Balcomb wasn’t so naïve as to think that President Obama would follow his advice. But he still had to write the letter. That was his job. To write to politicians. To talk to journalists and to anyone else who would listen. To keep tabs on the whales in Puget Sound and on the Navy ships in the area. To keep beating the drum as loud and as long as he could.
EPILOGUE
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
—Mahatma Gandhi
FIVE YEARS LATER; AUTUMN 2013
Joel Reynolds had been willing to suspend sonar lawsuits for a while, but he was constitutionally incapable of “cooling off.” He immediately threw himself into a fight to stop development of the Pebble Mine in southwest Alaska, which—if built, as proposed, at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed—promised to become one of the largest open-pit copper and gold mines anywhere, generating some billion tons of contaminated mining waste and threatening the most productive wild salmon fishery left in the world.
At Tejon Ranch, Lebec, California, Reynolds announces the agreement he negotiated with the ranch and state of California to preserve 90 percent of the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch—with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the background, 2008.
It was a trademark, Joel Reynolds-led NRDC campaign, involving alliances with local groups on the ground, public pressure on the multinational backers from its membership, and media attention generated by NRDC trustee Robert Redford. Reynolds held face-to-face meetings with the mining interests, and confronted their lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Within four years of Reynolds and NRDC’s entering the fray, all three of the major mining company partners had pulled out, leaving only a small Canadian company remaining, in search of partners. After an in-depth EPA study found that large-scale mining threatened the Bristol Bay region with “catastrophic” risks, Reynolds—recently elevated to western director of NRDC—called on that agency to use its authority under the Clean Water Act to stop the project. In February 2014, EPA initiated a formal process to do just that.
Meanwhile, Ken Balcomb had also refused to cool off. In 2009, when the Navy introduced proposals to build a mine-warfare range in its Northwest Training Range Complex, Balcomb spearheaded the local protests. The Puget Sound orca population continued to struggle following the crash of their prey species, the Chinook salmon. The pods had to venture farther and farther afield each season for food. Since underwater explosives would further disrupt their foraging patterns, Balcomb pressed Fisheries to enforce the “endangered” protections the orcas were due under the Endangered Species Act.
Dozens of local groups lodged protests with Fisheries, and NRDC submitted a 20-page legal and scientific declaration. While the suit was pending, Michael Jasny, who had recently been promoted to head of NRDC’s Marine Mammal Protection Project, helped Balcomb convene a cross-border conference with Canadian conservationists and Fisheries officials to implement a coordinated plan for protecting both the Southern and Northern Communities of orcas.
Ken Balcomb on the deck of his house—and headquarters of the Center for Whale Research—Smugglers Cove, San Juan Island, Washington, 2010.
• • •
In the five years since the Supreme Court decision, consensus had built inside the research community—even among Navy and Fisheries researchers—about the threat that noise pollution, including military sonar, poses to whales. Research into whale distribution and behaviors—funded largely by ONR as part of the sonar settlement—revealed that much lower sound levels than previously believed cause whales to change their migration patterns and eating and communication habits. Most importantly, chronic noise pollution depresses their reproduction. In particular, research into beaked whale populations in the waters off California—as well as a study of beaked whales in the Bahamas published by Diane Claridge as part of her PhD thesis—documented a dramatic drop-off in reproductive health.1
Meanwhile, whales continued to mass-strand—sometimes in alarmingly high numbers—in the presence of sonar.
