May learning more about these ocean giants help us be in better relationship with them.


** News of the world environment
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NEWSLETTER | JUNE 2, 2023
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** Being Whale
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Back in April, I heard Canadian whale biologist Shane Gero, who has spent thousands of hours in the company of sperm whales, speak about how culture was fundamental to these deeply social marine mammals.

“Sperm whales are sperm whales across the globe, but how they learn to live their lives is very different, in the same way as some of us learn to use chopsticks and some of us learn to use forks,” he said ([link removed]) . Sperm whale clans — whose cultural differences are reflected in their various dialects — “are the largest, culturally defined, cooperative groups outside of humanity,” he said. And since they’ve been around for longer than we humans have been walking upright, “their stories are deeper than ours.”

His words stuck with me as we worked on the just-released cover story for our Summer 2023 issue, “Captain Joy’s Last Voyage ([link removed]) ,” about a whaler and his chronicles. Joy’s logbooks clinically describe the habits of whales, but what horror stories, I wonder, does the collective memory of these ancient beings hold about us humans?

We have massacred sperm whales up and down the oceans over two extended whaling periods ([link removed]) : between the early 1700s and late 1800s, when whalers under sail killed around 300,000 individuals; and through much of the twentieth century, when, using diesel engines and exploding harpoons, whalers managed to kill about the same number in just 60 years. By some estimates, we have killed off two-thirds of the sperm whale’s pre-whaling population. We would have killed more, but the whales learned to avoid whaling ships and shared that information across clans.

While whaling is no longer a major threat, sperm whale populations have been slow to recover. Though none were spared, whalers especially targeted breeding-age males who were prized for their size. This has skewed the male-to-female ratio, impacting the birth rate in some clans. And that has consequences in terms of how populations recover, if at all. When a sperm whale family dies out, it takes along with it generations of gathered knowledge about the ocean — the best hunting grounds, resting places, birthing sites — which helped that particular family thrive in the past.

We are no different. We too need our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, our communities, to learn how to be, how to grow, how to make sense of the world around us. And when we lose a culture or a language — to say war, or famine, or migration — we lose, with it, a unique way of being human. Researchers are now using whalers’ logbooks to understand sperm whale behavior and to help save them from new threats, from ship strikes to climate change. That’s good use of the data gathered at a bloody cost to their kind. I like to imagine that we will build on this effort to be in better relationship with these ocean giants, and that a time will come when the stories that sperm whales tell each other will include a narrative on how their greatest foe, the humans, eventually redeemed themselves.

Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal

PS: This is a version of my Letter from the Editor published in our Summer 2023 print issue ([link removed]) where you can read about whaling logbooks and much more.
In a hurry? Get a quick breakdown on the issue below.
Photo by Gabriel Barathieu ([link removed]) / Wikimedia Commons.

SUMMER 2023 ISSUE ()
The latest print edition of Earth Island Journal will be arriving in mailboxes
and hitting newsstands any day now.
In this issue you will find:
* A unique feature digging into how researchers are using centuries-old whalers’ logbooks to inform our current understanding of natural history, whales, and even the climate crisis.
* An on-the-ground report from Scotland, where one ecologist is on a personal quest to save the country’s peatlands and educate the next generation of bog-savvy climate experts.
* A dispatch from Rio de Janeiro that delves into Brazil's “landless workers” movement, which has made significant progress towards gaining the legal right to farm the land.
* A feature about two self-taught animal doctors in Delhi, brothers who have taken on the significant task of caring for the city’s injured birds of prey while also campaigning to restore its urban ecology.
* A deep-dive into the world of rayon, a textile that is often marketed as eco-friendly but that is produced via a chemically-intensive process and has been linked to logging of ancient forests around the world.

Plus:
* A conversation with Jojo Mehta, co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International ([link removed]) , about what it would mean to criminalize acts causing severe damage to the Earth.
* A personal essay by Lisa Owens Viani, director of Earth Island’s Raptors Are the Solution ([link removed]) , about why she’s dedicated herself to protecting wildlife from rat poisons.


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