A bowhead whale caught by Igloolik, Nunavut, hunters. Photo by Ansgar Walk.

Whale hunting is a fundamental practice in the North and should be celebrated, not restricted…

Gabriel Nirlungayuk can’t pinpoint when Inuit first began hunting bowheads. “Whaling, from an Inuit perspective, has been ongoing since time immemorial,” says the director of wildlife and environment for the land-claims group Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. But he knows one thing: It wasn’t always so heavily regulated.

Currently, Nunavummiut are permitted to harvest three bowhead whales per year. The territory’s 25 communities and two outpost camps compete each year—and the stakes are high. Whaling is an indispensable way of life for Nunavut’s predominantly coastal communities. In August, thanks to healthier bowhead whale numbers and favourable conditions, hunters in Iqaluit caught their first bowhead whale in more than a century.

Nothing on the 14-metre mammal was wasted. Everything—bones, blubber, skin, and meat—is used, and distributed throughout the community and beyond. “Within Inuit culture, the celebration of sharing the meat is one that is special to individuals who are harvesting,” says Nirlungayuk, “They’re not just hunting for themselves; they’re hunting for their family and extended family.” Inuit are working with government and the scientific community to establish a new quota that won’t threaten the whale population, he adds. “We know we could hunt more,” says Nirlungayuk. “We’re taking it slow.”

…But conservation methods must ensure the health of the Arctic whale population.

Whale hunting in the North has long been controversial. Governments and biologists carefully monitor whale numbers, with conservation officers enforcing quotas, licences, and inspections before and after hunts. Some conservation groups, such as Sea Shepherd, say it’s still not enough. “I do not believe in cultural justifications for slaughtering wildlife if other redress is available for survival,” says Sea Shepherd’s Capt. Paul Watson.

More moderate groups, such as the World Society for the Protection of Animals, believe subsistence hunts should become more humane, cautioning any form of whaling has the potential for severe negative impacts for animal welfare. “WSPA urges all whalers, including aboriginal subsistence whalers, to consider the increasing and irrefutable scientific evidence that all whaling causes immense and prolonged suffering,” says Joanna Toole, the oceans campaign coordinator for WSPA.

Bowheads have been precariously close to extinction: the zealous commercial whaling that ended decades before put the bowhead whale on the endangered species list in the 1980s, and they were only downgraded to “special concern” in 2009. However, numbers are on the incline off the coast of Nunavut and in the Hudson Bay. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans revised its estimates from hundreds to thousands in 2008 and continues to survey the population. As the whale population strengthens, so too does the Inuit argument for putting conservation and culture on equal footing.

Scary. The Green Scare, published by Ebarhardt press

An activist in Goteborg, Sweden was attacked this week for his efforts at crippling the fur industry in Sweden. Some of the furs he targeted in his actions were seal furs from Canada. Branded an “eco-terrorist,” his opponents say he is threatening jobs and the economy. But when the “eco-terrorists” are the ones actually being terrorized, who are the real terrorists here?

Alfred Törre, an animal rights activist in his mid-20’s, had a fire bomb smash through his apartment window. Törre was inside his apartment at the time as his window curtains went up in flames; luckily he was able to extinguish the fire before it spread further. But the police believe that the perpetrator is connected with the Swedish fur industry and the crime has been reported as attempted arson. Törre, who could have been sleeping during the arson attack, fears for his life.

Attacks on “eco-terrorists” are not rare. Some attacks have taken the form of imprisonment by governments; others have been physical intimidation or harm by self-styled vigilantes. In the post 9-11 era, radical environmental activists, such as animal rights activists, have been transformed into ‘eco-terrorists’ in the public eye.

In 2005, the FBI “rated eco-terrorists” as the “top domestic terrorism threat. The media inflamed this threat, with reports appearing in ABC News, BBC News and the Globe & Mail. They all talked about the threat of “eco-terrorism” and gave little voice to the side of the alleged perpetrators—the activists, instead demonizing them.

