April 28, 2026 • 44 mins
In the 1970s, conservation groups around the world rose up to protect dwindling whale populations, some on the verge of extinction. They all worked under the same banner: Save the Whales! It turned out to be one of the most successful campaigns ever.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are going crunchy
granola even today talking about saving the whales, which Chuck,
I don't know about you, but for me, that was
like a big part of my childhood. So this is
a little bit nostalgic for me.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, I mean, if you're insinuating I grew up under
a rock in the nineteen seventies, that it's not the case.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You did live on a gravel road.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
We're rocks involved.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
I lived among rocks.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
But yeah, I mean I would go out on a
limb and say that. Well, this article says save the
Whales is one of the most successful environmental conservation movements
in history. But I'm from my mouth to thine ears,
I'm going to say I think the Save the Whales
campaign is one of the most effective marketing camp pains
(01:00):
across any genre in history.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Well, wow, it was that ambiquitous.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah, it was super ubiquitous. I think you caught more
of it than me. Even like the stuff that I
call was a little bit of the the after wash.
I don't know, like remember that thing you were living well, no,
it was still a thing. Yeah, but I think the
peak I missed the peak and you were living right
through it because the seventies were like when this really
(01:27):
started to ramp up big time. And I'm sure plenty
of people out there have heard save the whales, and
it is like a pretty ubiquitous slogan used to be
even more ubiquitous, like we're saying. But despite that, there
wasn't like one person or group that you're like that
they started save the whales. It almost just kind of
bubbled up into the collective consciousness and a bunch of
(01:51):
different groups kind of started doing the same thing, sometimes
working together, other times doing it independently. But the whole
goal was to preserve declining whale populations from extinction, and
they all were kind of under the same banner of
save the whales.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, and we're going to talk a little bit about
the actual saving of the whales. We're gonna talk a
little bit about that campaign, you know, slogan, and how
that was a thing. But if you want to talk
about just the word save the whales, that did not
come about in the nineteen seventies that became a thing.
And I mean the phrase dates back to the eighteen hundreds,
(02:29):
like the eighteen eighties, but it really became a thing
in the nineteen twenties when whale conservation was first a
little flicker on the radar of I mean, what would
be early conservationists. But in nineteen twenty eight there was
a mammalogist group that had to save the whales, meeting
in Washington, DC. And that's when it really kicked off
(02:50):
as far as like you know, there were buttons and
there was a satirical poem written about how ubiquitous it
was in the nineteen twenties and thirties.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
So it was definitely a big thing early on.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, and in those articles, I think Anna helped us
with this one. She dug up some articles from the
twenties about those meetings and they were saving the whales
to the bison populations that almost went extinct, yeah, you know,
just a few decades before. So the lesson was learned
by some and they're like, these whales aren't going to
be around much longer either. And it wasn't just the US.
(03:23):
It spread around the world, like other countries started kind
of their own save the whale initiatives. It was clear
that we were over whaling. And yet despite that, in
the nineteen twenties and thirties, whaling was still generally antiquated.
It was still the kind of whaling that you think
of like New Bedford, Massachusetts, like the salty old sea
(03:45):
dog with a peg leg and a spear in his
other hand, a pipe, maybe even a parrot like out
there whaling with a harpoon that he's using with his hands.
They killed a lot of whales like that, but it
was nothing compared to the Austrial whaling that started in
like the middle of the twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yeah, I mean they started having you know, literal cannons
mounted on the side of a of a ship that
would shoot exploding harpoons. And by the sixties they were
taking eighty thousand whales a year. Blue whales neared extinction,
plenty of others in like grave danger. I am taking
(04:24):
my first trip to Nantucket this summer, and that is
they have a whaling museum there.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Yeah, that I'm going to go to.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I've never even been to that part of the country really,
so I'm eager to go, and not to celebrate whaling,
but just as a sort of historical museum kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Emily has already said that she won't be going.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
No, I can understand that it would be kind of
hard to take for sure.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Yeah, but I mean, I imagine it's fairly interesting.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's just a blip in time, but it's not I
doubt if they're trying to sell you on whaling at
least a.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Right right, Remember when it's great about Nantucket. That is
like to thirty limericks, what enya is the crosswords?
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Wow? Yeah, yeah, that's a nice full So a good.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Comparison here is like, like I said, New Bedford, Massachusetts,
that area Nantucket, Cape Cod. I guess sure they this
was like the seat of whaling internationally in like the
mid nineteenth century and over this basically this decade of
American dominance of whaling, they took one hundred thousand whales.
(05:30):
Now what you're saying is that by the sixties they're
taking almost that amount in one year, not a decade. Yeah,
that's how much it had gotten stepped up. And if
the people in the twenties in the thirties were worried
about whales going extinct before using the kind of antiquated
original whaling techniques. This new stuff was really a threat
to them.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
And you know, the seventies, it sort of merged with
the post sixties crunchiness to really become a big thing.
But going back to the thirties and nineteen thirty on
the nose, the League of Nations got together and established
the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics just so they could
see if it truly was a bison situation. And a
year later they're like, yep, it's pretty bad. They're declining
(06:14):
big time. And so twenty two nations signed in agreement
at the Geneva Convention that year for the regulation of
whaling to put some limits. And that was kind of
the first move was in nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
You know what else I saw too, Something else that
saved the whales in the first way the first half
of the twentieth century was the invention of the light
bulb because people didn't need whale oil for lamps anymore.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yeah, I mean, I guess we should say that they
whiled because that blubber was oil for lamps, and people
also ate it. And also, you know, we're not going
to not talk about indigenous populations where it's right. You know,
they depended on that stuff for sustenance and some still do, so, yeah,
that's why they wailed.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Well. Also, that's why some of these early I guess
international agreements on conserving whale stocks were created, not because
they're like whaling's wrong. They were like, we need to
be able to keep whaling in the future, so let's
not overdo it now, let's figure out what is a
sustainable amount. That's what the earliest agreements were for.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Yeah, let's stop whaling some so we can keep whaling exactly.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
So that was the first one.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Thirty one, thirty seven came along and ten nations signed
on to another one called the International Agreement for the
Regulation of Whaling.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Also put some more limits.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
It banned blue, humpback fin and sperm whales under certain links.
But it was still declining. So in nineteen forty six
the International Whaling Commission. They just keep starting these commissions
and getting member countries on board and it's really not
making much of a difference. And they did that in
forty six again with fourteen member nations. But the forty
(07:57):
six one, you know, aligned I guess at thirty seven
aligned with World War two, so they were like, we
can't go without this oil like at this time. So
it just it didn't really have any teeth.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, not only that they needed like meat, So they
weren't in a position. The world wasn't in a position
after World War two to be like no, not let's
stop taking this meat. Like whale meat fed a lot
of people who didn't have access to other kinds of
protein from World War two. So yeah, those agreements were
kind of like, no, this isn't gonna work right now.
(08:28):
And then as things started to ramp up, because now
there was a much bigger market that hadn't been there
before for whale meat, like a global market. That's why
it became this industrial factory farming like version of whaling, right, So,
because there was just a lot more money to be made.
So the people who finally started to save the whales
(08:51):
campaign of the seventies had a really huge hill to climb,
the biggest hill anyone who was against whaling itself ever
had to climb in the history of whaling.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, for sure, but it was, like I said, kind
of the right time. Coming out of the sixties. There
were a lot more just sort of environmental concerns popping up.
The EPA was a little more in the limelight, and
it was just there was more awareness of that kind
of thing, and there was a big perspective shift that
happened that was much much different from those earlier ones
like you were saying, where it was like let's conserve
(09:21):
so we can keep whaling. Like this was a legitimate
like hey, these things were realizing are intelligent, and that
started happening in the nineteen fifties, like finding out that
whales were smart. Yeah, thanks to a Navy engineer named
Frank Watlington was a really big change.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Well, yeah, he liked to I almost have the sense
that it was in his spare time record with a
hydrophone the underwater sounds of the Navy, like shooting off bombs,
and he accidentally caught some whale songs of some baileing whales,
and he was like, this is I've not heard stuff
like this before. It seems like there's a pattern to
it or a rhythm, or they keep coming back to
(09:59):
like a chorus. I don't know. So he gave it
to some marine biologists who actually took it and released
it as an album in nineteen seventy Songs of the
Humpback Whale and have you listened to it?
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Oh? Yeah, I like most of my adult life.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yeah, it's just so mellow. It's so ambient that you're like, wait,
did they add some synth here? And no, it's just
nothing but whale songs.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Right yeah, Brian, you know had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Right, So I can't imagine this was released in nineteen seventy.
I can't imagine between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty how
much acid was dropped listening to the album Songs of
the Humpback Whale. Man, it was like made for it.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
So maybe I think this has got to be fair.
Use we can just play a short snippet just so
people can can hear a piece.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, okay, sure, let's give it a shot.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
All right, here we go, everybody with Songs of the
hump Back Whale on s y sk.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Here is part of the same song played at its
natural speed and pitch, just the way other whales hear it.
