Friends of the Earth

Friends of the Earth is named alongside Greenpeace as an organization that helped open public eyes to the effects of commercial whaling. The book gives no organizational history, named members, or specific campaigns for Friends of the Earth; its significance here is its place in a wider conservation effort that challenged the division of the world’s whales among commercial interests and governments. The account’s central irony is that public attention and policy victories gathered force only after the industry had inflicted damage on a vast scale.

Public Attention and the Whaling Crisis

The book describes conservationists as demanding a voice in the work of the International Whaling Commission, which seemed to treat the world’s whales as resources it could parcel out. Friends of the Earth is included in the account of organizations that brought the horror of whaling to public notice. Acrimonious protests included blood being thrown over Japanese delegates, as well as direct action at sea; the text does not attribute either tactic specifically to Friends of the Earth.

That attention came amid a long industrial history. In 1859, Edwin L. Drake’s oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania signalled a new source of illumination and a decline in the sperm-whale fishery. Yet new technology opened other targets: Sven Foyn’s patented grenade harpoon, celebrated in his diary on Christmas Eve 1868, made it possible to pursue large, fast rorquals. In 1904, Norwegian and British steamships opened Antarctic grounds to supply whale material for nitro-glycerine. During the two world wars, fifty thousand whales were killed, while the South Atlantic humpback population was driven to extinction by 1918. These changes give the organization’s brief appearance a stark setting: awareness followed extraction that had already transformed whale populations and uses.

Conservation Gains and Their Limits

The account describes protection as piecemeal. Humpback whaling was banned in 1966, fin whales received protection in 1976, and sei whales in 1978. In 1982, the International Whaling Commission instituted a worldwide moratorium, though its implementation was delayed to give whaling nations time to comply. The book presents these measures as hard-won but incomplete: by the time conservationists had prevailed, the industry had already ground to a halt, making the victory a Pyrrhic one rather than a restoration of what had been lost.

The North Atlantic right whale illustrates the distance between formal protection and survival. It became the first cetacean protected from hunting in 1935, yet fewer than four hundred remained in the North Atlantic in the account, and their numbers had stayed static despite regulations. Ship traffic and fishing gear continued to threaten them; more than sixty per cent had been caught in fishing line. These details show why conservation cannot be measured solely by the passage of rules: a species may be protected from hunting and still face severe pressures in the waters it inhabits.

The Stakes Beyond Individual Animals

The book also frames whaling as the loss of social knowledge, not only the taking of individual animals. Studies cited in the account describe cetaceans as problem-solvers that use tools, experience joy and grief, and pass abilities through cultural transmission. Hal Whitehead warns that twentieth-century whaling may have destroyed knowledge about how to use particular habitats, while the slow-breeding sperm whale population was growing at only one per cent a year. In this wider argument, public advocacy matters because the costs of extraction include knowledge and social structures that cannot be recovered simply by ending a hunt.

The scale of the crisis reaches beyond whaling itself. The book reports an average loss of one hundred plant and animal species a day and notes that, between the beginning and completion of its writing, the Yangtze River dolphin was declared extinct. It predicts that right whales in Cape Cod Bay could also disappear by the end of the century. Friends of the Earth is not credited with a particular intervention or outcome in these passages; rather, its brief mention locates it within the public response to a crisis whose causes, consequences, and remaining risks extend well beyond any single campaign.