Those who sail the seas alone, with only the birds and the flying-fish for company, have been returning to port with a disconcerting message for the world.
Competitors in the BOC Challenge, the single-handed round the world race, reached Newport, Rhode Island at the end of last month in a mood of gloomy unanimity. "There has been a massacre out there. The seas are turning to desert," said Kanga Birtles of Australia. "They are almost empty of wildlife but it is only idiots like us that seem to be noticing it."
Robin Davie of Britain, who had 20 years of service in the merchant navy before competing in the race, shared Birtles' concern. "Apart from an eight-strong school of whales off Bermuda, I saw nothing during the first stage across the Atlantic to South Africa. When I sailed from England to Cape Town and back in 1981-82, there were numerous occasions when schools of dolphins 10, 20 or 30 strong would play around the yacht for hours. Not to have seen a single dolphin from Newport to Cape Town this time is quite simply unbelievable."
Some of the yachstmen admitted that they had difficulty in filling in forms given them by the Worldwide Fund for Nature to record the different species, because they had seen so few. What they did see, in plenty, were vast Asian, Soviet and east European fishing fleets working the shoals off South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the Falklands.
Many environmentalists believe that we are seeing in the world's oceans the unfolding of a classic parable of man's greed: the tragedy of the commons. Where a resource is owned in common, or has no owners at all, competing demands by individuals seeking to maximise their own returns can impoverish everybody by destroying the resource itself.
The problem is not new, as the meeting this week of the International Whaling Commission in Reykjavik testifies. The heroic days of the whaling skippers setting out after the creatures with simple equipment and raw courage are long past; today nobody would dream of writing the great American novel about the hunt for Moby Dick. Hollywood once made films about big-game hunting; now it concentrates on soft-focus weepies about women who go and live with gorillas.
But is the new enlightened attitude any more rational than the old hunting instinct? "Save the Whale" is a nice slogan, but we need to be clear about whether it means saving the species or every single member of it. The IWC was set up to regulate whaling on scientific principles, not to ban the hunting of every whale. John Selwyn Gummer's anguish at whaling's brutal methods may well be sincere but it is certainly misdirected, for the IWC has never pretended to be the society for the prevention of cruelty to whales.
The scientific evidence suggests that hunting for the minke whale, the smallest but most numerous of the species, could resume without threatening its survival. Even if this week's meeting temporises and imposes further delay, the logic of the IWC is that hunting is permissible if the stocks allow it. The longer whaling is banned, the larger the stocks become, and the stronger the argument for resuming the hunt.
How the IWC resolves the conflict between those who want to regulate whaling and those who want to ban it will have important implications for other species. So far, nobody has launched an organisation to save the cod, though it is a fine species and the methods used for catching it are hardly less cruel than the explosive harpoons that kill the whales. The evidence is, though, that humbler species are at least as much in need of friends as the great cetaceans, and if we cannot successfully regulate the hunting of whales, we probably cannot prevent the tragedy of the commons taking place in the world's oceans.
Dolphins and porpoises are being killed in huge numbers, perhaps as many as 1.5 million a year, many caught in the long drift nets that are set to catch tuna. Last week, the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency claimed that most of the world's dolphin populations might be extinct within our generation, though the truth is that nobody knows how many there are or how quickly they are being killed.
Stocks of fish have also shown worrying declines. Off South Georgia in the south Atlantic, fishing may have to be banned after the disappearance of Antarctic ice fish, for reasons so far unexplained. In the North Sea, haddock and cod stocks are in danger of exhaustion from overfishing, despite restrictions on catches set by the European Community.
All around the world, the fishing industry is in trouble. Since the end of the second world war, the total take of fish has risen from 20 million tons a year to 100 million, which appears to be close to the maximum the oceans can provide. The point may have been reached when modern fishing methods, too efficient for their own good, are destroying whole fisheries by reducing populations beyond the point of no return.
There are two approaches to averting the tragedy of the commons. Conservatives say that the problem arises because ownership of the threatened resource is obscure, so that nobody has the incentive to protect it. Their solution is to fence the common land, establish ownership, and compensate those who are displaced. At sea this is hard to arrange, although the extension of coastal fishing limits to 200 miles provides an example.
Liberals, more optimistic about human motivation, appeal to the common interest as a basis for establishing rules designed to restrain individual greed. In the vastness of the oceans it is difficult to enforce such rules, but there appears to be no sensible alternative.
The IWC is one of the better examples of this kind of international agreement, which is why it is important that it should not be forced to attempt things beyond its competence. The whales will be better protected by a functioning IWC than by the free-for-all that would result from its destruction. Friends of the whale should tread carefully this week.
