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Welcome to Stuff.
You Should Know a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
Um, talking about saving the whales.
Which chuck?
I don't know about you, but for me that was like a big, a big part of my childhood, so this is a little bit nostalgic for me.
Yeah, i mean, if you're, I grew up under a rock in the 1970s.
That is not the case.
You did live on a gravel road.
That's true.
There were rocks involved.
I lived among rocks.
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 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 campaigns across any genre in history.
Wow.
Wow.
It was that ubiquitous.
Yeah, it was super ubiquitous.
I think you caught more of it than me even.
Like the stuff that I caught was a little bit of the after wash.
I don't know.
Like remember that thing?
You were living, well, no, it was still a thing.
But I think the peak, I missed the peak and you were living right through it.
Because the 70s were like when this really 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 yep, they started Save the Whales.
It almost just kind of bubbled up into the collective consciousness movement and a bunch of 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.
Yeah.
And we're going to talk a little bit about the actual saving of the whales.
We're going to 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 the word, save the whales, that did not come about in the 1970s.
That became a thing.
And I mean, the phrase dates back to the 1800s, like the 1880s.
But it really became a thing in the 1920s when whale conservation was first a little flicker on the radar of
I mean, what would be early conservationists?
But in 1928 there was a momologist group that had a Save the Whales meeting in Washington DC and that's when it really kicked off as far as, like you know, there were buttons and there was there was a satirical poem about written about how ubiquitous it was in the 1920s and 30s.
So it was definitely a big thing early on.
Yeah, and in those articles, I think Anna helped us with this one.
She dug up some articles from the 20s about those meetings and they were likening saving the whales to the bison populations that almost went extinct 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 U.S.
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 1920s and 30s, 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 dog with the 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 industrial whaling that started in like the middle of the 20th century.
Yeah, I mean, they started having, you know, literal cannons mounted on the side of a ship that would shoot exploding harpoons.
And by the 60s, they were taking 80,000 whales a year.
Yeah, blue whales neared extinction, plenty of others in like grave danger.
I am taking my first trip to Nantucket this summer and they have a whaling museum there that I'm going to go to.
I've never even been to that part of the country really, so I'm eager to go, not to celebrate whaling, but just as a sort of historical museum kind of thing.
Emily has already said that she won't be going.
No, I can understand that.
It would be kind of hard to take for sure.
Yeah, but I mean, I imagine it's fairly interesting.
It's just a blip in time, but it's not.
I doubt if they're trying to sell you on whaling, or at least I hope not.
Right, right.
Remember when.
That's great about Nantucket.
That is like to dirty limericks what Enya is to crosswords.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a nice pull.
So a good comparison here is like, like I said, New Bedford Massachusetts, that area Nantucket, Cape Cod, I guess.
Sure.
They they this was like the seat of whaling internationally in like the mid 19th century.
And over this basically this decade of American dominance of whaling.
They took 100,000 whales.
Now what you're saying is that by the 60s 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 20s and the 30s were worried about whales going extinct before using the kind of antiquated original whaling techniques?
This new stuff was really a threat to them.
Yeah, for sure.
And you know the 70s.
It sort of merged with the post 60s crunchiness to really become a big thing.
But going back to the 30s, in 1930, 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 big time.
And so 22 nations signed an 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 1931.
You know what else I saw, too?
Something else that saved the whales in the first half of the 20th century was the invention of the light bulb, because people didn't need whale oil for lamps anymore.
Yeah, I mean, I guess we should say that.
They whaled 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.
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.
Yeah, let's –
Stop whaling some so we can keep whaling.
Exactly.
So that was the first one, 31.
37 came along and 10 nations signed on to another one called the International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling.
Also put some more limits.
It banned blue humpback, fin and sperm whales under certain lengths. but it was still declining.
So in 1946, 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.
Right.
And they did that in 46 again with 14 member nations.
But the 46 one, you know, aligned or I guess the 37 aligned with World War Two.
So they they were like, we can't go without this oil like at this time.
So it just it didn't really have any teeth.
Yeah, not only that, they needed meat.
So they weren't in a position, the world wasn't in a position, after World War II, to be like no, 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 II.
So, yeah, those agreements were kind of like, no, this isn't going to work right now.
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 version of whaling right.
Yeah.
So because there was just a lot more money to be made.
So the people who finally started the Save the Whales campaign in the 70s 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.