Sixty dolphins stranded along the coast of Cornwall, England, in 2008, by far the largest marine mammal mortality ever recorded in British waters. The forensic investigation involving 24 experts from five countries and multiple government agencies identified nearby exercises being conducted by the Royal Navy—in collaboration with American Navy forces—as the only possible cause of the strandings.2
At least ten, and possibly dozens, of Cuvier’s beaked whales stranded or washed ashore dead on the Greek island of Corfu in December 2011. The stranding coincided with a major Italian navy exercise using sonar in the nearby Ionian Sea.3
And on May 30, 2008, a pod of more than 100 melon-headed whales stranded in a mangrove estuary on the northwest end of Madagascar. Despite intensive rescue efforts by both local authorities and experts from around the world, 75 of the whales died on the shore. An independent review panel of five scientists appointed by the International Whaling Commission spent several years examining evidence. They “systematically excluded or deemed highly unlikely” nearly every other possibility before concluding in their final report (to which Darlene Ketten appended a 26-page analysis of the specimen CT scans) that these deep-water whales had been driven ashore by an underwater mapping sonar that the ExxonMobil Corporation was using nearby to search for oil and gas deposits.4
Then in 2012 the Navy filed public notice of its plans for expanding exercises on its Undersea Warfare Training Ranges up and down its East and West Coast ranges. In addition to increasing its sonar exercises on both coasts and in Hawaii, the Navy proposed new mine warfare and firing ranges for torpedoes and other underwater explosive ordnance. The Navy’s own Environmental Impact Statements predicted millions of marine mammal “takes,” including nearly one thousand deaths and 13,000 serious injuries. For the first time, the Navy included explosives testing along with sonar trainings in its projections, which gave a more comprehensive picture of the overall impacts of the expanded activities.
Fisheries was preparing to approve permits for the Navy’s expanded undersea warfare activities across its ranges by January 2014, and it was already girding for the response—not just from NRDC, which had resolved to return to court to challenge the permits, but also from a host of national, international, and grassroots organizations.*
SEPTEMBER 7, 2013
Smugglers Cove, San Juan Island, Washington
Reynolds had never visited Balcomb at his research station home on San Juan Island, but now that he was heading back into the fight against the Navy and Fisheries, he wanted to check in with Balcomb in person and ask him to re-up. With his intensive involvement in the Pebble Mine campaign, Reynolds was frequently traveling through Seattle. So a week earlier, he’ d called to see if Balcomb would be around to talk. “I’m still here,” said Balcomb. “So are the orcas. Come on over.”
The last time Reynolds had seen him—when they were both members of a congressionally mandated advisory group meeting on ocean noise pollution some years earlier—Balcomb was undergoing treatment for his prostate cancer and looked like hell. When Reynolds pulled up behind his cedar shingle house on Smugglers Cove and Balcomb greeted him at the door, Reynolds was reassured by how ruddy and robust he looked at 73 years of age. He was wearing jeans and one of his trademark T-shirts—“Pacific Beach: A quaint little drinking town with a fishing problem”—along with his customary wide, toothy grin.
Reynolds and Balcomb at Smugglers Cove, San Juan Island, Washington, September 2013.
Reynolds had recently taken his two teenaged daughters to a screening of Blackfish, a documentary about captive orcas in which Balcomb appeared. When they heard that their father would be visiting Balcomb, they said he had to come back with a picture. So Balcomb set up a camera on a tripod and shot the two of them against a backdrop of whale skulls that lined the foyer of the house.
They updated each other on their personal lives. Balcomb was healthy again, having had follow-up treatment for his prostate cancer.
He had a couple of girlfriends who moved in and out of Smugglers Cove, seasonally, like the whales. Balcomb acknowledged, with a smile, that he wasn’t sure whether the women were coming to see him or the orcas.
Now, in mid-September, the summer interns and most of the whales had departed for the season. Dave Ellifrit had moved to San Juan Island in 2008 and bought a house. Other researchers had married each other, divorced, and remarried other young colleagues on the team. Balcomb joked that it was harder to keep track of the researchers’ couplings and uncouplings than those inside the resident orca pods.
Reynolds told him about his fiancée and showed him photos on his phone. Jenny was an environmental chemistry professor at UCLA whom he’ d been dating for several years. They’ d recently gone to city hall to get a marriage license. But the day they showed up, it was swamped by hundreds of gay and lesbian couples who’ d arrived for licenses during the week after the recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld California’s same-sex marriage law. The line was out the door and around the block, so they decided to go out for lunch and return another day.
