Where's Tahlequah?

And how do we clear the glass?

In my last post I shared the tragic story of Tahlequah, the bereaved mother Orca who, for a second time, has carried a starved calf on her nostrum through the waters of the Salish Sea in a sad pageant of grief and warning. As far as has been reported, she was last seen carrying her calf sixteen days ago. We have to assume she’s released the calf by now, but at present I can find no information on her location.

Her geographic location is not what I’m referring to though. It is something more amorphous. It’s her psychic location, where she abides inside us and in our culture. There she, and the rest of nature, seem more and more to be slipping away.

I mean this in a general sense. Many people, including the scientists working on whale conservation, are still excruciatingly aware of the circumstances facing the Southern Resident Orcas, that they are nutritionally unable to grow their community, starving at the the edge of functional extinction. This must particularly be the case for Lynda Mapes, the Seattle Times reporter who has followed Tahlequah since the beginning, relaying the necessary scientific information while carefully maintaining a human space in which to absorb the full moral and emotional range of Tahlequah’s desperate expression.

Yet in a societal sense, at least as seen in the media, we are losing focus. For instance, I noticed that the Seattle Times has been filing Mapes’ reporting on Tahlequah under a section of the paper they call “The Climate Lab.” I find that odd. While global warming certainly isn’t good for the Orca, it’s not what’s driving them to extinction. It’s dams. It’s malnutrition for want of the salmon, particularly Chinook, blocked by those dams. Placing Tahlequah’s ordeal under a climate heading simply confuses the matter. She becomes less clear to us, categorized out of her true existence, which isn’t as a subset of climate. She’s not a carbon quantity. Her value cannot be calculated via climate models.

This is only one specific example, but it reflects a broader trend I’ve watched develop over the years—the subsuming of nature by climate, as though the biosphere is somehow a category of climate. Climate obviously effects the biosphere, but without the biosphere there would be no climate as we now experience it. Earth’s climate would be more like that of the moon or Mars. Earth’s climate is best understood as a creation of the biosphere, like breathable air. Further, the most immediate damage being done to the biosphere, and the main driver of the extinction crisis, is and has always been land degradation, not the gradual warming of the atmosphere. It’s good old habitat destruction, traditional environmental concerns like deforestation, industrial agriculture, and, in the case of the Orca, dams. Categorizing these matters under Climate does them, and us, no good. If anything, it fogs the glass.

Our visceral connection with the living earth, and its creatures, is something we cannot afford to lose, and a narrative superstructure that insists on viewing the entire natural world through the ocular of climate isn’t helping. Countering this drift, bringing particular nature into clearer focus is one of the main reasons I write this newsletter. It’s also why I defer so often to poetry, whether good or bad. We can’t see nature with the reasoning mind alone.

Tahlequah

I say your name 
to remember my own
that it too is made of water.
I sit by the shore
to be closer to your torment
even as widgeon float by 
trailing silken threads
of light diamonds
as if all were well below.

Their chirps, wheezes and whistles 
help me see your plight, for you are also
innocent of the age
that’s befallen you both.

For them at least, programs are in place 
to ensure their survival, to ensure, that is
that we can keep shooting them.

No programs in place to ensure your survival
when all that’s needed is to breach
four lousy dams.

But we're a stingy bunch
The first dams
we built inside us.

And we still don’t know where we are.
We can’t know where we are.
If we did...

Only a few can see you now
through the screens and data
but those that do
     are enlarged by you.
Those that do 
     have the waterheart.

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