To the Last Whale
Wind on the water, carry me home...
Over the years you have been hunted By the men who throw harpoons And in the long run he will kill you Just to feed the pets we raise Put the flowers in your vase And make the lipstick for your face Over the years you swam the ocean Following feelings of your own Now you are washed up on the shoreline I can see your body lie It's a shame you have to die To put the shadow on our eye Maybe we’ll go Maybe we'll disappear It's not that we don’t know It's just that we don't want to care Under the bridge Over the foam Wind on the water Carry me home - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - 1980
I highly recommend that you listen to the song at the bottom of this read, while you read.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun - Ecclesiastes 1:9
The drought is over in California. We have been in an almost continual drought since 2011. Historical fires and now historical rainfall. Climate change is real and historically, it’s normal. Paleoclimate records going back more than 1,000 years show many more significant dry periods in California and many rainy.
I grew up in a time where the only environmental cause was “Save the Whales.” In April of 1975, Greenpeace launched the world's first anti-whaling campaign from a dock in Vancouver. The mission would become the spark that ignited a global Save the Whales movement and eventually helped secure an international ban on commercial whaling. I was 14 and interested. Good on Greenpeace and every single activist that sat in a tiny boat out in a rough sea, facing the monstrous whaling ships.
In 2008, Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, was followed by camera crews in a series called “Whale Wars,” as he and the crew aboard various vessels attempted to stop the killing of whales by Japanese whaling vessels off the coast of Antarctica. Seven seasons and 61 episodes later it ended in 2015 with injunctions against the Sea Shepherd vessels, keeping them at a distance, making it even more costly to film.
In negative press Nancy Dewolf Smith of The Wall Street Journal wrote: "What is shocking at first is how unprepared most of these people are for their self-appointed mission as planet savers.”
My response to Ms. Dewolf is at least they were doing something tangible. No one cared to take a self-promoting picture in front of a whaling ship. They went right up to them. They drew further attention to the horrors of the whaling industry under the ban.
By the time I was 17, I had spent many a day sitting on Zuma Beach in Southern California listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. After graduation, a few of my friends and I got to use a timeshare in Maui for a week. One day we were snorkeling off the coast of Napili when suddenly we were pushed around by a school of curious wild dolphins. I will never forget people screaming from the rocks above “sharks!” We froze, ripping off our goggles, realizing what we had encountered and watched as they swam back out to deeper water. We laughed in amazement the rest of the trip.
By 19, I drove our family dog, Duke, an English Mastiff, down to Zuma to play in the ocean. On one of our trips he was awkwardly frolicking in the water, biting foam, when suddenly a whales tail appeared out of the water, making me scream, as he barked his head off. A grey had come in close to play. A mind image that never goes away.
As parents we took our kids on a whale watching boat in California. We also witnessed grey whales on their 12,000 mile round trip migration from the Artic to Baja, Mexico, basking in a cove in Depoe Bay, Oregon. I can still see the mother and her baby. Imagine a baby grey calve doing this trip?
This week, in recent news the New Jersey shoreline has had an unprecedented rise in whale and dolphin deaths. They are beaching themselves. 18 whales as of February 1st and seven just this month, including 8 more dolphins in a mass stranding. If they are not stranding, they are frantically diving down to the bottom of the ocean floor to save themselves and this is equally tragic.
Can you imagine a 40 foot, 29,000 pound creature not able to find its way in the ocean? washing itself up onto the shore to die? or seeing an Orca grappling for its last breath? or eight dolphins swimming straight to shore, still breathing but slowly dying? Seems we got Shamu to stop performing at Sea World only to make things harder for his ocean family.
For the rescuers with the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, first responders, Sea Isle City workers and everyday citizens desperately trying to save these incredible creatures, covering them in wet-wraps, watering them down with buckets of water, it was heartbreaking. Sea Isle News story <click
There are many standard reasons this could happen, but one things for sure, something isn’t right and Governor Murphy, of New Jersey knows it.
