Whale meat Again.

Being easily bored with TV there’s nothing I like better than settling down with a good spreadsheet of an evening. I’m sure Nostradamus would have been far less cryptic if he’d had Excel. Tonight for example I have quantified the sustainability of whales for the next 120 years; the big fat blubbery ones that is. Assuming a local Inuit population of 100 people start with a 100 local whales. I won’t bore you with the details, but if each person consumes 400Kg of whale meat per 10 yrs the whale population grows from 100 to 337 in 80 years, and even if their appetite grows to 470Kg there’ll still be 100 whales. My guess is the Inuit have a good feel for how much to take by how easy it to catch them. At 337 available whales it’s easy, at 100 it’s tough. But as there are no fat blubbery Inuit they’re obviously happy with 400 to 470Kg. Now if one entrepreneurial Inuit decides to take more to sell for profit they could easily go past the 470Kg sustainable limit and by 500Kg they’d ALL be fresh out of whales in 80 years. Obviously the whales aren’t going to up their birth rate just to supply this Inuit with extra blubber. So this one Inuit kills and sells today’s blubber for his profit whilst in effect stealing the future blubber available to the rest. Of course we all know about levels of sustainability, but look at the mechanism. The few individuals that unwittingly exceed the sustainable limit, just because they have the machinery to do it, extract their profit directly from the future resource available to everyone. They not only take what’s available, they take away the environment’s ability to regenerate it. One wealthy Inuit thus causes 99 Inuit to starve and his own profits to go the same way. So please tell all your Inuit friends to seek out and dissuade any of their number expressing an interest in buying a factory whaling ship.