According to the blog Green is the New Red, a “green scare” has been promoted through ad campaigns in newspapers such as a New York Times and public relations campaigns that have turned innocuous literature like Charlotte’s Web into manifestos of eco-extremism.

But the ones facing the real threats are not society at large or civilians, but the activists themselves. Activists face surveillance and infiltration for their environmental efforts which is damaging our civil liberties. Törre himself had his apartment watched for months, then raided by federal police in 2007, for a perceived link to radical animal rights groups. Following the raid, he spent several months in jail without being informed of the charges against him.

Other activists have been physically beaten and their lives endangered by the goons of industry. In 2003, Allison Watson, a Sea Shepherd activist who was protesting the Taiji dolphin hunt, was brutally attacked by some local fishermen. She was run over by a fisherman’s boat while in the water, and another fisherman attempted to strangle the activist with rope.

Some "eco-terrorists" with their beagles.

This kind of green-fear-mongering is not to make us safer, but to promote a corporate agenda, a corporate agenda that the “eco-terrorists” threaten when they protest against dolphin, whale, seal, and fur commodization, among other things. But this message gets slanted to protecting jobs and the economy and much of the public buys into this argument.

Take for example the Canadian seal hunt, before this recent EU ban on seal products, the seal industry brought in $5.5 million to our GDP and 6,000 jobs. Eco-actions against the 300,000 baby seals clubbed every year were deemed as “eco-terrorism” that threatened jobs and the local economy.

But what are the costs to demonizing eco-activists? Beyond the obvious environmental degradation that gets subverted, our rights and democracy are at risk.

Standing up against injustice, being an engaged citizen, and voicing opposition promotes a healthy functioning democracy. Freedom of speech is our basic civil liberty. Threatening these cripples our society.

The attack on Törre is not a simple arson investigation, but part of a larger societal problem. The problem being that the real eco-terrorists, corporations and conservative governments that aid them, are scaring us into inaction, or bullying those who do act, for the sake of private profit.

In a time when Prime Minister Harper is attempting to intimidate the EU with a costly and lengthy legal appeal to the World Trade Organization for their ban on seal products, the questions over what ‘eco-terrorism’ is are more important than ever. On whose behalf is Harper pressuring the WTO, and can we allow this to happen?

Alfred Törre is a pseudonym; names have been changed to protect sources.

Sea Shepherd activists confronting the Japanese whaling fleet, Winter 2009

I just posted Emily Hunter’s feature story from the May-June 2009 issue, because it has some bearing on the current controversy over the EU’s banning of commercial Canadian seal products. Trade Minister Stockwell Day says Canada will take the issue to the WTO to try and force the EU to accept Canadian seal pelts, furs, and Omega-3 pills derived from the hunt. About 6,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador make a substantial part of their income from the annual seal hunt, which kills 300,000 seals per year, and is condemned by animal rights groups for the cruel methods used.

The indignation in Canada over the EU’s decision has been, on the surface, about the economics of the decision: it will hurt the livelihoods of Canadian hunters, many of them Inuit. Whatever your opinion of the cruelty of the hunt—and I’ll be honest, the notion of clubbing an animal to death strikes me as the definition of cruel—this ban will throw people out of work or substantively lower their income in a province that needs jobs more than ever, and that’s a problem.

But it’s not really about economics: this is a sovereignty issue, about whether the EU gets to effectively shut down a foreign industry its members don’t like. Because frankly, the amount of money involved here, about $5.5 million worth of seal products that Canada sold to EU consumers last year, is a miniscule fraction—by my back-of-the-envelope math, about 0.0005%—of total Canada-EU transatlantic trade ($111 billion in 2008). As Emily explains in her article, Japan is in the same boat: the whale hunt there has no real economic impact: the actual market for whale meat is tiny, and the producers make almost nothing selling it. But despite the economic lunacy of sending all these ships around the world for a grand total of $51,000 profit, it continues because Japan doesn’t want to accept the authority of the international community that has declared whaling unethical, unnecessary, and cruel. In both cases, the verdict is in: whaling and sealing are not really viable businesses, but both countries persist in their nationalist posturing out of what seems to be pure stubbornness. There are other ways to help the people whose jobs are at risk, ways that don’t require Canada to mount a complex, longwinded, and no doubt expensive appeal to the WTO.

