Bevington - ˜Theœ Rebirth of Environmentalism Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear

The Marine Mammal Protection Act became law in the 1972. It reflected a high level of public interest in the welfare of whales and dolphins. One key impetus for the Marine Mammal Protection Act was the revelation that hundreds of thousands of dolphins were being killed each year by the U.S. tuna fishing fleet in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. There the fishers would deliberately encircle dolphins in nets because large schools of tuna were often found swimming with the dolphins. Although the fishery did not seek to harvest the dolphins, many were killed when they became entangled in the nets and drowned. It was estimated that about 5 million dolphins were killed this way in the late 1950s and 1960s.

In response, a bill called the Ocean Mammal Protection Act was introduced in Congress in 1971. The prospective legislation was notable for its comprehensive ban on the killing of marine mammals and the importation of marine mammal products. At first the bill attracted significant political momentum, but then it ran into opposition from a coalition of conservation groups representing wildlife managers, including the National Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund. Wildlife managers objected to the comprehensive moratorium, which was seen as divergent from the maximum sustained yield approach that had dominated wildlife management up until that time. The coalition succeeded in derailing the Ocean Mammal Protection Act and replacing it with a less restrictive bill called the Ocean Mammal Management Act, which sought to manage marine mammals within a sustained yield approach, while exempting the tuna fleet from these regulations. This bill was poised to be passed by the House of Representatives in December 1971 when a last minute flurry of media outreach by Friends of Animalsa small animal rights organization with one person on staff in DCled to Washington Post and New York Times editorials against the Ocean Mammal Management Act. The bill was subsequently defeated.

Then in 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act was introduced as a compromise bill, combining elements of both the Ocean Mammal Protection Act and the Ocean Mammal Management Act. It became law by the end of the year. The Marine Mammal Protection Act returned to a moratorium approach, but included various exemptions, including a provision allowing for a long phase-out period for the dolphin bycatch of the tuna fleet. As a result, tens of thousands of dolphins continued to be killed by U.S. fishers each year through the 1970s and 1980s. Thus in the case of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, two of the national environmental organizations (National Audubon Society and World Wildlife Fund) played a counterproductive role that led to a weakening of biodiversity protection compared to the original legislation. Moreover, the much more problematic legislation originally promoted by those two organizations was defeated by a small animal rights group, Friends of Animals, rather than any of the established national environmental organizations.