New Jersey has one of the strongest Environmental “Protection” Acts in this country. It’s called the New Jersey Environmental “Justice” Act, that Murphy signed into law in 2020. The Atlantic Ocean project totaling 183,353 acres has only just started on its massive ocean wind farm. Right now New Jersey-based Clean Ocean Action is asking the federal government to probe the recent whale and dolphin deaths to see if they may be linked to construction work or offshore wind farms.
A few months ago I listened to a marine biologist in the New Jersey shore area and long-time family fisher-woman explaining the dangers of these wind farms, even offshore. I wish I could find her interview because she was exceptionally rational and down-to-earth and was noticing unusual changes in sea life.
The fact is turbines can create two types of sound: a mechanical hum produced by the generator and a “whooshing” sound produced by the blades moving through the air. Modern commercial turbines are designed so that the turbine is upwind of the tower, which mitigates low-frequency and impulsive sound. Yet it’s not “mitigated” enough.
Dolphins and other toothed whales locate food and other objects in the ocean through “echolocation.” In echolocating, they produce short broad-spectrum burst-pulses that sound to us like "clicks." These "clicks" are reflected from objects of interest to the whale and provide information to the whale on food sources. <whoi.edu>
Standard wind turbines are 148-foot blades on a 262-foot tower. The GE 1.5-megawatt model weighs more than 164 tons and the tower alone weighs about 71 tons. The approximate total weight of one turbine is about 267 tons. These turbines have sounds and low-frequency noises that interfere with the unique God-given language of cetaceans throwing them off as they look for food and each other.
Where are the big activists? Greta? Gates? Gore? DiCaprio? Fonda tied to a turbine? Prince Harry?
One of David Crosby’s last Twitter posts, besides shaming real rebels, was a post heralding Greta Thunberg as a hero. Like Fonda, setting up arrests for photo ops is not heroic or responsible. It’s about them.
I wonder what Jacques Cousteau would think of these looming ocean wind farms?
..or 57 million pounds of PPE like I recently wrote about. Gut-wrenching.
Science uninhibited by government and platform censorship, can be trusted. At this point if an experienced, published scientist is being censored, you should pursue what they have to say.
In 2017 this report was released:
Impacts of Navy Sonar on Whales and Dolphins <click
Was an extensive study, by our Navy, considered in future ocean wind farm projects?
Our problems are as big as the ocean. Our priorities are insanely upside-down in the name of Climate Change, Global Warming and The Green New Deal.
Like I’ve said before, no amount of world conferences, “environmental acts,” solar panels, electric cars or wind turbines will ever make a difference to the unreached and underserved.
New Jersey’s wind project alone will cost $500 million. More by the time they’re done, like all government projects. How many mental health and drug rehab facilities could be built by the private sector with that money? Don’t most of the drug-addicted artists of my day understand this?
I wrote this while listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Radio. I still love the music. It brings back great memories.
Can we “change the world, rearrange the world?”
“Driving out through the windmills
and some of them were still
Sometimes it's hard to catch the wind
and bend it to your will”
To the last whale carry me home…
Have a listen
I am 66; I remember the beginnings of Greenpeace. I remember efforts to discredit them. Who was right, then?
I agree with every single word that you wrote. Wind turbines, data centers, satellites orbiting the Earth are all causing interference with our natural world turning it into an unnatural one. The whales, the birds, the insects and, yes, the humans dying premature and unnatural deaths ought to give us reason to say "Hold on. We need to rethink this. We need to change direction. "
If we don't, what kind of world are we leaving to the next generation.
This was such an informative and well written read. A skeleton of an enormous whale washed up on one of our Oregon beaches recently. How many more sea creatures will die on our golden sands before the realization dawns on many of us how devastating the well intended man made inventions of today affect the natural environment of our oceans and their abundant inhabitants.