Fathoms: the world in the whale

by Rebecca Giggs

Would we know it, the moment when it became too late, when the oceans ceased to be infinite?

Whales elicited our smallness set against the largess of nature: they proved nature’s sovereignty and its resilience.

We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.

The limits of human imagination were never more concrete than in the seconds that pass, eye to eye, with another sentient organism.

Each whale has been calculated to be worth more than a thousand trees in terms of carbon absorption.

Saving ‘the environment’, and saving the whale from whaling, were yoked together by virtue of scale and of polar regionality; these goals became, implicitly, the same endeavour.

We, alone, have concepts of the past occupied by whales and their ancestors. We are the animals able to envision the time to come, and the nature that will abide it.

Yet even as nature was breaking (maybe because nature was breaking), people’s emotional connection to nature intensified.

Changes foisted upon the oceanic realm by humankind have shaped how whales understand their world and how whales relate to one another, at the same time as what whale song and silence means, to us, has also shifted to sync with the urgencies of this environmental moment.

(David Attenborough: ‘the hard scientific, dispassionate evidence [is] that there is no humane way to kill a whale at sea’.)

What we have caught and what we have killed, we have left behind. But what has escaped us, we bring with us.

In their breadth of connectedness, do whales not show us how to be conscious of environments we ourselves cannot see, environments beyond our habitation where crisis is being staged?

To protect any wild animal now, the task is not to look for it, but to consider what it might depend on: the abundance of food, of shelter, and paths of migration, the preservation of biophony, of oceanic chemistry, and temperature within ranges tolerable to species other than our own; freedom from being crowded out by pollution.