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Current policy approaches to manage whaling and protect whales are failing. Its time to try a new approach that combines economic pragmatism and ethical principles.
Since the beginning of the conservation movement in the late 19th century, decisionmakers facing environmental issues have struggled to square the impulse to respect natures dignity with more anthropocentric calculations of economic utility. It is a task that has often divided scientists, ethicists, and advocates who share a regard for biodiversity and ecological integrity, yet differ on how such goals are to be justified and promoted in policy discourse. This debate has evolved over the years as new conservation initiatives and policy proposals have taken center stage, but the core of the dispute remains relatively unchanged: Does viewing species and ecosystems as economic goods preclude seeing them as objects of moral duty? Will the use of economic valuation methods extinguish rather than encourage public support for environmental protection? Can conservation really be expected to succeed by ignoring economic incentives bearing on the protection of wild populations and ecosystems?
A recent proposal to create a "whale conservation market" has highlighted this stubborn ethics/economics divide in a very visible and contentious way. The whale market or "whale shares" idea presents an alternative to the traditional regulatory approach. By calling for the establishment of quotas that could be bought and sold, it allows conservation groups as well as whalers to purchase a fixed number of whale shares, thereby providing a mechanism for whale protection as well as managed harvest. The proposal is for the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to allocate the quotas to member nations on a sustainable-yield basis, which would permit buyers of whale shares to use or sell.
The whale shares idea was first proposed in the January 12,2012, issue of Nature by one of us (Gerber) and two other researchers: Christopher Costello, the lead author, and Steven Gaines, both at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The concept was intended to attempt to deal with what many conservationists view as a significant policy failure in international whale management. The IWC, charged with the global conservation and sustainable use of whales, introduced a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986 as a...