The whaleboat in Barry Lopez’s fine essay “The Whaleboat” is a model. It sat in the room where Lopez wrote.
It reminded him that the people who built whaleboats in 1860 had a sophisticated knowledge of the properties of the wood from the many species of trees in the forest. They understood that different woods had different properties, so they used white oak, spruce, pine, cedar, ash and hickory for different parts of a small, efficient boat.
That intimate knowledge of the properties of trees in the forest was used to ravage creatures of the ocean. Such is our knowledge: knowledge of the natural world in one area leads to the destruction of the natural world in another.
That’s not the point of the essay. But it’s the point in the essay I couldn’t get past.
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