[D66] What Have We Done to the Whale? | newyorker.com

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/what-have-we-done-to-the-whale?

What Have We Done to the Whale?

The creatures once symbolized our efforts to save the planet; now they 
demonstrate all the ways we have devastated it.

By Amia Srinivasan
August 17, 2020

Last November, drone footage was posted on Instagram of a gray whale 
swimming near the surface just off the coast of Dana Point, California. 
In the video, the whale, a juvenile maybe twenty-five feet long, cruises 
slowly into a lineup of surfers, its undulating tail casting arcing 
ripples, and then emerges from the water, exhaling through its blowhole. 
A few surfers paddle off in alarm, though most seem oblivious. The whale 
dips below the surface again, a ghostly silhouette, and glides out 
beyond the surfers, away.

I had been surfing in that spot just a few weeks before. Had I been in 
the water that day, and suddenly seen the whale’s body beneath me, 
gargantuan and silent, I would have, for a moment, gone cold with dread. 
How could I not? To be close to a whale, in the wild, not in a boat but 
in the water itself, is to encounter an embodied agency that exists, 
across every dimension, on a scale that swallows our own: its physical 
size, its evolutionary age, its polar voyages. The fear evoked by the 
whale is not a judgment on its character. Whales almost never harm 
humans, and when they do it is invariably the humans’ fault. And yet: 
what am I to a whale? After the whale passed, terror would have melted 
into an abiding thrill: of having met life in its largest, ancient form. 
Of having been blessed, in the most pagan sense of that term. In drawing 
close to those surfers, the whale drew them closer to its own alien 
dominion, offering the watery communion for which every surfer quietly 
longs: to be absorbed, returned, dissolved into the sea.

‘‘Would we know it, the moment when it became too late; when the oceans 
ceased to be infinite?” Rebecca Giggs asks in her masterly “Fathoms: The 
World in the Whale” (Simon & Schuster). She means the moment when the 
oceans become so disfigured by human activity that, seeing them, we will 
see only ourselves. Her answer is that this moment is already here, and 
most of us are missing it. For Giggs, the whale is a potent but 
misleading symbol of the ocean’s infinity, its alterity and 
expansiveness. We tend to think of the whale as a story of human 
redemption: a creature almost hunted out of existence by the commercial 
whaling industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then 
saved by our collective recognition that, as activists told the United 
Nations in 1972, whales are “the common heritage of mankind.” Since 
1986, when the International Whaling Commission began enforcing a global 
moratorium on commercial whale hunting, many whale populations, once 
near extinction, have rebounded. The laying down of harpoons and the 
return of the whale appear to speak not just to our empathy for 
creatures that, like us, care for their young, create culture, and sing 
songs but also to the part of our humanity that respects what lies 
beyond it. In truth, Giggs argues, our mass consumption and globalized 
supply chains, our carbon emissions and throwaway plastics threaten to 
bring us a sea that is “not full of mystery, not inexplicable in its 
depths, but peppered with the uncannily familiar detritus of human 
life.” In 2017, a beaked whale washed up onshore near Bergen, Norway. In 
its stomach were some thirty pieces of plastic trash, including 
Ukrainian chicken packaging, a Danish ice-cream wrapper, and a British 
potato-chip bag. This is the “world in the whale” of Giggs’s title: not 
an alien dominion but the totalized reality of human domination.

The size of whales has made them, for most of human history, extremely 
difficult to kill. Adult grays can grow up to fifty feet long and weigh 
forty tons. Blue whales, the largest creatures ever to have lived, can 
grow almost a hundred feet long and weigh a hundred and ninety tons. 
When whales exhale through their blowholes, the vapor is so dense that 
it produces rainbows. The earliest evidence of whale hunting is perhaps 
as old as eight thousand years, in South Korea, where Neolithic-era 
shale carvings depict marine animals being hunted with lances and 
makeshift floats. Traditional whale hunters typically had to harass 
their prey to death over many days and nights. They used bludgeons and 
spears, sometimes tipped with poison, to serially wound and exhaust the 
animals, while floats were used to prevent them from 
diving—“sounding”—out of reach. The Inuit created their floats by 
inflating gutted seals, their orifices stitched shut. All the indigenous 
cultures that hunted whales for subsistence—on the coasts of the Korean 
Peninsula, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Zanzibar, Siberia, Canada, 
Greenland, Iceland, Norway—did so at their peril, and with elaborate 
ritual and frugality, using the whale’s many parts for food, shelter, 
and amulets.

