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Moby-Dick, with Kyle Harper · Christians Reading Classics

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1:38
SPEAKER_01: But soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Ere that come to pass, ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacle's hulls of the Leviathan, at the outset, it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough, appreciative understanding of the more special Leviathanic revelations and illusions of all sorts, which are to follow.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera that I would like, that I would now fain put before you.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Yet is it no easy task?
2:20
SPEAKER_01: The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less, is here essayed.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: No branch of zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology, says Captain Scoresby, A.D.
2:42
SPEAKER_01: 1820.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cytasia into groups and families.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal, sperm whale, says Surgeon Beale, A.D.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: 1839.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: Unfitness to pursue our research in unfathomable waters.
3:08
SPEAKER_01: Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetaccea, a field threw with thorns.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: All these incomplete indications, but serve to torture us, naturalists.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and lessen those lights of zoology and anatomy.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: So writes Herman Mulville in one of his famous Cytology chapters in the book Moby Dick or the Whale, one of the greatest, if not the great, American novel, published in 1851.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Christians Rating Classics, a podcast from your orthodoxy.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: Today it is my delight to talk about Moby Dick or the Whale with a historian of whales and other, many, many other animals and the world in which we inhabit together with them.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: Kyle Harper is the GT and Libby Blankenship Chair of the History in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: He has published many books, including Lagues Upon the Earth and The Fate of Rome.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: And his latest book, The Last Animal, Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth, from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction, is out this fall.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: In it, he talks about whales and many, many more animals whose stories have intersected with the human story.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: And it is about both his book and Moby Dick that we get to talk today.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: Kyle, thank you for being here.
4:51
SPEAKER_02: Nadia, thank you for having me.
4:53
SPEAKER_02: It's a pleasure.
4:53
SPEAKER_02: But can I start with one small correction of the factual record?
4:58
SPEAKER_02: Moby Dick is not possibly the great American novel.
5:01
SPEAKER_02: It is definitely the great American novel.
5:03
SPEAKER_02: That's just an objective truth.
5:07
SPEAKER_02: So you wouldn't even need to qualify it.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: Fair.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: Make your case.
5:11
SPEAKER_01: Here we go.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: Let's start with that.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: Just make your case.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: Well, one of my other favorite American novelists, Cormac McCarthy, said somewhere that if he didn't know better, he would think that Moby Dick was divinely inspired.
5:26
SPEAKER_02: And I always felt that way.
5:28
SPEAKER_02: Actually, before I heard him say that, it's the book more than any other book that when I read, I just am blown away over and over that a human being wrote this.
5:40
SPEAKER_02: It is so transcendently wonderful, beautiful, weird.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: I mean, you started reading from the Satology sections, which have been the bane and fear of generations of schoolchildren.
5:53
SPEAKER_02: That's the hard stuff.
5:54
SPEAKER_02: And it does take a little bit of getting into the spirit of Moby Dick to really uh absorb and learn to love some of those, some of those somewhat forbidding uh chapters on whales that that Melville makes you sort of listen to to get to the to the story, which is at the heart of it.
6:13
SPEAKER_02: And it is like it's we can lose sight of the fact that it's just an unbelievable story.
6:19
SPEAKER_02: Like just Melville was just an incredible story, uh adventure storyteller.
6:25
SPEAKER_02: And at the heart of it, like this is just a watchable movie, you know.
6:30
SPEAKER_02: This is this is a an incredible adventure quest story with with compelling characters.
6:36
SPEAKER_02: And then beyond that, it is one of the most profound philosophical novels.
6:41
SPEAKER_02: It's about everything, it's about God and and being and truth and knowledge.
6:47
SPEAKER_02: Um it's and it's also one of the most extraordinary works of artistic creativity.
6:54
SPEAKER_02: Just the language is is unforgettable.
6:57
SPEAKER_02: It comes out of nowhere.
6:59
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's it creates a style.
7:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's one of one.
7:03
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have um sort of any predecessors and very few um successors.
7:09
SPEAKER_02: So it's it's sort of the the the story itself, the philosophy, the the language, all come together to create what what I really, in all seriousness, would say is I think the great American novel.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: That is that is a really uh that is a strong case.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: And we'll get to that in a second.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm gonna take a step back and ask you a question I always ask uh guests.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: What is a classic to begin with?
7:36
SPEAKER_01: So since we're saying this is the great American novel and it is a classic, well, what is a classic to begin with?
7:42
SPEAKER_02: I think a classic is a work of the human spirit that endures the test of time.
7:49
SPEAKER_02: And to endure the test of time, it has to be truly great.
7:53
SPEAKER_02: So it has to withstand changing uh standards, changing tastes, and be recognized uh as a great uh aesthetic product, even as tastes and standards evolve.
8:08
SPEAKER_02: And timeless works do that because they speak to really fundamental questions that transcend time and place.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: And so when we think about the classics, often we mean the Greeks and the Romans.
8:19
SPEAKER_02: And that's because the questions that they're asking, that Plato and Aristotle are grappling with are even given everything about the world that has changed, everything we know that they didn't know, the questions that they ask are eternal, timeless.
8:33
SPEAKER_02: They transcend any kind of local, contextual, contingent facts, and they ask really enduring fundamental questions about the human condition, and they give answers that are that are worth being in conversation with, whether we agree with them or not.
8:48
SPEAKER_02: So the classic is something that that stands the test of time.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: And by that standard, Moby Dick is absolutely a classic.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: A lot has changed since 1851 when the novel appeared, and yet it still speaks to some of the most basic questions that we will ever face.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: So walk us through these questions as we kind of enter this novel.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: What would you say to somebody who has not read it?
9:13
SPEAKER_01: What should they prepare for?
9:15
SPEAKER_02: Don't don't be afraid.
9:17
SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a big doorstop of a novel.
9:21
SPEAKER_02: Um and it it has sort of been uh feared and and uh the object of sort of being forced to read it.
9:31
SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that's that's you know, it is what it is because we have to assign this book.