A whale being hauled up the slipway of the Japanese whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru. Photo by Joshua Gunn

It’s a sight I’ll never forget: a whale being hacked up in front of me, cut into tiny squares, its excess blood and guts discarded. One minute, it was a whole whale; 20 minutes later, nothing but a spinal cord and the harpoon that killed it.

It was February 6, 2009, and I had spent two months in the Antarctic Ocean with Sea Shepherd, the radical conservationist group. Sea Shepherd is notorious for the extreme tactics it uses to stop whaling in the southern oceans each year. Its ship, the M/Y Steve Irwin, had chased and harassed the Japanese whaling fleet for weeks to prevent them from hunting. But on this particular day, the whalers killed in front of us, and at first we could only watch from a distance. But it soon became a confrontation.

The Yushin Maru No. 3, a harpoon ship, attempted to transfer a dead whale to the mother ship, Japan’s whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru, the floating factory that processes whale meat at sea. The Irwin moved to block that transfer by manoeuvring into the Yushin Maru’s path. Within seconds, the boats collided with a loud crash and screeching noise that rang through our ears. The Irwin tipped 30 degrees on its side—it felt as if the ship was going belly-up. I was on the outside deck of the Irwin, hanging on to a railing watching the water approach from below. The Yushin was pushed down into the water by the force of the impact. I can only imagine the crew must have thought they would have to abandon ship. But 22 seconds later, when the two boats scraped apart, all had survived, with only minor damage to the vessels. It was a collision of two boats—but also a collision of worlds.

The Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, along with many of its supporters, argue that the annual whale hunt by Japan is the country’s national heritage, and that efforts to end Japan’s whaling is colonial Western arrogance. The critics, such as Sea Shepherd, claim that the Japanese government is simply playing a “culture card” to stymie criticism. They believe that conservation—preserving wildlife—outweighs any such cultural differences.

However, are eco-issues, like whaling, really a simple matter of culture versus conservation? Are these two opposing sides? Can they be reconciled? And if they are in opposition, is it right for cultural concerns to trump environmental ones? I take the issue personally. In high school, I lived in Japan for a year on an exchange program. I lived with a Japanese host family, attended a Japanese-speaking high school, and grew to love the culture, country, and my new friends: Japan became a second home for me. But my first home is the environmental movement. My parents, Robert and Bobbi Hunter, were ecoactivists who had fought on the first anti-whaling campaigns against the Soviets in the North Pacific in the 1970s. My father co-founded Greenpeace, which has campaigned against the global whaling industry for decades.

So you can understand why, on one hand, I felt it was important to be part of the environmental battle for the whales. But on the other, I believe cross-cultural understanding and co-operation is vital. The issue is more complex than black and white. Japan claims that its annual whale hunt is for scientific purposes. The “research” hunt is run by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which is heavily subsidized by the government of Japan. The ICR studies whale-stock demography and health. To do this, the Japanese whaling fleet targets around 900 Minke whales annually. In addition, each year a different endangered species of whale is targeted, including humpback and fin whales.

Once the scientific data is collected, the whale meat is then sold for commercial use by Kyodo Senpaku, the same private firm that runs the fleet. Selling whale meat for commercial use after collecting it for scientific use is acceptable under current international whaling laws. Recently, however, the hunt has also been called “cultural” by the ICR, which says that Japan is simply continuing its centuries-old cultural practice of whaling. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, among others, dismiss these claims as a smokescreen. If it is in fact commercial and not scientific, that would make the hunt illegal: there has been an international ban on commercial whaling since 1986.