Then, in the sixteenth century, Basque whalers created a global whale 
trade. This was made possible by a technological advance: the attaching 
of a two-flued iron harpoon to a braided rope that could be uncoiled at 
great speed off a boat’s deck. Although the harpoon was unable to pierce 
through to a whale’s vital organs, it was, with its flared barbs, almost 
impossible to dislodge from the animal’s blubber. Thus tethered to the 
boat, the whale could not escape the hunters’ lances.

Soon Basque whalers depleted shoreline populations in the Bay of Biscay. 
Bigger ships, in turn, allowed the whalers to hunt in the open 
seas—what’s known as “pelagic whaling”—and to pursue various species at 
different points in their migration routes. Near Newfoundland, Basque 
whalers killed as many as forty thousand whales between 1530 and 1610, 
becoming, for a time, the world’s dominant whaling force. Their 
preferred method was to harpoon calves first, followed by the mothers 
that rushed to their rescue.

Whale hunting became a year-round business. The Dutch, the Danes, and 
the British joined in; by the late eighteenth century, commercial 
whaling had spread to South Africa and New Zealand. American colonists 
pioneered the onboard rendering of oil from whale blubber. In this 
process, a whale carcass was chained to the side of the ship, and 
rotated with pulleys as sickle-shaped blades peeled it like an orange; 
the blubber was then separated from flesh and skin, and liquefied in 
huge cast-iron cauldrons, underlaid with water to avoid setting fire to 
the ship. By turning their vessels into mobile slaughterhouses, American 
whalers were able to hunt whales that were then abundant in equatorial 
waters, whose carcasses would have otherwise rotted by the time the 
ships returned home. The whalers also came to use shoulder guns and bomb 
lances, increasing the possible distance between hunter and prey. By the 
mid-nineteenth century, pelagic whaling was the fifth-largest industry 
in the United States.

Why whales? Like traditional whale hunters, early commercial whalers 
sought out whales largely for their flesh, a food approved by the 
Vatican for meatless Fridays. By the nineteenth century, though, whales 
had become prized as a source of a much more valuable commodity: oil. In 
1854, whale oil, extracted from blubber, traded at, in today’s terms, 
eighteen dollars a gallon. A single mature right whale could yield seven 
thousand gallons. Whale oil greased factory cogs, lit shop floors and 
streets, and, deployed as an insecticide, spurred industrial 
agriculture. Sperm whales were hunted for the waxlike spermaceti found 
in their heads, which was used as a lubricant in looms, trains, and 
guns, and, most significant, as a raw material in fine candles. New 
Bedford, Massachusetts, the center of sperm-whale hunting, was called 
“the city that lit the world.” Baleens, the bristly combs that certain 
whales, including humpbacks, have in place of teeth, were used in 
corsets, parasols, hairbrushes, fishing rods, shoehorns, eyeglass 
frames, hat rims, sofa stuffing, police nightsticks, and the thin canes 
used to beat misbehaving schoolchildren, which may explain the phrase 
“to whale on.” Increasingly, whales were seen not as prey but as a 
natural resource to be mined; whalers talked about migrating sperm 
whales as veins running through the ocean, like gold.

