For its researchers, the relationship between whales and carbon simply states that the creatures need to be cared for. This makes their continued decline a threat to the planet – and a warning of how one industrial process (such as whaling) could exacerbate the effects of another (the fossil fuel industry) in unexpected and catastrophic ways.īut that is not the IMF’s conclusion. In other words, whales protect our climate. Whales also feed populations of phytoplankton with their waste, and globally, these phytoplankton capture about 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide, four times as many emissions as the jungle in the Amazon. A single great whale can thus bind 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide – a not insignificant amount, given that a tree only absorbs 22 kg annually. In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher diagnoses the dominance of a ‘business ontology’, a mentality that can only imagine human activities to the extent that they are profitable.įor example, researchers affiliated with the International Monetary Fund recently noted that whales – especially great whales – capture significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, which they store in their huge bodies and take down to the ocean floor when they die.
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