Yeah, for sure.
But it was, like I said, kind of the right time coming out of the 60s.
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 so we can keep whaling, like this was a legitimate, like hey, these things we're realizing are intelligent.
And that started happening in the 1950s, like finding out that whales were smart.
Yeah.
Thanks to a Navy engineer named Frank Watlington was a really big change.
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 baleen 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 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 1970.
Songs of the Humpback Whale.
Have you listened to it?
Oh, yeah.
Like most of my adult life.
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, right?
Yeah, Brian Eno had nothing to do with it.
Right.
So I can't imagine this was released in 1970.
I can't imagine, between 1970 and 1980, how much acid was dropped listening to the album songs of the humpback whale man.
It was like made for it.
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.
Yeah.
OK, sure.
Let's give it a shot.
All right, here we go, everybody, with Songs of the Humpback Whale on SYSK.
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 rumbly ones.
Wow.
What an album, right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's the only multi-platinum album of animal sounds, which is completely believable.
Yeah.
I can't imagine there's too many more.
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.
Right.
But if you if you just go listen to it, it's only like a half hour or 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.
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.
These are really super smart animals to be protected.
Right.
And so in environmental ease, they became ambassador animals for the ocean as a whole.
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.
That's right.
Should we take a break?
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing.
So Jinx, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
You owe me nine Cokes.
Oh, gosh.
All right.
I'm going to go to the store and we'll be right back.
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All right, we're back, everybody, after a delay that you don't need to even know about, right?
It's our business.
Yeah.
None.
Yeah.
So Save the Whales is kicked off in the 70s.
And I think you mentioned earlier on it's it's, you know, sometimes 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 1971 when the Animal Welfare Institute got together with the Fund for Animals to officially launch the 1970s version of the Save the Whales campaign.
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.
Yeah.
In just a few years, they started a pretty big boycott.
I think in 1974, 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 18 other groups signed on.
And I think five million Americans said, yes, no Russian goods, no Japanese goods.
Let's save the whales.
Hot damn.
For real.
They got benefit concerts together.
I know David Bowie in 1972 had a very he headlined a very famous Save the Whales benefit concert.
You know, 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.
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, Greenpeace came around.
Yeah.
And you know a lot of this early stuff was very just sort of local roots oriented, like in the mid 70s the Connecticut Cetacean Society, just like literally went from town to town in Connecticut with Save the Whales events and places like Mendocino, California.
I had the Mendocino Whale Festival and founded the Mendocino Whale War.
So it's like 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.
Yeah, and there were different ways of doing this.
Some were like, we want to go basically confront whaling ships where they're whaling.
Other people are like, we just need to raise awareness and raise money.
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 right on.
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 70s was that T-shirt.
In 1977 there was a woman named Maris Seidenstecker who had been selling these shirts for like three years, like really successfully since, I think, 1974.
And she was 16 years old and, in 77, founded because of the success of these t-shirts, founded her own conservation group called Save the Whales.
Yeah, she had a small ad in 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 Seidenstecker II because her mother was Maris Seidenstecker I.
That's unusual, but pretty cool, huh.
Yeah, usually that would be junior.
Well, you just don't usually see that with women.
It's mostly men, you know?
Well, it's because men are the only people who think their name means something.
Well, sure.
The Seidenstecker women stuck their thumb in the eye of the patriarchy is what they did.
You put it on this building or on my parking spot.
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 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.
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, that's not just like hey, let me make this shirt like bumper stickers and shirts and buttons are a big part of any kind of movement like that.
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 concert was where he turned the corner.
What year was it?
72.
Okay.
It was supposedly a pretty good concert.
He had Lou Reed 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.
I wish I could have been there.
That's a big regret for me is Bowie.
He's on the short list of dudes I never got to see and had a chance to, you know?
He's on the time machine list?
Yeah, like a really regrettable one, because he was around and 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 stopped playing shows in Atlanta when I was.
I don't think they played there after.
I was like seeing concerts.
So, you know, I see.
I see.
So that's not as regrettable as Bowie.
Yeah, because I had the chance to see Bowie and did not take it.
I understand.
He's never going to leave us is what I thought.
Bowie will never die.
Bowie rules.
Bowie lives.
Yeah, very sad.
So one of the tactics that actually kind of emerged from this Greenpeace 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 – Yeah, it is very corny.