All the sounds are made by one whale, both the
high squeaky tones and the low rumbling ones.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Wow. What an album, right, Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:37):
I mean it's the only multi platinum album of animal Sounds,
which is completely believable.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, I can't imagine there's too many more.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, I mean it actually became a huge hit. It's
the only multi platinum album of animal sounds, which I
guess now they think about it is completely believable.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Right, But if you just go listen to it's only
like a half hour so long. I think it's a
It says songs of the humpback whale. There's so many
different songs that I'm like, there's got to be different
species involved. It's just neat. Just go listen.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah, it's super cool. And the whole point of it
all was is that it raised awareness. People were all
of a sudden like wait, these like scientists said, I
think they're communicating here, and they're super smart, like Chuck
would later say in a podcast, And so save the
Whales campaign all of a sudden had a kind of
different rallying cry, which is like, hey, we're you know,
these aren't just big dumb logs floating around in the ocean.
(12:31):
These are really super smart animals to be protected.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Right, and so an environmental ease, they became ambassador animals
for the ocean as a whole. Yeah, this is now
an animal that you can make people care about, and
now we have to go get the word out. And
by saving whales, you're also going to save everything else
in the whales ecosystem that you're working to preserve.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
That's right. Should we take a break?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I was about to say the same thing, so gen one, two, seven, eight,
not you owe me nine cokes?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Gosh, all right, I'm going to go to the store
and we'll be right back. All right, We're back everybody. Uh,
(13:35):
after a delay that you don't need to even know about, right.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
It's our business.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah? None.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
So Save the Whales is kicked off in the seventies,
and I think you mentioned earlier on It's it's you know,
sometimes it was in parallel with one another. It wasn't
like just one group doing this, but everyone got on
board with that same the same three words because it
was a very unifying thing. And this is sort of
a loose timeline of how it started. And it kicked
off in nineteen seventy one when the Animal Welfare Institute
(14:06):
got together with the Fund for Animals to officially launch
the nineteen seventies version of the Save the Whales campaign, right,
and they started doing things like, you know, going to
teachers conventions, you know, sending out you know, information and
mailers and placing ads and saying like, hey, maybe we
should boycott whaling nations that kind of stuff, right.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, in just a few years they started a pretty
big boycott. I think in nineteen seventy four they said
no Japanese goods, no Russian goods. Yes, we're even talking
about vodka. They had to say that a lot. Yeah,
and I think eighteen other groups signed on, and I
think five million Americans said yes, no Russian goods, no
(14:49):
Japanese goods, Let's save the whales hot damn for real.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
They got benefit concerts together. I know, David Bowie in
nineteen seventy two had a very headlined, very f famous
save the Whales benefit concert.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Of course Greenpeace would get on board early on, although
they would get on board two years after it started
with their project Ahab, which was a little surprising.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
They're like, no, wait, what about the panda. I thought
we were all doing the panda. They're like, that's later,
we'll do the panda next. We're going to save the
whales now. Finally green Peace came around.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Yeah, and you know, a lot of this early stuff
was very just sort of local routes oriented, Like in
the mid seventies, the Connecticut Cetacean Society just like literally
went from town to town in Connecticut with save the
Whales events and places like Mendocino, California had the Mendocino
Whale Festival and founded the Mendocino Whale War. So it's like,
(15:46):
you know, and this is where whaling is taking place,
mainly in these like sort of little small coastal towns.
So it wasn't like, you know, we're going to go
to New York City and have this big event like
they were doing it where it was going on.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, and there were like different ways ways of doing this.
Some were like we want to go like basically confront
whaling ships where they're wailing. Other people are like, let's
just we just need to raise awareness and raise money
and all.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Like.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
It wasn't like this this thing that I'm doing is
the right way to do it. It was like, okay,
you're going to do that. I'll handle this over here
and all together, we're going to save the whales. Even
though there wasn't like necessarily a lot of coordination going on.
It was just you know, you kind of look to
your left and see somebody like trying to save the
whales with you, and you just kind of give them
like a finger gun and a wink and be like,
(16:35):
right on.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Yeah, for sure. I mean they're proposed moratoriums and stuff
like that. And we'll get into the weeds about how
that actually went down in a little bit. But one
of the big things that happened in the seventies was
that T shirt. In nineteen seventy seven, there was a
woman named Maris Sidenstecker who had been selling these shirts
for like three years, like really successfully since I think
(16:57):
nineteen seventy four, and she was sixteen years old old
and seventy seven founded because of the success of these
T shirts, founded her own conservation group called Save the Whales.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, she had a small ad and Rolling Stone, just
this recurring ad and that's how she got the word
out about the T shirts. And then one other thing
I saw about her. She was named Maris Sidenstecker the
second because her mother was Maris Side and Stucker. The first. No,
that's unusual but pretty cool. Huh.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Yeah, usually that would be junior.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Well, you just don't usually see that with women. It's
mostly men.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
You know, Well, it's because men are the only people
who think their name means something.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Well, sure, the and Stecker women stuck their thumb in
the eye of the patriarchy, is what they did.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Oh, you put it on this building or on my
parking spot.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
So let's talk about some of the tactics they took.
Like I said, you'd look to your left, look to
your right. All these people are taking these different approaches
to it. It's all about saving the whales. One of
the easiest ones is to just kind of go to
the kids, because, as we'll see, if you can go
to the younger generation, that's like the long game that
you're playing, But it's also the one that's more likely
(18:07):
to pay off. If you teach little kids that whales
are smart, that they live in families, that they care
about their babies just like your mom cares about you,
those kids are going to grow up to see whales
is not something that you kill for blubber or meat,
but something that you need to protect from people who
want to kill them for their blubber or meat.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah, for sure, So that was you know, that's kind
of the starting point. I think is just educating the children.
The children's we already talked about obviously, you know, public
events like concerts and protests and boycotts. The merchandising, like
the T shirt, Like that's not just like hey, let
me make the shirt, like bumper stickers and shirts and
buttons are a big part of any kind of movement
(18:48):
like that.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, one thing you mentioned, that Bowie concert. I saw
somebody was writing about it and they said like this
was the concert that made David Bowie like a superstar,
like he was on the rise, and that that concert
was where he turned the corner.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Hmm, what year was it?
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Seventy two? Okay, it was supposedly a pretty good concert.
He had lou Reid on stage and they played Sweet
Jane and like two other songs I've never heard of. Yeah,
it seemed like it probably was pretty cool.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
I wish I could have been there. That's a big
regret for me as Bowie.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
He's on the short list of dudes I never got
to see and had a chance to, you.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Know, he's on the time Machine list.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Uh Yeah, like a really regrettable one because he was
around him playing shows that you know, I never was, like, no,
I'm not going to go to that, Like, but it
wasn't like, you know, Queen stopped playing shows. That's another
one on my list. But they could stop playing shows
in Atlanta when I was I don't even think they
played there after. I was like seeing concerts, so you know.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I see, I see. So that's not as regrettable as Bowie.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah, because I had the chance to see Bowie and
did not take it.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
I understand.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
That's like he's never going to leave us, is what
I thought, right.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Bowie will never die rules, Bowie lives.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Yeah, very sad.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
So one of the tactics that actually kind of emerge
from this greenpiece is like, we need to catch up.
We got to come up with our own kind of
brand of doing this, and they came up with a
term for it. They called it the mind bomb, which
is basically like, now, yeah, it is very corny and
nowadays you're like, well, yeah, that's of course you're gonna
do something like that if you're you're an activist campaigning,
(20:25):
you know, to say, save an animal. The mind bob
was basically like showing people unfiltered photographs of what is
actually going on. Yeah, and that's what they did They
released a lot of photographs to the press internationally of
whaling in action so that people could see how brutal
it was. They made it no longer just a concept
(20:48):
that people heard about save the whales, Save the whales.
