Once upon a time I did see whales.
We were vacationing in the Azores Islands, mostly due to the generosity of friends that opened their parents’ house to our ramblings. We enjoyed their tales, got to know them a bit, and used all their tips about things to do and to look at. In one island we climbed a volcano, feeling the heat of the hearth in the soles of our shoes. In another we ate chicken cooked in a geyser. In yet another we walked across very humid forests, and dived in blue water. And of course, we hired a boat to go and do some whale watching.
We certainly enjoyed ourselves in that boat, and towards the end of a rather long sailing, a mother and a calf sperm whale allowed themselves to be seen by us. Sperm whales indeed! The only ones that have actually teeth, and are capable to kill and eat things like… humans! Sperm whales are the kind more frequently seen in the Azores in summer, so one could think that those we saw are remote descendants from Moby Dick. But it is enough to be a while in their water to understand that whales are gentle animals, giants strolling through, living! in waters that we have barely started to recon. I guess it is possible to imagine that such giant could grow tired of us, little mosquitos, actually hunting and hurting her, and accordingly plan a revenge, or a defense. But it is definitively easier to imagine that oil not having been discovered and processed in due time, whales would have gone gently into their destruction and anihilation, by us.
We certainly got close to kill them all. And yet they are coming back.
Today I read in the Guardian that blue whales have been seen in the Spanish Atlantic. Which is almost impossible. They have not been there for forty years. Whales are animals that swim the whole ocean, migrating with the seasons. But differently than other animals, their knowledge of the route is not imprinted in the biology of each animal, but maintained and communicated from one generation to another. So biologists thought that blue whales would not be seen again in that part of the ATlantic, because all the ones that knew how to get there, were killed. BUt now, 40 years after the moratorium on their hunting was enforced, they have been seen back in the spanish atlantic. So now diffferent scientist are wondering if there was an ancestral memory, passing culturally through generations even if it wasn’t enacted. Trained as a biologist, I seriously distrust the antropomorphization that we frequently do on the animals that we relate to. And yet I imagine older whales, harpooned to near death, telling the surviving youngsters of that other place to which they should come back some day.
In the end it does not matters much how did they manage. The recovery of whale populations is a great success in a field that is replete with abject failures. We have destroyed so much, and yet some is coming back. I don’t know about you, but I need, in the middle of so much increasing certainty on the damage that we have inflicted, and inflict, in the biosphere, these kind of news, the news that sort of shine a light in an otherwise very dark tunnel. To me feel like if our inmense greed and unparalleled cruelty, are actually forgiven.
Or perhaps I am lying to myself, and I should know better. But the whales are back.