Barry Sanders is the Founding Co-chair at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research-E4. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is the author of fourteen books and over fifty essays and articles, including Sudden Glory, Alienable Rights (winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award; with Francis Adams), ABC (with Ivan Illich), The Private Death of Public Discourse, and A Is for Ox.

Melville brings readers to an up-close, magnified view of killing—in the very bloodiest, most intensely cruel and shuddering details of hunting and hectoring; of men, in abandon, yelling and thrusting harpoon after harpoon into the resistant flesh of highly sentient creatures. “Die,” they might be yelling, “Die now!” First, the stabbing with harpoons, then the decapitation with lances, followed by the slicing with razor-sharp knives, and then the spurting, the awful geysers of blood. Rage and hate, and the prospect of money, made slicing hunks of flesh off those behemoths necessary and even for those on deck, fun. In the end, the crew rejoiced in the swabbing of the “greasy decks,” thick with blood, oil, and guts.

In his blown-up horror that was whaling, Melville forced readers to confront the reality of the whale as a preternaturally outlandish mammal—as one of us but vastly different from us—as a creature alive beyond any easy definition, close to unbelievable and simply unable to be contained by the usual boundaries or definitions. Melville moves us, swiftly, past the commercial to the anger and rage needed to carry out the ruthless ending of so much sentient, magnificent life.

He makes us wonder about all the planning, the financing, the felling of trees needed for building those ships, and the recruiting of men for a nefarious enterprise that operated out of sight and beyond oversight. In reading Melville, we catch ourselves eavesdropping on acts of violence that over the years confronted nature with such arrogance it forced an unbelievable number of animals and their habitats into extinction, gone forever, and utterly, totally forgotten. What should we call eradication on such a scale? Such levels of horror drove Melville, first, to the bible to resurrect religious categories of hate and malignity, and then to the Iliad for Classical accounts of rage and outrage, and back, once more, to the ocean he so loved to save the sanctity of life.

Ishmael tells us what has happened, some time after the story has essentially ended, after the Pequod has sunk and the crew drowned, leaving him as our storyline, who has been treading water, for two days, up to his neck and making us into his lifeline. Until his rescue, he will take us back to the beginning of the voyage, and ahead to the moment when Moby Dick throws off its harpoons, turns on its attacker, and smashes its massive body into the Pequod, demolishing wood and flesh, the inert and the living.

There is never a retailing of events in the present, not even at the very end, for as Ishmael informs us in the Postscript, he has been “picked up at last.” Melville leaves us with a rough image of our own plight, of wreaking havoc on the natural world and of nature in utter revolt. It is an image that remains biblical, marked with floods and droughts, ice and fire, with an unbelievable number of species of fauna and flora driven into extinction. We are left wondering, has that fictional, biblical catastrophe, Moby Dick, become our reality?

The grand assault against life began with the denigration, if not of a religious sense of the created world, then with the loss of a sacred or even majestic idea of nature, the ancient attitude of wonder at all things as they are, replaced by something approaching the thrill of amassing huge profits from all things as they are commodities. With that first gusher, money trumped magnificence, a moment of jubilation for investors, and a sheer disaster for the Earth and all things dependent on clean air. As the drive after fossil fuels ramped up, it meant the amassing of fortunes, and spelled the end for everything else.

In December 1976, a tanker named the Argo Merchant, loaded with 7.7 million gallons of oil, ran aground near the dangerous Nantucket shoals, off the coast of Massachusetts. Two days later, it broke in half and sank, resulting in the world’s first major oil spill: a pool of toxic sludge covering an area of 69 by 115 miles. Winds carried it out into the open seas, where the sludge slowly sank, poisoning life out of view, silently and invisibly. Oil was first harvested from the ocean, from Sperm whales, then on land with the extraction of tar, and then, ironically and tragically, through far too many spills, oil moved back to the high seas as a death sentence to marine life. The Argo became the worst disaster imaginable.

That is, until a bit more than ten years later, on March 24, 1989, when the supertanker christened the Valdez, owned by Exxon Oil, ran aground on the Bligh Reef off the coast of Alaska, resulting in the worst oil disaster in history. According to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, over the next few days, as the ship began to break apart, it spilled a whopping 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound, spreading its toxic tar over 1,500 miles of the Gulf of Alaska, killing 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, and some 22 killer whales. Exxon appealed its more than 30,000 class actions to the Supreme Court and, citing laws that had been promulgated by Melville’s father-in-law, managed to have the 2.5-billion-dollar settlement vacated, reducing damages to 500 million. If they wanted to continue their lifestyles, people would just have to live with the poisoning of a most generous portion of nature. (In 2007, it took Exxon Mobil only two days of the first quarter to produce revenue of 2.5 billion dollars.)

Melville describes nature de-natured. He knows, he warns, and he tries, with all his writing might, to send up a warning. The maniacal Ahab, deranged biblical king, a character bordering on caricature, king of all killing, failing and fuming, raging and railing, is emblematic of the deranged mania for wealth that began to infect entrepreneurs in the middle of the nineteenth century. He is possessed of a diabolical hatred intensified with a fury that rages beyond all limits, with a goal, unspoken, of emptying the Earth—looting on the grandest scale imaginable—of all its contents for nothing other than money—obscene amounts of money. While the Earth’s bounty remains finite, investment must expand, profits must increase—limits must be eliminated. Entrepreneurs eventually run out of riches, digging and dynamiting no longer yielding a profit, investment ending in frustration and anger in corporate boardrooms. Greed blinds people to the truth, insinuating itself like some untreatable infection, weakening people’s resolve. So seductive is the promise of power and infinite potential of a capital economy, few people have the insight to see it for what it is—a highly infectious virus, with fewer willing or able to stop its inexorable contagion.

