The Makahs have told the International Whaling Commission (IWC) that they intend to kill up to five California greys next year "for ceremonial and subsistence purposes". The ritual hunt, not carried out since 1913, will help to tie their tribe together,as well as to feed them, they say.
Predictably, many Canadian greens are up in arms, and the California-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society - a kind of marine vigilante squad - threatens to halt the Makah hunt by force. This is not a matter of saving a species, since there are plenty of grey whales migrating past Vancouver Island these days, after a decade-long moratorium on commercial whaling. It is a matter of ethics, and comes down to a question of what matters more: the cultural traditions and rights of the Makah or the right to life of migrating whales?
Ask Greenpeace campaigners about this conundrum and they go quiet. The organisation, like other green groups, derives much of its moral strength and publicity from animal rights issues - and none more so than its "save the whales" campaigns. But the organisation has also always prided itself on its affinity with Amerindians and their relationship with the Earth. It named its most famous ship, the Rainbow Warrior, after a legend of the Cree Indians.
And it has expelled several generations of campaigners whose uncompromising stance on animal rights it couldn't stomach. Sea Shepherd, for instance, was founded by Paul Watson who, according to Robert Hunter, a Greenpeace founder, in his book Greenpeace Chronicles, was thrown out 20 years ago for allegedly being too violent in opposing seal-hunting Newfoundlanders.
And Pete Wilkinson, a former Greenpeace director, says that Mark Glover, currently a leading British organiser against the trade in veal calves, was sacked by Greenpeace ten years ago for refusing to abandon a campaign in Britain against Canadian fur trappers, traditional peoples whom Greenpeace in Canada was attempting to befriend.
The truth is that there are two sorts of environmentalists: those whose main concern is animal rights, and those more interested in people and in saving the planet for future generations. The guiding phrase of the latter group is "sustainable development". They say we are all allowed to use the planet's living resources - whether we are industrialists or rainforest tribes, and whether we are cutting trees, catching fish or harpooning whales. So long as we do it equitably and "sustainably", so that the resource can reproduce and is not diminished for the next generation.
Most green groups paper over the cracks in their own organisations between whale-lovers and people-lovers by omitting to make a fuss about "aboriginal" hunting - for instance, the Inuit's hunt of bowhead whales. I guess that, unless their more absolutist members start leaving in droves, they will support the Makah case at the IWC. But this is a fudge. Where do you stop? "Aboriginals" aren't alone in having cultures worth protecting. Or jobs. What about the Japanese islanders whose traditional trade is whaling? Or the Faroe Islanders whose bloody slaughter of pilot whales is deeply rooted in their culture and, say whale demographers, is entirely sustainable? Their economic survival is threatened by a campaign to boycott Faroese fish while the hunt continues, organised by the Environmental Investigation Agency - a London-based outfit run by Allan Thornton, another former Greenpeace campaigner.
The desire to maintain the coalition between their animal rights and sustainable development wings has also led green groups to abuse science, as the more intelligent activists admit Jonathan Porritt, Britain's most influential independent environmentalist, complained about this before a meeting of the IWC two years ago (BBC Wildlife Magazine,1993).
He said that some campaigners were dishonestly arguing that a continued ban on all hunting of minke whales in the North Atlantic was essential to save the species from extinction. It just wasn't so, he said. By all means, make a moral case against a resumption of whaling, he said, but don't pretend it has anything to do with whale demographics or sustainability.
Whales aren't unique. You see the same tensions over big-game hunting in Africa. Witness the flip in 1989 of the then World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund of Nature) over elephants. Traditionally, the WWF had backed controlled hunting of elephants for their ivory. It argued that if people couldn't make money from their local elephants they would have no interest in saving them. Especially where the beasts kept rampaging over their fields, trampling their crops.
But that year, the WWF abruptly changed tack and backed a total ban on trade in ivory. It did so against the advice of most of its experts, but in the face of intense campaigning from animals rights activists in the US, who ran large adverts with pictures of hacked-up elephants captioned with the words "the WWF supports this slaughter". WWF members were leaving in droves - a slaughter of its income the WWF could not sustain.
I am with the Africans who want to earn a living from their wildlife. But I am with the Norwegians, too. They kill whales and club seals, and their prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland took the phrase "sustainable development" to the heart of UN environmental thinking at the Earth Summit in Rio. And I am with the WWF campaigners in the Amazon, who support a sustainable harvest of the Amazonian manatee - an officially endangered species, but I am told that it is a tasty one - inside one of their ecological reserves.
I don't personally like killing. I can't imagine myself shooting a bird or hunting a fox for pleasure. I have never even dangled a fishing rod over a river bank. Blood rituals are not my cup of tea. But I find it hard to condemn those who do such things - and especially those for whom killing things is a livelihood. I find the urban greens who romanticise rural communities in far-off lands and then condemn the hunting that is central to their lives to be absurd. And I certainly don't like the kind of animal rights extremist who places animal above human livelihoods.