9:36
SPEAKER_02: Um I've I've taught this book quite a bit in a class that I teach at the University of Oklahoma.
9:42
SPEAKER_02: Um the class itself is kind of interesting.
9:45
SPEAKER_02: It's a it's more or less a great books class, although what we do is we use as the basis of our syllabus the the reading list that the poet W.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: H.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: Auden used for a course that he taught in 1941 at the University of Michigan called Fate in the Individual.
10:01
SPEAKER_02: And this book is at the core of that syllabus, it's at the core of our syllabus.
10:05
SPEAKER_02: And so I do, I do have the experience of trying to bring students into this book, usually university students, although I think it's a great book for anybody.
10:16
SPEAKER_02: I think it's a great book for high school students who are sort of thinking about who am I, how do I know what I know?
10:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, what are my responsibilities to the world?
10:25
SPEAKER_02: Why does the world not make sense?
10:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, I mean, this is a book about two ways of responding to the fact that the world doesn't always make sense.
10:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, and those two ways are sort of embodied in the main characters of Ishmael and Ahab.
10:39
SPEAKER_02: One of them, uh, Ishmael has a kind of um openness to the world.
10:45
SPEAKER_02: You know, he swings between depression and love, um, but he's fundamentally uh the more passive character.
10:52
SPEAKER_02: He's the sailor, not the captain.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: Whereas Ahab is this giant Nietzschean uh willful figure uh who is deadset on trying to impose his will on a senseless world, even though it will cost him everything, and he seems to know it all along.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: So we have these powerful characters, and of course, we have the whale.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: So, what role does the whale play as a character?
11:20
SPEAKER_01: Can we say he is a character here?
11:23
SPEAKER_02: I see a character.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: It's a oh, what a hard question.
11:26
SPEAKER_02: I think this is, I mean, it's a tantalizing question because the the book is, you know, subtitled The Whale, and it's a story about a whale um named Moby Dick, which is a uh character in the story.
11:40
SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a white sperm whale that has injured Ahab in the past and he's out for for revenge.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: Um, but obviously it's um it's a symbol.
11:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, and Melville plays with this symbol and teases us with the whale, um, with what the whale is, with what the whale means, with the possibility that the whale means nothing.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: Um, he approaches the whale from every possible angle, and this is really what the book as a whole does.
12:11
SPEAKER_02: The whale is the object of the quest, the whale is the object of scientific knowledge.
12:15
SPEAKER_02: I mean, cetology is the official term for the study of cetaceans, which is the you know, the taxon to which whales belong.
12:24
SPEAKER_02: Um, and there's there's a whole lot of science, and it's kind of intentionally half of it's bad science and mocking science, um, because Melbourne wants to say, can we ever really pin down the world and be certain that we um are seeing it the way it really is?
12:42
SPEAKER_02: Um, do our scientific words, do our scientific ideas and categories really give us um something to hold on to uh about reality?
12:51
SPEAKER_02: But the whale he approaches through literature, through the Bible.
12:55
SPEAKER_02: Um the whale is Leviathan, the whale is the beast that um that swallows Jonah.
13:01
SPEAKER_02: Um the whale is approached through through literature, the whale is an economic object, and I hope we'll come back to that just because it's one of my interests in the book, and it's sort of one of the ways that I approach the book is to remind us that the setting of this story is extreme realism.
13:19
SPEAKER_02: And that's one of the things that we most misread about it as modern readers because we're we're far enough removed that this seems like a fantastical story, but it's actually a kind of hyper-realist novel in really important ways.
13:35
SPEAKER_02: And that's that's one of the things that makes it work.
13:37
SPEAKER_02: This is a real industry.
13:39
SPEAKER_02: Melville himself had sailed in the Pacific on a whaling ship, and Nantucket was the longtime center of this industry.
13:47
SPEAKER_02: Um, and the kind of real gritty um factual context of this story, right down to the fact that there was uh a whale that was called Mocha, Mocha Dick, um in the 1820s, um, that was sort of mythologized among whalers and had been involved in the destruction of a ship.
14:10
SPEAKER_02: So, like everything about this is deeply grounded in reality.
14:14
SPEAKER_02: And that's one of the things that uh as a historian who's thought about the history of animals that I like to sort of bring, try and bring to the novel and and remind us that this may seem like a work of extremely creative fantasy when actually it's it's a hyper-realist novel.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: So, in connection with this hyper-realism, let me ask a question about one other aspect of this.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: Usually in fiction, obviously the characters are important, but so is place.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: And most American novels are set in particular places that are towns, cities, and so on.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: This novel is not really on land.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: So, what do we make of the place where it is set?
14:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: And it's it in a sense, it has sort of two settings because in the, you know, the first whatever it is, hundred pages or so, um, the the main character or narrator, Ishmael, um, travels to across New England and goes to um Nantucket, which was very much the center of this real industry, was part of the early American economy, was part of the early American culture of New England, and really is Melville's very interested in that place and the people who are there, and the you know, the kind of like weird paradox that I think is very weird.
15:38
SPEAKER_02: And Melville's one of the people who most sort of confronts us with this, but the the whaling industry is dominated by Quakers.
15:46
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's very strange.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: It's an extremely violent, bloody industry.
15:52
SPEAKER_02: And they also in England they dominate the gun manufacturing industry too.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: It's kind of a weird thing because there's such a deep, earnest commitment to like peacefulness that's combined with this like commitment to this extremely bloody way of making a living.
16:09
SPEAKER_02: So the the sort of New England whaling coastal landed environment is the first place of the novel, but it's always looking out to sea.
16:18
SPEAKER_02: I mean, right from the very first pages, he tells you, I want to go out and stand at the end of Manhattan and look out into the ocean.
16:25
SPEAKER_02: And so this is a this is a story about the ocean.
16:28
SPEAKER_02: Um, the ocean is also a symbol, its vastness, its sublimity, its sort of incomprehensibility, its depth.
