{"id":33299,"date":"2020-12-08T00:05:07","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T08:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_quick&p=33299"},"modified":"2023-11-17T14:24:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T22:24:04","slug":"gods-of-the-storm","status":"publish","type":"custom_quick","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/article-short\/gods-of-the-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"Gods of the Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every year, Chukchi hunters in eastern Russia harvest around 120 gray whales, and every year, several turn out to be stinky. The phrase \u201cstinky whale\u201d is not a euphemism, but a quasi-technical term that appears in scientific reports<\/a>. Stinky whales have a pharmaceutical taint so unnatural that even dogs<\/a> avoid their meat. No one knows what makes stinky whales stink; hypotheses include biotoxins and oil spills. Whatever the cause, writes Rebecca Giggs in Fathoms: The World in the Whale<\/em>, her new meditation on cetaceans, stinky whales invert our understanding of pollution. Environmental contamination is not merely a medium that whales swim through, but something that, given enough exposure, they become<\/em>. \u201cTo view animals as <\/em>pollution,\u201d Giggs writes, \u201cis both worrisome and novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giggs has been puzzling over whales for years, ever since she encountered a humpback stranded on an Australian beach; wrapped in layers of insulating blubber, she realized, the creature \u201cwas boiling alive in the kettle of itself.\u201d She was fascinated by both the people who orbited the whale\u2014the teenagers who wanted to wreathe it in flowers, the exhausted official burdened with possibly euthanizing it\u2014and the creature itself. Did the whale comprehend its fate? Did it feel fear? \u201cI wanted to tap on the outside of the animal and whisper to it: \u2018Are you in there, whale?\u2019\u201d she recalls. \u201cNeighbor, is that you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Fathoms<\/em>, Giggs\u2019s lyrical and wide-ranging debut, plumbs the relationship between humans and whales, possessors of two of Earth\u2019s most sophisticated consciousnesses. Our connection is an ancient one. Coastal Indigenous peoples around the world ate\u2014and still eat\u2014whale flesh, performed whale ceremonies, engraved whale petroglyphs. As commercial whaling replaced subsistence harvest, though, whales ceased to be part of a \u201ctotemic exchange,\u201d and became a commodity of almost infinite utility in industrializing societies. Manufacturers rendered whale oil to light lamps, lubricate machinery, and spread on toast. Baleen became hairbrushes and hat brims; bones were ground into fertilizer and livestock feed. Spermaceti, a natural wax produced in the head of a sperm whale, found its way into car transmissions, missiles, even satellites.<\/p>\n

Our forebears, Giggs notes, used \u201cwhale-gleaned products\u201d as though they were plastics; today, our plastics are consumed by whales. The stomach of a single dead sperm whale was recently found to contain a mattress, a coat hanger, an ice-cream tub, and the trappings of a greenhouse. \u201cThe banality of household items belied their potential for a gruesome afterlife,\u201d Giggs writes. There\u2019s a tragic irony to this story: we no longer exploit cetaceans for corsets or soap, yet our daily lives are as inextricable from whales as ever.<\/p>\n

There are few live whales in Fathoms<\/em>. Instead, Giggs is obsessed with cetaceans as symbols. Their polluted bodies testify to our malign influence on nature; the worms that infest their guts bespeak the teeming ecosystems that \u201cpush and pulse within each creature.\u201d Even more significant, the 20th-century campaign to save them from hunting represents our own evolution into a truly global civilization capable, at desperate moments, of multinational cooperation. \u201cTo be anti-whaling was not simply to be pro-nature, pro-wilderness: it was to be pro-worldliness<\/em>,\u201d Giggs claims. \u201c[Whales] both revealed the extent of our power to change, and put us in touch with some loftier part of ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Giggs doesn\u2019t make the link explicit, the fight against whaling thus prefigured a later, even more challenging struggle: the one against global warming. Climate change, of course, is inflicting chaos on our coasts. Oceanfront villages have slumped into the waves; tropical newcomers have invaded cold-water fisheries. On North America\u2019s Eastern Seaboard, warmer ocean temperatures have pumped up hurricanes like steroids injected in a bodybuilder, while higher sea levels have worsened storm surges. \u201cHurricanes of the future,\u201d cautions Eric Jay Dolin in A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America\u2019s Hurricanes<\/em>, his engaging chronicle of hurricane history, \u201cwill most likely be worse than those of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an ominous forecast when you consider the devastation hurricanes have already wreaked. Humanity\u2019s entanglement with tempests is at least as deep and complex as its relationship to whales. The word hurricane<\/em> comes from Caribbean languages, observes Dolin, \u201cwhere native cultures attributed the region\u2019s wild weather to the work of gods.\u201d For the Arawak, the deities governing storms and destruction were hurakan<\/em>; for the Ta\u00edno, it was jurac\u00e1n<\/em>. European explorers quickly learned from Indigenous people that \u201clarge swells, high wispy clouds, and an ominous red sky in the morning\u201d portended trouble. When Christopher Columbus escaped a storm by laying up his ships in a safe Hispaniola harbor, his enemies accused him of sorcery.<\/p>\n

