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In summer 2018, a killer whale known as Tahlequah gave birth to a calf that died half an hour later; overcome by grief, Tahlequah refused to let her baby go and instead carried it with her, raising the body above the surface as though to help it breathe, over and over again, for 17 days.
Seventeen days. Nobody could have been astonished to learn that orcas are struggling to survive in these industrialized waters, but the prolonged image of an animal so clearly deranged by grief did something that anyone who’s ever tried to write a story or start a movement knows the value of: It turned knowledge into feeling.
Everyone knows that our oceans are in trouble. Everyone knows whose fault that is. Humans didn’t kill Tahlequah’s child directly, but we are very much the reason why her community is on the brink of extirpation, down to less than eighty individuals as of this writing. Hounded by whale-watchers and pollution and crashing salmon populations and a degree of acoustic agony no human can fully comprehend, the Southern Residents’ suffering is both a tragedy and a cautionary tale.
And this is where the moral disaster becomes an existential crisis. Even if your cold, anemic heart is unmoved by the Tahlequahs of the world, there are perfectly selfish reasons to protect them and their habitat. Forget about killer whales. An ocean with more plastic than fish won’t be an endless source of protein. Slaughtering the world’s pollinating insects isn’t a great agricultural strategy. Throw in the global depletion of potable freshwater, hypervolatile weather bringing ever more droughts, fires, floods, and hurricanes, plus, oh I don’t know, rising sea levels set to displace one or two billion coastal inhabitants before the end of the century, and it all becomes — like nothing else but nuclear war — too much to contemplate.
Has it ever been easier not to? The grocery stores in which I’ve foraged all my life suggest ever more abundance and diversity from one year to the next. That message, and countless others like it, hits me on a far more visceral level than any data-driven communique from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Today’s music is so excellent, the television so sophisticated, our opportunities so unlimited, that it’s harder than ever to feel the moral, mortal peril that we’re in.
It’s like we’ve turned Noah’s Arc into a humans-only party yacht and sailed it to the edge of Niagara Falls. There are a million distractions aboard, but only three options as far as the waterfall goes. You can struggle against all odds to turn the ship around, stare numbly into the abyss, or turn your back and dance.
My personal adaptation is to ricochet erratically between all three. But on those days when I’m going with the first one, standing on the dance floor shouting, guys, guys, I take a certain solace from the fact that, lately, more of us are waving our arms.