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Please join us to discuss Ailish Lalor's paper draft, "Suburban Dolphins and Free Spermaceti: The Afterlife of Whaling in the Netherlands, 1965-1985"
Abstract:
In 1965, a year after the Dutch stopped whaling in the Antarctic, four dolphins were flown into Harderwijk, a town in the north-east of the Netherlands, from Philadelphia. They were to be the founding specimens of the Harderwijk Dolphinarium, which would expand, through the 1970s, to include several orcas. The Dolphinarium was the first of its kind on mainland Europe. It described itself as having a dual purpose: to entertain and educate the public about cetaceans, and to conduct scientific research, particularly on whale communication. Throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a series of sperm whales washed up on the shores of the Netherlands. They attracted attention: they became ciphers for anxieties about the rearrangement of the Dutch coastline, and about the country’s role in the decimation of the whale population worldwide. In the Antarctic, krill bloomed to fill a whale-sized ecological niche, and the former Dutch whaling company, Vinke & Co., made plans to move its exploitation down the food chain. As global concerns about population growth churned, Vinke & Co. convinced the Dutch Center for Nutrition that krill protein would be the solution. Red clouds of krill replaced whale blood in the Antarctic Ocean. This is an essay about whales’ deaths and afterlives, and the deaths and afterlives of whaling.
To RSVP and to request a copy of the paper, please email Nathanial Moses: nathanielmoses@g.harvard.edu