The West coast of Canada is breathtaking. I am on Vancouver island, home to many indigenous communities and their art and culture, to ancient forests and groves, to lakes, mountains and the Pacific ocean. Alaska is but a stone’s throw away and gigantic steamers labouring under the weight of everything from logs to automobiles, buses to boats, make their way slowly up the bay towards Halifax, still the most economical form of transport to the wild north.
I walk, at low tide, across another bay into a forest redolent with the fragrance of pine. The beaches, stony and rough, are covered with the remnants of hundreds of sea creatures, and underfoot, tiny crabs scuttle across with their funny side ways movement.
I have heard that two hours further north on the island there are whales to be seen, and I drive there for a whale safari. Our pilot is an indigenous man and regales us with stories of his ancestors which I only half believe. We scan the waters for fins for that is what we have been told to do. The guide keeps close touch with the special radio station that reports sightings. And suddenly there they are, five Orcas, swimming rapidly, one in the lead, their fins appearing and then disappearing, challenging us to keep up with them, to spy them again. My first whale sighting in the wild – what beauty.
Later that day I decide to find out more about whales. And the shock of what human endeavour does to nature hits me again. No, I am not even talking of the brutal killings of whales that the Japanese refuse to stop. I am talking of something much more removed – something that shows us how short sighted we continue being.
In 2002 beaked whales were found stranded in Isla San Jose in Mexico. They had died recently. Surprisingly this followed, by just one day, the stranding and later death of 14 whales in the Canary Island 5700 miles away. Some of the bodies were sent for analysis. While many reasons are cited for whales getting stranded, the two episodes so many miles away did have something in common. In both cases naval exercises were being conducted in the vicinity and creating loud noises thousands of miles below the surface of the water. The whales had developed lesions around their brains and ears and in their livers, lungs, kidneys as well as nitrogen bubbles in their organs and tissue, all symptoms of a sickness that scientists assumed whales would be immune to – the bends, a sickness caused in divers who come out of the deep too fast. Frightening as this may sound, the whales were being driven to commit suicide on dry beaches because of the deafening noise that we humans were creating in their domain. Similar effects had been earlier seen in the Bahamas, the Galapagos Islands, Italy, Greece and Japan amongst other countries.
Soon after the 2002 episodes a group of environmentalists sought to have underwater nuclear testing stopped in the United States but, in spite of irrevocable evidence, the Supreme Court ruled that it chose to believe the naval commandants who claimed that the tests were completely safe for all under water creatures.
As we move towards “more and better” science and technology for our alleged good, do we have any idea of the repercussions they might have on the world around us? When cervical vaccines banned for trial in the West are tried on young girls in Andhra, several of whom die, are the makers of the vaccine concerned? When untreated effluents destroy marine life on our coasts, do we know what the effect will be in the life cycle of nature? Do we even care?
