Changing Perceptions of the Natural World

Changing Perceptions of the Natural World. Charles W. Morgan. , Americans' prevailing beliefs about humans' place in the natural world have shifted dramatically since the active whaling years of the Charles W. Morgan. A century ago most Americans saw the ocean's seemingly boundless resources solely as sources of profit. Today, commercial whalers' overharvesting of the world's largest mammals baffles or angers many 21st-century Americans., But the human-whale dynamic has always been more complex than it first appears. The 19th-century whalers' deep knowledge of the sea and its creatures contributed greatly to scientific exploration and study. While subsistence whaling is still practiced on a small scale by a few indigenous groups in U.S. waters, many more whales are stressed and threatened by modern hazards such as ship strikes, net entanglements, and sound pollution., [Captions:] , Humans have been aware of whales from the beginning of recorded time. But artistic depictions often relied on fantasy and accounts by merchant seamen, who only had glimpses of whales. Wildly inaccurate and sinister images proliferated such as the wood engraving of Jonah from about 1760 (top) and the image by Swiss artist Conrad Gessner, circa 1560 (above). Whalemen provided some of the most precise information about their prey. The surprisingly accurate scenes (left) from a German source shows whaling from 1646-1756., Since the environmentalist movement of the 1960s worked to protect whales, whalewatching has become a big business for many former whaling ports around the nation and the world, including Provincetown., Before underwater photography, Americans had to rely on illustrations of stranded whales to get a sense of their size, shape, and anatomical features. This engraved bookplate (left) is from 1837., Indigenous peoples in Arctic regions have long-relied on summer whalehunts for energy-rich food.