Despite the best efforts of activists, more whales are killed now than two decades ago. To people who think killing the majestic creatures is wrong, it's a tragic state of affairs – but perhaps markets could sort it out.

That's the premise of a controversial proposal floated Jan. 11 in the high-profile journal Nature. Hunters could buy the right to kill whales. Conservationists could pay to save them.

"At worst, you end up with a sustainably caught number of whales that is well-studied. At best, you'd have whales taken off the market," said environmental economist Christopher Costello of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Costello's proposal comes 25 years after the International Whaling Commission outlawed commercial whaling. The ban has proved difficult to enforce: Norway and Iceland openly defy it, while Japanese hunters operate under the guise of scientific research.

Approximately 1,600 whales, mostly fin and minke, are killed each year by hunters from those countries. Another 350 are killed by hunters from indigenous Arctic communities. Altogether, about twice as many whales are killed now as were killed in the early 1990s. To Costello and his co-authors, biologists Steve Gaines and Leah Gerber, this represents a failure of current conservation approaches.

Certainly the impasse between pro- and anti-whaling forces has proved difficult to break: Conflict is less about the survival of species – minke and fin whale populations are relatively healthy – than the ethics of killing any whales at all. The researchers hope that a market could at least provide a common ground, with, "You're wrong!" replaced by, "How much are they worth to you?"

The proposed market would be patterned after a system known best known from fisheries management as catch shares: Sustainable harvest levels are quantified, a maximum quota established, and catch allotments put up for sale by the International Whaling Commission. Costello's proposal would add the crucial wrinkle of allowing activists to buy shares, too. If they did, a corresponding number of whales would be removed from the quota. (Indigenous groups would receive a set number of shares to be owned in perpetuity, apart from the market – though those could conceivably be sold, too.)

Minke whale. Photo: Martin Cathrae/Flickr

According to Costello's estimates, global whaling profits amount to $31 million, and likely less when government subsidies are removed. Mainstream anti-whaling groups – Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and the World Wildlife Fund – spend about $25 million to fight the hunts.

"This money could be used to purchase whales, arguably with the same or better effect," write the researchers in Nature.

Of course, another difference between proposed whale markets and fisheries catch shares is fundamental nature of whales. The best-studied species are extraordinarily intelligent and highly social, possessing culture, possibly language and perhaps even the capacity to forgive. Sperm and humpback whales fit any reasonable definition of personhood that doesn't hinge on being human; many other whale species probably do, too, except they haven't been so formally studied.

Against this perspective, any whale killing is wrong, and a whale market would only institutionalize an immoral practice.

"The authors have the premise wrong. The division between the pro- and anti-whaling factions is not fundamentally over an environmental difference, it is over a philosophical one. Are whales 'persons' who should be treated as persons, or are they resources?" said Hal Whitehead, a Dalhousie University biologist who has studied whales since the late 1970s.

Continued Whitehead, "Trading resources is fine, and although those on that side might quibble about features of the proposed system, it could work. Trading persons is basically slavery, although in this case rather worse than slavery, as the slaves, once bought, are to be killed."

Costello's team thinks that argument is principled but impractical. "Unless all nations can be convinced or forced to adopt this view, whaling will continue," they write. In conversation, Costello rejoined, "We've been trying the same ideas for 30 years and haven't been effective. Here we're presenting a new idea to reduce whale deaths, and they're digging in their heels."

"We do need fresh approaches," said Patrick Ramage, whale program director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare. But Ramage said that fresh approaches are now being tried, with the "if we hug them harder, the whales will survive" campaigns of the 1970s giving way to negotiations with local groups.

"The case needs to be made to decision-makers in Tokyo, Oslo and Reykjavik, who are going to decide to end whaling for reasons that make sense to them," Ramage said. "The idea that we somehow get to avoid this difficult work is a delusion."

According to Ramage, modern commercial whaling depends for its existence on government subsidies. On this point, at least, he and Costello agreed; but whereas Ramage sees subsidies as evidence that whaling as an industry is vulnerable to continued pressure, Costello sees an advantage for conservationists.

"I had a prominent conservationist say to me, 'What's it going to cost to buy 1,000 whales and take them off the market? And I said, 'It's hard to know, but let's say $20 million.' He said, 'I can have that money tomorrow,'" said Costello. "The profits of whalers don't exceed the funding of anti-whalers."

To be sure, a number of details remain to be worked out: What would the IWC do with the money raised by selling hunting rights? If whales were taken off the market, but whalers persisted in hunting, how could that be stopped? "The idea that an Ayn Rand free-market solution will just magically arrive like Venus on a half shell, and that problems will be resolved, is unrealistic," said Ramage. "Real efforts are just not that simple."

"Conservationists say they don't want to put a price tag on a whale," Costello said. "But right now, the price of a whale is zero."

Citation: "A market approach to saving the whales." By Christopher Costello, Leah R. Gerber and Steven Gaines. Nature, Jan. 12, 2012.