Whaling in the Soviet Union
psmag.com
psmag.com
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/on...
https://www.robedwards.com/2010/12/the-soviet-environmental-...
But even when landowners have "skin in the game", man-made environmental disaster can still strike, like when bad farming practice led to the Dust Bowl.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atol...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_in_Vieques,...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine
That the soviets were falsifying documents, killing whales indiscriminately, not even using the carcasses very efficiently, and operating in ways that seemed to clear the sea of cetaceans, seems to point to some other deeper motivation to continue apace.
So much so, that Russian marine biologists and whaling scientists themselves took note of the attitude, and secretly retained records of the activity.
The article chalks this up to a simple antiquated quota established as a simple matter of the Soviet version of pre-environmentalist dust bowl ambition, and that the stubborn, bureaucratic single-mindedness of Soviet communists saw a number printed on a piece of paper and capriciously, if not robotically declared it must be so, and the machinations of a fear of failure to deliver unto Stalinist masters perpetuated an artificial demand to perform, in the face of GULAG style negative reinforcement, even though there was no such authentic demand that the supply was feeding into.
So, boss sees number, insists number must go up, stooges deliver number for fear of punishment. All of this willfully flouts international oversight of conservation efforts in secret, at the behest of the Soviet ministry of fisheries to save face before the high court of the communist party.
But is that really it? Or was it a paranoia of mobilized nuclear tipped missiles slipping past defenses onboard underwater launch platforms?
Did they think that maybe all the environmentalism was really a cover to hamstring anti-submarine warfare, at a time when this represented a key means of delivering nuclear deterence? That saving the whales was an effort to provide cover for submarines that might threaten Soviet cities with submarine launched ballistic missiles?
Maybe all the noisy whales were getting in the way of other cold war related human activity?
I guess if that were true, the whaling ships might have followed a different pattern, but maybe submarine warfare followed a pattern of using the animals as cover, and where a pod of animals could be found, so too a sneaking submarine?
Soviet ships’ officers would have been familiar with the story of Aleksandr Dudnik, the captain of the Aleut, the only factory ship the Soviets owned before World War II. Dudnik was a celebrated pioneer in the Soviet whaling industry, and had received the Order of Lenin—the Communist Party’s highest honor—in 1936. The following year, however, his fleet failed to meet its production targets. When the Aleut fleet docked in Vladivostok in 1938, Dudnik was arrested by the secret police and thrown in jail, where he was interrogated on charges of being a Japanese agent. If his downfall was of a piece with the unique paranoia of the Stalin years, it was also an indelible reminder to captains in the decades that followed.
I'm definitely not defending the Soviet system or communism, but this sort of phenomenon happens, in a milder form, within a corporation too.
Globally? More difficult to estimate. But one example where the environmental impact of nuclear testing can be seen is the contamination of worlds steel supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
I presume a different background radiation level has some impact?