Two days ago I received a many-times-forwarded email with the heading, “Please sign and send to everyone you can think of...HORRENDOUS!” Normally I am leery of such chain emails, which tend to be poorly-formatted and reactionary; this one was no exception. But the subject matter compelled me to probe further.
The email graphically depicted, in words and photos, the annual slaughter of Calderon dolphins (which comprise two species of pilot “whales” but like orcas are actually in the dolphin family) in the Danish Faeroe Islands.
I was instantly reminded of the documentary film
The Cove. In
The Cove, former
Flipper host Ric O’Barry assembles a team of Hollywood tech experts, extreme divers and environmental activists to travel to Japan for what has been aptly described as a
Mission Impossible-style exposé. Going truly behind enemy lines, they lay bare to the world the killing of some 20,000 dolphins a year.
While the Danish slaughter is horrific as well, it sadly is not surprising.
Around age six I joined Greenpeace, and then the Cousteau Society, and soon my involvement in “saving the oceans,” as I saw it, included the American Cetacean Society and the World Wildlife Fund. I adopted my own orca and wrote letters to protest the clubbing of harbor seals. In a seventh-grade animal report I veered away from my usual favorite—the giant squid—to write a dissertation,
The Whale Called Killer.
I concluded with, “…to call the orca a killer diverts our attention from the true killer: man.” I was and remain stalwart in my conviction that marine mammals should not die at our hands.
I do, however, question the impact of emails such as the one above. Apart from grammatical and spelling errors (Faeroe Islands was “Feroe Iland”), there were several larger issues. The first was the question of where all these forwarded signatures were going. A simple internet search takes one to a more organized petition site (below), which I did sign.
A second issue is delineated in an easily-found Wikipedia article on Faeroe Islands Whaling: just how different is this slaughter of wild, free (and intelligent) animals from the awful treatment, and often inhumane methods of killing, of feedlot cattle or boxed chickens? While I personally would refute this argument on its own grounds (i.e., it is precisely the freedom and especially the intelligence of the dolphins that makes their killing so horrific), there are others who would see it differently. Even as a meat minimalist, I cannot deny the point made by the Faeroe Islanders that the majority of us are hopelessly disconnected from our food sources.
On a much bigger scale is the question of what we as a species are doing to our oceans, and our world.
What may finally bring an end to the killing of marine mammals—and perhaps soon the majority of marine life—are some scenarios less gruesome than their current slaughter but equally chilling.
The first of these, which is shared by the waters of Japan and Denmark, is mercury and other poisoning. The world over, dolphins and whales concentrate human-made toxins because of their position at the top of the food chain. Already the mercury levels in these creatures are at levels known to cause neurologic damage. In the last 50 years the list of new chemicals we make that end up in the sea, including compounds that turn male species members into females, has exploded.
The second is ocean acidification. A
New Yorker article a couple years back called “The Darkening Sea” painted a grim picture: Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped today, the amount of CO2 we’ve put into the atmosphere will take 50-100 years to reach equilibrium with the oceans. As the waters take it up, their pH is lowered, i.e., they become more acidic. What occurs next, and is already happening, is that calcium carbonate cannot precipitate out of solution and thus coral reefs, oysters, shellfish, and over 1/3 of the ocean’s phytoplankton cannot form the shells the depend on for life.
That is to say, it may already be too late.
Which brings me to my final point, and the reason that I’m actually thankful to my friend for forwarding me the email. How willing are we to change our own behavior to lessen our negative impact on the planet? It’s easy to sign and forward an email; a modicum of effort more reveals other ways to get involved. But until we are personally willing to do such things as drive our cars less often and demand public transit systems (emitting less CO2), change our diet to eat less meat (a recent
Science News article found that 85% of the carbon footprint of foods is not from the distance they travel to us, but from whether they are animal-based instead of plant-based), and in general form sustainable, fun, inter-dependent and non-growing communities that recognize that we—all of us, all species—are in it together on this finite planet, change will be small and limited.
On the other hand, the stakes of what we may yet save with a concerted effort make any involvement worth it: dolphins, whales, sea turtles, fish, water, the air, the planet, ourselves. It may not be too late.
http://thecovemovie.com/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop-the-calderon-dolphin-slaughter-in-denmark
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/20/061120fa_fact_kolbert
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40934/title/AAAS_Climate-friendly_dining_%E2%80%A6_meats
“Don't wish it away
