now it’s time to move on again.
