By that the token humans drove a great number of species to extinction long before the Industrial Revolution. So by that line of thinking we were already running into the limits of natural resources in the Neolithic.
Obviously we’re becoming better at extracting resources over time, but humans ran out of new land to exploit long before Europe's conquest of the Americas. Land only seemed empty because disease decimated native populations, people lived in San Francisco thousands of years ago.
Most of humanity survived on agriculture and sometimes hunting-gathering for last 10k years. People that survived on hunting whales is minuscule. Comparing those two is nonsensical.
But you seem to be missing the point, parent is talking about the industrial scale of means to create a lot more destruction to the environment which the OP point hinges on. Parent does not say humanity survived on hunting whales, quite the opposite, when they had the means people nearly drove whales to extinction.
The industrial revolution is generally understood to have started somewhere around 1760, Moby Dick took place in approximately 1830, about 10 years before what some historians mark as the end of the agrarian to Industrial shift that is generally termed the Industrial revolution
I get sort of wishy-washy from 1830 on, because lots of people put the end of the Industrial revolution as being 1900, but 1840 is a defensible and commonly held position.