Balcomb led him on a tour of the grounds, including the 1929 Ford and 1956 Chevy parked in nearby sheds. Back inside, he gave Reynolds a tutorial on some of the finer points of beaked whale hearing, using the three skulls in his living room as teaching props. Then Reynolds sat down at a white piano set incongruously among the skulls; the piano had come with the house, and Balcomb liked having it around as a reminder of his chanteuse mother. Reynolds played a country-and-western song he’ d recently written about an old red pickup truck and a woman driving away at dawn with his heart in the flatbed.
When they moved onto the back deck to watch the sunset over Haro Strait, Reynolds immediately recognized the view from the video that Balcomb had shot in 2003 of the USS Shoup blasting high-intensity sonar while J Pod cringed along the shoreline. Reynolds had always thought of it as the Zapruder film of whale strandings. He stood there and took it all in. The splendor of the cove at sunset, with the specter of the Shoup still hovering in the background.
On this late afternoon, six kayakers were paddling near the shore, and a few fishing boats transited the mouth of the cove. As the sun dipped behind Vancouver Island, Balcomb shot a time-dated photograph, as he did every evening.
Reynolds had bought a bottle of scotch from the ferry station dock. They sipped their drinks as the lights of Victoria, Canada, came up across the strait. Balcomb described how the resident orcas had continued to dwindle in number, down to 80 from a peak of 100 back in 2000. In addition to the drop-off in the local salmon population due to overfishing and runoff from logging operations, Balcomb attributed the orcas’ decline to man-made noise from shipping and increased sonar and explosives trainings in their homewaters. Meanwhile, his funding from Fisheries to monitor the orca pods throughout the Pacific Northwest had been cut back from $125,000 to $80,000 a year, which meant less money to hire staff and maintain and operate his research vessel. The Capitol Hill budget battle and sequestration hadn’t helped things.
They talked about the upcoming court dates with the Navy and the ways the two of them might work together, particularly on the Northwestern ranges. They ticked through a roll call of all the players who had cycled out of the various federal agencies over the years, from ONR and the fleet and the Navy secretariat, from Fisheries and the Department of Justice. But Balcomb and Reynolds were still here. And so were the whales. They lifted their glasses in the direction of the cove.
Balcomb turned on the speakers connected to the underwater hydrophones, and suddenly the serene visual landscape was overlaid by a cacophony of mechanical sound. A speedboat crossed the mouth of the cove, trailing a rattling roar in its wake. They heard the lower-pitched rumble from the engine of a distant fishing trawler as it chugged past.
Just as the last amber light faded to dark gold, a bank of fog drifted in from the south and unrolled like a deep-pile carpet across the cove. The lights of Victoria went soft, and the drone of the distant engines was interrupted by the occasional bleat of a foghorn.
Just then a different sound came over the hydrophone speakers. A chirping, overlapping conversation, like a flock of shrill birds.
“You hear those chatterboxes?” said Balcomb, rising from his seat and peering into the dense fog. “Sounds like five or six of them, heading in this direction.” As the sound of the pod drew closer, the two men moved to the porch railing and strained to look and listen through the fog-damped silence. Then, just below them, something moved through the water. A gentle lapping rose up through the fog.
“Wait for this . . . ,” Balcomb said quietly.
And then they heard it: the unmistakable whoosh of air being forced through a half dozen blowholes. Soft yet powerful, like the rumor of a whale.
* * *
* In December 2013, Fisheries approved a five-year permit allowing the Navy to expand its sonar and explosives training activities on its Southern California and Hawaii ranges. Within a month, in separate lawsuits, Earthjustice and NRDC, along with half a dozen co-plaintiffs, sued the Navy and Fisheries for violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Coastal Zone Management Act.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Researching and writing this book turned into a seven-year odyssey that sent me around the world and, at times, around the bend. I am deeply thankful to the people who guided me from shore to shore and, finally, safely home.
Had I grasped at the outset the depth of my ignorance concerning whales, submarines, the Navy, the ocean, and the law, I never would have dared embark on this project. It was my great good fortune to enlist some of the world’s leading experts as my tutors along the way.
