Category — Whales

Although I’ve been living up and down the west coast for several years, I’d never made it far enough north (or south) see the Redwoods National Forest.

Until yesterday.

It is a strange feeling to stand next to another living thing that has been on this planet for more than a thousand years.

These trees are survivors, and not just because they’ve outlasted centuries of Pacific storms. But because they’ve outlasted the loggers.

I asked a park ranger how these trees escaped logging. He said only 3% of them did. He said that even today there are people who would like to get at what’s left of them with a saw.

Thankfully, we have the Save the Redwoods League. It got started back in 1918, when a handful of people realized that something precious was about to be lost and very nearly was. There was no national park then (not until 1968). In the absence of government protection, the people protected those trees. And this organization is still around today as there are still trees in danger.

After visiting the redwoods, I visited the coast south of Crescent City and I watched grey whales in the distance.

More survivors. And, thankfully, people have stepped up to protect them as well.

In a few weeks the Sea Shepherd Society begins its 7th annual journey down to Antarctica to protect the whales from the Japanese. No government is protecting these whales. Just people.

From Save the Redwoods to Save the Whales, these fights are not fought by governments or militaries, but by people. And for that reason alone I remain optimistic that we can save many more creatures, many more habitats.

The fight is only just beginning.

PS: I just came across a great TED presentation on the redwoods:

I’ve been avoiding The Cove — the Oscar-winning documentary about Japan’s dolphin slaughter.

I’ve been avoiding the film because I knew it would be disturbing. While researching the Japanese whaling industry for The Tourist Trail years ago, I learned about what happens off the coast of Japan. I had seen video clips, and those were enough to turn my stomach.

Last night, The Cove was on TV and I ended up watching most of it. It’s hard to put into words the feelings that go through you when you watch dolphins treated that way. I alternated between anger and tears. Now I’m just angry.

The film wasn’t just about dolphins. It was about all cetaceans. Paul Watson of The Sea Shepherd Society was featured. He’s been doing battle with Japan for decades.

When I began this blog I asked: Why doesn’t Japan just stop killing whales?

The same question could be posed for dolphins.

Japan is in a sad state of denial about its past and its future. The world has changed. The oceans are depleted. And Japan wants to pretend that its “way of life” — a way of life that is overly romanticized — will continue forever.

We do the same thing here in the US. We romantize fisherman. But we overlook the brutal fact that the fishing industry is an industry. Machines do most of the heavy lifting. And machines are too efficient and there are too many of them. The fish, the dolphins, the whales. They can’t reproduce quickly enough to compete with the machine. They never stood a chance.

The sea needs a break.

What is most sad about the dolphin slaughter is that these are animals that, by most measures, everybody loves.  The Cove is the tip of the iceberg because there are so many other species at risk — species that aren’t quite so loved. The Northern Bluefin Tuna. The Silver Shark. Orange Roughie. Swordfish. When will they get their documentary? Or will they just fade away?

We all have a role to play. I know what I’ve got to do. And Ric O’Barry, the man behind The Cove, isn’t about to give up. Blood Dolphins is a new TV series that keeps up the pressure on Japan. Hopefully, sustained pressure will convince Japan to give up.

And then we will turn our fight to the next species.

This article in Outside Magazine is about as heartbreaking as it is eye-opening. If you have any doubts about freeing Orcas from captivity, you should read it.

Here are some stats from the article:

• There are 42 orcas alive in parks around the world today.
• SeaWorld owns 26 of them.
• Over the years more than 130 orcas have died in captivity.

And this is a particularly horrible description of how Orcas were treated in a low-rent version of SeaWorld — Sealand:

Sealand’s owner, a local entrepreneur named Robert Wright who’d captured his share of Pacific Northwest killer whales in the early 1970s, worried that someone might cut the net to free his orcas, or that they might chew through it themselves. So at 5:30 P.M., after the shows were over, the orcas were moved into a small metal-sided pool that was 26 feet in diameter and less than 20 feet deep. The trainers referred to it as “the module,” and the orcas were left in it for the next 14 and a half hours.

According to Eric Walters, who was a trainer at Sealand from 1987 to 1989 while working toward a bachelor’s degree in marine biology at the University of Victoria, the module was so tight that the orcas had difficulty avoiding conflict, and their skin would get scratches and cuts from rubbing against the sides. About once a week, Walters says, one or more of the orcas would simply refuse to swim into the module and would have to be left in the performance pool overnight.

The orca show was performed every hour on the hour, eight times a day, seven days a week. Both Nootka and Tilikum had stomach ulcers, which had to be treated with medication. Sometimes Nootka’s ulcers were so bad she had blood in her stool.

Imagine spending your life confined in a bathtub; that’s what these animals — some of the most intelligent mammals on this planet – are forced to endure. And even under these circumstances, they perform for us, again and again.

There is the argument often used that children need to see Orcas, that there is some educational component to these shows they put on every day. But I think children would be better served to see them where they live. It’s a lot more educational to see them swimming freely and knowing that they can travel a hundred miles a day. In other words, they need their space.

And, more important, it’s important to know that no orca in the wild has ever killed a human.

Natalie Angier contributed an excellent article in the NYT about the intelligence of whales (and dolphins).

Here are a few key excerpts:

…the evidence is high and mounting that the cetacean order includes species second only to humans in mental, social and behavioral complexity, and that maybe we shouldn’t talk about what we’re harvesting or harpooning, but whom

And…

Whale brains are indeed giant. At roughly 18 pounds to our 3, the sperm whale brain is the largest of any animal on earth. More significantly, the ratio of brain size to body mass in the sperm whale and other toothed whales and dolphins is impressively high, bested only by ours.

While using the “size of brain” as a reason for valuing one species over another is inherently flawed, it at least gets people thinking about animals having brains, which is in itself a start.

The people who hunt whales want people to think of them as just any old fish, which they are not of course. They are mammals. They are creatures that emerged from the water at one point in history and then returned to it.

It’s interesting that the more science learns about whales and dolphins, the smarter they get.

And what about those creatures of the ocean we’ve yet to study?

My novel is about an anti-whaling activist organization and their efforts to halt whaling in the Southern Ocean. But the leader of this organization, who goes by the name of Aeneas, isn’t just out to save whales. When asked where he’ll go when the whaling season ends, he replies “I’ll head north. There’s always a hunting season for something somewhere.”

Paul Watson, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Society, has been added to Interpol’s wanted list, at the urging of Japan.

As this article notes, this designation does not mean Japan wants Paul arrested, just spied on.

For now.

It appears that the International Whaling Commissions meeting is going nowhere fast, which means Japan will continue its annual hunts and Paul and his crew will continue their annual battles.

So Japan is taking another approach to getting Paul out of their way.

I write about all of this here because one of the major themes of The Tourist Trail is the illegal whale hunts. The main character known as Aeneas was inspired by Paul Watson. In my book, Aeneas is on the run from those who are trying to arrest him. It’s all fiction of course, but when I read the news lately, it’s not quite as fictional as I once thought.