Last weekend I had the opportunity to walk through the Smithsonian’s whale warehouse on a field trip with my marine megafauna class. The warehouse was dark and gray and smelled of krill (a sort of pungent, fishy aroma). Fascinating as it was, the place was strangely eerie for me. I leaned over to my friend and told her I felt like I was walking through a whale graveyard. Bones, baleens, and other whale pieces splayed out on white table tops and sat labeled in cabinets. I may be superstitious, but I felt like the spirits of whales lost to the whaling industry were still here. I had to crane my neck to see the top of the blue whale skull. A certain gravity is commanded of a room holding the skeleton of the largest animal known to have existed. Many of the whale pieces were taken from the remains of the whaling. It was hard to believe that whaling was a multi-million dollar industry a century ago, that whaling was only banned about 50 years ago.
I didn’t think about the connection between whaling and the fossil fuel industry until reading Divest Duke’s report, which explained how our sources of energy have been transitioning to easier and more efficient sources since “Colonial Americans relied on whale blubber and bones in a similar manner as Americans now rely on petroleum products… After whale blubber, wood incineration and processing was the basis for power and raw materials in
America. After wood, coal. After coal, refined petroleum… In each
of these periods, people living daily with the resources they had available may
have been unable to envision what would be next. Yet it is not hypocritical….
encourage and bring about the transition to a more appropriate
fuel source while still using fossil fuels, which divesting does” (Divest Duke P.24).
Divest Duke’s use of history as evidence demonstrates how we can learn and grow from analyzing the past. Dr. Kirk taught us the importance of looking to history for direction in activism, as did Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals. Historically, considerable resistance stands against any change in our energy sources; whalers didn’t want to lose their jobs, and many were afraid of the economic impacts of ending a multi-million dollar industry. Energy is power and power is money. Whaling did not end on the basis of moral arguments about the treatment of whales (compelling as we find them). Whaling pressure was reduced only once fossil fuels proved more lucrative. As students who care deeply about the environment, we easily see the moral wrongs of investment of fossil fuels. But to push Duke’s Divestment, I think we need a compelling financial argument against fossil fuels and for alternative investments. As Saul Alinsky reminds us, we must start where the world is right now, which is on the edge of a transition, waiting for a push. Renewables are a rising, more ethical, sustainable, and “appropriate” fuel source to power our world. Hopefully someday oil rigs and pipelines will become museum artifacts, not the species they put at risk.
Society, N. “Big Fish: A Brief History of Whaling.” National Geographic Society, 15 Oct. 2012, www.nationalgeographic.org/news/big-fish-history-whaling/.
Divest Duke. Report Proposing Fossil Fuel Divestment for the President’s Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility. 2015.
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals: a Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. Vintage Books, 1989.
