This whale’s body serves as an accounting of the legacies of industry and culture that have not only escaped the limits of our control but now lie outside the range of our sensory perception and, perhaps even more worryingly, beyond technical quantification. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.
