Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America
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Publicizing the book, McIntyre emerged as a vibrant and unpredictable ambassador for the animals. At the time, one newspaper profile noted, most ecological crusaders were “edifying dullards.” McIntyre, however, carried on about whales as “sensual, sexual animals,” and about fostering more “whale connectedness”; for one photo shoot, she spontaneously French-kissed an aquarium’s killer whale. (“I want to make love to a sperm whale!” she announced to a Washington Post columnist.) For her, the whale was “the guardian of the sea’s unutterable mysteries” and the “deep calm mind of the ocean, connected to body, living in the world, not looking out at it.” In short, the animals weren’t innocents that we were obligated to protect. They were equals, maybe even superiors. McIntyre was decoupling the meaning of these animals from their ecosystem, warning that the most profound consequences of their extinction could be spiritual, not ecological.
Maybe this sounds stale and flaky—the stuff that gets garbled through a cloud of smoke in dorm rooms late at night. But that’s just the point: in 1974, this was apparently a fresh and mesmerizing way to talk about wild animals. It was literally news, splashed onto the pages of the country’s most straitlaced newspapers. McIntyre was making a novel argument for saving species, swirling the outrage and urgency of William Temple Hornaday together with the sentimentality of the nature fakers and dialing up the intensity of both. The result was sexy, heartfelt, explosive, and exuberantly unscientific—a vision of whales as shamanistic creatures who only “play, swim, look for food, love, eat, travel, take care of their young and each other,” as she told one newspaper. “That to me is, like, a very instructive lifestyle. Their way could be an incredible teacher to us.”
Since the dawn of modern wildlife conservation a century earlier, the threat to nearly every imperiled species on the continent seemed straightforward enough: people were shooting it. McIntyre was taking the stage at the beginning of a new era, when what menaced wildlife was suddenly oblique. In 1962, Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, tracing how invisible pollutants like DDT were ricocheting around the environment, wearing away bird species such as the bald eagle, and infiltrating our own bodies. America seemed determined to solve these problems with nothing but more technology—by studying and tracking so many wild animals and atmospheric variables and pollutants that, eventually, we could trace the entire, baffling web of Earth’s ecology and repair it. In 1970, when a female elk in Wyoming was outfitted with the first-ever satellite tracking collar by NASA and Smithsonian scientists, the contractor that had built the device, a company called Radiation Incorporated, promised in a press release that now only the “ability to measure a moving system” could “prevent extinction of animal species” and “help bring these menaces to human life under control.” In an artist’s rendering, the elk—nicknamed Monique the Space Elk—stood with vulnerable doe eyes, in a picturesque valley, while the electronic appliance around her neck ejaculated a thick thunderbolt to a satellite in the sky.
With whales, McIntyre had locked onto one of the last clear-cut conservation cases, where simply convincing humanity to stop hunting an animal could save it from extinction. But she also saw whales as guides to lure us away from the cerebral attitude toward nature on the rise. John Lilly, a neuroscientist-turned-conservationist, believed that if humans recognized an intellect like our own in whales, we would be moved to protect them. But intellect bored McIntyre; it was, for her, the root of the entire catastrophe, the very thing that had reduced whales to objects to kill and carve. Intellect built the exploding harpoon and industrialized the business of whaling, transforming little wooden boats into mechanized and efficient floating slaughterhouses. Intellect, she wrote in Mind in the Waters, had led us to look down on animals and “blinded us to their incredible essence.” It had left us “incomparably lonely. It is our loneliness as much as our greed which can destroy us.”
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MCINTYRE’S IMAGE OF PACIFIST, messianic whales may have been mostly a projection. But the fantasy was appealing, particularly against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. By the time Mind in the Waters was published, she’d formed a nonprofit called Project Jonah, and she and her two-woman staff found themselves backed by celebrities like Candice Bergen and Judy Collins, with a stream of unsolicited donations and lucrative invitations, like the one that brought her to the IBM sales retreat. Project Jonah organized rallies for children and flew three kids to Tokyo to deliver the twenty-six thousand letters and drawings they’d collected from children around the world, asking the Japanese prime minister to retire his whaling fleet. Momentum was building. But then, in the summer of 1975, Joan McIntyre watched the antiwhaling movement that she’d been nurturing stand up and walk off in its own direction.
