How audio recordings saved the whales

photo: wikimedia.org

From the 12/26/2014 airing of All Things Considered: How in the 1960s recordings of whale songs were made inadvertently by a military researcher, who passed them to a biologist, who passed them to Judy Collins, who incorporated them into a song that helped launch Greenpeace.

Audio stream and transcript here.

Many Books in One

According to Robert Finch in the introduction to The Norton Book of Nature Writing, "no less a nature writer than Annie Dillard has called [Moby-Dick] 'the best book ever written about nature.'"  It may seem odd at first to view a book about killing whales as nature writing, but in view of "Cetology," "The Grand Armada," etc., Dillard's claim makes sense.

Indeed, Moby-Dick can be considered "the best book ever written" about a lot of things.  Depending on which chapters you turn to, it's:


- A ripping sea story.

- A psychological drama.

- A philosophical novel.

- A meditation on religion.

- A book about ships and the days of sail.

- An in-depth study of an industry.

- An exploration of the life of the working man.

- A travelogue.

There are probably others I'm forgetting.

During the marathon, I sometimes amuse myself by wondering which aspect of Moby-Dick attracts the people around me.  There are the aging environmentalists and the emo youths; the culture vultures, subclass bohemian, and the culture vulture, subclass bourgeois.   There are haunted souls draped in black, doughy book nuts in sweatpants and untucked shirts, and autodidact laborers whose New England accents you could cut with a knife.  And maybe even a Marxist academic faux-laborer in a blue workshirt and steel-toed boots.  Nevertheless, we all get along and take pleasure in the mix.

"And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

Yesterday was a particularly fitting day for Gansevoort to post about the Essex disaster, since it was the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. 

The intended works of man and the unintended works of nature may collide tragically.  We sail into the middle of the Pacific Ocean to harvest whales for oil, and one such animal bursts the hull of our ship, leaving us suddenly stranded in tiny boats thousands of miles from land.  We launch a spaceship into orbit, and cold weather shrinks the ship's gaskets, causing it to disintegrate and kill the crew.  Thus do the impersonal forces that surround us doom in an instant our high ambitions and brave venturings far from shore. 

Captain Ahab thought those forces weren't so impersonal after all.  Starbuck differed with him: "'Vengeance on a dumb brute!' cried Starbuck, 'that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.'" But Starbuck's objection did not arise from any sort of modern agnostic materialism, in which mere energy and particles account for everything.  After all, Starbuck calls Ahab's anger blasphemous.  There can be no blasphemy without the divine.

Rage against a dumb brute seems blasphemous to the orthodox Starbuck because ... well, the simple explanation might be that since all creation is under God's direction, rage against a part of creation is rage against God.  Indeed, that is exactly why Ahab is enraged -- he wants to "strike through the mask" of the created world to hit the Creator.  The less simple explanation is that rage against a force of nature, no differently from worship of a force of nature, elevates the force into a god. Ahab has abandoned the God of Starbuck -- the God of George Fox, William Penn, and the good Quakers of Nantucket -- for an adversarial, animistic god who is bound by no covenant.

Natural disasters, more than man-made tragedies, raise the problem of evil.  If there is a god, and it's the God of Starbuck, why does He cause or allow earthquakes, plagues, whaleship sinkings, and O-ring failures?  How does the undeniable human suffering that results serve His plan?

The Book of Job, from which the headquote to Ishmael's epilogue is taken, provides one answer, the answer of a man who has seen, felt, and thought much in this world: 

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. 

* * *

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?
Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?
Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?
Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?
Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

Whatever we are, however strong our sailing ships and powerful our spaceships, we aren't gods.  A dumb brute, a particle of frost, a cancer cell can cripple us and wreck our works.