Now they can see for themselves why people were saying
save the whales, because they were being brutalized by humans.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, and those those one particular advance that they went
on that kind of started it all and was in
newspapers all over the country.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
I was in April of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Five aboard the Phyllis McCormick boat. Twelve activists got on
the boat and they spent a couple of months out
at sea trying to find some whaling boats. Finally, in
June they caught up with a Russian fleet off the
coast of California and just kind of followed it around
for a little while, like using bullhorns and loud speakers
to in Russian to beg them to stop killing whales,
(21:29):
played like blast music at them and stuff, and that
wasn't working. So eventually they were like, all right, we
need to step it up just a little bit, and
so they got on those little rubber speedboats like the
little raft boats, and followed it around like a lot
closer that you could do in those boats, and took
some pretty horrifying pictures that made a like these close
(21:49):
up pictures of harpooning whales made a big, big difference
in the campaign.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, I saw, just like that Bowie concert being where
he turned to corners. Supposedly, this is where the same
the whales effort really turned to corner too. Like it
was again international news. There were plenty of newspapers that
put it some of the pictures on their front page,
and like it just really kind of captured people's attention,
and so that whole mind bomb idea really kind of
(22:14):
took off and spread not just from Greenpeace, but you
know to other groups not just animal conservationists, and green
Peace continued on. The ship that I grew up with
that they used to do this with was the Rainbow Warrior,
remember that one.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Oh yeah, and by the way, for a second there
a minute ago, I thought you were going to say,
like the Bowie thing, this is where photography really.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Took off, right exactly in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Yeah, I was like, oh, man, is that what's coming? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I totally remember the Rainbow Warrior. I didn't know you
grew up on that boat, but that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah, yeah, my dad was a mate. He was a
Madiyah a Rainbow Warrior for many many years. We had
to basically peel him off of the deck and be like,
go get a different job, so he became an HVAC engineer.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Eventually, we need shout out Australia because they had a
green Piece affiliate called the Whale and Dolphin Coalition that was,
like you said, kind of doing the same thing. They
were like, hey, this is a really effective deal, so
let's get out there. And we didn't say why. I
thought it was corny and mind bombs because they would
blow people's minds.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Exactly with their pictures, for sure, and they did. But
again it is a very corny way to put it.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
That's right, But that would be stepped up even more
because you know, green Peace gets a little more aggressive,
and then there's always one more like the Brad Pitt
group in Twelve Monkeys. That's like, nah, they're not even
taking it far enough. We need to actually, well, I
guess sort of engage in sabotage.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, this one I associated with the nineties of the
Sea Shepherd. They were a conservation society founded I think
in nineteen seventy seven by a guy named Paul Wattson
you have been a Green Pieace member. It was like,
you guys are corny, I'm out of here, or I'm
gonna do something like actually significant, not just follow whalers
around and take pictures. He followed whalers around and tried
(24:02):
to sink their boats by ramming his own boat into them.
And he was so successful, Chuck, that I propose we
do a short stuff just on the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society itself. They have sunk a lot of boats.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah, he said, mind bombs are effective. Real bombs are
more effective.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Pretty much. I mean they used at least one bomb
on I think a ship called the Sierra, right.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah, Well, they rammed the Sierra a couple of times
with their boat and damaged it. And then a few
years later, no, I guess one year later. That was
seventy nine, and nineteen eighty is when they planted an
underwater bomb and sank that thing.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
And like you said, many others.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, And just to be clear, Paul Watson and the
Sea Shepherd Society, they've never injured a single person. They've
never been indicted for breaking any law. These are pirate
whaling ships. They're operating completely outside of the bounds of
international agreements where they're hunting endangered species that are off
(25:01):
the table. They're taking whales that are young that shouldn't
be taken. They're like taking more than they're supposed to.
Like it's a it's a big deal that these people
are out there and that's that's why he's targeted them.
And he said that in an interview. He's never lost
a lawsuit that's been brought against him either, so he's
(25:23):
feeling pretty good about what he's doing.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Yeah, and they you know, this wasn't like, hey, we're
gonna I mean, it was definitely awareness, but like it
it put an actual dentt in the whaling industry, Like
they sank two of Spain's five only five whaling ships. Yeah,
and if I had a better math brain, I could
figure out the percentage, but that's probably forty something.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
So Yeah. Another thing that he did he would put
out bounties on other pirate whaling ships. There was one
called the Astrod, and the owner of the Astroid eventually
just sold it because he couldn't trust the crew anymore
that they weren't gonna sabotage it and take twenty five
thousand dollars reward because he definitely wasn't paying them twenty
five thousand dollars, right, And then there was one other
(26:06):
thing that had this direct impact on whaling as an industry.
Just him being out there sinking ships made whaling ships
insurance rates go sky high. So there were some there
like I can't afford the insurance anymore. I'm gonna stop
doing illegal whaling.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
And he also he had that great line about mind
bombs not being as effective as real bombs. He also
had one about loose lips, and I think you can
just fill in the.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Rest, that's right.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
So they're making a lot of headway, you know, sinking
these ships and raising awareness. But you know, we mentioned
early on like just how big of a ubiquitous thing
this was in the seventies, and it was like a
legitimate pop culture phenomenon. I mean, it was right up
there with like where's the beef in the nineteen eighties, ironically,
as far as like slogans that people knew and wore
(26:56):
on shirts and put in songs like Judy Collins and
Kate Bush both sampled that songs of the Humpback Whale
as you know, awareness and because it sounded cool. There
was a Save the Whales board game in nineteen seventy eight,
and we can tell you firsthand, if you have made
it to board game territory, then you're part of pop culture. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Apparently I was reading about the rules players are they
cooperate rather than compete with one another to save the whales?
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Like games?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
I mean, that's definitely like difficult gameplay to come up with.
I would guess.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Yeah, they couldn't be like, all right, he's going to
play the whaler.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Right exactly? Everybody hates me.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
What was the pinnacle of the whole thing? Though, Chuck?
It came in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Oh yeah, as everyone who's listening to the show knows,
I know nothing of Star Trek, but I did know
the plot at least of Star Trek. What is that
for the voyage home, which is when the crew Captain
Kirk and his crew went back to save the whales.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, so that's I mean, yeah, a little game and
a Star Trek, not a Star Trek episode an entire
Star Trek movie dedicated to saving a whale. Saving the whales.
That was a pretty big deal. So yes, this thing
spread grew a tasta size, became part of just the
regular culture. There are comic strips that mentioned it, just
(28:18):
the casual mentions of it, the way it came up.
When you look back at it, you're like, yeah, this
was everywhere. I remember there's a Simpsons where Lisa develops
a crush on Nelson Mounts and she goes to visit
him at his house and he has a poster on
the wall that says Nuke the whales. Yeah, and she goes,
nuke the whales. He's like, got a nuke something, save
(28:40):
the nuke touche.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Yeah. I remember wearing We had Hippie Day in high
school once a year where you you know, pretty self explanatory,
and there was a picture of me, I believe, in
the yearbook wearing my little hippie outfit and my prop
was a little save the whales sign. So it was
you know, I wasn't stepping out and trying something original
(29:03):
by any means. It was like super And this was
the mid to late nineteen eighties at this point.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Right underneath it said Charles W. Bryant shows off his
hippie outfit. Also, he's the best all round boy.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
It probably said something like that, except for the last part.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, that was a big That was a big surprise
for you.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
Those yearbook captions.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
They were pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
I remember we had a yearbook in high school where
they misspelled tomorrow on the cover, say Tomory. It's a
t MMO r RW too many ms, too many, yes,
too many ms. I have my hands over my eyes
right now because I'm just cringing thinking about it. Like
(29:48):
they were. This was printed distributed before anybody noticed, like
they were done.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
That is on the editor in chief.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
And on the the teacher.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Yeah, the school sponsor.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
So okay, so I think we've established save the whales.
It spread throughout pop culture. People's sympathies like definitely started
to go toward the whales. But where the rubber meets
the road is whaling going to stop. You need to
go to the people who oversee stuff like this, like
entire governments and national bodies. And just like they did
(30:23):
in the thirties, they went back to the International Whaling
Commission and said, hey, guys, what do you think about
just stopping this, and the UNS a great idea in
the IWC said no.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Yeah, I mean I think the first try was they
proposed a ten year moratorium on whaling.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
What year was that, I don't have that in front
of me.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
It was nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Okay, yeah, so that was seventy two.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
The next year, in seventy three, the UN Conference on
Human Environment basically said, yeah, ten year moratorium. The IWC
rejected it, and then the next year, in seventy four,
the AWI called for a boycott of Japanese and Russian goods,
and that same year eighteen other conservation groups got on
board with that boycott. But again it would take I
(31:08):
think until nineteen eighty two before they got back to
real like voting on moratoriums.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah. So basically in nineteen yeah, nineteen eighty two, the IWC,
the International Whaling Commission basically said let's tick up this
vote again. I could not find what prompted this, so
I just have to assume it was just a general
awareness of saving the whales. So they voted again on
a moratorium and it actually passed this time, and so
(31:36):
they said, well, we'll give everybody four years to get
ready but in the nineteen eighty six season, the quote
was that the catch limits for the killing for commercial
purposes of whales from all stocks any kind of whale.
That's just me adding that parenthetical shall be zero. No
whales going to be killed in the nineteen eighty six
whaling season, and it passed. Twenty five nations said yeah,
(32:00):
seven said nay, yeah, And it came into effect in
nineteen eighty six, and the thing was chuck. It was
originally just going to be a temporary measure, and just
like in the tradition of the IWC and other whaling commissions,
the point was to allow the whale stocks to replenish
themselves so you could get back to whaling. But they
never lifted the moratorium. It's just continued indefinitely.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
Yeah, for sure. Should we talk about some of these
stats and then take our second break.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Oh my gosh, we haven't taken our second break. We
have not Okay, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
All right. So it had a big impact.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
Obviously, these moratoriums at its peak in the nineteen sixties,
I think I mentioned they were killing about eighty thousand
whales a year.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
In twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Three, the IWC estimated that eight hundred and twenty five whales,
down from eighty thousand, were killed by you know, obviously
only nations that object to the moratorium, and we'll get
to those after the break. And also this we should
point out, this doesn't include sort of the indigenous subsistence
whaling that continues, or I think kind of leaving that alone, right.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, I mean that only total three hundred and sixty
eight across four different indigenous groups in three different countries
that year. So all told, there was about twelve hundred
whales killed, and like you said, down from eighty thousand.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yeah, and since nineteen seventy eight, blue whale populations have
increased about eight point two percent per year, bowhead about
three point seven per year. Humpbacks I mentioned in Act
one were close to extinction. I think in the nineteen
sixties there might have been as few as five thousand,
and those babies are back over eighty thousand.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yeah, So let's take our breakschalk, and we'll come back
and talk about how whaling still continues unfortunately.
