LA TIMES– No one was surprised when conservation organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council challenged the anti-environmental policies of President George W. Bush. But it’s a shock to many when we part company with the Obama administration.

It happens. And it’s happening right now on the question of what to do about commercial whaling and, more specifically, whether to maintain the 25-year-old moratorium against the killing of whales for profit. Last week, the International Whaling Commission announced a proposed 10-year deal, spearheaded by the Obama administration, that would suspend the moratorium and allow whaling countries to kill whales legally for commercial purposes for the first time in a generation.

There’s no disagreement between the council and the administration about the fact that the moratorium is one of the singular environmental achievements of the 20th century. Before it was adopted, on average an estimated 38,000 whales were being killed each year. Since the moratorium, that number has dropped to about 1,240, and whale populations have begun, little by little, to rebound.

There’s no disagreement that whales are among the most extraordinary creatures ever to inhabit the Earth. And there’s no disagreement that we need to protect them, or that many of the large whale species covered by the proposed agreement — humpback, fin, sperm, sei and Bryde’s whales — are depleted or near extinction.

The problem is how best to protect them.

The Obama administration argues that the whaling moratorium should be suspended because it has loopholes that are being illegally exploited by Japanese, Norwegian and Icelandic whalers. They believe that after 25 years of conflict within the International Whaling Commission, commercial whaling should be legalized in the hope that, by bringing the killing out into the open through agreed-upon quotas, a consensus eventually will emerge in support of a phase-out of whaling altogether.

Read full article about Obama to Re-Open Commercial Whaling.

© 2010 LA TIMES

Joel R. Reynolds is a senior attorney and director of, among other programs, marine mammal protection at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles.

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