16:36
SPEAKER_02: Um, and we have to remember it's about the Pacific, this big weird alien world that becomes part of the whaling industry in the 19th century after, largely after the Atlantic whales have been hunted out.
16:54
SPEAKER_02: And there's a there's an extension of the whale hunt to the Pacific, which required multi-year voyages.
17:04
SPEAKER_02: So these ships would have to be at sea for years killing whales, and by this phase focused on a particular kind of whale that I hope we can come back to, the sperm whale, which is uh critical to understanding the story and its context.
17:22
SPEAKER_02: But this isn't just the ocean in the abstract, it's the Pacific Ocean, this giant, faraway, alien place where they go for years that's full of, you know, the Pacific is massive and it's it's spotted by islands that can be thousands of miles apart with very different cultures.
17:41
SPEAKER_02: And Melville knows that world because he's seen it, and he evokes that world through some of these um Pacific characters that he brings into American literature, of course, like Queequeg above all.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: But um, the the place of the novel is the ocean, but specifically the Pacific Ocean and its world and all that that could represent for an American reading public that is still very East Coast, urban, Atlantic, um, in its sort of orientation.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: And he's writing this when America is still under a century old.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: So it's still sort of this discovery like who are we as people?
18:22
SPEAKER_01: And that's right.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: I wonder.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's a yeah.
18:28
SPEAKER_02: Go ahead.
18:29
SPEAKER_02: Okay, sorry.
18:29
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, it's it's such a it's a deeply American novel, and it's a deeply democratic novel.
18:36
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's it's absolutely an expression of the the fully confident American democratic ethos.
18:44
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it confronts us with the the diversity and equality of people.
18:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and there's something very fundamentally American and democratic about the spirit of the book.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: I love this idea.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like the being uh being at sea together is a great equalizer as you're pursuing the same goal.
19:05
SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: So you've mentioned um the economic angle is, of course, essential to understand this novel.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: So talk to us about the economy of this.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: Why is everyone hunting whales in the mid-19th century?
19:20
SPEAKER_02: Right.
19:21
SPEAKER_02: It's it's it's sort of amazing that this ever happens.
19:25
SPEAKER_02: Humans, humans are hunters, we're predators, we like animal protein, and we've fished um from the very beginning, and even opportunistically, sporadically hunted whales that came near shore for as long as we can trace.
19:47
SPEAKER_02: But in the very late Middle Ages and early modern times, so from the 15th and 16th century, the modern whale hunt is born.
20:00
SPEAKER_02: And it starts in Europe off the Atlantic coast of Spain and France in the Bay of Biscay.
20:07
SPEAKER_02: In fact, the Basques are at the forefront of developing and scaling up a whaling economy that isn't just sort of happening to kill whales that come near shore, but organizing well-capitalized, well-financed, dedicated uh campaigns to sail further from the shore for the purposes of hunting and killing whales.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: And it's this is not a weekend fishing trip.
20:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's it's dangerous, it's risky, it requires serious, taking serious financial risk as well as personal bodily risk for the for the people who are involved.
20:48
SPEAKER_02: It involves extreme specialization.
20:50
SPEAKER_02: People learn how to track and identify and find whales.
20:55
SPEAKER_02: They learn the habits and migratory patterns of the whales, they learn how to go about killing whales.
21:01
SPEAKER_02: It's not easy to figure out how it is you're going to harpoon um marine megafauna, giant uh mammals that live live in the ocean.
21:10
SPEAKER_02: And so um this scales up from the 15th and 16th century.
21:16
SPEAKER_02: And then when Europeans cross the Atlantic, it sort of explodes.
21:21
SPEAKER_02: Um and the the driver is ultimately demand, but it's not demand for meat.
21:28
SPEAKER_02: This is one of the things that makes it sort of different about human hunting, is that we're not hunting for food, we're hunting to harvest the animals' body parts because they produce valuable commodities.
21:44
SPEAKER_02: And the number one commodity that comes out of whales is blubber that's rendered into whale oil.
21:53
SPEAKER_02: And it is easy for us to judge or fail to really understand this.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: But this is a world without electricity.
22:03
SPEAKER_02: And they, you know, they don't want to go to bed when the sun goes down any more than we do.
22:09
SPEAKER_02: And they have to keep their world lit.
22:12
SPEAKER_02: And they do it with beef tallow.
22:14
SPEAKER_02: That's the most common uh medium for illumination.
22:21
SPEAKER_02: And it's stinky.
22:25
SPEAKER_02: And you don't, it's kind of the poor man's light.
22:30
SPEAKER_02: And compared to beef tallow, whale oil is clean and clear and bright and long-lasting.
22:37
SPEAKER_02: And whale oil becomes a very, very popular medium for creating light.
22:44
SPEAKER_02: And so whale oil is the primary commodity that's motivating the whale hunt.
22:51
SPEAKER_02: Most of the meat is just discarded.
22:53
SPEAKER_02: So when the whales are killed, they're harpooned, left to bleed out in the water.
23:00
SPEAKER_02: And then they're taken on board ship, sometimes in the early days onto shore, where the blubber is extracted and burned down to produce barrels of whale oil that could then be sold in markets across Europe and then North America.
23:18
SPEAKER_02: There are other commodities, and the uh many of the ballen whales have whale, what they call whale bone.
23:25
SPEAKER_02: It's not really bone, it's keratin.
23:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, they're the filters that cover the front of the whale's mouth that they use to siphon plankton.
23:33
SPEAKER_02: And so think of like a wand that's bendy and flexible, but yet pretty hard and durable.
23:40
SPEAKER_02: And these can be used for everything.
23:42
SPEAKER_02: They're used for fishing rods, they're used for clothing, they're used for like hoops and skirts, um, they're used in all kinds of different um manufactured products in the 16th, 17th to 18th century.
23:54
SPEAKER_02: So there's a big demand for whalebone, but that's really secondary to the to the whale oil, which is primarily used for illumination.
