Maybe I am more of a geek than I imagined, since I was totally engaged by the 90-year-old New Bedford Whaling Museum...or maybe my "inner child" was out playing with the supposed grown-up who obsessively snaps photos. I believe part of the museum's success lies in the different ways different people of different ages can engage with a variety of exhibits. Plus, you can interact physically, climbing stairs & ships or listening to whale sounds.
The massive skeletons of the Sperm Whale were mesmerizing, if not only for their scale, for their ritualized totemic effect. Artful too. Perhaps this is even more true of the New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park's affiliated site, the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska?
Perhaps I forgot, but more likely I never knew that as the whales were hunted past sustainability off our Eastern shores, that commerce moved to Alaska. Until the same thing happened there. Then, around the time of the Civil War, kerosene & gas replaced Whale-oil. It got me thinking about sustainable technology. And how probably no one thing is sustainable for the long-term. And how, though change is almost always disrupting, better usually to be moving forward in the search for new technology or resources or methods.
Whale tail tip.
1 comment:
Many years ago I visited the whaling museum in New Bedford and remember also being fascinated by it, and by the great whaling museum in Nantucket too. At the time I was sailing on a friend's boat and reading Moby Dick; how could I not be interested. And you're right, it does make us think about the changing search for energy.
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