Speaker 4 (33:42):
All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
All right, we're back, and I think we kind of
alluded to it a couple of times, but we are
not indigenous whaling using traditional methods for subsistence is in
no way in the crosshairs of basically anybody who is
opposed to whaling. Right, they don't even have crosshairs, Like
people actually use the whales that they kill to feed
themselves throughout the winter and stuff like that. Right, nobody's
(34:33):
really got problems with that. It's commercial whaling, that industrial whaling.
That's what everyone has a problem with, and it's still
going on. Some stocks that actually did come back have
started to become depleted again. And the way that it's
going on is because some countries said, we're lodging an
objection and we aren't going to comply with the whaling moratorium.
(34:55):
Those countries were Iceland, Norway, and Japan, I should say
are because they're all still doing that. And rather than
Japan saying we're just going to whale for commercial purposes,
they for some reason hid behind this one exception that
was made in the moratorium that you could kill whales
for scientific purposes, ostensibly to study them to help preserve
(35:18):
the whales, basically, right, And Japan's like, yeah, every whale
we kill using all of our commercial fleet, we're just
studying that for science and that's just not what they've
been doing.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
No, which is super shameful. And here's the other thing
is there's two big points we're going to kind of
hammer home. Here is in twenty twenty six, not many
people at all are eating whale meat, and they aren't
making a lot of money doing this.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
So they've done studies.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Only two percent of Norwegians reported eating whale meat at
least once a month. Consumption of whale meat in Japan
is one percent of what it was from its peak
in the nineteen sixties. And so in two six, Green
pieces like, we need to get some independent research together.
So they commissioned from the independent Nippon Research Center a
(36:09):
study that found that ninety five percent of Japanese people
very rarely or never eat whale meat, and they're stockpile
they have a stockpile of uneaten frozen whale meat, and
it doubled between two thousand and two and twoenty twelve.
So like it's this old it seems like it's this
older generation of nostalgia kind of digging in and all
(36:31):
of this younger generation is just like just you know,
once they die out, like no one's eating this stuff.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Anymore.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, theyre probably won't be whaling in twenty years, is
one way to look at it. Unless there's some weird
revival of a taste for whale meat among younger generations,
doesn't seem likely. There's really the younger people are not
into whale meat. The older people are because it's nostalgia
food that takes them back to their childhood. And you know,
(36:59):
post World War or two, when people ate a lot
of whale meat. Norway's basically the same way Norway, so
few people eat whale in Norway that basically one hundred
percent of Norway's whale catch is exported to Japan. And
yet you said, right, and Japan is like they have
(37:19):
that stockpile. The reason they have a stockpile is because
the Japanese government subsidizes its whaling industry to the tune
of fifty million dollars a year. So that means that
if you whale, you have a total guarantee that the
Japanese government will buy the whale meat that you come
and sell them, and the Japanese government just basically puts
it in a freezer. So those whales died for nothing
(37:41):
except for a handful of people that make some money.
And like you said, the amount of money that we're
talking about is relatively paltry when you're talking about an
entire global industry.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
Yeah, there was.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
In twenty eighteen, the US Naval Institute put out an
article that said, the global revenue, like the entire world
whaling industry revenue is about thirty one million bucks in
twenty twelve, And this is going, this is really going
to drive it home. Norway's largest whaling company made a
gross revenue of one point three million dollars, and they,
(38:14):
along with the lobby and the government, spent about four
times as much on campaigns to try to get people
to eat whale meat. Then they even netted with their
nation's largest whaling company.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Right, So, and it's not like if they were making
thirty one billion, that'd be a different thing. Forget the whales.
They're making a bunch of money. But like this should
be so easily overcome. Any reasonable person that seems like
who cares about animal life would be like, guys, what
are you doing. You're killing whales for thirty one million
dollars a year. Just stop. We can't find anything else
(38:50):
to do, right, And Japan seems to oppose it because
they resent the international pressure that's been put on them
over the years. Yeah, Norway seems to oppose it because
they have some non indigenous coastal communities who have a
tradition of whaling that they're just basically trying to keep
this custom alive for these small coastal communities. And again,
(39:10):
like I understand some people make their living like this,
but it's not like this is an amount of money
that could be subsidized in other ways by the government
that could spare the whales lives while also employing people
at the same rates that they're being employed by the
whaling industry.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, and Japan spite is not a good reason to
keep whaling. It's true, like we don't like this international pressure.
Everyone's trying to get us to stop that. So we're
not gonna stop it because just because you want us to.
I know, Norway, I think they eventually stopped in recent
years subsidizing the whaling industry, and I think in past
(39:50):
years that was about half the entire value of the
annual catch. So it's gonna definitely be going down in Norway.
And you know you got enough in your freeze, are Japan?
So like if you want to eat it, eat.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
That, right, Yeah. I mean, it's just it's bizarre, and
it doesn't seem like the Japanese. It doesn't seem like
something that would do.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
But it is an interesting conundrum from what everything I
know about Japanese culture and people. But you know, I
guess this is you know, a small part of that culture.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Yeah, everybody's got a little spie to them.
Speaker 4 (40:22):
Right, I mean, I know I do.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
So. Unfortunately, even if we just completely eradicate whaling, which
again I predict is gonna happen in twenty years, within
twenty years, God, I hope I'm right, there are other
threats to whales that have become like even bigger, Like
global warming is a big one. By catch, so like
a lot of whales die because they end up in
nets that are meant to catch other stuff like tuna,
(40:48):
so that I think a lot of them die that
way more than are hunted. And then ghost fishing. Remember
we did an episode on ghost fishing. Yeah, that's a
big problem for whales as well.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
You know, Ordinarily, in the past, Josh I would have said, well,
in twenty years, we'll let you know. But if I'm
still doing the show at seventy five years old. That
I'm not going to say something has gone really right.
That means something has gone really wrong. Okay, officially, fair enough,
I'm with you on that one. I'm not announcing my retirement,
but I'm not gonna do this till I'm seventy five.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Okay, all right, I'll hold you to that. Seventy two,
seventy three.
Speaker 4 (41:24):
No one wants to hear Abe Simpson.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
So I guess that's it. One challenge for conservationist now, Chuck,
I have to say is like you can't just say
stop global warming, stop by catch, stop ghost fishing. There's
all these different things. Before it was stop whaling, and
it was very successful. Like you said, it's often compared
to the ozone layer being tackled. The whales were definitely saved,
(41:53):
but there's still now other problems that we have to
work on too.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
I mean, if you had, you'd have to have a
T shirt collection about bycatch and global warming and everything else.
Save the whales really just encapsulated everything nicely.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Or yeah, or you could put it all on one
T shirt, but you just walk around with a magnifying
glass to hand to people. So they could read your
T shirt.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Yeah, or maybe it just says equals and then on
the back save the whales.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Nice. Nice. I think that's it. Chuck just kind of
dropped his mike. You couldn't hear it because Jerry edited
it out, but I heard it, and that means it's
time for listener, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
All right.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
We also took another break while I reattached my mic
and I'm going to read this one. Hey, guys, near
the end of your recent Middle Class episode, you discuss
greenwashed recycling programs, and Chuck, I'm sad to say and
confirm that your instincts regarding car battery recycling are correct.
I've sent you an investigative piece by The New York
(42:51):
Times which uncovered the reality of the recycling of batteries,
namely that they are collected, shipped on freighters to another continent,
and then gnually broken down by an exploited workforce. Rather
than true recycling, it seems more of a resource harvesting,
where many of the components are smelted down in ways
that pollute the surrounding area and cause a lot of illness. Sadly,
(43:12):
I'm not sure where this leaves any of us as
to a better alternative when replacing our batteries.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
That is from Gabby, who says thanks for many years
of learnings and companionship man.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Why is everything so evil?
Speaker 4 (43:24):
I know it's sort of sort of not a great
time to be alive.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
You know, I've kind of come to the same conclusion, Chuck.
Very interesting time to be alive, But I think I
would trade interesting for stable and calm and happy and
yeah so evil.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Yeah that's the T shirt.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Equals save the Josh.
Speaker 4 (43:45):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Well, if you want to be like Gabby, thanks a lot, Gabby.