24:02
SPEAKER_02: And then in the apex of the whale hunt, the most mature and advanced and large-scale phase of the industry in the 18th and into the 19th century, sperm whales are hunted, and they have in their skulls a kind of um sort of light waxy substance called spermaceti that's valuable for a number of things, including lubrication.
24:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's extremely effective for lubricating everything, you know, from factory gears to um to automotive transmissions.
24:44
SPEAKER_02: So the the whale's body is harvested for all of these different commodities that can then be can then be sold.
24:53
SPEAKER_02: And the the setting of Moby Dick is is really the the kind of apex or even slightly like waning days of the the glory period of the the sperm whale hunt that took American sailors all over the world, but particularly to the Pacific.
25:15
SPEAKER_01: That is a really wild story when you think about it.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: So, like your point, normally through much of human history, people have hunted, but this is a different sort of hunt.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: It sounds like a very uh modern industrial method of hunting.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: Like this is not just for food, this is for tools almost.
25:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is.
25:36
SPEAKER_02: It's a kind of well, yeah, industrial.
25:39
SPEAKER_02: It's a good word because it's it sort of makes us think about the nature of this industry, which is such a strange mixture of very primitive techniques and methods and very advanced capitalist, commercial, mercantile, financial systems of extracting a resource as efficiently as possible for markets.
26:10
SPEAKER_02: But but we should remember too, when Melville's experiencing the whale hunts, the setting of Moby Dick, even though it's you know, the novel's published in 1851, it's kind of the world of the 1840s, more or less, and the the whale hunt, even this late, there's something like remarkably primitive about it.
26:32
SPEAKER_02: At the at the end of the day, these guys out on these boats have to get in little whale hunting boats.
26:42
SPEAKER_02: So they ride, you know, the the big ships, the like the Pequod, and they then to actually go and try and harpoon and kill the whales, they have to load into these little easily maneuverable rowboats, basically, and uh approach at very close range these huge and often very dangerous animals and try and throw a spear through them.
27:13
SPEAKER_02: And Melville has this um this scene in Moby Dick where they kill a sperm whale and they find a stone-tipped lance in the body of the whale that had been stuck there and had heeled around.
27:31
SPEAKER_02: And first of all, this actually happens.
27:35
SPEAKER_02: And like a decade or so ago, a whale died.
27:40
SPEAKER_02: I can't remember if it was killed or what, off of the coast of the North Pacific, or I think it was Alaska, and it had a more than century-old spear tip, harpoon tip, in its body.
27:53
SPEAKER_02: Um and this is way after Melville's writing.
27:56
SPEAKER_02: But Melville knew what he was talking about.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: And the second thing about this scene is it sort of captures the fact that Melville recognized that, you know, the harpoons wouldn't have been made of stone anymore, but there was uh something like very primitive, visceral, raw about the reality of killing an animal at close quarters with the kinds of tools that humans have used for thousands and tens of thousands of years.
28:26
SPEAKER_02: Now that was about to change.
28:29
SPEAKER_02: Melville didn't know this, but a few decades later, the the whale hunt would be really even partly revived when um a Norwegian named uh Sven Foyne invented a grenade-tipped harpoon.
28:46
SPEAKER_02: And so they would throw um harpoons into the body of the whale that had an explosive on it and would blow up the animal.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, it's kind of the difference between hunting with a bow and arrow and hunting with a rifle.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, there's and as somebody who does this and does does both and knows what they're like, they're very different.
29:08
SPEAKER_02: You know, killing a killing a deer with a bow and arrow feels like a reasonably fair proposition.
29:14
SPEAKER_02: It's very different experientially.
29:18
SPEAKER_02: You're close, your main worry is scent, you're you're right there with the animal, you can you can hear everything.
29:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, there's no distance involved.
29:28
SPEAKER_02: Whereas the the whaling industry was transformed by these new kinds of killing technologies that came along a few decades after Melville is riding.
29:38
SPEAKER_02: And then eventually there would be diesel ships, um, so you're not relying on sail anymore.
29:45
SPEAKER_02: There would be you know, sonar and radar to find the animals, and the industry would become truly high-tech and industrial in that sense as well.
29:55
SPEAKER_02: But in the period that we're talking about, it's still basically a stone age hunt.
30:01
SPEAKER_02: They're they're sailing around, they're trying to find the animals using you know signs and habits and um sea knowledge, watching birds, watching fish.
30:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, and then they have to get up there and they have to go fight it face to face, hand to fin.
30:19
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's very risky.
30:22
SPEAKER_02: And that's that's what makes the scene, this, the context, the backdrop of Movie Dick so powerful is it's so modern in some ways and so Stone Age in other ways.
30:34
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30:41
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30:48
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31:00
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31:17
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31:22
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31:32
SPEAKER_01: That is a powerful contrast.
31:34
SPEAKER_01: And bringing into all of this is the contrast of the motivations of Ahab and everybody else.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: So you described this very lucrative industry.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: It's like high risk, high reward.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: Um, yes, you're risking your life to kill this massive animal, but then you make a profit, and you know, that's profits have been motivating people for millennia as well.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: But with Ahab, the captain of this whaling ship, you have something that is very different and very primordial, this sense of um revenge.
32:11
SPEAKER_02: Revenge.
32:12
SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's revenge at a literal level for the story.
32:16
SPEAKER_02: He wants to get back this whale, but it's at a deeper level, it's revenge against the nature of the universe that we find ourselves in.
32:27
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think Ahab is, I mean, Ishmael and Ahab are two of the greatest characters in all of literature.
32:35
SPEAKER_02: Um, Ahab's easier to underestimate um because he gets, I think, unfairly sort of portrayed as the villain of the story.
32:46
SPEAKER_02: And of course, that's there.
32:47
SPEAKER_02: I mean, he's he's named after a biblical villain, King Ahab.
32:52
SPEAKER_02: Um, but well, though, so is I mean Ishmael, we can talk about him and his name too.