An estimated two hundred and thirty thousand sperm whales were killed in 
the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, that number grew to more than 
seven hundred thousand. In total, nearly three million whales of all 
species were killed in that century. (Human hunting has reduced the 
world’s great-whale biomass by as much as eighty per cent.) 
Early-twentieth-century whaling was a truly international concern, run 
by conglomerates of Norwegian, British, Dutch, German, Japanese, 
Australian, and American fleets and capital. That whaling became more 
aggressive is a departure from the trajectory one might have expected: 
the previous century’s whaling had depleted whale populations, and 
abundant substitutes for whale oil—cheaper vegetable oils and petroleum 
products—had been found. But nautical technology advanced; coal-powered 
and then diesel-powered ships allowed whalers to hunt species that had 
previously been too quick—blue, fin, sei, minke. Ships were also 
equipped with mechanized weapons that could detonate or electrocute, and 
with improved tools for processing whale carcasses, including hydraulic 
tail grabbers, pressure cookers, and refrigerators. These ships were 
noisy machines, but radar and spotter planes, perfected in wartime, 
allowed them to home in on whales, called “the listening prey.” At the 
same time, new commercial uses were found for whale oil: in explosive 
munitions, a trench-foot treatment, soap, margarine, lipstick, burn gel. 
General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid until 1973. 
During the Cold War, the substance was used in intercontinental missiles 
and submarines. Whaling had become a matter of military interest.

The International Whaling Commission (I.W.C.) was set up, in 1946, to 
regulate whale hunting in international waters. But the quotas that the 
commission initially imposed backfired, sparking a mad rush by whalers 
who were keen to stockpile whale oil, anticipating a scarcity-driven 
price surge. Commercial fleets raced to take all the whales they could 
get, harpooning animals and then abandoning them when fattier specimens 
were spotted. Whalers hunted out of season and in whale sanctuaries, and 
illegally targeted whale calves. Aristotle Onassis’s lucrative whaling 
enterprise ended when his own sailors testified, in the Norwegian 
Whaling Gazette, to practices on his factory ships: “Shreds of fresh 
meat from the 124 whales we killed yesterday are still lying on the 
deck. Scarcely one of them was full grown. Unaffected and in cold blood, 
everything is killed that comes before the gun.”

The commercial whalers of the postwar period hunted Southern Hemisphere 
whales to near “commercial extinction,” the point at which the cost of 
killing an animal is no longer worth the returns. American and European 
whaling operations shrank, but the cause was taken up by two countries 
driven by nationalist rather than by commercial prerogatives. The 
U.S.S.R.’s whaling industry, which had begun in the nineteen-thirties, 
expanded during the Cold War. The Soviet military needed spermaceti, 
because Western embargoes cut off its access to synthetic substitutes. 
More than that, the Soviet state felt that it had not taken its “share” 
of the world’s whales, and set quotas for its whaling industry that far 
exceeded domestic demand for whale meat and oil. Soviet ships, frantic 
to keep up with state mandates that specified the total raw mass of 
animals to be killed, would often bring back carcasses too decayed for 
human consumption, or would simply throw them overboard, unprocessed. 
Between 1959 and 1961, Soviet ships harvested nearly twenty-five 
thousand humpback whales in the Antarctic.

Japan, meanwhile, was suffering from a postwar food crisis that lasted 
into the nineteen-sixties, triggered by the destruction of supply chains 
and agricultural land. On the advice of the U.S. overseer, General 
Douglas MacArthur, the country turned to whaling. Whale meat was served 
as a cheap source of protein to elementary- and middle-school children, 
and became a symbol of national resilience. Though whale is eaten in 
very small amounts today—just one and a half ounces per person a 
year—whaling is still heavily subsidized by the state, with most of its 
output stored, uneaten. In 2019, a researcher at Rikkyo University 
estimated the Japanese stockpile of whale meat at thirty-seven hundred 
tons. After the I.W.C. imposed its global moratorium on whaling, Japan 
was undeterred. Until 2019, when the country withdrew from the I.W.C., 
Japan openly exploited a loophole that allows whales to be killed for 
research purposes, and any leftover whale meat to be sold as food. 
Between 2005 and 2014, around thirty-six hundred minke whales were 
killed by Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean, resulting in just two 
peer-reviewed scientific papers.