If you want to be like Gabby and send us
an email, that's a total downer. We're open to those
kind of things. You can send it off to stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are going crunchy
granola even today talking about saving the whales, which Chuck,
I don't know about you, but for me, that was
like a big part of my childhood. So this is
a little bit nostalgic for me.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, I mean, if you're insinuating I grew up under
a rock in the nineteen seventies, that it's not the case.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You did live on a gravel road.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
We're rocks involved.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
I lived among rocks.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
But yeah, I mean I would go out on a
limb and say that. Well, this article says save the
Whales is one of the most successful environmental conservation movements
in history. But I'm from my mouth to thine ears,
I'm going to say I think the Save the Whales
campaign is one of the most effective marketing camp pains
(01:00):
across any genre in history.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Well, wow, it was that ambiquitous.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah, it was super ubiquitous. I think you caught more
of it than me. Even like the stuff that I
call was a little bit of the the after wash.
I don't know, like remember that thing you were living well, no,
it was still a thing. Yeah, but I think the
peak I missed the peak and you were living right
through it because the seventies were like when this really
(01:27):
started to ramp up big time. And I'm sure plenty
of people out there have heard save the whales, and
it is like a pretty ubiquitous slogan used to be
even more ubiquitous, like we're saying. But despite that, there
wasn't like one person or group that you're like that
they started save the whales. It almost just kind of
bubbled up into the collective consciousness and a bunch of
(01:51):
different groups kind of started doing the same thing, sometimes
working together, other times doing it independently. But the whole
goal was to preserve declining whale populations from extinction, and
they all were kind of under the same banner of
save the whales.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, and we're going to talk a little bit about
the actual saving of the whales. We're gonna talk a
little bit about that campaign, you know, slogan, and how
that was a thing. But if you want to talk
about just the word save the whales, that did not
come about in the nineteen seventies that became a thing.
And I mean the phrase dates back to the eighteen hundreds,
(02:29):
like the eighteen eighties, but it really became a thing
in the nineteen twenties when whale conservation was first a
little flicker on the radar of I mean, what would
be early conservationists. But in nineteen twenty eight there was
a mammalogist group that had to save the whales, meeting
in Washington, DC. And that's when it really kicked off
(02:50):
as far as like you know, there were buttons and
there was a satirical poem written about how ubiquitous it
was in the nineteen twenties and thirties.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
So it was definitely a big thing early on.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, and in those articles, I think Anna helped us
with this one. She dug up some articles from the
twenties about those meetings and they were saving the whales
to the bison populations that almost went extinct, yeah, you know,
just a few decades before. So the lesson was learned
by some and they're like, these whales aren't going to
be around much longer either. And it wasn't just the US.
(03:23):
It spread around the world, like other countries started kind
of their own save the whale initiatives. It was clear
that we were over whaling. And yet despite that, in
the nineteen twenties and thirties, whaling was still generally antiquated.
It was still the kind of whaling that you think
of like New Bedford, Massachusetts, like the salty old sea
(03:45):
dog with a peg leg and a spear in his
other hand, a pipe, maybe even a parrot like out
there whaling with a harpoon that he's using with his hands.
They killed a lot of whales like that, but it
was nothing compared to the Austrial whaling that started in
like the middle of the twentieth century.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yeah, I mean they started having you know, literal cannons
mounted on the side of a of a ship that
would shoot exploding harpoons. And by the sixties they were
taking eighty thousand whales a year. Blue whales neared extinction,
plenty of others in like grave danger. I am taking
(04:24):
my first trip to Nantucket this summer, and that is
they have a whaling museum there.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Yeah, that I'm going to go to.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I've never even been to that part of the country really,
so I'm eager to go, and not to celebrate whaling,
but just as a sort of historical museum kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Emily has already said that she won't be going.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
No, I can understand that it would be kind of
hard to take for sure.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Yeah, but I mean, I imagine it's fairly interesting.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's just a blip in time, but it's not I
doubt if they're trying to sell you on whaling at
least a.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Right right, Remember when it's great about Nantucket. That is
like to thirty limericks, what enya is the crosswords?
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Wow? Yeah, yeah, that's a nice full So a good.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Comparison here is like, like I said, New Bedford, Massachusetts,
that area Nantucket, Cape Cod. I guess sure they this
was like the seat of whaling internationally in like the
mid nineteenth century and over this basically this decade of
American dominance of whaling, they took one hundred thousand whales.
(05:30):
Now what you're saying is that by the sixties they're
taking almost that amount in one year, not a decade. Yeah,
that's how much it had gotten stepped up. And if
the people in the twenties in the thirties were worried
about whales going extinct before using the kind of antiquated
original whaling techniques. This new stuff was really a threat
to them.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
And you know, the seventies, it sort of merged with
the post sixties crunchiness to really become a big thing.
But going back to the thirties and nineteen thirty on
the nose, the League of Nations got together and established
the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics just so they could
see if it truly was a bison situation. And a
year later they're like, yep, it's pretty bad. They're declining
(06:14):
big time. And so twenty two nations signed in agreement
at the Geneva Convention that year for the regulation of
whaling to put some limits. And that was kind of
the first move was in nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
You know what else I saw too, Something else that
saved the whales in the first way the first half
of the twentieth century was the invention of the light
bulb because people didn't need whale oil for lamps anymore.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yeah, I mean, I guess we should say that they
whiled because that blubber was oil for lamps, and people
also ate it. And also, you know, we're not going
to not talk about indigenous populations where it's right. You know,
they depended on that stuff for sustenance and some still do, so, yeah,
that's why they wailed.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Well. Also, that's why some of these early I guess
international agreements on conserving whale stocks were created, not because
they're like whaling's wrong. They were like, we need to
be able to keep whaling in the future, so let's
not overdo it now, let's figure out what is a
sustainable amount. That's what the earliest agreements were for.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Yeah, let's stop whaling some so we can keep whaling exactly.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
So that was the first one.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Thirty one, thirty seven came along and ten nations signed
on to another one called the International Agreement for the
Regulation of Whaling.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Also put some more limits.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
It banned blue, humpback fin and sperm whales under certain links.
But it was still declining. So in nineteen forty six
the International Whaling Commission. They just keep starting these commissions
and getting member countries on board and it's really not
making much of a difference. And they did that in
forty six again with fourteen member nations. But the forty
(07:57):
six one, you know, aligned I guess at thirty seven
aligned with World War two, so they were like, we
can't go without this oil like at this time. So
it just it didn't really have any teeth.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, not only that they needed like meat, So they
weren't in a position. The world wasn't in a position
after World War two to be like no, not let's
stop taking this meat. Like whale meat fed a lot
of people who didn't have access to other kinds of
protein from World War two. So yeah, those agreements were
kind of like, no, this isn't gonna work right now.
(08:28):
And then as things started to ramp up, because now
there was a much bigger market that hadn't been there
before for whale meat, like a global market. That's why
it became this industrial factory farming like version of whaling, right, So,
because there was just a lot more money to be made.
So the people who finally started to save the whales
(08:51):
campaign of the seventies had a really huge hill to climb,
the biggest hill anyone who was against whaling itself ever
had to climb in the history of whaling.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, for sure, but it was, like I said, kind
of the right time. Coming out of the sixties. There
were a lot more just sort of environmental concerns popping up.
The EPA was a little more in the limelight, and
it was just there was more awareness of that kind
of thing, and there was a big perspective shift that
happened that was much much different from those earlier ones
like you were saying, where it was like let's conserve
(09:21):
so we can keep whaling. Like this was a legitimate
like hey, these things were realizing are intelligent, and that
started happening in the nineteen fifties, like finding out that
whales were smart. Yeah, thanks to a Navy engineer named
Frank Watlington was a really big change.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Well, yeah, he liked to I almost have the sense
that it was in his spare time record with a
hydrophone the underwater sounds of the Navy, like shooting off bombs,
and he accidentally caught some whale songs of some baileing whales,
and he was like, this is I've not heard stuff
like this before. It seems like there's a pattern to
it or a rhythm, or they keep coming back to
(09:59):
like a chorus. I don't know. So he gave it
to some marine biologists who actually took it and released
it as an album in nineteen seventy Songs of the
Humpback Whale and have you listened to it?
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Oh? Yeah, I like most of my adult life.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yeah, it's just so mellow. It's so ambient that you're like, wait,
did they add some synth here? And no, it's just
nothing but whale songs.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Right yeah, Brian, you know had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Right, So I can't imagine this was released in nineteen seventy.
I can't imagine between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty how
much acid was dropped listening to the album Songs of
the Humpback Whale. Man, it was like made for it.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
So maybe I think this has got to be fair.
Use we can just play a short snippet just so
people can can hear a piece.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, okay, sure, let's give it a shot.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
All right, here we go, everybody with Songs of the
hump Back Whale on s y sk.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Here is part of the same song played at its
natural speed and pitch, just the way other whales hear it.