32:57
SPEAKER_02: But the, you know, so it's easy enough to say that Ahab is is the bad guy in the story, but that's not, I mean, I think Ahab's a hero.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: Um, and he's he's single-minded, and um, and there's something pure and honest about his reaction to the world.
33:14
SPEAKER_02: It's it's I mean, it's kind of a a truism of literary criticism to say that Melville's influenced by Shakespeare.
33:24
SPEAKER_02: And it's true.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Melville's influenced by lots of things.
33:27
SPEAKER_02: He's influenced by the experience of whaling.
33:29
SPEAKER_02: You mentioned William Scoresby, who's one of the great whale captains and writers about whaling, whose journal of the voyage, sea voyage to the northern fishery, is like one of the most important histories of whaling.
33:44
SPEAKER_02: He's British and he actually leaves the industry.
33:48
SPEAKER_02: I think he's kind of scarred by the violence and becomes a minister.
33:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, but so um Melville knows the literature of whaling.
33:56
SPEAKER_02: He knows it personally.
33:58
SPEAKER_02: He's deeply influenced by the Bible, he's deeply influenced by um by Milton.
34:04
SPEAKER_02: Um, he's deeply, deeply influenced by Plato.
34:08
SPEAKER_02: I think that's one of the elements of this story that doesn't get ever quite the attention it deserves.
34:13
SPEAKER_02: This is a book that's very, very deeply in dialogue with Plato.
34:18
SPEAKER_02: Um, but the Shakespeare is everywhere in this book.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: And last time we taught it, we we read Macbeth right before this.
34:28
SPEAKER_02: And I mean, I don't think this is like original to observe that that particularly Lear and Macbeth influence this book, but it was an amazing experience having just really been deep in Macbeth with students and thinking about you know what motivates um Macbeth, what motivates Lady Macbeth, um, what is what is evil, what is kind of the will to power, and then reading this book.
34:53
SPEAKER_02: And you it's one thing to to know that Shakespeare is in this book, but the experience of like really deeply reading Macbeth and then reading this book was was very moving for me.
35:04
SPEAKER_02: Uh, because you then you start to feel on every page how much of Shakespeare's tragic side um Melville has absorbed in this book.
35:15
SPEAKER_02: Ahab is is a tragic figure.
35:18
SPEAKER_02: Um the world has has been unfair to him.
35:21
SPEAKER_02: And um in the face of that, he resolves to um try and get revenge on the world, even though um it feels like his fate to be destroyed and trying to do so.
35:35
SPEAKER_02: Um but he goes down exactly the way that he wants to, as close to something resembling on his terms uh as possible.
35:44
SPEAKER_02: So the revenge is really more than just about Ahab versus the whale.
35:49
SPEAKER_02: It's about um a kind of, I think he's a kind of Nietzschean Ubermensch.
35:56
SPEAKER_02: He's he's a sort of figure who refuses to recognize any values except his own and then lives that out.
36:04
SPEAKER_02: Uh, he doesn't care about his men.
36:05
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't care, certainly doesn't care about the bankers who've paid for his ship.
36:10
SPEAKER_02: I mean, no concern whatsoever for them.
36:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, he cares about one thing, his will, uh, and and trying to realize it uh in a universe that that seems unjust and indifferent.
36:25
SPEAKER_02: Um, and that that's sort of what Ahab brings.
36:28
SPEAKER_02: And so I think um he's not even a villain.
36:32
SPEAKER_02: He's he's a great figure um who who uh refuses to to accept the the indifference of the universe.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: That sounds to me actually Homeric.
36:46
SPEAKER_01: This sort of like that's the kind of heroes who know, like this world will die with me, but I will be um I will be victorious in this duel.
36:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's that's absolutely there.
37:00
SPEAKER_02: And there's there's elements of both the Iliad and certainly the the Odyssey in this book, but absolutely there's a kind of Greek pagan um element to Ahab in particular.
37:15
SPEAKER_01: And I guess this makes, in some ways, Moby Dick a tragedy.
37:19
SPEAKER_01: Would you agree?
37:20
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I think it's I think it's absolutely a tragedy with the the figure of Ishmael sort of threading through it in a weird way that uh canonical tragedy wouldn't let you.
37:32
SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, the tragedy is is the irreconcilability between Ahab's strident individualism and the nature of the world.
37:43
SPEAKER_02: I mean, if all tragedy in some sense is about living in a in a world where um everything is fragile, a world that breaks everything, that breaks in particularly the the beautiful and the proud and the strong, um in a universe that's that's hostile or indifferent to us, um, then this is classically a tragedy and it breaks Ahab and it goes down um you know in gory Greek tragic fashion at the end.
38:13
SPEAKER_02: And yet then there's Ishmael um from the first line to the last.
38:18
SPEAKER_02: He's with us, and in some sense, he's not a uh a character out of tragedy, I don't think.
38:25
SPEAKER_02: Um what do you think?
38:27
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think he seems, I think he would his spirit and his openness um and his kind of passivity and existentialism is is sort of alien to to the form and spirit of tragedy.
38:42
SPEAKER_02: And he he's sort of on all sides of this story, and that's one of the things that makes it makes it such a special book.
38:50
SPEAKER_02: But but I would say Ishmael, and maybe you're probably one of our listeners will will give me some correction to think about here, but he doesn't seem like a very tragic figure to me.
39:00
SPEAKER_02: And he survives.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: Um He does.
39:03
SPEAKER_01: Well, he in this regard, he reminds me of tragic choruses.
39:06
SPEAKER_01: They just sort of like comment, like, oh yes, this this awful thing is happening.
39:10
SPEAKER_01: It's like yeah, very sad.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: Moving on.
39:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
39:15
SPEAKER_02: And I'm not sure he's any wiser at the end.
39:19
SPEAKER_02: Um that's striking.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: So he's not developing as a character.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: He just observes.
39:26
SPEAKER_02: He just he he observes.
39:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, but maybe, you know, I mean, he he tells us in the first in the amazing first paragraph um that he's depressed, um, and that he's suicidal, and that he's going to see um as the alternative to that path.
