A Modest Proposal

Solutions are particularly elusive when it comes to energy, so let’s start there. Oil’s through the roof and showing no signs of coming back down. Electricity demand keeps going up, driving up the price and the demand for more generating facilities. We want to keep driving our petroleum-fueled cars because we don’t have good alternatives. Everyone’s talking about using the wind and the sun to generate more kilowatts, and most of us are OK with that, but we aren’t necessarily happy about a wind generator or a big array of solar collectors right outside our living room windows, or in some wild place where we’d have to look at them when we’re on vacation.

Solutions are also pretty elusive in fisheries, which used to be big here in the Northeast. Now that the lobster catch is down and the groundfish business has been largely managed into oblivion by the government, everyone’s talking about “branding” and getting “sustainable;” innovative marketing is on the rise; there’s growing awareness that without some kind of fishing industry, island communities are going to become as threatened as whales. The question, of course, is whether all this creativity will do the trick.

And speaking of whales — there’s another crisis. They get entangled in lobster gear, we’re told, so everyone has to spend thousands of dollars on new whale-safe gear, just as the lobster catch is headed downward. As a business proposition, lobster fishing is beginning to look as dicey as groundfishing. All at a time when the U.S. economy — financed by mortgages on over-valued houses and loans from the Chinese — is looking even shakier than fishing.

So let’s get to the solutions.

We’ll begin by putting at least some of the problems into perspective while noting that all things are connected and always have been. To wit: at one time in our history, much of the energy we used for lighting came from whales. Fortunes were made by men who went out and harpooned whales, boiling them down for their oil and then transporting that oil back home where it lit lamps in Maine, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and thousands of other places. Whale oil dominated the lighting market in the U.S. and Europe, in fact, until an Englishman figured out how to transform coal into gas, making possible gas lighting while creating a whole new industry — coal mining — that in turn spawned all kinds of industrial development. Track that one down and you’ll get to several of today’s crises, but that’s another story.

Back to the whales, which you’d think would have returned to their old, free-swimming, breeding and migrating ways once the energy-connected hunting pressure was off. That didn’t prove to be the case, of course: we found other uses for whales including dog food, certain kinds of sushi, baleen for corsets, perfumes, ivory for scrimshaw and other useful products, not to mention more contemporary things such as Japanese scientific research projects and views for tourists on whale-watching cruises. For lots of reasons the numbers of whales have kept declining, to the point where now they’ve got to be saved from extinction.

Energy. Whales. Lobsters. Coastal communities. The economy. Time for some creativity here!

Whales need jobs, just like people. If they’re going to stay with us here on the planet they need to start earning their keep. Lobsters do, after all; so did groundfish before we caught most of them. Pigs and cows pay their way.

We need energy. Whales were once a prime source of energy. We don’t like looking at the systems we currently use to generate energy, be they mountaintop windmills, offshore drilling rigs, strip mines or landscapes flooded by hydroelectric projects. We don’t care for nuclear power’s long-term risks. We do like looking at whales in the wild, and I’m betting we’d be OK, at least, with looking at them in captivity, just as we look at the small whales at Marine World.

So here’s the thing: let’s round up the remaining whales, place them in visible, enclosed areas off the coast where they’ll be safe from lobster gear, encourage them to breed and multiply and then harvest their oil sustainably, pumping them out every so often — like shearing sheep. No more oil drilling; no more nuclear power plants; no more wind generators in our viewsheds; plenty of tax revenues from whale-viewing tourists and the proprietors of this new generation of feed lots; jobs galore. No more mercury from discarded compact fluorescent bulbs.