On June 27, a fledgling band of activists from Canada rented a small fishing boat and intercepted a Soviet whaling vessel off the coast of Northern California, in a part of the Pacific known as the Mendocino Ridge. The group called itself Greenpeace. Until then, they’d been focused on the issues of nuclear weapons and power, but they’d learned that sperm whale oil, because of its low freezing point, was still used as a lubricant in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. It seemed like madness—one species driving another extinct in order to build a tool to extinguish itself.
Two of the men confronted the Soviet ship in a small Zodiac, situating themselves in front of a sperm whale like a human shield. The Russians fired anyway. A 250-pound grenade harpoon streaked over the men’s heads and into the back of the whale. Those in the Zodiac stared into the animal’s giant eye as it died. A second Greenpeace boat was filming the attack, and a few days later, Walter Cronkite somberly broadcast the footage to millions of Americans. The historian D. Graham Burnett writes that the event “galvanized broad and deep public revulsion at modern whaling, and modern whalers.” It was a turning point: a century earlier, small bands of men huddled in little boats and risked their lives to hunt sperm whales; now they were ready to trade their lives to save one.
Burnett calls the confrontation “epoch defining.” It introduced Greenpeace to America and unveiled a more theatrical, militaristic style of environmental campaigning—one that has compelled people to sit in front of trees when the loggers arrive, or lie down in front of developers’ bulldozers, ever since. It believes that nature is worth dying for. And though it is absolutely radical in practice, in theory it seems to have a fairly wide appeal. (One of the young men in the Zodiacs that day was Paul Watson, whose splinter group, Sea Shepherd Society, known for ramming its boats headlong into Japanese whaling vessels, has been the star of Animal Planet’s best-rated program since 2008, the reality show Whale Wars.)
This is to say, the Mendocino Ridge incident signaled the beginning of something powerful in America. But for Joan McIntyre, it was only an end. The episode sickened her. She worried that the tack Greenpeace had taken with the Russians could escalate out of control into an international incident, maybe even nuclear war. Having recently briefed one of Greenpeace’s founders on the whaling issue, hoping to get the group involved, she now felt curiously betrayed. For her, saving whales had been about clearing more space for compassion in the world. Whales “were role models to increase our ability to get along with one another, and be affectionate, and re-establish our connections,” she later remembered. “Now there was this heroic, macho event, where people are chasing Russian ships around and potentially catalyzing violence. That was the betrayal: taking something that I believed was gentle, and turning it into something warlike. Our natural ability to go wrong was manifesting itself.”
It solidified something in McIntyre’s mind. She’d been noticing that her efforts to increase empathy only backfired or fed old antagonisms. Among the letters to the Japanese prime minister she collected from kids, for example, she’d found more than a few attacking “the Japs” for being such barbarians. It seemed to her that good intentions were easily disfigured after too much exposure to the world, like metal corroding in the elements. There was something u
gly and self-defeating in humans, or at least hapless, that always rose up to confound any progress. It was similar to how, ten years later, the crowd for Humphrey the Humpback would ravage a butterfly’s habitat, and how a fence meant to protect the Antioch Dunes nearly tore them apart. (More recently, after I stopped visiting the dunes, I read that Fish and Wildlife had determined that herbicides it was spraying to control weeds there had probably been killing 25 to 30 percent of the butterfly larvae every year.) “All our efforts to control our future,” McIntyre wrote, “are like ants walking around a Möbius strip.”
