Socially conscious films try to entertain and affect the way we lead our lives.
Sometimes, the film wants us to pull the appropriate lever on election day (“Fahrenheit 9/11”) or conserve natural resources (“An Inconvenient Truth“).
The 1986 film “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” sent out an APB to save the humpback whales. The story follows the “Trek” crew attempting to bring two humpback whales from the 20th century past into the present to stop a probe from destroying the Earth.
WWTW reached out to Cheryl M. McCormick, Executive Director of the Calif.-based American Cetacean Society (ACS), to see just what impact, if any, the film had on this particular whale population.
McCormick, whose group served as consultants on the film, cautions it’s hard to measure the film’s influence due to several factors unique to whale populations.
In the mid-80s, the “Save the Whales” campaign was pervasive in the global environmental movement, McCormick says. The film also came out roughly the same time as when the International Whaling Commission established an international moratorium on commercial whaling.
“My instinct is to bet that the film didn’t serve as the catalyst for any major, independent change in humpback whale conservation, per se,” she says. “I think it’d be safe to bet as well that it probably didn’t change anybody’s mind about whales – but maybe it did intensify the anti- and pro-whaling interests.”
Countries including Japan, Iceland and Norway hunt whales primarily to provide domestic markets with whale meat, she says. Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling occurs when indigenous tribes – such as the Makah, Alaskan tribes and Greenland natives – are allotted an annual quota of whales by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), she says, even though those tribes don’t all target humpbacks.
In the last week alone Greenland killed its second of nine allotted humpback whales, she reports.
The humpback whale species (Megaptera novaeangliae) consists of many distinct populations, but as a whole these whales have started to recover – slowly – since many were aggressively hunted during the 1950s and early 1960s.
She says recovery rates are difficult to nail down, in part, because humpback whales undertake annual migrations between high-latitude summer feeding areas and low latitude winter breeding areas.
Populations that enjoy protection in places like the U.S. eastern seaboard during feeding stops in the Stellwagon Bank may migrate north near nations without hunting laws, like Greenland.
“Humpbacks that migrate along the east coast of Australia were hunted to near-extinction in the 1950s and early 1960s, but since this time there has been an apparent rapid increase in the population,” she says, adding surveys show a high but steady rate of increase in the size of the population since 1981.
Yet another, non-migratory population of humpbacks in the Gulf of Oman are “critically endangered” with the last count being as low as 82 individuals.
(Photo credit: Top, right – Humpback whale image courtesy of Michael Daniel Ho; Bottom, left – Executive Director of the Calif.-based American Cetacean Society (ACS) Cheryl M. McCormick)
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with Ms. McCormick’s assessment. Film, as a general rule, tends to make emotional points rather than logical or factual ones. So while environmentalist and anti-war movies tend to make people aligned with those causes feel even more passionately about them, they haven’t done much to preserve the environment or end war.
Likewise, while “Farenheit 9/11″ definitely inflamed anti-Bush passions (here in Seattle, one liberal couple walked out of the movie so angered that they went on a rampage, smashing and painting over every pro-Bush sign they could find), but I’ve never met or heard about anyone whose opinion was actually changed by it.
One exception was “An Inconvenient Truth,” which managed to snooker a large number of people into joining the green movement because (a) it focused solely on presenting facts, even though they were unreliable ones, and (b) most people simply didn’t know that much about the subject, so it was easy for the film to manipulate them.
Maybe the value in Star Trek IV isn’t what it did for the whales then but its potential to help out now and in the future. People will watch this movie today because they’re into Star Trek. It just so happens that this particular movie ALSO pushes the agenda of saving the whales that was popular when the movie was made.
Even though the movie itself might not have had any palpable impact on the movement at that point in time, it remains after the fervor of the moment dies down. The potential still exists for people to watch this movie now and be inspired by the message and hopefully make some kind of contribution or ignite resurgence.
“I think it’d be safe to bet as well that it probably didn’t change anybody’s mind about whales – but maybe it did intensify the anti- and pro-whaling interests.”
Yeah, maybe it didn’t change anybody’s mind, but it still had some impact. As a general rule, isn’t some better than none? Even though they won’t act, at least they’ll have thought about it. In the end, it’s a combination of all the influences (education, books, culture, society, MOVIES, etc.) that inspire people to try to make changes and make a difference.
Star Trek may not have saved a whale, but I think “Bowling for Columbine” did.
How much cooler would it have been if the giant space probe were, in fact, a whaling factory ship looking for intergalactic blubber?
My first thought was the two whales are supposed to talk to the space ship and save earth? Really?
They’ve been captured and imprisoned, if they’re intelligent enough to talk to a space ship they surely know that we’ve been hunting and eating their kind.
Why in hell would they do anything to help save mankind?
I rented ‘Bowling for Columbine’ and realized that if it were World War 2 it would definently be a film that tagged on a pro-Japan/Nazi thing at the end to captalize on the new war. It’s just about money and people acting like their better than the rest of us. I came to the conclusion that whomever made it was waiting and hoping for an Iraq war.
Stuff like that makes me sick.
At one time in human history there was a need for the Whaling Industry,
but these days there is so many alternatives …
The needs of the few (whales )
outweigh the needs of the many ( humans )
Star Trek IV may not have changed anyone’s views about whaling but it was still great movie. In my opinion it was the best of all the Trek movies. Besides having an intriguing plot it also contained a lot of humor, humor that could be could even be enjoyed by non-trekkers.