Barry Sanders is the Founding Co-chair at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research-E4. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is the author of fourteen books and over fifty essays and articles, including Sudden Glory, Alienable Rights (winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award; with Francis Adams), ABC (with Ivan Illich), The Private Death of Public Discourse, and A Is for Ox.

Melville brings readers to an up-close, magnified view of killing—in the very bloodiest, most intensely cruel and shuddering details of hunting and hectoring; of men, in abandon, yelling and thrusting harpoon after harpoon into the resistant flesh of highly sentient creatures. “Die,” they might be yelling, “Die now!” First, the stabbing with harpoons, then the decapitation with lances, followed by the slicing with razor-sharp knives, and then the spurting, the awful geysers of blood. Rage and hate, and the prospect of money, made slicing hunks of flesh off those behemoths necessary and even for those on deck, fun. In the end, the crew rejoiced in the swabbing of the “greasy decks,” thick with blood, oil, and guts.

In his blown-up horror that was whaling, Melville forced readers to confront the reality of the whale as a preternaturally outlandish mammal—as one of us but vastly different from us—as a creature alive beyond any easy definition, close to unbelievable and simply unable to be contained by the usual boundaries or definitions. Melville moves us, swiftly, past the commercial to the anger and rage needed to carry out the ruthless ending of so much sentient, magnificent life.

He makes us wonder about all the planning, the financing, the felling of trees needed for building those ships, and the recruiting of men for a nefarious enterprise that operated out of sight and beyond oversight. In reading Melville, we catch ourselves eavesdropping on acts of violence that over the years confronted nature with such arrogance it forced an unbelievable number of animals and their habitats into extinction, gone forever, and utterly, totally forgotten. What should we call eradication on such a scale? Such levels of horror drove Melville, first, to the bible to resurrect religious categories of hate and malignity, and then to the Iliad for Classical accounts of rage and outrage, and back, once more, to the ocean he so loved to save the sanctity of life.

Ishmael tells us what has happened, some time after the story has essentially ended, after the Pequod has sunk and the crew drowned, leaving him as our storyline, who has been treading water, for two days, up to his neck and making us into his lifeline. Until his rescue, he will take us back to the beginning of the voyage, and ahead to the moment when Moby Dick throws off its harpoons, turns on its attacker, and smashes its massive body into the Pequod, demolishing wood and flesh, the inert and the living.

There is never a retailing of events in the present, not even at the very end, for as Ishmael informs us in the Postscript, he has been “picked up at last.” Melville leaves us with a rough image of our own plight, of wreaking havoc on the natural world and of nature in utter revolt. It is an image that remains biblical, marked with floods and droughts, ice and fire, with an unbelievable number of species of fauna and flora driven into extinction. We are left wondering, has that fictional, biblical catastrophe, Moby Dick, become our reality?

The grand assault against life began with the denigration, if not of a religious sense of the created world, then with the loss of a sacred or even majestic idea of nature, the ancient attitude of wonder at all things as they are, replaced by something approaching the thrill of amassing huge profits from all things as they are commodities. With that first gusher, money trumped magnificence, a moment of jubilation for investors, and a sheer disaster for the Earth and all things dependent on clean air. As the drive after fossil fuels ramped up, it meant the amassing of fortunes, and spelled the end for everything else.

In December 1976, a tanker named the Argo Merchant, loaded with 7.7 million gallons of oil, ran aground near the dangerous Nantucket shoals, off the coast of Massachusetts. Two days later, it broke in half and sank, resulting in the world’s first major oil spill: a pool of toxic sludge covering an area of 69 by 115 miles. Winds carried it out into the open seas, where the sludge slowly sank, poisoning life out of view, silently and invisibly. Oil was first harvested from the ocean, from Sperm whales, then on land with the extraction of tar, and then, ironically and tragically, through far too many spills, oil moved back to the high seas as a death sentence to marine life. The Argo became the worst disaster imaginable.

That is, until a bit more than ten years later, on March 24, 1989, when the supertanker christened the Valdez, owned by Exxon Oil, ran aground on the Bligh Reef off the coast of Alaska, resulting in the worst oil disaster in history. According to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, over the next few days, as the ship began to break apart, it spilled a whopping 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound, spreading its toxic tar over 1,500 miles of the Gulf of Alaska, killing 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, and some 22 killer whales. Exxon appealed its more than 30,000 class actions to the Supreme Court and, citing laws that had been promulgated by Melville’s father-in-law, managed to have the 2.5-billion-dollar settlement vacated, reducing damages to 500 million. If they wanted to continue their lifestyles, people would just have to live with the poisoning of a most generous portion of nature. (In 2007, it took Exxon Mobil only two days of the first quarter to produce revenue of 2.5 billion dollars.)

Melville describes nature de-natured. He knows, he warns, and he tries, with all his writing might, to send up a warning. The maniacal Ahab, deranged biblical king, a character bordering on caricature, king of all killing, failing and fuming, raging and railing, is emblematic of the deranged mania for wealth that began to infect entrepreneurs in the middle of the nineteenth century. He is possessed of a diabolical hatred intensified with a fury that rages beyond all limits, with a goal, unspoken, of emptying the Earth—looting on the grandest scale imaginable—of all its contents for nothing other than money—obscene amounts of money. While the Earth’s bounty remains finite, investment must expand, profits must increase—limits must be eliminated. Entrepreneurs eventually run out of riches, digging and dynamiting no longer yielding a profit, investment ending in frustration and anger in corporate boardrooms. Greed blinds people to the truth, insinuating itself like some untreatable infection, weakening people’s resolve. So seductive is the promise of power and infinite potential of a capital economy, few people have the insight to see it for what it is—a highly infectious virus, with fewer willing or able to stop its inexorable contagion.