As colonial North America took shape, hurricanes guided its trajectory. Storms thwarted France\u2019s attempts to claim Florida, contributed to the infamous ruin of the Jamestown colony, and even influenced the American Revolution by driving the French navy northward from the storm-tossed Caribbean to help fight the British. Like all natural disasters, hurricanes amplified racial and economic disparities. When the Lake Okeechobee hurricane drowned thousands in 1928, the 674 Black victims were dumped, unidentified, in a mass grave, \u201cmaintaining, in death, the segregation and injustice that these men and women had suffered in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Furious Sky <\/em>is itself a whirlwind, leaping from Katrina to Sandy to Harvey like a roof shingle caught in a gale-force wind. Yet one theme repeatedly emerges, a persistent human failing that has cost untold lives: the inability to comprehend risk. We expect the house to withstand the winds, the storm to swerve out to sea, the levees to hold, for no other reason than that they have in the past. One paradigmatic story of hubris occurred in 1891, the year a hurricane obliterated Galveston, Texas. As the storm bore down, Isaac Cline, a foolhardy meteorologist, reassured the city that, \u201caccording to the general laws of the motions of the atmosphere,\u201d no harm would come. The atmosphere did not oblige, and thousands died; even so, Cline later recast himself as a hero, claiming that he\u2019d saved \u201csome 6,000 lives\u201d on the day of the storm. When, in 2005, President George W. Bush absurdly claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was doing a \u201check of a job\u201d in the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he was merely continuing a timeless tradition of post-hurricane dissembling.<\/p>\n

Stylistically, A Furious Sky <\/em>and Fathoms<\/em> have little in common. Dolin\u2019s book proceeds chronologically, its unadorned prose as blunt as its powerful subject. Fathoms<\/em>, by contrast, cavorts like a porpoise in a boat\u2019s wake, darting wherever Giggs\u2019s curiosity takes her, from the transoceanic transmission of humpback songs to the Shinto Buddhist mores that permit whale consumption in Japan. She\u2019s most preoccupied by the odd charisma of cetaceans, and how our adoration for them can lead us to perverse places. Take the case of the La Plata dolphin calf that was effectively cuddled to death by tourists in Buenos Aires, Argentina\u2014the tragic result of \u201ca need to connect, so dire, that it smothers their beloved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their artistic differences notwithstanding, though, Giggs and Dolin have similar concerns: namely, the oceanic forces that structure the lives of coastal humans. Once, hurricanes and whales governed our species. Whales bestowed their flesh on Indigenous hunters like beneficent deities; storms swept in to destroy our fleets with utter caprice. As Homo sapiens<\/em>\u2019 power has grown, though, the polarity of our relationship with the ocean has reversed; we have become masters as well as supplicants. Today, our plastics fill whales\u2019 guts; our greenhouse gases fuel the hurricanes that batter us. As the La Plata dolphin would attest, nothing escapes our influence.<\/em> It\u2019s we who are the gods of the storm.<\/p>\n

Fathoms: The World in the Whale<\/em>
\nBy Rebecca Giggs
\n352 pp. Simon & Schuster<\/p>\n

A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America\u2019s Hurricanes<\/em>
\nBy Eric Jay Dolin
\n432 pp. W. W. Norton & Company<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every year, Chukchi hunters in eastern Russia harvest around 120 gray whales, and every year, several turn out to be stinky. The phrase \u201cstinky whale\u201d is not a euphemism, but a quasi-technical term that appears in scientific reports. Stinky whales <\/p>\n

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