It advanced our moral imagination. It gave us the capacity to conceive of the rights of nature -- endangered species, wilderness, rivers -- and brought forth the idea that things and places and creatures are worthy of continued existence in their own right, not because of what we might use them for.

This radical notion, advanced in 1875 by John Muir, had its most famous expression in our time circa 1970 in the commandment "Save the whales!," the birth cry of the modern environmental movement.

That's why this is a good time to reflect. Because whatever else was born with the birth of that moment and whatever else has come from it since, that original impulse is surely on the verge of death. The International Whaling Commission is meeting this week in South Korea, and when the gavel comes down on that proceeding, it may bring the hammer down on the future of the order cetacea and any hope of saving them. How we got to this point is an instructive history of the constriction and corruption of the moral imagination that the environmental movement brought forth.

In 1982, the IWC took the unprecedented action of declaring a moratorium on whaling, with zero quotas on all whale species, granting four years for whalers to get into another line of work before the ban took effect. It did not do so out of a sudden rush of compassion or remorse, but because the environmental movement, in the span of a decade, had created the world opinion that forced them to, and because the IWC had tried everything else and nothing worked.

That same year, The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea affirmed that cetaceans are likely intelligent, sentient, communicative beings; to be classified as a "special status" species subject to conservation measures beyond those taken to preserve fish stocks.

The IWC was created with the intention of conserving whales to ensure the survival of the whaling industry, and then failed to do so in spectacular fashion, instead providing definitive proof that whale hunting cannot be "managed." Between 1959 and 1973, Russia's factory fleets reported killing 37,275 sperm whales in the North Pacific. The real catch records (each ship kept two sets of books) later disclosed an actual kill of 66,950 sperm whales. Much of this gargantuan sleight-of-hand occurred with an international on-board IWC observer system in place.

Nothing was halting the slide into oblivion of the largest animals the world has ever produced. The IWC was forced to pull the emergency brake. The slide was slowed. But the whaling nations are now arguing -- as they began arguing two years after the inception of the moratorium -- that the whales have recovered. They've had plenty of time to bounce back from 150 years of industrial slaughter, and they are eating a lot of fish, so it's time to get back to business and also thin the herd.

The source of growing alarm for many activists are not these absurd, oft-repeated claims, but the fact that the United States government and several big green groups are acting as though they agree with these arguments while continuing to claim steadfast opposition to the return of commercial whaling.

The U.S. and allied governments and non-government organizations have a number of rational arguments for falling in line behind the formal plan to re-start world-wide commercial whaling, known as the Revised Management Scheme (RMS). The moratorium, they point out, is leaking like a sieve. Japan, Norway and Iceland are already killing hundreds of whales every year and are getting impatient with the IWC because it has taken so long to draft the RMS. The World Wildlife Fund has backed the plan as a "safety net," framing the issue not as an argument over whether any nation should be engaging in the lethal exploitation of whales, but as a necessary "completion of a strong management system for whales to replace the current weak and outdated one." Most of the strategically-inclined don't go this far, simply believing that going along with the process confers some influence over the process. They hope the RMS will never be implemented, remaining a theoretical model.

In 1994, the US, UK and Netherlands delegations spear-headed the effort on the theory that it was a necessary appeasement of Norway and Japan in order to secure the establishment of the Southern Ocean (Antarctic) Whale Sanctuary. This deal was promoted by none other than Vice President Al Gore, who, in an October 1993 memo to the Prime Minister of Norway, pledged to "join you in working in good faith within the IWC to complete all aspects of the Revised Management Scheme." Gore secured provisional adoption of the hunt protocol for the Scheme at the May 1994 meeting of the IWC in Mexico, where the International Fund for Animal Welfare dismissed the shaky math concocted to generate the protocol's "sustainable" kill figures that could be plugged into the RMS, but supported its provisional acceptance anyway in the name of compromise.

Meanwhile, the government of Japan has been steadily buying the IWC votes of Third World countries with "fisheries aid." This year, figuring in the compromise contingent, they think they may have the votes to install the RMS and overturn the moratorium.

Are the U.S. government and fellow RMS proponents correct in believing there is simply no alternative to this plan? Four events from the recent past suggest otherwise.

In 1991, at its 18th General Assembly in Perth, Australia, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) resolved that the IWC should "maintain the existing moratorium on the commercial killing of all whale stocks indefinitely." The meeting was attended by representatives of governments, non-government organizations, research institutions, and conservation agencies from 118 countries. The resolution, along with its numerous scientific bases, was endorsed by the Global Cetacean Coalition, an alliance of 60-plus national and international NGO's in two dozen countries.

In 1996, more than 100 UK Ministers of Parliament signed a motion calling for the moratorium on commercial whaling to be extended for at least another fifty years. Shortly thereafter, the Australian government's National Task Force on Whaling recommended to the Environment Minister that Australia "work towards the insertion in the [IWC] Schedule of a commitment to a fifty-year moratorium, using a precedent such as the Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty (on exploitation of mineral resources.)"