The I.W.C.’s moratorium, perhaps the greatest triumph of the postwar 
conservationist movement, was spurred by decades of dire news. In 1964, 
an independent committee of biologists had warned that Southern 
Hemisphere whale populations faced “a distinct risk of complete 
extinction.” The scientists reported that there were fewer than two 
thousand Antarctic blue whales left. A decade later, that number was 
three hundred and sixty, representing a population decline of 99.85 per 
cent since 1905. This is the sort of mass destruction that biologists 
refer to as a “bottleneck” event, a decisive shrinking of a species’ 
gene pool that may well be irreversible. Once anti-whaling advocates 
helped bring non-whaling (including many landlocked) nations into the 
I.W.C., the group’s scientists were able to take a more explicitly 
conservationist stance. They were also buoyed by a worldwide outcry 
against whale killing. Greenpeace, employing a strategy that one of its 
leaders called “more an imagology than an ideology,” used footage of its 
theatrical high-seas tactics to evoke public sympathy and outrage. A 
fifteen-thousand-person anti-whaling rally was staged in London, and 
photographs of it were broadcast around the world. Popular books were 
written that celebrated whales and mourned their death; Farley Mowat’s 
“A Whale for the Killing,” from 1972, called whaling a “modern Moloch.” 
Whale songs—first recorded by accident in the nineteen-fifties by U.S. 
naval engineers sweeping for Soviet submarines—became, in the 
nineteen-seventies, a big commercial success. The 1970 album “Songs of 
the Humpback Whale” went multi-platinum. It provided a natural 
soundtrack for the decade’s faddish embrace of Eastern spirituality, 
promising an auditory portal to higher spiritual planes, repressed 
memories, and past lives. And it was taken as proof of the animals’ 
intelligence and sensitivity. Animal protectionists, appearing before 
Congress during a 1971 hearing on whale conservation, played the record 
as part of their testimony. One of them said, “Having heard their songs, 
I believe you can imagine what their screams would be.”

This mass gestalt shift, from whales as an extractive resource to whales 
as symbols of a global inheritance, is striking in part because whales 
are not typical of what conservationists call “charismatic” animals. 
Animals that win human sympathy tend to be readily anthropomorphized 
(elephants, chimps, dolphins), or cute (baby tigers, pangolins), or—the 
holy grail of animal conservation—both (otters). Whales, by contrast, 
are too large to be taken in easily by the human eye, let alone 
imaginatively given human form. They are magnificent but hardly cute. 
Philip Hoare, in “Leviathan or, The Whale” (2008), notes that the “blue 
marble”—the photograph of Earth captured by the astronauts aboard Apollo 
17, in 1972—became famous before the first photograph of a free-swimming 
whale did. “We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the 
whale looked like,” he writes. Human uncertainty about the whale is 
reflected in the stories we have long told about the animal. Ancient 
cartographers used drolleries—hybrid monsters, part whale, part sea 
serpent—to indicate the limits of their knowledge. In the thirteenth 
century, Norse sailors said that whales fed on rain and darkness. In the 
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when taxonomists began 
classifying animals according to their internal structures as opposed to 
their outward appearance, they were stunned to discover the signs of 
whales’ evolutionary history as land-dwelling mammals: fin bones, a 
physician wrote in 1820, that resembled “a man’s hand . . . enwrapped in 
a mitten.”

And there is still much we do not understand about whales. They navigate 
tremendous distances—some humpbacks swim more than sixteen thousand 
miles each year, three-fifths the circumference of the earth—aided by 
unknown sensory apparatuses, and according to migratory routes that are 
passed, somehow, from parent to child. Scientists know that whale 
vocalization—the singing of humpbacks, the chattering of belugas, the 
powerful clicks of sperm whales (at up to two hundred and thirty-six 
decibels, the loudest animal noise on the planet)—performs an important 
communicative function. Whales converse, and perhaps commune, at great 
distances. Songs of humpbacks off Puerto Rico are heard by whales near 
Newfoundland, two thousand miles away; the songs can “go viral” across 
the world. Some scientists believe that certain whale languages equal 
our own in their expressive complexity; the brains of sperm whales are 
six times larger than ours, and are endowed with more spindle neurons, 
cells associated with both empathy and speech. Yet no one knows what 
whales are saying to one another, or what they might be trying to say to 
us. Noc, a beluga that lived for twenty-two years in captivity as part 
of a U.S. Navy program, learned to mimic human language so well that one 
diver mistook Noc’s voice for a colleague’s, and obeyed the whale’s 
command to get out of the water. A recording of Noc’s voice can be heard 
online today: nasal and submerged, but also distinctively like English. 
(Oooow aaare you-ou-ou-ooooo?) At the very least, it’s a better 
impression of a human’s voice than a human could do of a whale’s.