All the sounds are made by one whale, both the
high squeaky tones and the low rumbling ones.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Wow. What an album, right, Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:37):
I mean it's the only multi platinum album of animal Sounds,
which is completely believable.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, I can't imagine there's too many more.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, I mean it actually became a huge hit. It's
the only multi platinum album of animal sounds, which I
guess now they think about it is completely believable.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Right, But if you just go listen to it's only
like a half hour so long. I think it's a
It says songs of the humpback whale. There's so many
different songs that I'm like, there's got to be different
species involved. It's just neat. Just go listen.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah, it's super cool. And the whole point of it
all was is that it raised awareness. People were all
of a sudden like wait, these like scientists said, I
think they're communicating here, and they're super smart, like Chuck
would later say in a podcast, And so save the
Whales campaign all of a sudden had a kind of
different rallying cry, which is like, hey, we're you know,
these aren't just big dumb logs floating around in the ocean.
(12:31):
These are really super smart animals to be protected.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Right, and so an environmental ease, they became ambassador animals
for the ocean as a whole. Yeah, this is now
an animal that you can make people care about, and
now we have to go get the word out. And
by saving whales, you're also going to save everything else
in the whales ecosystem that you're working to preserve.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
That's right. Should we take a break?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I was about to say the same thing, so gen one, two, seven, eight,
not you owe me nine cokes?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Gosh, all right, I'm going to go to the store
and we'll be right back. All right, We're back everybody. Uh,
(13:35):
after a delay that you don't need to even know about, right.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
It's our business.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah? None.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
So Save the Whales is kicked off in the seventies,
and I think you mentioned earlier on It's it's you know,
sometimes it was in parallel with one another. It wasn't
like just one group doing this, but everyone got on
board with that same the same three words because it
was a very unifying thing. And this is sort of
a loose timeline of how it started. And it kicked
off in nineteen seventy one when the Animal Welfare Institute
(14:06):
got together with the Fund for Animals to officially launch
the nineteen seventies version of the Save the Whales campaign, right,
and they started doing things like, you know, going to
teachers conventions, you know, sending out you know, information and
mailers and placing ads and saying like, hey, maybe we
should boycott whaling nations that kind of stuff, right.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, in just a few years they started a pretty
big boycott. I think in nineteen seventy four they said
no Japanese goods, no Russian goods. Yes, we're even talking
about vodka. They had to say that a lot. Yeah,
and I think eighteen other groups signed on, and I
think five million Americans said yes, no Russian goods, no
(14:49):
Japanese goods, Let's save the whales hot damn for real.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
They got benefit concerts together. I know, David Bowie in
nineteen seventy two had a very headlined, very f famous
save the Whales benefit concert.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Of course Greenpeace would get on board early on, although
they would get on board two years after it started
with their project Ahab, which was a little surprising.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
They're like, no, wait, what about the panda. I thought
we were all doing the panda. They're like, that's later,
we'll do the panda next. We're going to save the
whales now. Finally green Peace came around.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Yeah, and you know, a lot of this early stuff
was very just sort of local routes oriented, Like in
the mid seventies, the Connecticut Cetacean Society just like literally
went from town to town in Connecticut with save the
Whales events and places like Mendocino, California had the Mendocino
Whale Festival and founded the Mendocino Whale War. So it's like,
(15:46):
you know, and this is where whaling is taking place,
mainly in these like sort of little small coastal towns.
So it wasn't like, you know, we're going to go
to New York City and have this big event like
they were doing it where it was going on.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, and there were like different ways ways of doing this.
Some were like we want to go like basically confront
whaling ships where they're wailing. Other people are like, let's
just we just need to raise awareness and raise money
and all.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Like.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
It wasn't like this this thing that I'm doing is
the right way to do it. It was like, okay,
you're going to do that. I'll handle this over here
and all together, we're going to save the whales. Even
though there wasn't like necessarily a lot of coordination going on.
It was just you know, you kind of look to
your left and see somebody like trying to save the
whales with you, and you just kind of give them
like a finger gun and a wink and be like,
(16:35):
right on.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Yeah, for sure. I mean they're proposed moratoriums and stuff
like that. And we'll get into the weeds about how
that actually went down in a little bit. But one
of the big things that happened in the seventies was
that T shirt. In nineteen seventy seven, there was a
woman named Maris Sidenstecker who had been selling these shirts
for like three years, like really successfully since I think
(16:57):
nineteen seventy four, and she was sixteen years old old
and seventy seven founded because of the success of these
T shirts, founded her own conservation group called Save the Whales.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, she had a small ad and Rolling Stone, just
this recurring ad and that's how she got the word
out about the T shirts. And then one other thing
I saw about her. She was named Maris Sidenstecker the
second because her mother was Maris Side and Stucker. The first. No,
that's unusual but pretty cool. Huh.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Yeah, usually that would be junior.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Well, you just don't usually see that with women. It's
mostly men.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
You know, Well, it's because men are the only people
who think their name means something.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Well, sure, the and Stecker women stuck their thumb in
the eye of the patriarchy, is what they did.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Oh, you put it on this building or on my
parking spot.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
So let's talk about some of the tactics they took.
Like I said, you'd look to your left, look to
your right. All these people are taking these different approaches
to it. It's all about saving the whales. One of
the easiest ones is to just kind of go to
the kids, because, as we'll see, if you can go
to the younger generation, that's like the long game that
you're playing, But it's also the one that's more likely
(18:07):
to pay off. If you teach little kids that whales
are smart, that they live in families, that they care
about their babies just like your mom cares about you,
those kids are going to grow up to see whales
is not something that you kill for blubber or meat,
but something that you need to protect from people who
want to kill them for their blubber or meat.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah, for sure, So that was you know, that's kind
of the starting point. I think is just educating the children.
The children's we already talked about obviously, you know, public
events like concerts and protests and boycotts. The merchandising, like
the T shirt, Like that's not just like hey, let
me make the shirt, like bumper stickers and shirts and
buttons are a big part of any kind of movement
(18:48):
like that.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, one thing you mentioned, that Bowie concert. I saw
somebody was writing about it and they said like this
was the concert that made David Bowie like a superstar,
like he was on the rise, and that that concert
was where he turned the corner.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Hmm, what year was it?
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Seventy two? Okay, it was supposedly a pretty good concert.
He had lou Reid on stage and they played Sweet
Jane and like two other songs I've never heard of. Yeah,
it seemed like it probably was pretty cool.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
I wish I could have been there. That's a big
regret for me as Bowie.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
He's on the short list of dudes I never got
to see and had a chance to, you.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Know, he's on the time Machine list.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Uh Yeah, like a really regrettable one because he was
around him playing shows that you know, I never was, like, no,
I'm not going to go to that, Like, but it
wasn't like, you know, Queen stopped playing shows. That's another
one on my list. But they could stop playing shows
in Atlanta when I was I don't even think they
played there after. I was like seeing concerts, so you know.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I see, I see. So that's not as regrettable as Bowie.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah, because I had the chance to see Bowie and
did not take it.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
I understand.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
That's like he's never going to leave us, is what
I thought, right.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Bowie will never die rules, Bowie lives.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Yeah, very sad.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
So one of the tactics that actually kind of emerge
from this greenpiece is like, we need to catch up.
We got to come up with our own kind of
brand of doing this, and they came up with a
term for it. They called it the mind bomb, which
is basically like, now, yeah, it is very corny and
nowadays you're like, well, yeah, that's of course you're gonna
do something like that if you're you're an activist campaigning,
(20:25):
you know, to say, save an animal. The mind bob
was basically like showing people unfiltered photographs of what is
actually going on. Yeah, and that's what they did They
released a lot of photographs to the press internationally of
whaling in action so that people could see how brutal
it was. They made it no longer just a concept
(20:48):
that people heard about save the whales, Save the whales.
