The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [19]
THE SAD STORY OF THE SEA
Perhaps the ecosystem that has been most depleted of its animals in the modern era is the least visible one: the sea. While disappearances on land are comparatively easily studied and recorded, what goes on beneath the waves is an enduring mystery, and humans have traditionally—and tragically—viewed the sea’s bounty as limitless. History once again provides a cautionary tale: The whaling industry, for example, managed to reduce cetacean populations once in the hundreds of millions to near extinction in just a couple of centuries. The sheer scale of the effort was enormous: In the mid-nineteenth century, when many Atlantic whale species had already been exterminated, some 650 whaling ships operated in the Pacific, employing 13,500 seamen.19 Southern right whales saw their population reduced to as few as 25 breeding females by 1925,20 after nearly two centuries of devastating slaughter: A low-end estimate is that 150,000 were killed between 1770 and 1900.
Today the eastern North Atlantic right whales are marked as “critically endangered, possibly extinct” on the IUCN Red List, while in the western Atlantic a population of about 300 individuals qualifies merely for “endangered” status.21 Several are still killed each year by collisions with ships and through entanglement in fishing nets. As each species was destroyed in turn in its primary areas, the industry moved farther afield, killing whales from Antarctica to the Galápagos Islands. Calving grounds were often targeted: Congregating mothers could be killed while at their most vulnerable and calves captured too or left to starve. Each population was exploited to near-extinction. Most whales are slow-breeding, and with reproduction rates of 1–3 percent per year the economically rational whaler would gain more benefit from driving the species to extinction and investing the profits elsewhere (to accumulate interest at perhaps 5 percent a year) than leaving any alive in the sea.22 Such is the remorseless logic governing the unregulated capitalist exploitation of nature.
As technology improved, so the slaughter worsened. Steam ships could pursue and kill the fastest species, while factory ships could process carcasses at sea without having to call at a port. One after the other, blue, sei, fin, humpback, sperm, and minke whales were wiped out over most of the ocean. New whaling grounds would be exhausted at most after a decade, sometimes from one year to the next. All told, the twentieth century saw the slaughter of about 3 million whales, leaving only between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales in the whole world. The killing goes on still, thanks to the “scientific whaling” loophole (more like a chasm) in the current International Whaling Commission (IWC) system. Norway, Iceland, and Japan continue to kill whales today using the fig-leaf of scientific research, and these countries and their allies have recently tried to overturn the whaling moratorium altogether at the IWC. While it is plausible that stocks of smaller whales like minkes can support a sustainable annual catch, there is a stronger case for leaving the whales alone altogether until their numbers—and the marine ecosystem generally—can properly recover.
Although no whale species were driven to outright extinction, some marine animals have been extinguished completely. The Steller’s sea cow, a gentle and intensely social Pacific species, was wiped out for its meat and blubber in the mid-eighteenth century. The great auk—a flightless penguin-like seabird that