CONSERVATION

Conservation of whales through research and education is the key objective of the Whale Conservation Institute.

Whales are compelling representatives of the natural world. The threats to their existence - the resumption of commercial whaling, the entrapment of cetaceans in drift-nets and the pollution of ecosystems by poisonous chemicals - attract the concern of people interested in conserving whales and the environment as a whole.

The struggle to conserve a species is never won permanently. The threats to a species need only to succeed once in order to destroy them forever. For conservationists to succeed, however, they must win every battle. This means that as new threats evolve so must the thinking of conservation organizations.

'A brief glance back'

Right whales once filled many of the bays and inlets on earth. They were in Delaware Bay, the Chesapeake and many bays on the European coastline. Diarists from the Mayflower marveled at the whales they saw as they entered Massachusetts Bay. The surfaces of all these bays were alive with the slow restful breathing of whales. Their sounds would have filled the bays and inlets for all but the last two hundred years of the twenty million years they have existed.

Now children, whose great-grandparents would have delighted in hearing these whale sounds, cannot even imagine what it was like such a short time ago.