If you had a time machine and went back to the early 1900s, you’d see something awful. Humans realized that a single blue whale could produce tons of oil, meat, and blubber. So we got really good at hunting them with explosive harpoons and fast boats. By the 1960s, we had killed over 90% of the entire population. Imagine wiping out nine out of every ten people in your town—that’s what we did to them.
They only stopped because the whales became too scarce to hunt profitably. Not because we felt bad, but because there were almost none left. Talk about a wake-up call.