The whale’s aura lies in its unique synthesis of ineffability and 
mammality. Whales are enormous and strange. But—in their tight familial 
bonds, their cultural forms, their incessant chatter—they are also like 
us. Contained in their mystery is the possibility that they are even 
more like us than we know: that their inner lives are as sophisticated 
as our own, perhaps even more so. Indeed, contained in whales is the 
possibility that the creatures are like humans, only much better: 
brilliant, gentle, depthful gods of the sea.

The I.W.C. moratorium on commercial whale hunting has some important 
exceptions. It grants special whale-hunting rights to indigenous 
communities, including the native peoples of Alaska and of Russia’s 
Chukotka Peninsula, the Greenlanders, and the residents of the island of 
Bequia, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It also excludes species 
classified as “small cetaceans,” such as the long-finned pilot whale, a 
species of dolphin hunted off the Faroe Islands, an autonomous Danish 
territory about two hundred miles north of Scotland. (The Faroe Islands, 
unlike Denmark, are not part of the European Union, which prohibits the 
hunting of whales and dolphins.) The grindadráp—or the grind, for 
short—is a traditional Faroese drive hunt that dates back to at least 
1298, when the first law regulating the hunt was introduced. Records of 
the hunt have been kept since 1584 (the longest such archive), and show 
that an annual average of eight hundred and thirty-eight pilot whales 
have been killed by the Faroese during the past three centuries. The 
grind has long been the focus of anti-whaling advocacy: gruesome 
photographs showing rows of black whale corpses, their necks slit, 
floating in a sea bright red with blood, spark outrage on Facebook and 
Twitter. Faroese defenders of the grind argue that the hunt is not only 
a traditional part of their culture but also a sustainable and 
ecologically friendly practice. They point out that they monitor the 
pilot-whale population, and hunt only a small proportion each year, 
consuming what they kill. In an extreme northerly landscape that does 
not support agriculture, the Faroese maintain that they still depend on 
the ocean for their food.

The irony is that pilot whales, like whales the world over, are becoming 
inedible. Whale blubber stores toxins that have made their way to the 
sea, in the form of agricultural and mining runoff or condensed 
emissions—an effect magnified by whales’ longevity. Mercury levels in 
pilot whales are so elevated that scientists have advised the Faroese to 
drastically reduce their consumption of whale meat, which might in turn 
force them to import farmed protein from elsewhere, increasing their 
carbon impact. The breast milk of Inuit women in Greenland, one of the 
least industrialized places on earth, has, because of mercury levels in 
beluga whales and other marine animals, become a dangerous substance. 
Some studies suggest that the Inuit’s mercury exposure is comparable to 
that of people living downstream from gold mines in China. Orca in 
Washington’s Puget Sound have been declared among the earth’s most 
toxified animals; the carcasses of beluga whales that wash up on the 
shores of Canada are classified as toxic waste. The most prolific whale 
killers are no longer the whale hunters. They are, instead, the rest of 
us: creatures of late capitalism whose patterns of consumption make us 
complicit, however unwittingly or unwillingly, in an unfolding mass biocide.

