You are thinking of the whaling industry as an organization that is interested in maintaining whales; actually it is better viewed as a huge quantity of [money] capital attempting to earn the highest possible return. If it can exterminate whales in ten years and make a 15 percent profit, but it could only make 10 percent with a sustainable harvest, then it will exterminate them in ten years. After that, the money will be moved to exterminating some other resource.14
