[On October
18, 1851, the first edition of Herman Melville’s
epic novel Moby-Dick was
published in London (under its initial
title, The Whale). So this week
I’ll AmericanStudy Melville’s novel and other histories and stories related to
the book’s ostensible subject, the world of whaling. Leading up to a special
weekend post on a wonderful colleague at the New Bedford Whaling Museum!]
On an ongoing
issue, an activist response, and why I’m writing about them here.
This first paragraph
is one of those moments on the blog where I could pretend like I knew much of anything
about the day’s topics prior to researching this post, but I’d be lying. I
vaguely remembered something about a recent debate over whether commercial
whaling should be allowed after a long moratorium (turns out the moratorium began in 1986 and the debate
took place at the 2010 meeting of the International Whaling Commission), and had a
general sense that Japanese
whalers had been practicing commercial whaling even when they weren’t supposed
to. But holy moly is the issue still much more widespread and prevalent than
that in the 21st century, from the fact that whaling of various
types and for various prey has apparently never stopped to the fact that numerous
countries (such as Iceland and Norway in addition to Japan) have advocated for
a return to commercial whaling, among other surprising (to me at least) and
salient details. Again, I could pretend I know all this because I drink and I
know things, but in truth I learned much of what I now know from this excellent Wikipedia page on
contemporary whaling.
What I did have
a better sense of, but which has been confirmed and amplified by my research,
is the dangerous and inspiring work that
Greenpeace (among other organizations, but with Greenpeace at the
forefront) has done to challenge
contemporary whalers. Greenpeace came into existence with an act of nonviolent
protest at sea (using a chartered fishing boat to protest US nuclear
testing on Alaska’s Amchitka Island), and it was not long thereafter that the organization
began using the same form of activism to oppose commercial whaling. Those
courageous efforts certainly played a role in the move toward the 1986 ban, but
I would argue that it was the organization’s overall Save the Whales campaign which
truly raised public and popular awareness of the issue (it was even the center
of a Star Trek movie!) to the point where support for such a ban
became a driving force. Moreover, just as not all commercial whaling has
stopped since the ban, and just as those various countries are arguing for a
return to legal commercial whaling today, so too has Greenpeace
continued to fight the good fight into the 21st century. Indeed,
the anti-whaling campaign is one of the most sustained and successful
environmental activist movements of the last half-century, and a model for all
those who seek to use every means and method to protect our planet from
ourselves.
Those
inspirations for activism against injustice in all forms represent one big
reason why I wanted to dedicate my last post in a series on American whaling
histories to these more international and contemporary sides to the issue. But
another reason is one for which we have reminders all around us all the time
these days: that the past is never past, that echoes and extensions of our
histories (including, if not most especially, our darkest and most destructive
histories) are central and influential and inescapable parts of our world. Which
is to say, of course 21st century whaling isn’t the same as the
industry’s 17th or 19th century histories, no more than
any part of the present is ever identical to the past. But nonetheless these
prior and ongoing histories are on a spectrum, are interwoven threads within
the same patterns—and those very complex patterns can be best understood if we
examine and work to understand all of the threads, historical just as much as
(if not more so, as they are less immediate and thus take more effort to
understand) contemporary. As the story of whaling continues to unfold around
us, it’s vital that we remember and engage with the very American histories of
that industry and world as well.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other whaling contexts or connections you’d highlight?
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