She wasn’t angry with Greenpeace. But she felt that whale activism had now shifted onto a new plane—one where she wasn’t needed or useful. In 1977, she dropped the cause entirely. She moved to the small Hawaiian island of Lanai, where she lived in a tent on a cliff. She wanted to watch the whales—the actual whales—and did so with a childlike diligence that brought to mind Rudi Mattoni, withdrawing into his land in Uruguay to catalog the bugs. Before, McIntyre wrote, whales were “symbols flopping around inside my mind.” Now, she “perceived the gigantic distance between the reality of the whales that I was watching from the cliff on Lanai and the effort to save them.” Eventually, she moved to Fiji, where she married a native man, changed her name to Joana Varawa, and, after quietly publishing a couple of rambling memoirs, basically disappeared.
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I’D APPROACHED McIntyre’s story as one in a series, pulling apart the different ways in which America has thought about and cherished its wildlife over the last 250 years, from Thomas Jefferson’s time, through William Temple Hornaday’s, and up until my own. These aren’t attitudes that switch on and off; instead, they’ve been draped over animals, and on top of each other, like translucent silk scarves, so that by now their patterns meld into something new and are no longer easily decipherable. So, having read so much about Joan McIntyre, I found it strange to watch the actual woman step off a ferryboat in downtown San Francisco to meet me one morning recently, nimble but worn-looking, with all that fire-red hair spilling from a faded baseball cap. It was as though she’d come hurtling out of history, to give me a hug and tell the barista her name—Joana—so we’d know when her americano was ready.
I’d tracked down Joana Varawa on Lanai, where she now lives again, working as an artist and writing an online community newsletter. She was back in the Bay Area, visiting her son and grandchildren for the first time in almost a decade. On the phone, she’d laughed when I asked if she still wanted to make love to a sperm whale, and laughed at what she called her youthful and naive belief that “if we could save the whales, we could save the earth”—even though that’s exactly what Robert Buchanan had told me in Churchill about polar bears, and he believed it in his bones.
She told me right away that she didn’t disown anything she’d done with Project Jonah, but she was disillusioned. The pointlessness and folly that she’d glimpsed at the Mendocino Ridge—“our species’ absurdity,” she called it—is only more apparent to her now. “The ultimate path in front of us appears to be the total extinction of everything,” she said. But she was laughing when she said that too, and when I pointed that out, she shot back, “Well, because what else are you going to do?”
I was relieved not to find yet another crabby and wounded ex-environmentalist, and I asked her how she was managing to live in a world that she found so discouraging. The answer wasn’t reassuring. She told me about the Taoists in ancient China. “They looked around and saw they were facing the same situation, a world that was disintegrating around them. And they realized the best thing to do is do as little as possible. Don’t feed any new energy into a system that’s falling apart, because you don’t know what that energy will wind up being spit back as.” Rather than try to change society, it’s better to retreat. “You try to stay virtuous in your immediate life, you try to be correct—because you only feed the monster if you interfere too much.” That was why she’d disappeared after the Mendocino Ridge, she said. She was done interfering.
Joana told me that she’d gone to one more International Whaling Commission meeting first, however. It was in Canberra, Australia, in 1977. The scene saddened her. Outside, she said, herds of new save-the-whales organizations were jockeying for money, influence, and attention; inside, nonwhaling nations traded their whaling quotas to Russia and Japan in exchange for increasing their fishing quotas. It was like a stock exchange to divvy up Earth’s living things. The real turning point came when she met a Japanese delegate who told her that he now spent more than two hundred days of every year flying to and from fisheries meetings just like this one. She looked deep into his exhausted eyes and saw a man trapped in needless and hopeless complexity. She pitied him, she told me, and as she described it, I couldn’t help think of the much smaller squabbles flaring in the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, among all those people who wanted only to save a beautiful bird. “My original intention was to soften things,” she told me, “and this was just all getting so hard.”
So she left. Early the next morning, she bought up all the daffodils she could find in downtown Canberra, and before anyone arrived for that day’s meetings, she placed a few on every conference table. Then she went to the airport and flew home. “And that,” Joana said, laughing, “was my last act as a whale saver.”