Nowadays you're like well yeah, of course you're going to do something like that if you're an activist campaigning to say save an animal.
The mind bomb was basically like showing people – unfiltered photographs of what is actually going on, 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 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.
Yeah.
And there was.
There was one particular adventure that they went on, that kind of started it all and was in newspapers all over the country.
It was in April of 1975 aboard the Phyllis McCormick boat.
Twelve activists got on that 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 loudspeakers in Russian to beg them to stop killing whales.
Uh, 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 speed boats like the little raft boats and followed it around like a lot closer uh that you could do in those boats and like took some pretty horrifying pictures that.
Like made a like.
These close up pictures of harpooning whales made a big, big difference in the campaign.
Yeah, I saw just like that Bowie concert being where he turned the corner.
Supposedly this is where the Save the Whales effort really turned a corner.
To like, it was again international news.
There were plenty of newspapers that put 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 took off and spread not just from Greenpeace but to other groups, not just animal conservationists.
And Greenpeace continued on.
The ship that I grew up with that they used to do this with was the Rainbow Warrior.
Remember that one?
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 took off.
Right, exactly.
In 1975.
Yeah, I was like, oh, man, is that what's coming?
Yeah, I totally remember the Rainbow Warrior.
I didn't know you grew up on that boat, but that's pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah.
My dad was a mate.
He was a matey on the 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 eventually.
We need to shout out Australia, because they had a Greenpeace affiliate called the Whale and Dolphin Coalition.
That was, like you said, kind of doing the same thing.
They're like, hey, this is a really effective deal.
So let's get out there.
And and we didn't say why I thought it was corny.
Mind bomb is because they would blow people's minds.
Exactly.
With their pictures.
For sure.
And they did.
But again, it is a very corny way to put it.
That's right.
But that would be stepped up even more because, you know, Greenpeace gets a little more aggressive.
And then there's always one more like the Brad Pitt group and 12 Monkeys.
It's like, no, they're not even taking it far enough.
We need to actually, well, I guess sort of engage in sabotage.
Yeah, this one I associate with the 90s, the Sea Shepherd.
They were a conservation society founded, I think in 1977, by a guy named Paul Watson who had been a Greenpeace member.
It was like, you guys are corny.
I'm out of here.
I'm going to do something like like, actually significant, not just follow whalers around and take pictures.
He followed whalers around and tried 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.
Yeah.
He said, mine bombs are effective.
Real bombs are more effective.
Pretty much.
I mean, they used at least one bomb on, I think, a ship called the Sierra, right?
Yeah.
Well, they rammed the Sierra a couple of times with their boat and damaged it.
And then a few years later or I know, I guess one year later, that was 79 in 1980 is when they planted an underwater bomb and sank that thing.
And like you said, many others.
Yeah.
And just to be clear, Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society they've never injured a single person.
Right.
They've never been indicted for breaking any law.
These are pirate whaling ships.
They're operating completely outside of the bounds of international law.
Like agreements where they're hunting endangered species that are off 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 big deal that these people are out there.
And 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 feeling pretty good about what he's doing.
Yeah.
And they, you know this wasn't like hey, we're going to.
I mean, it was definitely awareness, but like it, it put an actual dent in the whaling industry, like they sank completely.
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 40 something.
So yeah, another thing that he did, he would put out bounties on other pirate whaling ships.
There was one called the astrid And the owner of the Astrid eventually just sold it because he couldn't trust the crew anymore that they weren't going to sabotage it and take the 25000 reward because he definitely wasn't paying them 25000 right.
And then there was one other 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 going to stop doing illegal whaling.
That's right.
And he also he had that great line about mine bombs not being as effective as real bombs.
He also had one about loose lips.
And I think you can just fill in the rest.
That's right.
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 70s.
And it was like a legitimate pop culture phenomenon.
I mean, it was right up there with, like, Where's the Beef in the 1980s, ironically.
Yeah.
As far as like slogans that people knew and wore on shirts and put in songs like Judy Collins and Kate Bush both sampled that Songs of the Humpback Whale as awareness and because it sounded cool.
There was a Save the Whales board game in 1978.
And we can tell you firsthand if you have made it to board game territory, then you're part of pop culture.
Yeah, apparently I was reading about the rules.
Players are, they cooperate rather than compete with one another to save the whales.
I like cooperative games.