39:43
SPEAKER_02: Um, and in the end, he's alive and he writes this book and he creates something.
39:47
SPEAKER_02: Um, so it's maybe, yeah, maybe he has, in a sense, learned or been wiser, or certainly he's survived.
39:54
SPEAKER_01: The irony that this tragedy becomes for him literally life-giving.
39:59
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
40:01
SPEAKER_01: Well, so I'm gonna shift gears um to a related tragedy, and perhaps, and I want to hear you uh reflect on that.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: So your new book, The Last Animal, uh, Human History, and the fate of life on Earth from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: And on the cover, so for listeners, the cover of the book has a massive whale.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: It is a sperm whale, right?
40:26
SPEAKER_02: Um yes, on the yeah.
40:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: And it is massive.
40:31
SPEAKER_01: It looks from afar, if you look at the cover of the book, it looks like a rock.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: And then you realize, no, that's a whale.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: And there is a group of about 20 men lined up on top of this massive whale, just standing there.
40:45
SPEAKER_01: And so it gives you a scale of just like when we say megafauna, when you use the term megafauna, like this is megafauna.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: It is.
40:54
SPEAKER_01: It looks like a small island, but it is an animal that these men have just killed.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: And so the question I have for you to start with, the um our conversation on the last animal, do you see this book as a tragedy?
41:09
SPEAKER_02: Ooh, no, um, because the the ending isn't written.
41:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I will say, too, about the the cover of the book, the photo was was found and chosen by my great editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio, uh, who shares my obsession with Moby Dick as a novel and had this idea because in one of the older editions of Moby Dick, I forget which one, um, actually they used this picture, um, which I think is like a getty image.
41:38
SPEAKER_02: You just license it from somewhere.
41:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, that they'd used this picture on the cover of Moby Dick.
41:44
SPEAKER_02: And um, and so I wanted it, I loved it when he proposed that idea um to have it have it as the cover of of this book.
41:51
SPEAKER_02: That's it's a story about the the history of humans and animals trying to capture the the essence of the story from the very beginning, from the ice age hunter-gatherers that were our ancestors down to the present.
42:07
SPEAKER_02: And of course, whaling is is just one thread of that fabric, but it's a really interesting one.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: And I think you can actually understand it better if you do zoom out and try and see it in terms of the whole story, which certainly has tragic elements because there are um there are things that have been broken and lost.
42:24
SPEAKER_02: Um, there are losses that are irreversible.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I but I avoid saying it's a tragedy because I have to believe in the the ability that we have to also recognize um what we want to preserve and to to act to stop destruction.
42:42
SPEAKER_02: And whales, again, are a great example of this.
42:45
SPEAKER_02: Um the the whale hunt is is part of our very long story of of exploitation and often over-exploitation of animals.
42:57
SPEAKER_02: Humans kill millions and millions of of whales.
43:01
SPEAKER_02: And um, even in the 20th century, the whale hunt just keeps expanding.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: Um, even as we no longer need whales for the same reasons, like whale oil.
43:17
SPEAKER_02: We don't need whale oil after we have kerosene and then electricity.
43:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but we find more new uses for whales.
43:25
SPEAKER_02: And I tell the story a little bit, but nitroglycerin in the early days is dependent on the whale industry.
43:32
SPEAKER_02: So we use it to build dynamite and bombs.
43:35
SPEAKER_02: Um, we use the whales become incredibly important in the production of margarine, which is such a weird thing to think about, but humans are eating whale fat um all over the world.
43:47
SPEAKER_02: Um whales become exploited for for use in transmission fluid.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: We're using it to to keep our cars running smoothly.
43:58
SPEAKER_02: Um, and the So the whale hunt just grows and grows and grows and grows across the 20th century to the point that whale populations are are going to cease to exist.
44:11
SPEAKER_02: Whales are going to start going extinct.
44:14
SPEAKER_02: We've killed 90, 95% of many different whale species globally.
44:21
SPEAKER_02: And then there's a movement to stop it in the 1970s and particularly comes to fruition in the 1980s with international whaling um treaties that lead to global cooperation to stop killing whales.
44:36
SPEAKER_02: So it would be a tragedy if we were somehow incapable of doing that.
44:39
SPEAKER_02: But the very fact that we are able to change course is why it's not a tragedy.
44:45
SPEAKER_02: And whales are a great example of the fact that we can make a difference and we don't have to be like Ahab.
44:53
SPEAKER_02: We don't have to destroy the world in search of imposing our will on it.
45:01
SPEAKER_01: So on the one hand, in your story, there are these the megafauna, the uh humans hunting megafauna to extinction, which seems to have happened since like the earliest days.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: Um on the other hand, you note that um we've brought certain animals into like proximity with us for various purposes, like food, companionship.
45:22
SPEAKER_01: And those animals now dominate um the earth uh like chickens.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: It was striking to think like just the number of chickens that are are now in existence precisely because we eat them.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh so what is uh what is the problem with having these many chickens in the world?
45:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
45:43
SPEAKER_02: Well, you you you have no one to blame but yourself.
45:46
SPEAKER_02: You got me going on chickens.
45:47
SPEAKER_02: Uh you may have to stop me.
45:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I think the the story of the chicken captures so many features of of what humanity has done that we're just apt not to see or to forget.
46:01
SPEAKER_02: But like imagine if aliens showed up on Earth tomorrow and took a survey of the the biosphere on our planet, they would they would say, Oh my gosh, this world is dominated by chickens.
46:17
SPEAKER_02: Um there's this there's this big white bird that um that's somehow taken over the planet.
46:24
SPEAKER_02: There are 35 billion of them alive.
46:27
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and there's this weird uh two-legged animal that goes around feeding it and keeping them warm and taking care of them, and yes, eating them.
46:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's a planet dominated by by chickens.
46:41
SPEAKER_02: So think of it in these terms.
46:43
SPEAKER_02: Humans have driven thousands of species of birds to extinction.
