Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

I dwell on all this because of a routine presumption—that the whale’s ability to receive and generate sound indicates it is an “intelligent” creature—and an opposite presumption, evident in a Canadian government report, that the continuous racket of a subsea drilling operation, with the attendant din of ship and air traffic operations, “would not be expected to be a hazard [to narwhals] because of … the assumed high levels of ambient underwater noise in Lancaster Sound.” It is hard to believe in an imagination so narrow in its scope, so calloused toward life, that it could write these last words. Cetaceans may well be less “intelligent,” less defined by will, imagination, and forms of logic, than we are. But the idea that they are intelligent, and that they would be affected by such man-made noise, is not so much presumption as an expression of a possibility, the taking of a respectful attitude toward a mystery we can do no better than name “narwhal.”