Whales consume much of the eight million metric tons of plastic that 
enter the oceans each year, which gather in swirling trash vortexes 
known as gyres and can extend for miles. Often, this plastic is from 
packaging that allows us to consume non-seasonal food year-round. A 
sperm whale that recently washed up on the Spanish coast had an entire 
greenhouse in its belly: the flattened structure, together with the 
tarps, hosepipes, ropes, flowerpots, and spray cannister it had 
contained. The greenhouse was from an Andalusian hydroponics business, 
used to grow tomatoes for export to colder climes. Food waste produced 
by the globalized supply chain accounts for eight per cent of carbon 
emissions (air travel accounts for only about 2.5 per cent), which melt 
the ice on which whales depend indirectly for their food. Since the 
nineteen-seventies, with the loss of ice-fixed algae, Antarctic krill 
populations have declined by between seventy and eighty per cent. Noise 
from industrial shipping—eighty per cent of the world’s merchandise is 
transported on cargo vessels—has shrunk the whale’s world: the distance 
over which a whale’s vocalizations can travel is just one-tenth of what 
it was sixty years ago. Whales have washed up on the Peloponnesian coast 
with ears bleeding from decompression injuries caused by 
anti-submarine-warfare training.

Ecologists have warned that the dramatic shifts associated with climate 
change could subject even relatively large whale populations to sudden 
extinction. There are signs that this is already happening. In 2015, 
three hundred and forty-three sei whales, an endangered species, were 
found dead on the coast of Chilean Patagonia, likely because of a toxic 
algae bloom. The seis, scientists said, could be “among the first 
oceanic megafauna victims of global warming.” Meanwhile, because whales 
are enormous carbon sinks, the era of commercial whaling hastened 
today’s climate crisis. According to one estimate, a century of whaling 
equates to the burning of seventy million acres of forest. The people of 
the Lummi Nation, who live on the coast of the Salish Sea, between the 
U.S. and Canada, have started to feed salmon to wild orca that are 
starving because of the effects of pollution and climate change. “Those 
are our relations under the waves,” one Lummi tribal member said.

On an Argentine beach in 2017, a stranded baby dolphin was killed by a 
mob of tourists intent on taking selfies with it. Something similar had 
happened in Argentina the year before, when a baby La Plata dolphin 
washed up at a Santa Teresita beach; the animal was passed from tourist 
to tourist until it died of dehydration. Ecological historians may one 
day write about the early twenty-first century as a time of frenzied 
cultural obsession with wild animals: anime-eyed lorises, badass honey 
badgers, “trash panda” raccoons. As Rebecca Giggs observes, this frenzy 
has been facilitated by the rise of social media. On Twitter and 
Facebook, animal cuteness has become the only antidote to political 
fury. Instagram encourages us to curate our encounters with the 
extraordinary, so that we may ourselves seem extraordinary. Driven by a 
search for the perfectly “grammable” shot, ecotourism is everywhere on 
the rise, though it rarely delivers on the promise of its name, which is 
to reconcile the impulse to consume nature with the desire to conserve 
it. At least thirteen million people worldwide have been going on 
whale-watching tours each year, leading to more and faster 
diesel-powered boats. Wildflower superblooms are trampled by 
social-media influencers. Thousands of recreational drones—like the one 
that produced that video of the whale swimming through the surfers off 
Dana Point—disturb the wildlife they so rapturously capture.

Future historians will have the task of explaining how our performative 
love for animals relates to our relentless extermination of them. It is 
not simply a lack of knowledge. Could the Argentine tourists not sense 
the dolphin going limp in their arms? Don’t many of us acknowledge the 
contradiction of flying across the world to lose ourselves in nature? 
Who doesn’t grasp the vulnerability of the world to our collective 
power? Perhaps it’s something more like willful self-deception: a 
refusal to believe what it is we know. Or perhaps we are simply 
embracing what we sense will soon be gone, memorializing what does not 
really exist, as social media has taught us to do. Here is my fabulous 
holiday; here is my happy wedding day; here is the vast ocean; here is a 
whale. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 24, 2020, issue, with the 
headline “Belly of the Beast.”
is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the 
University of Oxford. Her book “The Right to Sex” will be published in 2021.