ABSTRACT
Some Pacific populations are faring better, but the Pacific-rim nations are engaged in drilling, oceanic petroleum transport, and industrial-level fishing that threaten to destroy species and deplete habitat to an extent inconceivable before the advent of high technology. The very word "harvest" or "culling" applied to hunts of animals into the twenty-first century shows our desire to classify animals as plants in our relationship to them so as to make the killing of sentient beings appear as an agricultural undertaking. The discovery of the rich feeding and breeding grounds of sperm whales in the Pacific coincided with the increased demand for lubricants and artificial lighting in the Industrial Revolution. The fate of the albatrosses is similar to the fate of the whales. The massive whale hunts of the nineteenth century forged the world as we know it not only by "lighting up the world," as the inscription on the New Bedford Whaling Museum proclaims, but by fueling the Industrial Revolution.