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AROUND THANKSGIVING, Operation Migration caught a streak of good weather and rallied. The cranes were locking into the trikes and had built up enough stamina that, during some flights, the pilots found they could skip a stopover and keep pushing the flock to the next one. During one eight-day stretch, the team flew on four different mornings, shredding through seven migration stops and 350 miles, and catapulting the cranes out of Kentucky, through Tennessee, and across the Alabama state line. There was talk of finishing the migration before Christmas, which hadn’t happened since 2004.
Still, there was one ongoing headache—crane number 2, the same bird that had freaked out and retreated into the woods that first morning in Necedah. Shortly after, the crew discovered that the bird had sustained an injury, a nasty abrasion along the leading edge of its wing—it was ripped up, with feathers and fibers dangling from the flesh. After the wound was treated, number 2 seemed to recover quickly; soon it raced out of the pen in the morning with the rest of the gang and thrust out its wings as though it were going to spurt into the sky. But it seldom left the ground. And when it did get airborne, it bailed out after a quarter-mile at most and had to be tracked down on foot by OM’s costumed ground crew. Often the bird would land deep in the woods, or far off the road in a gauntlet of farm fields and six-foot-deep irrigation ditches, and the ground crew would have to hike in after it, then hoist it in a wooden crate on their backs, all the way back to their van. (Experience shows that a whooping crane can be driven a few legs of the migration and still learn the route, though it’s unclear how many exactly.) One morning, number 2 did lift off from the pen, but then rocketed straight into the top of a tree, ricocheted down through the branches, Pachinko-like, and landed with its legs wrenched open in a V.
For weeks, this one problem child siphoned up a tremendous amount of Operation Migration’s time and patience. By the time they’d reached Tennessee, number 2 had become the subject of many internal e-mails and conference calls between the WCEP partners. Almost everyone in OM was convinced that the bird was incapable of flying—that the torn wing had been more serious than anyone realized. But the scientists at Patuxent argued that number 2’s problem might only be psychological, that the bird had been traumatized and needed to work through a fear of the trike. One government researcher told me that Operation Migration seemed to be giving up on the bird too easily: “My attitude was: Try harder. This is what you’re there for—to deal with the difficult ones, not just the easy ones.” In the end, the partners consented to have the bird driven to a vet in Nashville.* After an X-ray showed that number 2 had, in fact, ripped a membrane in its wing and would never fly normally again, the bird was
taken out of the migration and sent back to Patuxent. But by then, the whole debate about the bird between Operation Migration and the other partners seemed to have dragged out and gone sideways, in that special, galling way that disagreements between unhappy spouses do.
The intensity of those conversations, at least on Operation Migration’s side, was probably amplified by a more serious disagreement developing that fall. During a parallel series of conference calls, a team of WCEP members, including a representative from OM, was hashing out a new long-range plan for the partnership. And by now, WCEP’s commitment to putting its work back on firm scientific footing was presenting an existential threat to Operation Migration. The pilots were being argued out of their jobs.
WCEP’s initial goal had been to release a new troop of whooping cranes at Necedah every fall until it had built up a self-sustaining population of between one hundred and 125 birds—whooping cranes that were nesting and breeding at Necedah at a healthy rate and autonomously teaching their young the way to Florida. Only then could the humans stand down.
With a hundred birds now soaring down the flyway, WCEP was extremely close to reaching that goal. Many of these cranes did nest and mate in Wisconsin. But they routinely abandoned their eggs. After ten years, only one chick had survived long enough at Necedah to follow its parents to Florida. The discouraging truth was that, although large numbers of whooping cranes had been miraculously conjured into a place where, previously, there’d been absolutely none, those cranes weren’t yet taking care of themselves. Whooping cranes would continue to live in Wisconsin only if humans kept breeding them and putting them there. That is, the reintroduction was working fantastically. But, looked at in a narrower and less forgiving way, it was still a near-total failure.