Listening to Whales

Tonight I read Alexandra Morton's book, "Listening to Whales," a book I expected to be mostly about her discoveries related to Orca speciation and the effects of fish farming. I was delighted to find that her book is autobiographical in tone. So many of the people I met in the Broughton archipelago are in the book. Through her words, I got to meet younger versions of them, and she writes so vividly, I can practically hear Billy Proctor's exclamations in his own voice, and listen to the kids run up to the Echo Bay schoolhouse.

What amazes me about her story is how quickly she discovered the harm done by fish farms, how the Canadian experience quickly began to emulate the fishstock-depleting experiences of the Scandanavian fisheries, and how unwilling Canadian governments are to even acknowledge there might be a bit of an issue here. The greedy rush to do things bigger, better, faster, more profitably may result in the loss of several native species of salmon. Then there's the folly of farming a foreign species, the Atlantic salmon, in Pacific waters, and how the government refused to admit they would escape (they did), breed (they did), or thrive (they have.)

But Morton, the whale version of Jane Goodall, meets the chimpanzee version, Jane herself. And near the end of her tale, Goodall injects a note of optimism, a belief and hope that the human race can save itself from some of its gross mistakes tampering with nature...