The Importance Of The Whaling Industry In Moby Dick

Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick can be read as a “green” novel because Melville brought up in 1851 what we would still consider ecological issues today. Melville was not afraid to cause a little controversy in his time, especially when talking about whaling, and so with whaling comes the discussion of the health of marine life. Even though Melville plays with controversial topics all throughout the novel such as religion, freewill, and equity, another theme emphasized in the book is, of course, about the whales and marine life.
The novel is set during the early to mid 1800s in New Bedford, the largest whaling port at the time. Melville plunges the reader deep into the controversial industry we recognize as whaling by making the novel revolve around one task: getting revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale. Even by just initially setting the stage of Moby – Dick in New Bedford, Melville prepared for commenting on the whaling industry. By pushing limits and by publishing one of the first criticisms and explorations of the whaling industry, Melville turns Moby Dick into a layered novel, in which issues concerning nature are a significant layer. Melville recognizes what the slaughter of whales is enacting and by utilizing his words, text, and language, Melville recognizes a larger global movement and issue.
What began as a farming settlement that found success in maritime, factory industries and the manufacturing of lights came to be considered the wealthiest port and “the city that lit the world.” This was the small town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where amazing quantities of whale oil came from in the early 19th century. However, New Bedford’s success also led to its decline due to competitors and a decline in manufacturing aft...

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..., 20 thousand or more blue whales were killed, and at the same time, the North Pacific gray whale population was reduced form 15-20,000 whales to a couple thousand (Estes 303). The problem with whales however, is that so little is known about the effects and consequences of whaling both to the extent of the remaining population of whales and on the depletion of the population’s effect on the environment (Estes 1).
What little we do know, however, is that patterns of declining marine mammal populations, such as populations of pinnipeds and sea otters, have emerged in nature right after the deterioration of whaling in the North Pacific. It is theorized that a shift in diet and food webs is the major factor to the patterns of declining marine populations since food webs and predatory to prey interactions are critical for abundance and healthy population (Estes 2, 67).