Now they can see for themselves why people were saying
save the whales, because they were being brutalized by humans.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, and those those one particular advance that they went
on that kind of started it all and was in
newspapers all over the country.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
I was in April of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Five aboard the Phyllis McCormick boat. Twelve activists got on
the boat and they spent a couple of months out
at sea trying to find some whaling boats. Finally, in
June they caught up with a Russian fleet off the
coast of California and just kind of followed it around
for a little while, like using bullhorns and loud speakers
to in Russian to beg them to stop killing whales,
(21:29):
played like blast music at them and stuff, and that
wasn't working. So eventually they were like, all right, we
need to step it up just a little bit, and
so they got on those little rubber speedboats like the
little raft boats, and followed it around like a lot
closer that you could do in those boats, and took
some pretty horrifying pictures that made a like these close
(21:49):
up pictures of harpooning whales made a big, big difference
in the campaign.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, I saw, just like that Bowie concert being where
he turned to corners. Supposedly, this is where the same
the whales effort really turned to corner too. Like it
was again international news. There were plenty of newspapers that
put it some of the pictures on their front page,
and like it just really kind of captured people's attention,
and so that whole mind bomb idea really kind of
(22:14):
took off and spread not just from Greenpeace, but you
know to other groups not just animal conservationists, and green
Peace continued on. The ship that I grew up with
that they used to do this with was the Rainbow Warrior,
remember that one.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Oh yeah, and by the way, for a second there
a minute ago, I thought you were going to say,
like the Bowie thing, this is where photography really.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Took off, right exactly in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Yeah, I was like, oh, man, is that what's coming? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I totally remember the Rainbow Warrior. I didn't know you
grew up on that boat, but that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah, yeah, my dad was a mate. He was a
Madiyah a Rainbow Warrior for many many years. We had
to basically peel him off of the deck and be like,
go get a different job, so he became an HVAC engineer.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Eventually, we need shout out Australia because they had a
green Piece affiliate called the Whale and Dolphin Coalition that was,
like you said, kind of doing the same thing. They
were like, hey, this is a really effective deal, so
let's get out there. And we didn't say why. I
thought it was corny and mind bombs because they would
blow people's minds.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Exactly with their pictures, for sure, and they did. But
again it is a very corny way to put it.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
That's right, But that would be stepped up even more
because you know, green Peace gets a little more aggressive,
and then there's always one more like the Brad Pitt
group in Twelve Monkeys. That's like, nah, they're not even
taking it far enough. We need to actually, well, I
guess sort of engage in sabotage.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, this one I associated with the nineties of the
Sea Shepherd. They were a conservation society founded I think
in nineteen seventy seven by a guy named Paul Wattson
you have been a Green Pieace member. It was like,
you guys are corny, I'm out of here, or I'm
gonna do something like actually significant, not just follow whalers
around and take pictures. He followed whalers around and tried
(24:02):
to sink their boats by ramming his own boat into them.
And he was so successful, Chuck, that I propose we
do a short stuff just on the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society itself. They have sunk a lot of boats.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah, he said, mind bombs are effective. Real bombs are
more effective.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Pretty much. I mean they used at least one bomb
on I think a ship called the Sierra, right.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah, Well, they rammed the Sierra a couple of times
with their boat and damaged it. And then a few
years later, no, I guess one year later. That was
seventy nine, and nineteen eighty is when they planted an
underwater bomb and sank that thing.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
And like you said, many others.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, And just to be clear, Paul Watson and the
Sea Shepherd Society, they've never injured a single person. They've
never been indicted for breaking any law. These are pirate
whaling ships. They're operating completely outside of the bounds of
international agreements where they're hunting endangered species that are off
(25:01):
the table. They're taking whales that are young that shouldn't
be taken. They're like taking more than they're supposed to.
Like it's a it's a big deal that these people
are out there and that's that's why he's targeted them.
And he said that in an interview. He's never lost
a lawsuit that's been brought against him either, so he's
(25:23):
feeling pretty good about what he's doing.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Yeah, and they you know, this wasn't like, hey, we're
gonna I mean, it was definitely awareness, but like it
it put an actual dentt in the whaling industry, Like
they sank two of Spain's five only five whaling ships. Yeah,
and if I had a better math brain, I could
figure out the percentage, but that's probably forty something.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
So Yeah. Another thing that he did he would put
out bounties on other pirate whaling ships. There was one
called the Astrod, and the owner of the Astroid eventually
just sold it because he couldn't trust the crew anymore
that they weren't gonna sabotage it and take twenty five
thousand dollars reward because he definitely wasn't paying them twenty
five thousand dollars, right, And then there was one other
(26:06):
thing that had this direct impact on whaling as an industry.
Just him being out there sinking ships made whaling ships
insurance rates go sky high. So there were some there
like I can't afford the insurance anymore. I'm gonna stop
doing illegal whaling.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
And he also he had that great line about mind
bombs not being as effective as real bombs. He also
had one about loose lips, and I think you can
just fill in the.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Rest, that's right.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
So they're making a lot of headway, you know, sinking
these ships and raising awareness. But you know, we mentioned
early on like just how big of a ubiquitous thing
this was in the seventies, and it was like a
legitimate pop culture phenomenon. I mean, it was right up
there with like where's the beef in the nineteen eighties, ironically,
as far as like slogans that people knew and wore
(26:56):
on shirts and put in songs like Judy Collins and
Kate Bush both sampled that songs of the Humpback Whale
as you know, awareness and because it sounded cool. There
was a Save the Whales board game in nineteen seventy eight,
and we can tell you firsthand, if you have made
it to board game territory, then you're part of pop culture. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Apparently I was reading about the rules players are they
cooperate rather than compete with one another to save the whales?
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Like games?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
I mean, that's definitely like difficult gameplay to come up with.
I would guess.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Yeah, they couldn't be like, all right, he's going to
play the whaler.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Right exactly? Everybody hates me.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
What was the pinnacle of the whole thing? Though, Chuck?
It came in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Oh yeah, as everyone who's listening to the show knows,
I know nothing of Star Trek, but I did know
the plot at least of Star Trek. What is that
for the voyage home, which is when the crew Captain
Kirk and his crew went back to save the whales.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, so that's I mean, yeah, a little game and
a Star Trek, not a Star Trek episode an entire
Star Trek movie dedicated to saving a whale. Saving the whales.
That was a pretty big deal. So yes, this thing
spread grew a tasta size, became part of just the
regular culture. There are comic strips that mentioned it, just
(28:18):
the casual mentions of it, the way it came up.
When you look back at it, you're like, yeah, this
was everywhere. I remember there's a Simpsons where Lisa develops
a crush on Nelson Mounts and she goes to visit
him at his house and he has a poster on
the wall that says Nuke the whales. Yeah, and she goes,
nuke the whales. He's like, got a nuke something, save
(28:40):
the nuke touche.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Yeah. I remember wearing We had Hippie Day in high
school once a year where you you know, pretty self explanatory,
and there was a picture of me, I believe, in
the yearbook wearing my little hippie outfit and my prop
was a little save the whales sign. So it was
you know, I wasn't stepping out and trying something original
(29:03):
by any means. It was like super And this was
the mid to late nineteen eighties at this point.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Right underneath it said Charles W. Bryant shows off his
hippie outfit. Also, he's the best all round boy.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
It probably said something like that, except for the last part.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, that was a big That was a big surprise
for you.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
Those yearbook captions.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
They were pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
I remember we had a yearbook in high school where
they misspelled tomorrow on the cover, say Tomory. It's a
t MMO r RW too many ms, too many, yes,
too many ms. I have my hands over my eyes
right now because I'm just cringing thinking about it. Like
(29:48):
they were. This was printed distributed before anybody noticed, like
they were done.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
That is on the editor in chief.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
And on the the teacher.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Yeah, the school sponsor.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
So okay, so I think we've established save the whales.
It spread throughout pop culture. People's sympathies like definitely started
to go toward the whales. But where the rubber meets
the road is whaling going to stop. You need to
go to the people who oversee stuff like this, like
entire governments and national bodies. And just like they did
(30:23):
in the thirties, they went back to the International Whaling
Commission and said, hey, guys, what do you think about
just stopping this, and the UNS a great idea in
the IWC said no.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Yeah, I mean I think the first try was they
proposed a ten year moratorium on whaling.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
What year was that, I don't have that in front
of me.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
It was nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Okay, yeah, so that was seventy two.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
The next year, in seventy three, the UN Conference on
Human Environment basically said, yeah, ten year moratorium. The IWC
rejected it, and then the next year, in seventy four,
the AWI called for a boycott of Japanese and Russian goods,
and that same year eighteen other conservation groups got on
board with that boycott. But again it would take I
(31:08):
think until nineteen eighty two before they got back to
real like voting on moratoriums.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah. So basically in nineteen yeah, nineteen eighty two, the IWC,
the International Whaling Commission basically said let's tick up this
vote again. I could not find what prompted this, so
I just have to assume it was just a general
awareness of saving the whales. So they voted again on
a moratorium and it actually passed this time, and so
(31:36):
they said, well, we'll give everybody four years to get
ready but in the nineteen eighty six season, the quote
was that the catch limits for the killing for commercial
purposes of whales from all stocks any kind of whale.
That's just me adding that parenthetical shall be zero. No
whales going to be killed in the nineteen eighty six
whaling season, and it passed. Twenty five nations said yeah,
(32:00):
seven said nay, yeah, And it came into effect in
nineteen eighty six, and the thing was chuck. It was
originally just going to be a temporary measure, and just
like in the tradition of the IWC and other whaling commissions,
the point was to allow the whale stocks to replenish
themselves so you could get back to whaling. But they
never lifted the moratorium. It's just continued indefinitely.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
Yeah, for sure. Should we talk about some of these
stats and then take our second break.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Oh my gosh, we haven't taken our second break. We
have not Okay, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
All right. So it had a big impact.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
Obviously, these moratoriums at its peak in the nineteen sixties,
I think I mentioned they were killing about eighty thousand
whales a year.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
In twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Three, the IWC estimated that eight hundred and twenty five whales,
down from eighty thousand, were killed by you know, obviously
only nations that object to the moratorium, and we'll get
to those after the break. And also this we should
point out, this doesn't include sort of the indigenous subsistence
whaling that continues, or I think kind of leaving that alone, right.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, I mean that only total three hundred and sixty
eight across four different indigenous groups in three different countries
that year. So all told, there was about twelve hundred
whales killed, and like you said, down from eighty thousand.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yeah, and since nineteen seventy eight, blue whale populations have
increased about eight point two percent per year, bowhead about
three point seven per year. Humpbacks I mentioned in Act
one were close to extinction. I think in the nineteen
sixties there might have been as few as five thousand,
and those babies are back over eighty thousand.