I mean, that's definitely like difficult gameplay to come up with, I would guess.
Yeah, they couldn't be like, all right, who's going to play the whaler?
Right, exactly.
Everybody hates me.
What was the pinnacle of the whole thing, though, Chuck?
It came in 1986.
Oh, yeah.
As everyone who's listened to the show knows, I know nothing of Star Trek, but I did know the plot at least of star trek.
Uh, what is that?
For the voyage home, which is when the the crew, captain kirk and his crew went back to save the whales?
Yeah,
So that's I mean yeah, a board 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 everywhere. grew, metastasized, became part of just the regular culture.
There were comic strips that mentioned it.
Just 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 Muntz.
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 to nuke something.
Save the nukes.
Touche.
Yeah, I remember wearing.
We had hippie day in high school once a year, where 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 by any means.
It was like super.
And this was the mid to late 1980s at this point.
Right.
Underneath it said Charles W. Bryant shows off his hippie outfit.
Also, he's the best all-around boy.
It probably said something like that, except for the last part.
Yeah, that was a big surprise for you.
Man, those yearbook captions.
They were pretty bad.
I remember we had a yearbook in high school where they misspelled tomorrow on the cover.
Did it say Tamari?
It's a T-O-M-M-O-R-R-O-W.
Too many M's?
Too many.
Yes, too many M's.
I have my hands over my eyes right now because I'm just cringing thinking about it.
This was printed, distributed before anybody noticed.
They were done.
That is on the editor-in-chief.
And on the teacher advisor.
Yeah, the school sponsor.
So, OK, 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 in the 30s.
They went back to the International Whaling Commission and said hey guys, what do you think about just stopping this?
And the U.N. said, great idea.
And the IWC said no.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the first try was they proposed a 10 year moratorium on whaling.
What year was that?
I don't have that in front of me.
It was 1972.
OK, yeah.
So that was 72.
The next year in 73, the UN Conference on Human Environment basically said yeah, 10 year moratorium.
The IWC rejected it.
And then the next year in 74, the AWI called for a boycott of Japanese and Russian goods.
And that same year, 18 other conservation groups rejected. got on board with that boycott.
But again, it would take, I think, until 1982 before they got back to real like voting on moratoriums.
Yeah.
So basically in 19, yeah 1982, the IWC, the International Whaling Commission, basically said let's take up this vote again.
I could not find what prompted this.
So I just have to assume it was just general awareness of saving the whales.
So they voted again on a moratorium and it actually passed this time.
And so they said, well, we'll give everybody four years to get ready.
But in the 1986 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 1986 whaling season.
And it passed.
Twenty five nations said yay.
Seven said nay.
Yeah.
And it came into effect in 1986.
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.
Yeah, for sure.
Should we talk about some of these stats and then take our second break?
Oh my gosh, we haven't taken our second break?
We have not.
Okay, yeah, definitely.
All right.
So it had a big impact, obviously, these moratoriums at its peak in the 1960s.
I think I mentioned they were killing about 80,000 whales a year.
In 2023, the IWC estimated that 825 whales, down from 80000, 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.
Yeah.
I mean that only totaled 368 across four different indigenous groups in three different countries that year.
So all told, there was about 1,200 whales killed.
And like you said, down from 80,000.
Yeah.
And since 1978, blue whale populations have increased about 8.2 percent per year.
Bowhead about 3.7 per year.
Humpbacks I mentioned in Act I were close to extinction.
I think in the 1960s there might have been as few as 5000, and those babies are back over 80000 now.
Yeah.
So let's take our break Chuck, and we'll come back and talk about how whaling still continues, unfortunately.
All right.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
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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 crosshairs, the whales that they kill, to feed themselves throughout the winter and stuff like that, right.
Nobody's 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.
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 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.
No, which is super shameful.
And here's the other thing is there's, there's two big points we're going to kind of hammer home.
Here is in 2026.
Not many people at all are eating whale meat.
And they aren't making a lot of money doing this.
So they've done studies.
Only 2% of Norwegians reported eating whale meat at least once a month.
Consumption of whale meat in Japan is 1% of what it was from its peak in the 1960s.
And so in 2006, Greenpeace was like, we need to get some independent research together.
So they commissioned from the independent Nippon Research Center a study that found that 95 of Japanese people very rarely or never eat whale meat.
Their stockpile.
They have a stockpile of uneaten frozen whale meat.
