Three Australian environmental activists from Forest Rescue with assistance from Sea Shepherd Conservation Society boarded a Japanese whaling ship, the Shonan Maru II, on a Sunday morning earlier this month.Their goal was to use non-violent demonstration to demand the ship leave, and to raise awareness of illegal whaling and the Australian government’s inaction on the issue. The activists boarded the whaling ship despite the “slim” possibility they could be taken to Japan with legal ramifications.  Japanese authorities questioned the trio and then released them about a week later to the Australian government at their request.

Were the actions of the three men successful beyond just the boarding of the ship? The Sea Shepherd’s founder Captain Paul Watson thinks so and wrote a blog titled, “Focusing Attention On Things That Matter Is Always Positive,” where he quoted Oscar Wilde, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” He went on to explain, “It was a huge success. Why? For precisely the same reason that Oscar Wilde articulated so brilliantly; and that is that people are talking about the issue, and whether that talk is either for or against the action, people are still talking about the issue. Even the Prime Minister is talking about it, as is the Prime Minister of Japan, and it was even discussed at the White House in Washington D.C.” The media attention and “the action has resulted in a surge of support for Sea Shepherd and Forest Rescue.” The Australian’s government’s chiding of the three men and focus on the hundreds of thousands of dollars the retrieval will cost taxpayers is not enough to slow the story down.

Two professors from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a marine scientist from Arizona State University think there is another way to end whaling to protect the dwindling whale populations and it would take the creation of a "whale-conservation market.”

The idea is presented in an article called, "A market approach to saving the whales" in a January issue of Nature.  Christopher Costello and Steve Gaines are professors of economics and marine science and Leah Gerber is a population ecologist and marine conservation biologist and they suggest "whale shares" be distributed in sustainable numbers to members of the International Whaling Commission. After distribution,“Recipients could then exercise them (by harvesting their quota), hold onto them for a year, or permanently retire them. The shares would be tradable in a carefully controlled global market. In the two most extreme scenarios, whalers could end up purchasing all the shares and harvesting whales at the established sustainable level, or conservationists might purchase all the shares, so that no whales would be harvested.”

In response to anti-whaling groups that think the plan will legalize whaling the authors say, “If quotas are set properly transactions would reduce the number of whales harvested, quite possibly to zero, unlike existing protocols, which seem to be increasing the catches."

After working out important details, like “agreeing on sustainable quotas and on how shares should be allocated”, the authors think the idea is practical and entirely possible.  They believe the “lack of a real price tag” on a whale’s life has caused whaling to continue because not all countries see the value of the whale equally. 

The idea is as non-violent as the recent efforts of the Australian activists whose respect and love for whales brought them to Captain Watson. Is there a place for a “whale conservation- market” in today’s global economy or is direct-action the only solution to a problem like whaling?