Against Whales

Paul Keegan

  • The Moon by Whale Light by Diane Ackerman
    Phoenix, 260 pp, £6.99, May 1994, ISBN 1 85799 087 0
  • The Last Panda by George Schaller
    Chicago, 292 pp, $13.95, May 1993, ISBN 0 226 73629 6
  • The Great Ape Project edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer
    Fourth Estate, 312 pp, £9.99, June 1993, ISBN 1 85702 126 6

For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8.5 billion by 2025, we must think of the outnumbering dead as outnumbered – at least until population slows (at perhaps ten billion, perhaps 15 billion) some sixty years hence.

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