Then it doubled between 2002 and 2012.
So like it's this old, it seems like it's this older generation of nostalgia kind of digging in, and all of this younger generation is just like just you know, once they die out, like no one's eating this stuff anymore.
Yeah, there probably won't be whaling in 20 years is one way to look at it, unless there's some weird revival of a taste for whale meat among younger generations, which 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 post-World War II, when people ate a lot of whale meat.
Norway is basically the same way.
So few people eat whale in Norway that basically 100 percent of Norway's whale catch is exported to Japan.
Yeah, and they're not even really eating it.
Right.
And Japan is like they have that stockpile.
The reason they have a stockpile is because the Japanese government subsidizes its whaling industry to the tune of 50 million 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 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.
Yeah, there was – in 2018, the U.S.
Naval Institute put out an article that said the global revenue, like the entire world whaling industry revenue, is about 31 million.
And in 2012 – and this is going to –, this is really going to drive it home – Norway's largest whaling company, made a gross revenue of 13 million.
And – they, along with the lobby and the government, spent about four times as much on campaigns to try to get people to eat whale meat than they even netted with their nation's largest whaling company.
Right.
So and it's not like if they were making 31 billion, that'd be a different thing.
Forget the whales are making a bunch of money.
But like this should be so easily overcome.
Any reasonable person, it seems like who cares about animal life would be like, guys.
What are you doing?
You're killing whales for $31 million a year.
Just stop.
We can't find anything else to do.
And Japan seems to oppose it, because they resent the international pressure that's been put on them over the years.
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, like I understand some people make their living like this, but it's not like...
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.
Yeah, and Japan, spite is not a good reason to keep whaling.
It's true.
Like, oh, we don't like this international pressure.
Everyone's trying to get us to stop that, so we're not going to stop it 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 years, that was about half the entire value of the annual catch.
So it's going to definitely be going down in Norway.
And, you know, you got enough in your freezer, Japan.
So like, if you want to eat it, eat that.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just it's bizarre.
And it doesn't seem like the Japanese doesn't seem like something they would do.
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, you know?
Yeah.
Everybody's got a little spite to them, right?
I mean, I know I do.
So unfortunately, even if we just completely eradicate whaling which again, I predict is going to happen in 20 years, within 20 years,
God, I hope I'm right.
Um, there are other threats to whales that have become like even bigger.
Like global warming's a big one.
Bycatch.
So, like a lot of whales die because they end up in nets that are meant to catch other stuff like tuna.
Um, so that I think a lot of them die that way more than are hunted.
And then, um, ghost fishing.
Remember we did an episode on ghost fishing.
Um, that's a big problem for whales as well.
You know, ordinarily in the past, Josh, I would have said, well, in 20 years, we'll let you know.
But if I'm still doing this show at 75 years old, then I'm not going to say something has gone, really right.
That means something has gone really wrong officially.
Fair enough.
I'm with you on that one.
I'm not announcing my retirement, but I'm not going to do this till I'm 75.
Okay.
All right.
I'll hold you to that.
72, 73.
No one wants to hear Abe Simpson.
So I guess that's it.
One challenge for conservationists now, Chuck, I have to say is...
Like you can't just say stop global warming, stop bycatch, stop ghost fishing.
There's all these different things with 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, but there's still now other problems that we have to work on, too.
Yeah.
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.
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.
Yeah.
Or maybe it just says equals and then on the back, Save the Whales.
Nice.
Nice.
I think that's it.
Chuck just kind of dropped his mic.
You couldn't hear it because Jerry edited it out, but I heard it.
And that means it's time for listener mail.
All right.
We also took another break while I reattach my mic.
And I'm going to read.
This one.
Hey guys, near the end of your recent middle class episode, you discussed 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 Times which uncovered the reality of the recycling of batteries, namely that they are collected, shipped on freighters to another continent and then manually broken down by an exploited workforce.
Rather than tree 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, I'm not sure where this leaves any of us as to a better alternative when replacing our batteries.
That is from Gabby, who says, thanks for many years of learnings and companionship.
Man, why is everything so evil?
I know.
It's sort of not a great time to be alive, is it?
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 not so evil.
Yeah, that's the T-shirt.
Equals save the Josh.
That's right.
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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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And on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
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In 2023.
Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms.
Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
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Greg Gillespie and Michael Marangini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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