The Whale as an Object
From 1900 to 1999, humans killed [murdered]nearly 3 million whales, in every corner of every ocean. Already by the 1970s they had reduced the population of every large species to near extinction. It was, in the estimation of Phillip Clapham, the former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s lab for cetacean research, the “largest removal of biomass in world history.” It was also the closest thing to genocide we can observe in the history of human relations with their large mammalian relatives. In less than a century, humans transformed the world’s oceans from places that pulsed with living whales, to nearly empty water. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/history-of-soviet-whaling-greenpeace-twentieth-century.html 'IS MOBY DICK CONNECTED TO LEBOWSKI?' Abstract Hieroglyphic images appear recurrently throughout the text of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Whether the marks in question are ancient Egyptian ciphers, Queequeg...