If  You go to the Antarctic during the winter when the cruise ships are keeping away….

You’ll surely find yourself being really, really away. 

A certain desolation gets hold of you. The big white depresses and makes the feeling of how far away you are; deeply disturbing. Being away isn’t what it seems.

Being away from lovers, and loved ones; being away from your newspaper, coffee and brioche in the morning; being away from internet, mobile and wireless; away from radio, TV and people; away from houses, roads, and news and away from messages, emails and  civilisation.  

On the other hand, it’s easy to marvel at this magnificent white wilderness that one  imagines to be totally untouched and get lost in thought and walk out to be really lost in an average day on an average white out. The weather changes momentarily and off you go. Lost like Shackleton’s good men gone for a walk. Lost like many who have never been seen again. Gone for a constitutional – that way for a walk… – be away now – for good.

But is also easy to feel like being away from our resource driven economy – our economy and daily life, so dependent upon swift use and fast hydrocarbon extraction and burning for energy.  Being away from our fossil fuel addictions and  energy hungry ways.  

But is it so?

I was really, really wrong.

There are ghost towns there devoted to energy extraction… ghost towns like Grutviken and Deception Island’s – Whaler bay and Gobernador Bories. Towns very much like the same ghosts in Northern Alberta or Montana and North Calgary or  Tombstone Arizona or in an old western film lot in Nevada or the Paramount lot city…sans the cowboy hats.  Maybe not like the ghost town built inside the Sony studio in LA’s Culver City – but a ghost town none the less .

There is a massive whaling town in Antarctica called Deception Island, where in 1906 an English company along with a  Norwegian and Chilean whaling concern, started using Whalers Bay as a base for a whale oil factory, the Gobernador Bories. Other whaling operations followed suit, and by 1914 there were 13 whale blubber boiling factory ships based there and a huge whaling fleet hunting whales to supply them. It had started before the whalers ever became businessmen;  as a seal oil processing base…Then they run out of seals. It was the turn of whales to give up their energy for us. Between 1900 and 1950, this whalers bay exploded in size. Somewhere more than  5,000 people worked there in the whaling industry and assorted trades; and even sixty years after the last whale was butchered for her blubber and her carcass was boiled for the last bits of oil – it still stank. Whales killed offshore and their blubber processed on board the whalers, still they brought back the carcasses to be processed in Deception island. Many whales and winters later  and even after all the whalers left and their settlement shut down all the way down to the South Georgia islands – you can still smell the death and decay.

When they run out of whales the whalers became oilers. Still the barrel measurement of oil from the old seal oil and whale oil days persisted. 

Now when the time of the ”peak seal oil” came and went – it was a passing of an era. Great fortunes were made and lost. And a new industry replaced the one that sank… into oblivion. There are still some Canadian sealers but most parents wouldn’t recommend this as a career day choice for their children. 

So Peak Seal oil is a morbid memory…not mourned by anyone.

But it was mourned by the seal captains of Cape Cod.

Now I hear a lot of murmuring and mourning about Peak Oil…

If you prematurely miss the security of fossil fuels and legacy oil – psychologically you deserve a visit as a homage to the old whaling towns. Even in Antarctica their presence is startlingly obvious and reminiscent of why they chose the names  of their town. The whalers were an arrogant lot. If you remember captain Ahab – Starbucks – Moby Dick -my name is Ismail…. – then you know the lot. The whaling industry was huge and profitable. Even Onassis built a huge profitable fleet as late as the 1960’s and the Norwegians who bought it – still profit from it today. More than 500,000 whales were caught because we needed the whale oil to make candles, soap and nitroglycerine. Half a million whales turned to oil,  soap…and nitroglycerine that was used in making fine explosives used against humans extensively during the First and Second World Wars. A fine blow-back from the old whales…  Home lamps used whale oil as the poor man’s light. Paraffin stoves and oil lamps that similarly used the great fish oil. This mammalian cousin has given us plenty of light before Willy.

The whalers came and went, but they left behind here in Antarctica, their homes and churches, the clinics, their workshops, the factories and their accounting offices. Even a cinema and a theatre that although it felt like a ghost town, as if they had one day all simply given up and walked out, it lacked the violence of say Detroit. The oily grime is what made me realise that what the whalers had done was to deplete a resource fully, and then move on to the next one. The great depression did the whalers in. I expect the same as a positive aftermath of this depression – it will do away with the fossil fuel oilers…

After whale oil, it was the English whale oil transport partner Shell that started transporting fossil oil from the ground in it’s tankers. In Antarctica I saw that the lessons learnt from whaling were equally relevant to fossil fuels and all other forms of dirty energy. Same as our world today relies on coal, gas and oil, which are ultimately finite – the whaler’s world was fascinated and abuzz with fear about peak oil. Read in old diaries and ship captain’s log books about how oilers and whaling captains were atwitter about their  not finding anymore whales to murder… let alone the crushingly cheap oil prices during the depression.

Peak whale oil came and went….

And so now has come the time for peak oil, peak king coal and peaking gas.

Shale and methane will have their time too – till sunlight dawns upon us.

But this time I fully understand what lays ahead and see the road map forward. Few intelligent people now dispute; that more and more humans living faster lives and consuming more resources will have a negative impact on the environment…  well beyond the Geo engineering we have already been engaged into through our massively harmful greenhouse emissions.  And the whale of an oil energy industry is at the heart of this.

What is the town we want to live into and inherit to our kids? A ghost lot or a garden?  …

Do we want to inherit a dark and dismal ghost town built on dirty fossil fuel energy for insecurity in transport, heating and food production fighting like Mad Max for the last can of gasoline in the desert?

Or do we want to bequeath them with a plentiful sunlit future?

 When you read statistics about the quantity of resources we use, they are staggering – and it makes you want to say, it’s time to act. But for the leaders reading this – It is important to remember that when the Oil companies start failing in this depression and they come cap in hand to your office begging for bailouts like the bankers before them – it is time to not act.

Let the sunlight replace their dark and dirty activities and let them perish as the old whaling captains did and left behind some memories and ghost towns and stories….

My name is Ismael.

 

 

Yours,

PS: When we stop measuring energy by the barrel we might realize we have moved on…