By 1997, the group Breach Marine Protection UK had gathered ten million signatures on a "Popular Resolution on the Abolition of Inhumane Commercial Slaughter of Whales," which was formulated in the language of a UN treaty, calling for a permanent ban on commercial and "scientific" whaling and the establishment of a global whale sanctuary in all the oceans of the world. In 2000, Breach Marine succeeded in getting whales onto the agenda of the UN Millennium Forum --1,350 representatives of 1,000-plus non-government and civil society organizations from more than 100 countries -- with an initiative that called for the establishment of an International Convention for the Conservation of Cetaceans (ICCC), a new iteration of the IWC with the goal of keeping whales alive, minus the goal of resuming their slaughter.

And in 2001, the government of Japan received a letter signed by 73 prominent Japanese organizations, including the Japan Wildlife Conservation Society, the Japan Consumers' Union, the Elsa Nature Conservancy, the Hokkaido Animal Conservation Society, and Japan Animal Welfare Society. They informed their nation's leaders that "the consumption of whale meat is not an indispensable part of the Japanese diet," the government's insistent claims to the contrary. They demanded that Japan "stop killing whales in the name of science," cease using fisheries aid to buy the pro-whaling votes of other countries at the IWC, alert consumers to the health risks of eating chemically contaminated whale meat, and "stop using the taxpayer's money to propagate biased reports designed to promote whaling."

The foregoing would seem to indicate that there are options available other than go-along/get-along and the Revised Management Scheme. But those alternatives, expressing the will of the people and their representatives in both whaling and non-whaling nations, don't seem to be getting through to the political appointees annually dispatched to the IWC's horse-trading sessions.

With the tide of world opinion and history overwhelmingly against them, the governments of Japan and Norway are on the verge of winning a return to commercial whaling. This is happening for one reason: They have no inclination whatsoever to compromise, and their opponents do.

Cetacean Society International is one of the groups pushing back against instinct to compromise. "Many NGOs, behaving as if they were actually nations with influence," it notes, "have defaulted to the queasy position of supporting the US position and an RMS that limits the killing as much as possible. However, can anyone deny that if the IWC agrees to allow commercial whaling to all members, the future killing will be far more uncontrollable and unenforceable than the past? It is certain we will see decades of species recovery vanish before the killing can be stopped. CSI cannot support any RMS as a matter of principle, and we are convinced that our members did not join us to support commercial whaling."

This is a test case. Twenty-three years ago, the world's dominant species agreed to stop killing another species even though doing so meant foregoing a profit. This agreement was reached strictly on the basis of delayed gratification to secure the enjoyment of future slaughter-based profits. Fifty years hence, we may see a shift in the mindset which accepts a concept such as "The numbers say it may now be safe for us to kill X number of whales from Y species," to one that accepts an idea such as "They all have the right to be left in peace."

For that to happen, a way must first be found to keep the whales around. If we get lucky again and the RMS is narrowly thwarted this week, we might contemplate future alternatives to the path of compromise and collapse. Nothing prevents other governments from engaging in Japan's favorite tactics: Buying the IWC memberships and votes of small nations, threatening to pull out of lucrative trade deals with other IWC member nations unless they vote the right way, etc.

But ultimately, beyond strategy and tactics, a leap is required. We have made such leaps before, based on radical ideas; that people should not own other people, women should be able to vote, wilderness should be protected. Many were angered by these ideas and many arguments were made to the contrary. In none of these instances were all contemporaries ever convinced of the rightness of the action. But in the end, the leap was made.

In a 1991 American Journal of International Law article ("Whales: Their Emerging Right to Life"), Anthony D'Amato and Sudhir Chopra wrote that the policies of international institutions concerned with whaling may someday evolve to the point of acknowledging that "we owe a duty to living creatures in the environment per se, without calculating their utility to future generations of human beings. The dawning of such a sense of duty involves a broadening of humanistic consciousness comparable to the Copernican revolution that changed the Ptolemaic earth-centered conception of the universe to the modern realization that ours is but a minor planet revolving around a minor star in only one of billions of galaxies."

The push for compromise and the establishment of a Revised Management Scheme for hunting whales will not bring about that dawn. In the absence of the vision and the will to enforce a moratorium, impose sanctions and save the whales, instead the day will come when the whaling fleets will expand and the factory ships will invade every ocean on earth. Pirate whaling and smuggling operations -- dispensing with fine distinctions between "recovering," "threatened" and "endangered" -- will thrive concurrently with legalized global trade in whale meat. The transnational interests that have fished down the food chain in every ocean on Earth, depleting one fishery after another in the name of quarterly profit reports, will turn their eyes to the species at the top of that food chain.

Should that day dawn, as it may this week, the conscience of our species, which thirty-five years ago lurched upward in a long struggle up a difficult path, will darken, shudder, and slide back.

Andrew Christie is an environmental activist in San Luis Obispo, CA. An expanded version of this article was previously published as "Their Darkest, Finest Hour" by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

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