Orca yacht ramming: Rethinking biodiversity extinction from historical perspectives of "participating consciousness"


Annette Louise Bickford, York University

An endangered species, killer whales are “orcanizing”. Initiated in 2020 by matriarch White Gladis “in a critical moment of agony”, there have over 500 cases of disabling and sometimes sinking yachts. This began in high-trafficked areas off the Iberian coast, but incidents have recently been reported off the Shetland Islands in Scotland [1]. Commercial fishing practices, along with underwater noise from industry and military activity jeopardize orcas’ food security, yet marine neuroscientists and animal behavior experts regularly attribute the behavior to “fun” and “play”. I am interested in exploring historical worldviews that inform the assumptions we make about such behavior we do not understand. Cartesian dualism permeates Western culture, forming a fault-line which runs through its entire conceptual system, redefining humans, once direct participants, “as only minimally and accidentally connected to the earth, and masking the reality of catastrophic biodiversity extinction. For most of human history people exercised a “participating consciousness”—engaging with the natural world in ensconced, symbiotic, often animistic ways, regarding the whole of nature as alive and powerful. Politics and epistemology reinforced each other to bring shifts in consciousness, and our current perception, which instrumentalizes nature as sets of inert commodity resources, and culturally obscures nonhuman animals through hyper-separation, is indicative of a metamorphosis that became influential in Europe by the early modern period. The Scientific Revolution propelled technological innovation. Technology in turn instrumentalized scientific ideas, enabling surplus production, monetized by the rise of industrial capitalism. By the twentieth century instrumental rationality contributed to the rejection of holistic views of nature; biocentric mutuality became unthinkable. How might orcas’ empathic collective cultural organization inform our ways of looking at ourselves and Nature that have proven disastrous? What are the epistemic constraints of our individual and collective ability to imagine other than human perspectives?

This paper will be presented at the following session: