Who Speaks for the Whales?
The snow is falling slowly as I stand in the ruins of a huge, rusting blubber cookery. I look up as the flakes drift down. Do they contain molecules from the bodies of some of the blue whales who were boiled up in this landscape over half a century ago?
This is Grytviken, a former whaling station on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. It is 2007 and I am here with the British Antarctic Survey to study the history of whaling, our species’ first boom-and-bust oil industry. At its peak, around 3,000 blue whales were killed each year in these waters, driving the populations to near extinction. If you read official documents from this era, individual whales are described simply as “units.”
How is it that I matter more than all those vast, magnificent whales in the sea?
What staggers is the sheer scale of the machinery these killings necessitated. The landscape itself is all contrast—dark, snarly rock, striped bands of brilliant cloud and blue sky, and the assault of light coming off the snow and ice. But the industrial history here takes your breath away. I find myself standing on a mortuary platform—a single, human female around five and a half feet tall on a slab of rusting metal around 80 feet in length. The difference between my slight form and the enormity of a
