The Earth Island Rules.(Earth Island Institute monitors tuna industry to protect dolphins)(Statistical Data Included)

This is the unlikely tale of how an obscure San Francisco office of dolphin lovers gained what all activists lust for: real power. Over the last decade, the Earth Island Institute has become a de facto global regulator of the $2 billion-a-year canned-tuna industry. Its 14 monitors track tuna fishermen worldwide for "dolphin safe" practices, and woe to those who are caught with so much as one dolphin in their nets. Falling off the Earth Island list of "certified" companies can kill a tuna business. First, however, may come a warning from a top Earth Island official, Mark Berman, whose e-mails sometimes begin, "From: The Bermanator." "If one of these major companies cheated, all we would have to do is run a couple of full-page ads, and sales would fall," says Berman.

So powerful has Earth Island become that tuna companies live in fear of being blacklisted, and help fund its efforts to track their fishing habits. To say this is a rare turn in the growing global battles between activists and corporations is an understatement. It's as if lumber companies were paying the tree huggers of Earth First to police their logging operations. At least 97 percent of tuna on the world's supermarket shelves now meets Earth Island rules on what is dolphin safe, a standard so rigid that many other wildlife activists consider it too radical. So bold has the group become that its activists are sure they will win a raging battle with a few governments of Latin America that are the last holdouts against Earth Island's authority. They're probably right.

Earth Island's power dates to the tuna wars of the late 1980s, when it got hold of a video showing dolphins dying in tuna-fishing nets. For reasons that are not well understood, tuna tend to swim under dolphins in the Eastern (but not Western) Pacific, and fishermen were catching tuna by casting nets around schools of dolphins. The video of dolphins drowning in the nets inspired a consumer boycott and a federal law setting standards for companies wanting to use a "dolphin safe" label. Based on the Earth Island guidelines, the law effectively banned fishermen from "setting on dolphins," lest they face the wrath of Americans raised on the popular TV character Flipper the friendly dolphin. "Earth Island was buying full-page ads and going to the retail stores," recalls David Burney, head of the U.S. Tuna Association. "When you've got your customers saying, 'We won't buy tuna caught in association with dolphins,' you've got to do something."

The industry quickly agreed to play by dolphin-safe rules, in large part by giving up fishing in the Eastern Pacific. Earth Island held it to the promise. In 1991 activist Brenda Killian exposed a Thai supplier of "dolphin deadly" tuna to Bumble Bee, one of the big three U.S. canners, and wound up in a TV debate on "Good Morning America" with the company president. To everyone's surprise, he admitted that Killian was right, and soon invited Earth Island to monitor the company's operations. "It was like David and Goliath," Killian recalls. "He was Goliath." Once Bumble Bee agreed, the other major U.S. brands had little choice but to follow. Earth Island was reborn as a quasi- official regulatory power.

The group began targeting Europe, threatening tuna firms with the same tactics that had been so effective in the United States. To this day, Europe has no labeling laws or tuna regulators, but it does have Earth Island. The key to Earth Island's influence is the list of "certified" dolphin-safe companies that it faxes throughout the industry each month. Currently the list includes 262 firms in 36 countries and territories. Occasionally Berman sends out bulletins about companies not on the list, with a warning that anybody caught dealing with them will be dropped.

The industry pays close attention. Tuna canners cancel supply contracts with letters saying, "We are not to deal with entities that are not themselves accredited by EII." Companies send tips about violators to the EII, as if it were a government ...