Believing the law is on its side, Sea Shepherd was the lone group to oppose the Japanese whaling hunt in Antarctica this past winter. Sea Shepherd fights the whaling industry everywhere, whether Norwegian, Icelandic, or Japanese. Sea Shepherd’s members don’t buy the cultural basis of the hunt any more than they buy its scientific value. And so the group engages in radical direct action to stop the hunts, such as ramming ships at sea and sinking ships in port, which is why some governments have labelled Sea Shepherd “eco-terrorists.” Its activities have undoubtedly stopped or limited whaling activity around the world.

Some critics, such as Milton Freeman, a specialist in ecology and culture at the University of Alberta, view groups like Sea Shepherd as difficult cases. He worries that their anti-Japanesewhaling line leads to rhetoric that is simply anti-Japanese. Freeman views anti-whaling actions as not just an animal-rights issue, but also a type of cultural bullying. It’s Western ecogroups campaigning against the remaining whaling nations, such as Japan, demanding they cease their hunt and assimilate Western cultural beliefs about whales and conservation.

This is what’s increasingly known in academic circles as “political ecology”—essentially, the politics of nature and the different ways people understand and treat nature. For some, a whale is just another fish in the sea, a resource like any other to be harvested. Others put a different value on a whale, and see a socially complex, highly intelligent sentient being that deserves the chance for a full and healthy life.

Freeman argues that our own Western views on whaling don’t give us the right to attack Japanese beliefs about it: “Seeking to stop a culturally valued activity, in any society,” he says, “is to attack those people’s culture and identity.”

Jun Hoshikawa doesn’t feel attacked. “What is taking place in the Southern Ocean is not part of Japanese culture and traditions,” says Hoshikawa, director of Greenpeace Japan. “There is a difference between coastal whaling in Japan and the industrial hunt in the Southern Ocean. Coastal whaling has taken place for centuries and continues today on a small scale with boats and spears. That can be argued to be part of Japan’s culture and identity … The industrial hunt in the Antarctic was introduced by western countries post-World War II, and is run by the government of Japan today using a six-ship fleet with exploding harpoons and guns, and it kills whales on a mass scale. It was and is purely a commercial industry. I do not call that culture.”

Hoshikawa says 82 percent of people in Japan do not eat whale meat. The profits come mainly from delicacy food restaurants or “public provisions,” where whale meat is provided to high school cafeterias, jails and the military. Mainly, it “goes to people who cannot reject the whale meat,” Hoshikawa says in a phone interview from Tokyo.

In the past, the whale-meat industry regularly produced ¥7 billion annually (US$74 million) in profit. But in recent years, profits have dropped off due to decreasing demand in Japan and unfilled catch quotas because of interference from groups like Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. In 2007, the industry saw profits of just ¥5 million (US$51,000). The government of Japan has heavily subsidized the ICR’s whale program over the years to allow its work to continue, despite the financial loss. The real reason Japan persists with whaling, says Hoshikawa, is not because it is a profitable industry any longer, but because “the whaling issue has been framed through a lens of nationalism. It has less to do with whales or the industry and more to do with protecting the sovereign right of a country.” With so much negative international attention focused on Japan because of its whaling, the country is being pressured by other nations to stop the whaling project. In the last few years, nationalism has crept onto the scene: although the hunt is commercially unviable, countries like Japan that still run whaling hunts now see it as a political defeat to cave in to international pressure.

This is not an abstract issue for Canada: many of the same dynamics are at play when it comes to Canada’s annual seal hunt. On this issue, we are regarded with much the same contempt by the international community that Japan bears for its whaling.