Speaker 4 (33:35):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yeah, So let's take our breakschalk, and we'll come back
and talk about how whaling still continues unfortunately.
Speaker 4 (33:42):
All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
All right, we're back, and I think we kind of
alluded to it a couple of times, but we are
not indigenous whaling using traditional methods for subsistence is in
no way in the crosshairs of basically anybody who is
opposed to whaling. Right, they don't even have crosshairs, Like
people actually use the whales that they kill to feed
themselves throughout the winter and stuff like that. Right, nobody's
(34:33):
really got problems with that. It's commercial whaling, that industrial whaling.
That's what everyone has a problem with, and it's still
going on. Some stocks that actually did come back have
started to become depleted again. And the way that it's
going on is because some countries said, we're lodging an
objection and we aren't going to comply with the whaling moratorium.
(34:55):
Those countries were Iceland, Norway, and Japan, I should say
are because they're all still doing that. And rather than
Japan saying we're just going to whale for commercial purposes,
they for some reason hid behind this one exception that
was made in the moratorium that you could kill whales
for scientific purposes, ostensibly to study them to help preserve
(35:18):
the whales, basically, right, And Japan's like, yeah, every whale
we kill using all of our commercial fleet, we're just
studying that for science and that's just not what they've
been doing.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
No, which is super shameful. And here's the other thing
is there's two big points we're going to kind of
hammer home. Here is in twenty twenty six, not many
people at all are eating whale meat, and they aren't
making a lot of money doing this.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
So they've done studies.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Only two percent of Norwegians reported eating whale meat at
least once a month. Consumption of whale meat in Japan
is one percent of what it was from its peak
in the nineteen sixties. And so in two six, Green
pieces like, we need to get some independent research together.
So they commissioned from the independent Nippon Research Center a
(36:09):
study that found that ninety five percent of Japanese people
very rarely or never eat whale meat, and they're stockpile
they have a stockpile of uneaten frozen whale meat, and
it doubled between two thousand and two and twoenty twelve.
So like it's this old it seems like it's this
older generation of nostalgia kind of digging in and all
(36:31):
of this younger generation is just like just you know,
once they die out, like no one's eating this stuff.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Anymore.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, theyre probably won't be whaling in twenty years, is
one way to look at it. Unless there's some weird
revival of a taste for whale meat among younger generations,
doesn't seem likely. There's really the younger people are not
into whale meat. The older people are because it's nostalgia
food that takes them back to their childhood. And you know,
(36:59):
post World War or two, when people ate a lot
of whale meat. Norway's basically the same way Norway, so
few people eat whale in Norway that basically one hundred
percent of Norway's whale catch is exported to Japan. And
yet you said, right, and Japan is like they have
(37:19):
that stockpile. The reason they have a stockpile is because
the Japanese government subsidizes its whaling industry to the tune
of fifty million dollars a year. So that means that
if you whale, you have a total guarantee that the
Japanese government will buy the whale meat that you come
and sell them, and the Japanese government just basically puts
it in a freezer. So those whales died for nothing
(37:41):
except for a handful of people that make some money.
And like you said, the amount of money that we're
talking about is relatively paltry when you're talking about an
entire global industry.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
Yeah, there was.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
In twenty eighteen, the US Naval Institute put out an
article that said, the global revenue, like the entire world
whaling industry revenue is about thirty one million bucks in
twenty twelve, And this is going, this is really going
to drive it home. Norway's largest whaling company made a
gross revenue of one point three million dollars, and they,
(38:14):
along with the lobby and the government, spent about four
times as much on campaigns to try to get people
to eat whale meat. Then they even netted with their
nation's largest whaling company.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Right, So, and it's not like if they were making
thirty one billion, that'd be a different thing. Forget the whales.
They're making a bunch of money. But like this should
be so easily overcome. Any reasonable person that seems like
who cares about animal life would be like, guys, what
are you doing. You're killing whales for thirty one million
dollars a year. Just stop. We can't find anything else
(38:50):
to do, right, And Japan seems to oppose it because
they resent the international pressure that's been put on them
over the years. Yeah, Norway seems to oppose it because
they have some non indigenous coastal communities who have a
tradition of whaling that they're just basically trying to keep
this custom alive for these small coastal communities. And again,
(39:10):
like I understand some people make their living like this,
but it's not like this is an amount of money
that could be subsidized in other ways by the government
that could spare the whales lives while also employing people
at the same rates that they're being employed by the
whaling industry.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, and Japan spite is not a good reason to
keep whaling. It's true, like we don't like this international pressure.
Everyone's trying to get us to stop that. So we're
not gonna stop it because just because you want us to.
I know, Norway, I think they eventually stopped in recent
years subsidizing the whaling industry, and I think in past
(39:50):
years that was about half the entire value of the
annual catch. So it's gonna definitely be going down in Norway.
And you know you got enough in your freeze, are Japan?
So like if you want to eat it, eat.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
That, right, Yeah. I mean, it's just it's bizarre, and
it doesn't seem like the Japanese. It doesn't seem like
something that would do.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
But it is an interesting conundrum from what everything I
know about Japanese culture and people. But you know, I
guess this is you know, a small part of that culture.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Yeah, everybody's got a little spie to them.
Speaker 4 (40:22):
Right, I mean, I know I do.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
So. Unfortunately, even if we just completely eradicate whaling, which
again I predict is gonna happen in twenty years, within
twenty years, God, I hope I'm right, there are other
threats to whales that have become like even bigger, Like
global warming is a big one. By catch, so like
a lot of whales die because they end up in
nets that are meant to catch other stuff like tuna,
(40:48):
so that I think a lot of them die that
way more than are hunted. And then ghost fishing. Remember
we did an episode on ghost fishing. Yeah, that's a
big problem for whales as well.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
You know, Ordinarily, in the past, Josh I would have said, well,
in twenty years, we'll let you know. But if I'm
still doing the show at seventy five years old. That
I'm not going to say something has gone really right.
That means something has gone really wrong. Okay, officially, fair enough,
I'm with you on that one. I'm not announcing my retirement,
but I'm not gonna do this till I'm seventy five.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Okay, all right, I'll hold you to that. Seventy two,
seventy three.
Speaker 4 (41:24):
No one wants to hear Abe Simpson.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
So I guess that's it. One challenge for conservationist now, Chuck,
I have to say is like you can't just say
stop global warming, stop by catch, stop ghost fishing. There's
all these different things. Before it was stop whaling, and
it was very successful. Like you said, it's often compared
to the ozone layer being tackled. The whales were definitely saved,
(41:53):
but there's still now other problems that we have to
work on too.
Speaker 4 (41:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
I mean, if you had, you'd have to have a
T shirt collection about bycatch and global warming and everything else.
Save the whales really just encapsulated everything nicely.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Or yeah, or you could put it all on one
T shirt, but you just walk around with a magnifying
glass to hand to people. So they could read your
T shirt.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Yeah, or maybe it just says equals and then on
the back save the whales.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Nice. Nice. I think that's it. Chuck just kind of
dropped his mike. You couldn't hear it because Jerry edited
it out, but I heard it, and that means it's
time for listener, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
All right.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
We also took another break while I reattached my mic
and I'm going to read this one. Hey, guys, near
the end of your recent Middle Class episode, you discuss
greenwashed recycling programs, and Chuck, I'm sad to say and
confirm that your instincts regarding car battery recycling are correct.
I've sent you an investigative piece by The New York
(42:51):
Times which uncovered the reality of the recycling of batteries,
namely that they are collected, shipped on freighters to another continent,
and then gnually broken down by an exploited workforce. Rather
than true recycling, it seems more of a resource harvesting,
where many of the components are smelted down in ways
that pollute the surrounding area and cause a lot of illness. Sadly,
(43:12):
I'm not sure where this leaves any of us as
to a better alternative when replacing our batteries.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
That is from Gabby, who says thanks for many years
of learnings and companionship man.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Why is everything so evil?
Speaker 4 (43:24):
I know it's sort of sort of not a great
time to be alive.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
You know, I've kind of come to the same conclusion, Chuck.
Very interesting time to be alive, But I think I
would trade interesting for stable and calm and happy and
yeah so evil.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Yeah that's the T shirt.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Equals save the Josh.
Speaker 4 (43:45):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Well, if you want to be like Gabby, thanks a lot, Gabby.
If you want to be like Gabby and send us
an email, that's a total downer. We're open to those
kind of things. You can send it off to stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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