46:48
SPEAKER_02: We don't actually know um even with with even approximate accuracy how many exactly.
46:57
SPEAKER_02: Um, but we know we've driven a lot, Labrea storks and and dodos, and great ox, and Mariana Mallards, and all the moas and passenger pigeons, and you can go on and on about the birds that we've driven to extinction.
47:12
SPEAKER_02: And yet one bird has become the dominant bird in the history of life.
47:19
SPEAKER_02: It's the most successful bird in the 60 plus million years that the birds have been doing pretty well.
47:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's the most successful one in the history of planet Earth.
47:32
SPEAKER_02: It's the descendant of a wild bird, the red jungle fowl, which lives in Southeast Asia, um, that enters into this weird symbiosis with us um thousands of years ago.
47:46
SPEAKER_02: The chicken is not one of our oldest farm animals, it's kind of a a new animal.
47:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, since I think some of your listeners will have uh have a little bit of biblical literacy in the in the book.
47:58
SPEAKER_02: I point out that um the lion is an old testament animal.
48:03
SPEAKER_02: So it's mentioned in the New Testament, but it's always kind of symbolic and references to the Old Testament.
48:07
SPEAKER_02: But like in the Old Testament world, the Near East, in the biblical Old Testament period, lions are around.
48:15
SPEAKER_02: They're a real animal, they're in Greece, they're in parts of Europe where you wouldn't expect them.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: Um, but humans kill off lions.
48:25
SPEAKER_02: Um and so the lions in New Testament, an Old Testament animal.
48:30
SPEAKER_02: I say the wolf is a is a biblical animal, Old Testament, New Testament.
48:35
SPEAKER_02: Wolves are incredible animals, they're very successful predators.
48:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, we've persecuted them for thousands of years, and yet they've managed in many cases to hang on, at least.
48:47
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so you hear wolves howls in the Old Testament, New Testament.
48:52
SPEAKER_02: But think about the chicken.
48:54
SPEAKER_02: Remember chickens in the Old Testament?
48:56
SPEAKER_02: No, it's a New Testament bird.
48:59
SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, Abraham isn't running around with his chickens, but St.
49:04
SPEAKER_02: Peter hears the cock crow three times.
49:07
SPEAKER_02: Um and the the story here is that the chicken is not a super old domesticated animal.
49:18
SPEAKER_02: It's only several thousand years.
49:20
SPEAKER_02: It comes from Southeast Asia, moves through Asia and India into the Near East, then into the Roman world.
49:26
SPEAKER_02: It's not a super popular farm animal.
49:29
SPEAKER_02: People eat eggs, but you know, chicken industry isn't a really big part of agriculture for a very, very long time.
49:37
SPEAKER_02: Um, but chickens become increasingly embedded in agriculture.
49:42
SPEAKER_02: And then in modern Europe and America, in the 18th, 19th century, agriculture really intensifies, and it's pigs that become the great meat animal, and then cattle.
49:57
SPEAKER_02: Um, and chickens are pretty marginal, and it's not obvious that chickens would become what they have.
50:03
SPEAKER_02: They could have gone the way of rabbit or goat, or there's a lot of animals that are kind of around the farm and that are kind of part of the protein diet.
50:12
SPEAKER_02: Um, and chickens could easily have been like that.
50:15
SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's this kind of weird story over the 20th century, um, for a variety of reasons, technological and genetic, we become very efficient at producing very large amounts of white meat that is highly palatable for consumers.
50:35
SPEAKER_02: And chicken then becomes the the number one form of meat.
50:40
SPEAKER_02: So it goes from, you know, not in the the first ranks to becoming the dominant bird, the dominant form of human meat.
50:50
SPEAKER_02: Um, there's like I say, there's over 30 billion.
50:52
SPEAKER_02: It's hard to pin down exactly how many chickens, but FAO estimates there's over 30 billion chickens alive on Earth.
50:59
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's the dominant bird in the history of evolution.
51:02
SPEAKER_02: So thousands of birds go away.
51:04
SPEAKER_02: One bird becomes the dominant bird, and that's because of humans.
51:10
SPEAKER_02: Humans like to eat it.
51:11
SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that is a kind of unexpected but revealing way to think about our relationship to the animal world.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: That is fascinating.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: And that that was one of the most uh just intriguing stories for me from your book.
51:27
SPEAKER_01: Um now, as far as animals who have gone in extinct or near extinct, but are coming back, I'd love to hear your thoughts like on the wolf, because there are all these proposals to reintroduce the wolf in various places.
51:41
SPEAKER_01: Like, is this a good idea?
51:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I'm a historian, um, not a not a policy person, but I I can I can offer my perspective, um, which is informed by by the story of our relationship with these animals.
51:56
SPEAKER_02: And um, since this is audio, people won't see.
51:58
SPEAKER_02: But actually, about uh 30 seconds ago, a wolf crawled into my lap.
52:03
SPEAKER_02: You can sort of see him here.
52:05
SPEAKER_02: He's my favorite wolf.
52:06
SPEAKER_02: His name is Teddy.
52:07
SPEAKER_02: Um, and he's a he's a very good wolf.
52:09
SPEAKER_02: But wolves live uh in and around us, of course, um, because dogs are wolves.
52:16
SPEAKER_02: Um and in a very like it's actually scientifically debated whether the domesticated dog should be considered a separate species from the wolf, the gray wolf, or um whether it should be considered uh a subspecies that has an ecological niche such that it's dependent on humans to survive.
52:39
SPEAKER_02: But this is actually a major part of the story of the wolf because wolves are predators.
52:46
SPEAKER_02: They're some of the most successful, incredible predators in the history of life.
52:52
SPEAKER_02: They um are social predators and they're very like us in some ways.
52:56
SPEAKER_02: So they hunt in packs and they so they cooperate, they communicate, they're they're used to understanding each other, to recognizing a leader, um, and they're they're cursorial, they run long distances, which is kind of weird in nature.
