Whaling peaked in 1962, a full thirteen years before Greenpeace’s heavily publicized action in Vancouver, and declined dramatically during the next decade. The United Nations called for a ten-year moratorium in 1972, and the United States banned whaling under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. By 1975, the year of Greenpeace’s celebrated Vancouver action, an international agreement between forty-six nations, which prohibited all hunting of the humpback, the blue whale, the gray whale, and some species of right, fin, and sei whales, was already in place.33
