It was a battle cry in the ’60s and ’70s and the earliest Earth Days: “Save the Whales” bumper stickers reflected a burgeoning green movement and deep concern about the decimation of the world’s whale populations. But decades later, do the whales still need saving?
Antarctic fur sea pups play in front of the abandoned Stromness whaling station on South Georgia Island
For 50 years there has been an international moratorium on whaling. Two years ago, in South Georgia Island in the subantarctic I saw the remains of the Stromness whaling station — where Ernest Shackleton famously first reentered civilization and found rescue for his crew after his ship was lost in the Antarctic. Today, Antarctic fur seal pups frolic among the wreckage. What you can’t see are the immense mountains of whale bones still lying at the bottom of the inlets and bays around South Georgia. It’s a terrible legacy that we should be happy about leaving behind. [Read more...]
Fresh from the Eisenhower Administration era, your friendly neighborhood Ocean Doctor turned 50 today. In doing so, I outlived my father, William L. Guggenheim, who tragically died at 49 when he was lost at sea. It was my days as a boy, fishing with my dad off of Cape May, New Jersey, that I truly inherited his passion for the sea, and I feel lucky to have been able to spend much of my life near, in, or best of all, under the water.
