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great whales iconic in a far more positive way than great whites.
Photographs and film clips of large, hi-tech whaling ships harpoon-
ing helpless whales, despite the efforts of activists in small Zodiac
inflatables, came to encapsulate the sensibility of the 'environmental
movement', a movement that had grown steadily through the 1960s.
As with Jaws , the viewer was invited to see nature in a particular way
(in this case, as mortally threatened), and to share the view of the repre-
sentative (Greenpeace). Whale hunting rapidly became emblematic of
Western society's wanton cruelty and utter disregard for other sentient
creatures. This reversed centuries of seeing whales as 'resources' to be
harvested from the oceans. It was achieved by connecting Greenpeace's
moral agenda to the 'eye-witness' images of slaughter at sea. Building
on this, Greenpeace also successfully demonised Canadian seal hunters
in the late 1970s by depicting seal pups as akin to small children being
butchered by ruthless men.
Clearly, I'm suggesting that representations must carry some trace of their
authors' habits, preferences, desires or values . 14 This means that references
to 'nature' and any of its collateral concepts are always politics by other
means. When we represent beluga whales, natterjack toads and Siberian
tigers we are doing what politicians do for their constituents, without nec-
essarily realising it. Or rather, others are doing it to us and for us. In saying
this, I'm deliberately stretching the meaning of the word politics beyond
those activities associated with the apparatus of elections, political parties,
governments and bureaucracies - as many others in social science and the
humanities have done (I'll return to this theme in Chapter 3 ). For me,
almost everything that we say and do is political in the sense that it involves
contestable, value-laden choices - albeit often unconscious or unthinking
ones - about profound issues pertaining to what's 'normal', 'interesting',
'relevant', 'good', 'right', 'permissable' or 'moral' for us and other people.
These are also choices about what not to represent. Some of these choices
are politically and practically trivial but others, upon closer inspection, are
very significant. In the domain of 'formal politics' (e.g. the British house
of Commons), we debate and justify these choices explicitly. But in many
other walks of life we do not. Plate 2.1 provides a rich and graphic example
of how the political and epistemic senses of representation bleed into one
another, even in seemingly unlikely places.
Study Task: Look closely at the image in Plate 2.1 but don't read the text
beneath the title just yet. Can you identify how both aspects of 'representa-
tion' detailed in this section are operative simultaneously?
 
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