53:12
SPEAKER_02: We do it as well.
53:14
SPEAKER_02: So their hunting style is very compatible to ours, and they do astonishingly well in the late ice age.
53:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, wolves, the gray wolf, um which has different subspecies, um, thrives over basically all the northern hemisphere.
53:30
SPEAKER_02: So Mexico, all across uh what's now the United States and Canada, up to the Arctic tundra, all across northern Eurasia, Siberia, uh, all across from China to Western Europe and the Atlantic.
53:46
SPEAKER_02: There are wolves everywhere.
53:48
SPEAKER_02: And we have a very unique relationship with wolves because one, in the ice age, we domesticate a lineage of wolves and bring them into our society.
53:59
SPEAKER_02: They're our first domesticate, they're our best friend, truly, they're our oldest friend in this respect.
54:05
SPEAKER_02: They're the only animal that we domesticate while we're still hunter-gatherers.
54:10
SPEAKER_02: So all of our other animals are domesticated as part of our transition to agriculture, farming.
54:16
SPEAKER_02: They're mostly livestock animals.
54:18
SPEAKER_02: Whereas wolves join us when we're still hunting and gathering, and they're part of the hunting enterprise.
54:25
SPEAKER_02: And so you the partnership with this animal represents an alliance between true, true, very gifted social predators that know how to cooperate.
54:35
SPEAKER_02: My dog is my wolf is sneezing over here.
54:37
SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh that's a very successful alliance.
54:42
SPEAKER_02: But then in a twist, we we kill off huge numbers of large prey species, and in their place, we come to rely on and promote a handful of domesticated livestock species: goats, sheep, cattle, pigs, above all.
55:02
SPEAKER_02: And what eats those animals?
55:06
SPEAKER_02: What's their natural predator?
55:07
SPEAKER_02: The wolf.
55:08
SPEAKER_02: And so wild wolves become an enemy, a threat.
55:12
SPEAKER_02: And if we're gonna protect our livestock, we have to defend them from their natural predators.
55:18
SPEAKER_02: And so humans have been in a 10,000-year bloody rivalry with this rival predator that wants the same thing we want, which is to eat the sheep.
55:32
SPEAKER_02: And um, people don't often realize how long this has been going on.
55:37
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's as old as recorded history.
55:39
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Solon, the semi-legendary Athenian lawgiver, the seventh age, who is like the source of the Athenian democracy, puts a bounty on wolves.
55:51
SPEAKER_02: They're paying people to kill wolves systematically.
55:55
SPEAKER_02: Um, and humans do this, but wolves are good, and it's hard to kill out wolves.
56:00
SPEAKER_02: Um, and we only sort of, I think Americans tend to know the final chapter of this, which is that when Europeans start spreading across North America, there are lots of wolves, and they pose a threat to farmers and their livestock.
56:16
SPEAKER_02: And there's uh the most massive systemic, rapid extermination of millions of wolves across America.
56:26
SPEAKER_02: So they were here, they were everywhere.
56:28
SPEAKER_02: Um, and the wolves that survive today are kind of the handful of pockets, populations mostly in pretty wild places that have managed to hang on.
56:40
SPEAKER_02: And it's a the thing that makes it a hard question is wolves are dangerous.
56:43
SPEAKER_02: They're stone cold killers, they are unbelievably uh gifted killers.
56:50
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it can be hard for humans to live in proximity to wolves, but um, but they're magnificent animals.
56:56
SPEAKER_02: They're smart, they're so much like us.
56:58
SPEAKER_02: This is why one branch of them becomes the dog.
57:02
SPEAKER_02: Like the compatibility between humans and wolves is incredible.
57:06
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's because they're smart and social mammals and they think and feel a lot like us, they communicate a lot like us, they're incredibly adaptable, um, which is why they survive from you know Arabia to Italy to almost the poles.
57:23
SPEAKER_02: And um, and we've wiped out most of them, but I think we should do everything we can within the reasonable limits of you know human safety to try and make sure that there are spaces for them to live and thrive.
57:36
SPEAKER_02: They're magnificent animals.
57:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you know, we're lucky, lucky to have them, um, but they are extremely dangerous.
57:46
SPEAKER_02: And this is why sometimes it can be controversial, the reintroduction of wolves.
57:50
SPEAKER_02: You know, and there are people who I think who exaggerate both ways.
57:53
SPEAKER_02: There are people who exaggerate the dangers because it can affect their farming profits.
57:59
SPEAKER_02: Um, and then there are people I think sometimes who who ignore the reality of the fact that wolves are very, very dangerous.
58:05
SPEAKER_02: Um and so it's it's simply a matter of trying pragmatically to find ways for them to exist in a world where they're not too much of a threat to humans.
58:19
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you for these glimpses of the stories you're telling in this book, The Last Animal.
58:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh, just so many reminders of the inextricable uh ways in which the history of humans and of animals, large and small, has been connected.
58:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, so our final question for you, Kyle.
58:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh, what classic book do you wish you had written?
58:44
SPEAKER_01: And why?
58:45
SPEAKER_02: What classic book do I wish I had written?
58:47
SPEAKER_02: And so I can't say, I can't say Moby Dick, um, right?
58:51
SPEAKER_02: That would be that would be too obvious.
58:54
SPEAKER_02: Um well, this is truly not because of recent film history, but I I always put the Odyssey at the top of my my list of just personal favorite classics.
59:08
SPEAKER_02: I actually haven't seen the movie yet, which is terrible.
59:10
SPEAKER_02: I have four kids and I I don't get out.
59:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, I do want to see the movie at some point, um, because it is is based on one of my favorite books.
59:18
SPEAKER_02: But like on in the Greek and Roman classical canon, just for like sheer love of a work of literature, if I were stranded on an island for the next 20 years and can only take one classic text from antiquity with me, I would take the Odyssey.
59:35
SPEAKER_01: Well, Kyle Harper, thank you so much for joining me.
59:38
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
59:39
SPEAKER_02: It was great fun.