“Every state is sovereign and can do whatever it wants” says Calestous Juma, former special advisor to the chair of the International Whaling Commission and professor of International Development Studies at Harvard University. “You can’t condemn sovereign states for exercising their rights because they will just go ahead and do it.” The International Whaling Commission is the international body that regulates whaling. Over the years, the IWC has sent letters of protest to Japan against the hunt in the Southern Ocean. In the IWC’s 2007 letter, it wrote that the lethal hunt of whales was unnecessary for Japan’s research, and called upon the government of Japan to suspend the whaling program.

But there are no real consequences for flouting the IWC rules, since as Juma says, there is no separate enforcement body for the treaty. The IWC comprises 84 member states that meet once a year to set quotas and regulations on whaling. But without an enforcement body, the regulations are toothless. Norway for example, works outside of the IWC and engages in commercial whaling despite the moratorium. Japan, in contrast, attempts to work within the framework by using the scientific loophole. This is because Japan has a real interest in doing things legally. “They want to be a good global citizen,” says Juma.

Ironically, the Japan Whaling Association states on its website that the purpose of the Japanese scientific research in whale stocks and health is to gather evidence that will lift the moratorium so that commercial whaling can resume. Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, director-general of the Institute for Cetacean Research in Tokyo, says that because the ICR believes whale stocks to be plentiful and healthy, “there is no need or reason to prevent sustainable commercial whaling in the Antarctic under IWC management procedures.”

The international community has reacted, but so far the results have been lacklustre. Panama de-registered the whaling fleet’s cargo vessel late last year, but Japan re-registered it under its own national registration; the Australian and New Zealand governments toughened their stance against Japan’s whaling, threatening to take action legally in international courts. But so far, these diplomatic and legal actions have been unsuccessful or stalled. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in June 2008 that Australia and Japan would simply have to agree to disagree.

Over the winter, a small group of IWC countries have been working at negotiating an agreement with Japan that would gradually phase out whaling in the Southern Ocean by reducing the catch by 20 percent per year for five years. In exchange, Japan would get permission to kill an increased but yet-to-be-determined number of whales off Japan’s coasts in the Pacific Ocean.

The package was developed at the request of the American chairman, Bill Hogarth, a Bush administration appointee. It was intended to be a step forward in ending Southern Ocean whaling and break the deadlock with Japan. However, most environmental groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believe this was a compromise that would both allow Japan to continue its commercial hunt, and effectively lift the global moratorium on commercial whaling. But Japan refused the deal. Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries minister Shigeru Ishiba said, “We cannot accept any proposal that would allow outside countries to prohibit Japan from continuing its research hunt.”

So the question becomes: is whaling simply a question of sovereignty? In this case, does diplomacy trump ethics, leaving the international community powerless to stop the killing? The Japanese whaling industry has cunningly used the term “culture” as a get-out-of-jail-free card—by framing this as an issue of culture or sovereignty, it aims to make any antiwhaling group look like they are colonialist and discriminatory. But the reality is that the hunt is senseless slaughter in service of fake science, a dead industry, and nationalist posturing. The whales should not bear the punishment for our foolishness.

How far are we willing to go—how much environmental damage are we willing to do—in the name of culture, heritage, national pride? None of these things will be of much use in an environmentally devastated land- and seascape.

More than 30 years ago, in 1977, my parents fought to end whaling in Australia. Their protest, in Albany, Western Australia, led to international attention, that culminated in the end of whaling in Australia. It is now one of the strongest anti-whaling nations in the world.

At the end of the anti-whaling campaign I went on this year with Sea Shepherd, I found myself in Australia and decided to visit Albany. What I found there was a miniature eco-haven: a dozen wind-power generators spinning on the horizon and organic crops in the fields. One of the old harpoon ships of the Australian whaling fleet, Cheynes IV, is now an on-land museum, and boats go out every day filled with tourists for whale-watching. The whale-watching industry has now surpassed the profitability of the whale-killing industry of 30 years ago.

I took a boat ride myself to see the whales. We got to see them up close, close enough that I could touch them. They played together in their pod, diving and chasing, waving their fins out of the water as they breached, tails in the air. It’s another sight I’ll never forget.