International Whaling Commission

The International Whaling Commission is presented as the principal international body attempting to limit commercial whaling, but its history is defined by the distance between regulation and enforcement. Established in 1946, it introduced successive restrictions as catches escalated; commercial pressures, disputed quotas, and countries acting beyond its agreements repeatedly compromised those efforts. Its eventual worldwide moratorium was a landmark, yet it arrived after enormous losses and could not remove the dangers whales faced from human activity.

Formation and limits of regulation

First convened by President Truman in Washington, DC, in 1946, the commission was headquartered in Cambridge, England. Its work developed against the scale of modern industrial whaling: between 1910 and 1958, recorded annual catches rose from 1,303 Fin whale and 43 Sperm whale to 32,587 Fin whale and 21,846 Sperm whale. Those totals register more than an increase in killing. They reveal the difficulty of governing an industry whose technological reach and commercial incentives were growing faster than international controls.

The commission took successive steps to restrict whaling, but, in the account presented here, good intentions could be overtaken by commercial pressures and unsustainable quotas. From 1951 to 1970, Soviet fleets took more than three thousand Southern right whale outside international agreements, while reporting only four to the commission. Humpback whale catches showed a similar gulf between declared and actual totals: Russia reported just over two thousand animals, while the figures cited in the book put the number killed at more than 48,000. The discrepancy made the problem more than a matter of setting rules. The institution depended on information and cooperation from whaling nations, while violations and false reporting weakened the basis on which protection could operate.

Restrictions amid international conflict

At its tenth meeting, held at The Hague in 1958, the commission extended an existing prohibition on killing Humpback whale in the North Atlantic and part of the Arctic Ocean, and limited Humpback whale hunting in the Antarctic. Those measures did not bind countries outside the organization. The book describes Holland and Norway withdrawing from the convention after failing to obtain what they regarded as reasonable quotas, even as Japan expanded its fleet and whale meat strengthened the industry’s commercial appeal there. The commission’s decisions therefore operated within a contested international system, not above it.

The political and economic pressures were especially visible in the treatment of quotas. For the 1967–68 Antarctic catch, the limit was set at 32,000 Blue whale unit. That measure translated different species into a common accounting scale: one unit represented one Blue whale, two Fin whale, two and a half Humpback whale, or six Sei whale. The system made catches administratively comparable, but the comparison also exposed the logic of management through extraction: animals became interchangeable quantities in an allowable total. At the same time, the average size of whales caught was declining, and the effort required to find and take one was increasing, signs that the hunted populations were being depleted.

As Rorqual populations in the Antarctic diminished, fleets turned again to Sperm whale, including females and breeding stocks in warmer waters. In 1965, after finding substantial evidence that size regulations were being widely broken, the commission prohibited Sperm whale hunting between latitudes 40 degrees north and 40 degrees south. That same year, however, the killing reached its historical peak: 72,471 whales. The sequence sharpens the account’s central irony. A regulatory response could be adopted while the broader machinery of whaling continued at a scale that made the need for regulation unmistakable.

From restrictions to moratorium

Growing public attention brought the commission under increasing criticism. Conservationists challenged its authority to parcel out the world’s whales, while organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth helped bring the consequences of whaling before a wider audience. Protests included the throwing of blood over Japanese delegates and direct action at sea. By the time the horror of the industry had become broadly visible, however, the account emphasizes that the damage was already extensive and that the industry had largely ground to a halt by the time conservationists won their campaign.

The restrictions accumulated in stages: Humpback whale whaling was banned in 1966, followed by protections for Fin whale in 1976 and Sei whale in 1978. In 1982, at the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, the commission instituted a worldwide moratorium, delayed to allow whaling nations time to comply. The measure eventually took effect in 1987, with exceptions for aboriginal subsistence hunts among Inuit populations in Greenland, Russia, and Alaska, Makah people in Washington State, and residents of the Caribbean. The moratorium was a decisive change in international policy, but the delay and exceptions also underline that it was neither instantaneous nor absolute.

What regulation could not settle

The book presents the moratorium as a major achievement and a qualified one: protection was piecemeal, and the commission could not shield whales from every form of human harm. By the time the moratorium took effect, populations had been reduced on a vast scale. The account also identifies continuing dangers that international whaling rules did not resolve: noise pollution that could damage hearing, chemical pollutants passed from mothers to calves, entanglement in fishing gear, plastic ingestion, changing ocean conditions, and the loss of food sources. Whales moving through international waters and different legal jurisdictions remained exposed to human activity beyond the reach of any single conservation measure.

The commission’s record is thus neither a simple story of failure nor one of rescue. It created a forum for restrictions and helped establish a global moratorium, but its rules repeatedly met evasion, conflicting national interests, and the practical limits of regulating a mobile animal across political boundaries. The book’s sharpest criticism concerns the mismatch between the scale of the threat and the pace and authority of the response: while whales were treated as a shared resource with no single owner, no nation had a direct interest in bearing responsibility for their survival. The moratorium changed the terms of the debate, but it could not restore populations, lost cultural knowledge, or the ecological conditions already damaged by decades of exploitation.