Here’s a rather excellent article in UK newspaper The Times from Ben Macintyre “Writer at Large”:
“As a child, I sat on a whale every day. Many years before I was born a 50-ton sperm whale had washed up on the Scottish coast near to where I grew up, and one of my relatives had cleverly fashioned a stool out of one of its enormous vertebrae. To a child, that bone-stool was a thing of wonder: a fraction of a creature of impossible vastness. I would scan the sea, imagining the great beast from which my seat had come, dreaming that another whale might one day burst the surface. It never did.”
…
“The whaling debate was stranded and picked clean long ago. It is a rotten thing, riddled with bad science, exploited loopholes, petty politicking, bribery, blind nationalism and human greed, both gastronomic and economic. But perhaps more alarming still, the whaling debate bears disturbing parallels with the looming battle over climate change, another issue on which the clarity of science is being hopelessly clouded by politics and narrow self-interest. The world has had 60 years to protect the whale for all time; there is nowhere near that long to find a way to rebalance a warming world.”