Whales can still inspire people to action like no other issue, Casson Trenor of Greenpeace told a packed house at Town Hall on Sunday.
More than one million people have contacted the Obama administration to dissuade U.S. cooperation with an International Whaling Commission (IWC) effort to allow legal whaling to resume, Trenor said.
While encouraging locals to join the chorus of voices against legal whale killing, he lamented that people don”t get motivated for politically more weighty issues like mountain top removal, offshore oil drilling or even polar bears.
“No other issue gets the boots on the ground like whales,” Trenor said.
He expects the issue to surpass the all time record of 1.3 million contacts on an environmental issue.
Even more revealing is that people have so strongly opposed the idea of legitimizing whaling — when the proposal actually purports to reduce the whale kill.
Trenor, Fort Bragg City Councilwoman Meg Courtney and others attributed that to a special, strong but poorly understood connection between the human and whale species.
Legitimizing whale harvests in an effort to reduce the overall kill of whales is just a small part of what the IWC proposes to do in Morocco in June.
Trenor pointed out some bizarre loopholes in the current proposal, including continuing to allow Japan to harvest endangered fin whales and a lack of oversight.
But he also characterized the Obama administration as twisting the arms of other countries to support the draft proposal.
In fact, the Obama administration is pressing some of the same concerns that Trenor has expressed.
“If the proposal remains unchanged, the United States will vote against it,” said Monica Medina, the Obama administration”s delegate to the IWC, told a congressional subcommittee last week.
What the United States has done is agree to listen to the whaling plan, where in the past the U.S. had joined the fiercest anti-whaling countries like New Zealand, South Africa and Australia in refusing to even discuss Japan”s proposals.
The IWC has couched the whaling resumption into a complex reorganization of itself into a purely conservation organization that focuses on saving whales by enacting global policies on a wide variety of issues such as protecting whales from ship strikes or safe ways to do whale watching.
The IWC wants to divorce itself from whaling regulation. Commercial whaling was banned globally in 1982 in an effort led by Australia, but Iceland, Japan and Norway continue to hunt under various exemptions, collectively targeting more than 2,000 whales each year.
One of the many controversial aspects to the draft proposal is that it legitimizes whale harvesting by the three countries that have defied the whaling ban — and not allowing any other nation to do legal whaling.
“This is three countries that have thrown a 25-year tantrum and giving them a big chocolate chip cookie and saying there-there, everything is fine … This is the wrong approach,” Trenor said Sunday.
It also has created a brouhaha among countries that have obeyed the law, but would like to engage in whaling, such as South Korea and Greenland. More than two dozen countries favor whaling but obey the worldwide ban they have signed onto as IWC members.
Japan, one of the world”s richest countries, has created animosity, particularly among southern hemisphere nations that dislike Japan”s journeying to the Antarctic to kill whales, including endangered species.
“The polarization of the IWC threatens the viability of the organization as the international forum for resolving current issues, coordinating critical research, and developing international agreements to further whale conservation,” Medina told Congress.
Environmental groups have stridently opposed the draft proposal, which Trenor characterized as having holes big enough to drive a truck through.
It is unclear whether opposition would wane if the final proposal fixed those flaws and actually found a way to reduce whale kills and confirm and enforce numbers.
The question from the crowd of about 75 people at Town Hall was “Why.”
“I can”t for the life of me understand why we are doing this,” said Courtney.
“Can you help us follow the money on why this is happening?” asked Debra Scott.
Trenor is convinced the move has nothing to with whales, which he said Japan doesn”t need and is embarrassed to kill in the Southern Ocean.
He said it”s about saving face for Japan and also about Japanese worries that regulation of their tuna harvest would be next.
Many locals signed the petition and pledged to call local representatives about the issue.
Letters to the president can be sent to the White House, 6000 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C., 20500. Letters to California”s senators can be sent to the Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C., 20510; Suite 112 for Sen. Barbara Boxer and Suite 331 for Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Rep. John Campbell can be reached at 1728 Longworth House Office Building at the same ZIP code as the Senate, in Washington.
On the Web go to http://iwcoffice.org/index.htm (agenda item is IWC reorganization).
