Mini-Throughput: The Hope of Humping Humpback Whales

Screen grab of the whale rescue scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Paramount Pictures)

One of the themes I often return to when I blog about the environment is a kind of cautious optimism. It’s not that I don’t think about doomsday scenarios; it’s that I am keenly aware of how many doomsday scenarios have failed to doom. A story that came out last week about humpback whales was a great reminder of this.

When I was a kid, it was accepted that humpback whales were on their way to extinction. 90% of the creatures has been wiped out with the North Atlantic population down to a few hundred. The extinction of the whale formed the basis of the movie Star Trek IV and no one at the time thought the movie was engaging in wild speculation. The movie’s premise seemed grimly reasonable. The problem wasn’t just that whales were being hunted to extinction; it was that parts of the world didn’t want to do anything about it. Japan, Norway and the Soviet Union, in particular, were vehemently opposed to bans on whaling.

But then something amazing happened: the opposition to the whaling ban collapsed. The Reagan Administration got Japan to finally agree to a moratorium by threatening their fishing quotas in US waters. The Soviet Union collapsed. And the ban on whaling started to work. Whale populations have now recovered to about 80,000 individuals. Humpback whales are now listed as “least concern”. And the news I referred to? Australia is talking about removing whales from their list of endangered species because the frisky creatures are breeding like rabbits in areas that were once almost devoid of them.

I’d be lying if I said the recovery of humpback whales is typical. Most species come off the endangered species list because … they go extinct. Not every endangered species is a photogenic as a whale. But seeing one more country mark whales as no longer endangered is a reminder that we are not doomed to environmental catastrophe. We can choose a different path. And unless someone out there really misses whalebone corsets, we sometimes don’t even have to pay that big an economic price.

Whales are not the only positive news we have had in the last few decades. The ozone layer continues to slowly recover from the dramatic damage inflicted on it. With the exception of greenhouse gases, air quality continues to improve (although some Trump Administration rule changes may have reversed that trend). And none of this is coming at the expense of human progress. In fact, human wealth and environmental health have progressed together over the last few decades.

I want to focus on that last bit just for second. One of my favorite stories about the folly of environmental doom-saying is the Ehrlich-Simon bet. In 1980, Paul Ehrlich was immensely influential due to his book The Population Bomb. Business professor Julian Simon challenged him to a wager. He bet that not only would Ehrlich’s predicted disasters fail to materialize, but that humans would become more prosperous. The bet was that Ehrlich could pick any raw materials he wanted and any span of time and that the price would go down as they became more abundant. Ehrlich picked ten years and five minerals — chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. They bet $1000. And in 1990, Ehrlich had to write Simon a check for $576.

Since then, Ehrlich and his defenders have been trying to weasel out of his defeat, setting the end points at brief mineral crunches to try to pretend he would have won or proposing a second wager that had nothing to do with human prosperity. I sometimes have fun watching them squirm.

The point here is not that all environmental catastrophes are fiction. It only takes one to be real for everything to come crashing down. Nor is the point that human progress is inevitable; our successes on environmental issues have become because we acted. We banned CFCs. We banned whaling. We improved farming. We passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and enforced them. We shifted to less dangerous chemicals, etc.

The point is that doom-mongering about the environment might be fun, but is ultimately a waste of energy. Half of people ignore doom-mongering. Those who believe it give up hope. The approach to environmental issues is to see what can be done.

Our current moment isn’t a good reason to be optimistic. In the US, we have one party that has lost its mind and another party that never had one. Our ability to forge international agreements seems to have faltered as has our ability to strongarm countries — as Reagan did — into compliance.

But…the fate of the humpback whales seemed equally hopeless in 1986. Thankfully, it wasn’t. And the writhing masses of horny whales off the coast of Australia is living proof of that.