The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with an Ancient Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life

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Explorers Club Public Lecture Series with Doug Clark

At a time when global change has eradicated thousands of unique cultures, The Last Whalers tells the stunning inside story of the Lamalerans, an ancient tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live on a remote volcanic island known by other Indonesians as “The Land Left Behind.”

They have survived for centuries by taking whales with bamboo harpoons, but now are being pushed toward collapse by the encroachment of the outside world. This story outlines of the world’s last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to the way of life that has sustained them for five centuries.

Award-winning journalist Doug Bock Clark, who lived with the Lamalerans across three years, will weave together their stories to usher us inside this hidden drama of tribal honor, love, sacrifice, and seamanship in this story of adventure and anthropology.

He will detail how the fragile dreams of one of the world’s dwindling indigenous peoples are colliding with the irresistible upheavals of our rapidly transforming world, revealing a hidden world of Indonesian islanders trapped between past and future.

Doug Bock Clark is a writer whose articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, GQ, Wired, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He won the 2017 Reporting Award, was a finalist for the 2016 Mirror Award, and has been awarded two Fulbright Fellowships, a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and an 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship. Clark has been interviewed about his work on CNN, BBC, NPR, and ABC’s 20/20. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.