Naomi Rose, formerly of the Humane Society of the United States and now at the Animal Welfare Institute, schooled me in the basics of marine mammalogy when I was an absolute beginner. She also introduced me to the world’s elite whale scientists at the biennial conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy in Cape Town, South Africa. Darlene Ketten, whom I first met in Cape Town and later visited in Woods Hole and in Washington, DC, is a gifted teacher who patiently explained to me the fine points of whale hearing, forensic marine mammal pathology, and acoustics. Peter Tyack and Chris Clark were also generous with their time, their anecdotes, and their expertise in bioacoustics. Bob Gisiner and Roger Gentry gave me an insider’s perspective on the machinations of the Office of Naval Research and the National Marine Fisheries Service, respectively. Jim Mead of the Smithsonian Institution was my guide to the hidden realm below the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the unseen world of beaked whales. Michael Stocker of Ocean Conservation Research helped me grasp the fundaments of marine acoustics.
Two historians were particularly helpful when I reached out to them for guidance. D. Graham Burnette, professor of history at Princeton University, shared his extensive research into the twentieth-century science of cetology, including his deep dive into the John Lilly archives at Stanford University. Anyone in search of a riveting book about whale science and scientists would do well to read his recently published The Sounding of the Whale. Gary Weir, chief historian at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, shared his trove of knowledge, as well as his published and unpublished research into the early days of the US Navy’s sound surveillance program. His book An Ocean in Common remains the best history of the Navy’s patronage of research oceanography.
My special thanks to Retired Admiral Dick Pittenger at Woods Hole, who not only schooled me in the rudiments of antisubmarine warfare and sonar but also vouched for me to other retired admirals who were instrumental in my naval education. Admirals Craig Dorman, Bob Natter, Bill Fallon, Pete Daly, Paul Gaffney, and Larry Baucom all were gracious enough to share their experiences and insights drawn from decades of dedicated service.
I’m also grateful to Admiral Pittenger for introducing me to the world’s greatest living oceanographer, Walter Munk, who was in residence that August at Woo
ds Hole’s geofluid physics cottage. Dr. Munk subsequently invited me to visit him at his home in La Jolla, California, near the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he has taught and conducted research for more than 65 years. It was my singular privilege to spend several fascinating afternoons with Dr. Munk. Further south on the California coast, Sam Ridgway was kind enough to host me at the SPAWAR (Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command) headquarters of the Navy’s Marine Mammal Training Program, where he has served continuously since 1961.
I’m indebted to Ken Balcomb and Joel Reynolds, who granted me unfettered access to their friends, families, and colleagues, and patiently taught me what I needed to learn about whale research and environmental law. Michael Jasny, now head of NRDC’s marine mammal program, was always ready to answer my questions on an array of topics and offer suggestions for further research.
My editor and publisher, Jonathan Karp, lashed himself to the mast of this book seven years ago and never bolted for the lifeboats—despite my many delays and detours in delivering the manuscript. I will always be grateful for his steadfast encouragement and unerring course corrections, without which I would have been lost at sea.
I am also the happy beneficiary of the topflight publishing team that Jonathan has assembled at Simon & Schuster. Special thanks to art director Jackie Seow for designing such a terrific cover and to Joy O’Meara for the elegant inside pages. (Kudos to Paula Robbins at Mapping Specialists for the excellent endpaper maps and thanks to Mary Challinor for her flawless designer’s eye.) Michael Szczerban, another remarkable S&S editor, was kind enough to read the penultimate draft of the manuscript and offer me his astute notes. Production editor Jonathan Evans lavished great attention and care on my book, and Phil Bashe combed through the manuscript with the eagle eyes of a great copy editor. The publicity and marketing group of Cary Goldstein, Sarah Reidy, Richard Rorher, and Elina Vaysbeyn is a dream team whose savvy and smarts have served me well. Finally, I want to thank Nick Greene for shepherding this book through every stage of production and for saying yes to each of my many requests.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 40