Dreaming the World

A fine mid-spring day. Suddenly everything is in bloom! The sun is high and bright and I need sunscreen and a hat when outside. I’ve made repairs to my electric trike and gone for my first relatively short ride. We noticed last night that twilight extended until almost eight!

Yesterday I found myself remembering a remarkable moment from my late twenties, some fifty years ago. I was on the beach in Carmel, California, very early one morning. (Had I slept there? Probably, although I honestly don’t remember.)

As I walked along the water’s edge, a California Gray whale came in close to the beach and began accompanying me. We walked to the end of the beach, turned around, and walked to the other end. It’s a long beach! When I made the last turn the whale looked at me as if bidding me adieu, and left. The entire episode was magical.

That was probably in February so the Grays were likely beginning their migration north. Late that summer, I found myself with a friend atop a cliff overlooking the ocean fairly near my then home in Humboldt county. Below us, passing north to south, were endless pods of Grays heading to their wintering grounds off Baja, Mexico.

I imagine these sweet memories were triggered by an article I had just read about the crash in California Gray whale populations, down 40% in ten years. The cause of this steep decline appears to be a lack of krill in their arctic feeding grounds. They are unable to find enough food to bulk up for the long migration south and are dying in route from starvation. The females are also unable to store enough nutrients to calf, so it is a double catastrophe.

Krill populations are rapidly declining due to a host of factors related to the warming of the arctic. This situation is made worse by several countries using factory ships to scoop up krill in great numbers. They are taken home and used as fish food for factory raised fish! The report also noted that factory fishing for krill in Antarctic waters was even more intense and threatens the survival of penguins and the entire ecosystem.

The fundamental fact is that krill may be the most crucial food source for the ocean ecosystem as a whole. Between climate change induced desalination, deoxidation, and warming, and plummeting krill populations, the ocean appears to be nearing a threshold for an unthinkable die-off.

Sadly, in our age of greed and extraction driven profit, there appears to be neither the will nor a international governmental structure to reign in the krill depletion. Witnessing, now from afar, the possible extinction of the magnificent Gray whales, my heart feels heavily burdened. To be shown once again humanity’s seeming indifferent to the ever increasing suffering, loneliness, and silence of the natural world is to feel unmoored.