Whaling used to be one of the biggest industries in the entire world, but with the discovery of oil as a means of powering machinery, it began to fall behind as an industry. In those days, whales were slaughtered to near extinction.These days, whales are on the rebound, at least some species are, and everyone understands that whaling is something that our civilization no longer needs to do. However, whales still do suffer due to our habits of destroying the oceans for our own purposes.
In regards to whaling, there are still countries that still use whaling as an industry, and all of them should no better considering how progressive they can be on other environmental initiatives. These countries are Norway, Iceland and Japan.
In 1986, a complete stop to commercial whaling was put in place. However, this initiative left open a loophole that allowed whaling to be done for scientific research. Japan did not support this until the United States threatened economic sanctions. Japan has signed this agreement but Norway, Russia and Iceland have not. Japan stopped commercial whaling in Antarctica, but they started their own research program called JARPA, which used the loophole of the initiative to kill whales using the same boats, crew and equipment that had been in commercial whaling before the ban. In Japan, far more whales are killed than could logically be killed for scientific research.
World Against Whaling was created by a user of YouTube as a means to create a central petition website that would link together all anti-whaling organizations and campaigns to one site. This allows computer users to come to this site to see all the organizations and campaigns going on to stop whaling around the world. Operating under the banner of "Together we can stop whaling", this is a great site to support a ban on whaling.
For our 202nd day of Our Green Year, we are joining this website and spreading the message of what a great site it is. We urge you to visit here if you are curious about whaling organizations and their efforts to get a complete ban on whaling. While the website is small now, every great initiative must start with baby steps before it can eventually change the world.
