SUST1400 lecture notes - week 9 - being cluster - Man and Leviathon, How the Whales Were Saved
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Course
SUST1000 (SUST1400)
Institution
Dalhousie University (Dal
)
Steve Mannell, Man and Leviathon
Hal Whitehead, How the Whales Were Saved, Part 1
whale population, sustainable whaling, culture in whales, scientific and political issues in whaling, whaling industry.
Week 9 - lecture 1 man and leviathon, lecture 2 how the whales were saved part 1
Subjects
sustainability
steve mannell
whale
sustainable whaling
inuit whaling
dalhousie intro to sustainability
international whaling commission
Written for
Dalhousie University (Dal
)
Social Science
SUST1000 (SUST1400)
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Steve Mannell, Man and Leviathon
19th century whale industry as an analogy
the boat is destroyed. The ship is destroyed. The men are all killed. Except Ishmael,
who is the only one left to tell the tale.And Ishmael all the way through is the one person
is a little skeptical about the hunt and some of its presuppositions, some of the conceits
that go behind it, but also very fascinated by the male only culture that builds up around
it.But Moby Dick is a very persistent cultural story. We know every generation remakes
a version of Moby Dick,and it's always got an analogy to some new thing that humans
are attacking in order to deal with the monster,but also really to secure their own
prosperity, their own living.So whether it's Rockwell Kent, very prominent 1930s
American artist, or whether it's Classics Illustrated comics, which I read when I was a
kid,this is something that we are going to present this story to make sure we
understandhow right we are when we go out and inflict violence on the natural
world.That's what these stories are about. So even relatively ironic and sympathetic
characters like the Newfoundlandartist David Blackwell still invest the whale hunt with
this kind of mythos.Fortunately for Black with this is kind of in the past,this is part of a
nostalgia about some past time in Newfoundland, where there's the giant iceberg and
the deep unknown.And what's on the top there?A tiny little boat up against these giant
glaciers, up against this giant giant whale like improbably big whale. That whale is not to
scale Hal.No, and this giant is unknown. So as much as we on the one hand,we're
actually out there taking that precise measure of the ocean and the precise measure of
the populationsof those whales that we're gonna go out and kill and harvest and
process and bring back and sell and burn.But we're also making these cultural images
of a kind of unknown heroism, kind of one against the many,whereas we get the whole
U.S. Navy behind us as as whalers telling us where to go, what to hunt, what to kill.And
the same thing will be true in almost any other extractive industry. So it's there in
lumbering and lumbering. You have the same kinds of imagery, that giant stack of
things. But the real heroes are not the horses, but the guys who've stacked up those
logs, who've spent their time out in the camp,who've gone down the river with the
logs,fought the rivers and the logs and the wilderness to bring back the lumber that we
need for what we're doing.We don't show images of big feller bunchers or the kinds of
massive machinery that are involved in logging today. Mining, same story.The heroism
of these individuals and also a kind of romance about these male only cultures of
extraction,that kind of tough guys who go out there and they spend the time that's
necessary.Another alibi we tell ourselves. This is getting to be an old film that anybody
seen
, He breaks his leg in the prospect of crawling down into this hole with his little bottle of
nitroglycerin, right? The heroism of putting nitroglycerin into the earth to blast that oil
out.Many people have looked at this kind of conceit about the individual against the
unknowable and the massive.Charles Olson, one of the great scholars of Herman
Melville, talks about it in terms of the giant-ness of space in the American story.So early
images of Leduc oil wells also include these images of lakes of oil, vastness of oil,
uncontrolled, uncontrollable.And with it also, it's been adopted in the 21st century and
especially in the last 10 years,very strongly what many cultural commentators talk about
as the politics of machismo.So if you're a leader of a country, you've got to go
somewhere wearing a hard hat and do something with a big machine if you're going to
be credible. Whether you're Justin Trudeau, whether you're Rachel Notley, that's what
you do. one of those individuals who's going to fight against the natural world in order to
bring back the bacon for the people at home.So here's northern Alberta. How many
people think there might be an analogy between northern Alberta and Nantucket?Or the
Pacific whale fishery. Maybe, maybe, maybe not.What do we have up here? We have
an area, a vast area, that's being flensed, that outer skin of the boreal forest is a waste
product.So the first thing to do if we're going to mine for oil sands is to strip off all the
vegetation and strip off all the topsoil,strip off all the living surface of the carcass of the
land in order to expose the subsurface. In Alberta there's a peculiarity of law that says
the land below the topsoil doesn't belong to the landowner,it belongs to the govt. So if
underneath your site is a mineral that the government wants to license for somebody to
exploit, you have to get out of the way.So on the right, you see the kind of flensed
Boreal Forest, and on the left you see the boreal forest in a kind of pre-flensing
state.Massive amounts of northern Alberta being flensed in order to prepare for these
mines,. Massive machinery,and here we actually get to the point where the machinery
itself starts to look tiny in relationship to the landscape.So there's a kind of a meta-
version of those images I was talking about where there's that tiny and often these days
in northern Alberta,they like it to be a female truck driver or a female digger driver
against this giant machine that she's driving.But that's against this giant landscape that
dwarfs even these machines.There are three stories high. And so the imagery also
wants us to see this as small relative to the scope of the landscape as a whole,even
though, as we can see from this map, this is a vast part of Canada. This is now the
world's largest man made structural system.It's the most visible thing from space, more
so than what we used to talk about, the Great Wall of China being the biggest thing.It's
a kind of relentless attack, it's a kind of day and night attack, like the images of the tri
works, the removal of the oil sands, the processing of the oil sands is a continuous
process that kind of continuous and heroic, at least constructed that way, act against
the landscape.
Not to talk about the specifics of oil sands mining, because we're actually going to talk a
little bit about that in the water cluster. But to talk about the social construction, oil sands
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