On October 29th, 2014, the Strauss Center and the Clements Center welcomed Dr. Kurk Dorsey at a joint event to discuss the history of Soviet whaling. In his talk, “When the Bear Picked Up a Harpoon: What Soviet Whaling Tells Us about the Environmental History of the Cold War,” Dorsey explained that while both the Soviet and Western capitalist models competed in the commodification of natural resources, the Soviet system’s lack of dissent led to far fewer checks on environmental destruction and yielded much worse environmental outcomes.

In his remarks, Dorsey explained the history of whaling and focused on the steep increases that occurred in the 20th century. He pointed to technological breakthroughs, like the exploding harpoon and floating factory-style whaling vessels, as well as an “insatiable demand” for whale oil-based margarine, in driving the increases in whaling activity. This surge in the 1930s and 1940s prompted the U.S. to call for a convention on whaling, which culminated in the creation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

While the IWC had the potential to provide a science-based regulatory system governing the oceans, constant and ubiquitous Soviet cheating undermined this potential. Dorsey explained that while the Soviets outwardly appeared to be complying with the quota system and other IWC rules, inwardly they were pursuing a course of destruction, the extent of which was revealed only years later. According to Dorsey, the consequences of Soviet dissemblance were devastating both for the whale population and for regulation of ocean resources more broadly.

Ultimately, Dorsey draws connections between Soviet participation in whaling to the larger Soviet experience in the Cold War, a topic he will cover in a new book project. He concluded that technology-driven militarization, a constant drive to commodify resources, and a lack of dissent led to a system in which bad ideas went unchecked and destructive behavior went uncorrectedcharacteristics that ultimately led to its downfall.

Kurk Dorsey graduated from Cornell University in 1987 with a BA, majoring in Biology and History, and he got his PhD in History from Yale University. He has taught History at the University of New Hampshire since 1994, focusing on U.S. foreign policy and environmental history. He was named the university’s outstanding assistant professor in 1999. In 1998, he published The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: US-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era, which was co-winner of the Stuart Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Last fall, he published Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas, which won the John Lyman book award in science and technology from the North American Society for Oceanic History. Whales and Nations uses material from Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Norway, Canada, and the United States to explain why all of the efforts to make whaling sustainable in the last century failed.

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