the driving force was the profit motive. With me aboard, the ship has gained more than a biologist; it also has a human ecologist. Only within human ecology can one fully appreciate the tension of landscape, natural history, human history, politics, governance, resource exploitation, human spirit, and sheer audacity that resides in Antarctica; manipulatively, I use my opportunities as a lecturer aboard Minerva to stress that lesson to my captive audience!
Once the whales were rendered down, whalers would leave the bones on the beach. Because there is no significant bacterial activity due to the cold, these bones have lasted over ninety years.
The ecological equivalent of a Serengeti lion, this eleven-foot leopard seal scans the water for such easy prey as a penguin.
in the wind as it is hoisted to the deck. By the time I reach the bridge the winds have escalated to hurricane force, and yet there is the congratulatory air of a team that has pulled off a difficult landing. Exhausted and relieved, I return to my cabin to marvel at how a human ecologist came to be here. This is my third season in Antarctica, a luxury afforded by my sabbatical. I am part of an expedition team aboard an ecotourism vessel. For the cost of a couple of lectures and Zodiac driving skills, I have free board and passage to study the southern humpback whales that come here to feed every summer. There is a density of life here, despite the hostility of the environment to human physiology. This density attracted the first whalers and sealers to come south, and now justifies my presence here. By photographing and identifying individual humpback whales, I can contribute to the process of assessing the recovering population after a hundred years of whaling. Arguably, it was the drive to exploit these populations as resources that motivated countries to sponsor the explorers of the so-called heroic age. There was some nationalistic pride too, but there’s little doubt that 14 | COA
Shortly after the storm I sit on a beach on South Georgia, a sub-Antarctic island where the great whales were slaughtered by the hundred thousands back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Across the bay lies the abandoned community of Grytviken, probably the largest whaling station on South Georgia. These stations that thrived in the 1920s are now ghost towns. Indeed, they feel haunted. By one interpretation, whalers were mass murderers, slaughtering stocks to the point of extinction. In another view, they are heroes, pitting themselves against the ultimate challenge of elements and leviathan. It is difficult for me to resolve these two views. Within twenty feet of me lies a huddled trio of massive southern elephant seals, each maybe ten feet long. Ahead is a small group of king penguins. They appear unaware of me, or at least unconcerned by my presence. The biologist in me marvels that I can be in such close proximity to these animals, so much in their environment. Half a day later I go to St. Andrews Bay, one of the largest king penguin colonies in the world; later I sit in my Zodiac breathing in the foul halitosis of a ten-foot leopard seal, an animal quite capable of taking my own life, but for now much more interested in the penguin he is inhaling for lunch. The sights, sounds and stenches of these moments are overwhelming, the experiences stirring. As a biologist I am at a loss to explain my inspiration. As a human ecologist, I am better equipped to understand that connection. To study Antarctica effectively one has to turn to human ecology. Nowhere is one’s ecological footprint so apparent. The governance of Antarctica is a marvelous experiment that has lasted over fifty years—an entire continent essentially run by committee. Environmental concerns, not economical, are prime considerations. The politics between the countries that are members of the committee are fascinating, convoluted and sometimes downright sinister. It is here that you see the definitive and observable effects of climate change—even in the eight years that I have been visiting this place, I see evidence of glacial retreat. Finally, there is the paradox of life (both human and “other”) in such a harsh climate. I am only here in the relatively mild summer, and yet there have been times when I have been challenged close to my own limits. I would describe those moments as extremely rewarding—even, perhaps, fun. One can only marvel at the persistence of human spirit in the story of Antarctica; that self-sacrificing, undaunted drive of the early explorers. What inspired Capt. Lawrence Oates to sacrifice himself to a storm so his starved team-