#whales
"In U.S.-Canada trade relations extinction is a policy choice. Just ask the right whale
There are approximately 380 North Atlantic right whales left on Earth. So named because their thick blubber and surprisingly relaxed response to being harpooned made them, according to Euro-American whalers, the 'right' whale to hunt.
They are one of the largest and rarest whales species on the planet. Broad-backed, charismatic surface-feeders with bulging black bellies and amiable attitudes, they are the pleasure-barges of the Eastern seaboard. This year, like every year, most of them will cross the Canada-U.S. border, cruising from their feeding grounds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to their calving grounds off Georgia and the Carolinas. They won’t carry passports: after all, what do laws and borders mean to a whale?
Every year, more than five hundred different species traverse the border, ranging in size from whales down to endangered monarch butterflies. The Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada classifies nearly a quarter of these species as being 'at risk.' Protection, for these species, is a patchwork of laws determined by province, state, county or municipality. A species may be legally endangered in one country, and legally invisible just across the border — a distinction that an animal is quite likely not to understand.
(. . .)
Canada has spent the last decade tightening protections for right whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence: a strictly enforced 10 knot speed limit to reduce collisions, a fishing gear-marking system with breakaway equipment to reduce entanglements, and mandatory closures and slowdowns throughout the Gulf when right whales are detected. Thanks to these efforts, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) reported this year that the population of right whales appears to be stabilizing after decades of decline.
South of the border, some of these same protections are set to be torn apart. The Trump administration seeks to eliminate speed limits on the Eastern seaboard. This is being framed as deregulation, although a speed limit strikes me as a much lower regulatory burden on coastal industry than, say, trying to understand an ever-shifting tariff landscape. It’s also a death sentence for right whales. Even with the speed limits in place, vessel strikes have killed at least twenty-three right whales in the last ten years. And with only seventy reproductively active females left in the right whale population, there’s not a lot of wiggle room for an experiment in deregulation. The proposed change is still only proposed, and is already the subject of multiple lawsuits opposing it — but the current of U.S. right whale conservation seems to be moving in a clear direction, and it is the opposite of Canada’s."
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/in-u-s-canada-trade-relations-extinction-is-a-policy-choice-just-ask-the-right-whale/article_ecc6dc12-e808-4878-88d4-66ddae4fa584.html
Levka
npub1x7…3emr8
2026-09-24 19:35:17 UTC
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2026-09-24 19:35:17 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "#whales \n\n\"In U.S.-Canada trade relations extinction is a policy choice. Just ask the right whale\n\nThere are approximately 380 North Atlantic right whales left on Earth. So named because their thick blubber and surprisingly relaxed response to being harpooned made them, according to Euro-American whalers, the 'right' whale to hunt.\n\nThey are one of the largest and rarest whales species on the planet. Broad-backed, charismatic surface-feeders with bulging black bellies and amiable attitudes, they are the pleasure-barges of the Eastern seaboard. This year, like every year, most of them will cross the Canada-U.S. border, cruising from their feeding grounds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to their calving grounds off Georgia and the Carolinas. They won’t carry passports: after all, what do laws and borders mean to a whale?\n\nEvery year, more than five hundred different species traverse the border, ranging in size from whales down to endangered monarch butterflies. The Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada classifies nearly a quarter of these species as being 'at risk.' Protection, for these species, is a patchwork of laws determined by province, state, county or municipality. A species may be legally endangered in one country, and legally invisible just across the border — a distinction that an animal is quite likely not to understand.\n\n(. . .)\n\nCanada has spent the last decade tightening protections for right whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence: a strictly enforced 10 knot speed limit to reduce collisions, a fishing gear-marking system with breakaway equipment to reduce entanglements, and mandatory closures and slowdowns throughout the Gulf when right whales are detected. Thanks to these efforts, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) reported this year that the population of right whales appears to be stabilizing after decades of decline.\n\nSouth of the border, some of these same protections are set to be torn apart. The Trump administration seeks to eliminate speed limits on the Eastern seaboard. This is being framed as deregulation, although a speed limit strikes me as a much lower regulatory burden on coastal industry than, say, trying to understand an ever-shifting tariff landscape. It’s also a death sentence for right whales. Even with the speed limits in place, vessel strikes have killed at least twenty-three right whales in the last ten years. And with only seventy reproductively active females left in the right whale population, there’s not a lot of wiggle room for an experiment in deregulation. The proposed change is still only proposed, and is already the subject of multiple lawsuits opposing it — but the current of U.S. right whale conservation seems to be moving in a clear direction, and it is the opposite of Canada’s.\"\n\nhttps://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/in-u-s-canada-trade-relations-extinction-is-a-policy-choice-just-ask-the-right-whale/article_ecc6dc12-e808-4878-88d4-66ddae4fa584.html",
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