LETTER FROM SAN DIEGO

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The story of the blue whale is worse: When that animal was protected from killing in 1965, scientists thought there were something like 11,000 left of an original population of around 250,000. "Now we think the blue whales number somewhere between 200 and 1,100—probably around 500," Holt said. "In seven years, shipboard observers saw 23 schools of blue whales. A school of blue whales is one whale, sometimes two. In seven years, covering more than 40,000 miles of ocean, the observers saw around 30 blue whales. That's all."

Across the road from the Islandia the NGO's are gathering. In addition to those mentioned above are journalists from Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute, who will publish a newsletter that reports the day's news. That's in direct contravention of the IWC's rules, which ban reporters from all but the opening and closing ceremonies.

This uninvited newspapering began in 1972 at the United Nations' historic environmental conference in Stockholm. The present series will make up volume 47. This year, for the first time, the newspaper staff is using computers and desktop publishing programs, which will supplant a half dozen volunteers who used to work half the night typing and retyping stories and creating headlines by rubbing letters one at a time off plastic sheets.

At five o'clock Sunday afternoon, 40 observers arrange themselves in a small motel room to plan strategy. David McTaggart, the chairman and founder of Greenpeace, fidgets in the comer, trying to keep the conversation on track. McTaggart is one of the shrewdest politicians in the international environmental arena --a recent chum, it's rumored, of Mikhail Gorbachev. He's short, tan, and fit. He's past 60 but could pass for 40. Easily.

The prominent issue at this year's meeting is expected to be an attempt by Japan to evade the moratorium by creating a new category of whaling that is somewhere between commercial whaling (which is illegal at present) and aboriginal whaling (which natives in Alaska, Siberia, and Greenland carry on legally). Japan wants the commission to recognize and approve what it calls "small type whaling"whaling conducted in small boats from coastal villages. Though many of the whale supporters express sympathy with the littoral dwellers who have had to stop whaling, none shows any sign of supporting a quota for them.

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