By Brian Rothschild

Michael J. Moore

We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. 224 pp. Illustrated. Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-2268-0304-3, $25.00; paperback, ISBN: 978-0-2268-2399-7, $18.00..

The Earth’s ability to sustain life is limited by a burgeoning human population that now exceeds 8 billion. Natural resources are being depleted, food security is threatened, water supplies are dwindling, and both natural capacities and human technologies to dissipate or eliminate waste have shrunk. Additionally, climate-related physical structures of the oceans and atmosphere have been modified while social and economic divides between rich and poor are increasing and bellicosities continue to erupt with consequent environmental and social costs.

Addressing any of these issues is a major, complex societal task and we can hope that at least some steps toward solutions can succeed. One approach is to consider case studies that exemplify specific challenges and illumine a way forward.

Michael Moore in his We Are All Whalers—the plight of whales and our responsibility develops just such a case study focusing on threats to the survival of great whales from hunting and other human actions such as collisions with ships and entanglements in fishing gear. The book is written from the perspective of a scientist and veterinarian. It embraces not only the life history and vital rates of whales, but also Moore’s personal life events that led him to train as a livestock veterinarian and then shift his career focus to whales.

While many scientists have studied whales and their habits, a veterinarian’s viewpoint is unique. To Moore, whale population mortality is not an anonymous statistic. It consists of the deaths of particular animals whose lives he knew via whale spotting and tracking and finally necropsy. This makes every whale’s death a poignant loss that clearly generated grief and a feeling of responsibility that could not remain silent in the author.

Moore acquaints the reader with his subject by describing some of the marvelous adaptations that whales as marine mammals have evolved to exist in the ocean environment. For example, some species attain huge sizes, and in fact exceed weights of the largest dinosaurs. Some species have circulatory systems allowing them to remain submerged for hours at great depths. Baleen whales, weighing tons, concentrate their diet on tiny plankton. Some species exhibit unique feeding, social behaviors, and interwhale communication facilitated by highly evolved acoustic transmission and reception capabilities.

Hundreds of thousands of these highly evolved animals have been killed over the millennia by coastal societies and later by long distance pursuits, like the Basque whalers who hunted the northern seas in the 15th century. Whaling accelerated in the 19th century; the hunting of whales for oil, food, ambergris, baleen and spermaceti reaped investors huge fortunes in New England. This period was marked by mass slaughter of whale populations which depleted many to near extinction levels e.g., the Pacific gray whale, the bowhead and the North Atlantic right whale. While some species have recovered in abundance from the curtailing of harvesting—either as uneconomical or through legal frameworks—other species remain at diminished levels challenging their population integrity and functioning in ocean ecosystems. The northern right whale is one species at risk, and is a major concern of this book.

Moore describes the development of legal frameworks and institutions such as the International Whaling Commission and the Marine Mammal Commission whose business is to protect whales by mitigating human impacts on them world-wide. However, the story is not one of complete success. While whale hunting has been reduced dramatically, commercial whaling is still allowed in countries such as Iceland, Norway, Japan, and aboriginal subsistence whaling in the U.S. Whale mortality from ship strikes and entanglements are harder to mitigate with increased international trade via shipping and increased fishing activities both inshore and offshore. These latter relate to the increase of human pressure on all aspects of our environment related to human needs or perceived needs.

These concerns form the backbone of Moore’s story. One of his fundamental questions, is: “What is worse for a whale—an explosive harpoon or entanglement?” adding, “One of the biggest surprises of my life is that the answer to this question is neither obvious nor clear-cut.”

In this question Moore shifts focus from mortality statistics to the ethics of killing these highly evolved and sentient living creatures. Moore’s participation in necropsies records the gruesome trauma that is perpetrated by effects of grenade-tipped harpoons, ship strikes, and entanglement.

Moore’s last chapter, “Taking the Long View,” focuses on right whales and their death by entanglement and slow immobilization from the wrapping lines leading to starvation. He points to the irony that, “…Today there are many more fishermen, managers, right whale conservation biologists, and lawyers concerned about and committed to changing the critically endangered status of the North Atlantic right whale, than there are such whales.” He ties his argument to what we might term “climate change”. The nineteenth century whaling era developed knowledge of the spatio-temporal location of whales and their habitats that is preserved in archived voyage log books. Such information is being mined today to develop conservation strategies to reduce shipping impacts on whale feeding grounds and migration routes. Reducing entanglements has remained problematical. But Moore’s schema seems to be working to some extent. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that last year only one North Atlantic right whale was killed by entanglement.

How to guide human interactions with whales to positive outcomes is not straightforward. With regard to future generations looking back on us, Moore poses two different judgements:

First: “How could they all have been so short-sighted as to demand affordable lobster and crab and cheap shipping of goods from overseas, despite the fact that they knew that the North Atlantic right whale was headed for extinction? All that we have now are the bones of a few skeletons hanging up in museums up and down the east coast of North America.”

Or second: “Finally, they all saw that there was a way for whales, fisheries and ships to coexist. It just took some legislative, regulatory, and political honesty and fortitude, enforcement of existing regulations, government investment, compromise, industrial ingenuity, and consumer education.”

Obviously, we would all vote for the second, but the “just took” predicate is a mighty proposition.

Consumerism is not the only societal factor. Social mores can come into the mix. One example is the harvest the U.S. allows of bowhead whales, which consists of several depleted populations, by indigenous people for cultural preservation. While Moore clearly opposes the killing of whales, he supports this harvest of bowheads, while other whale conservationists are opposed to the quota.

This is another case in point of balancing human societal determinism with our planet’s welfare and