War of the Whales (18 page)

The Baja campaign became a case study in what NRDC—and Reynolds in particular—did best: improvise methodically. Without legal standing in Mexican courts, Reynolds and Scherr reasoned that the only way to save the lagoon was to shame Mitsubishi and the Mexican government into doing the right thing.

Environmental campaigns have a lot in common with the Napoleonic Wars. They’re prolonged and punishing offensives fought on multiple fronts, with success often determined by the strategic alliances you forge and the foot soldiers you mobilize. And they cost a lot of money. Like most large environmental groups, NRDC’s programs were funded by membership, foundations, and large donors. Reynolds and Scherr tapped all those sources to build a war chest and recruit an army of activists. One major donor pledged start-up money. A foundation provided matching funds. NRDC’s crackerjack direct mail group activated its membership, which contributed money and generated over 1 million letters to Mitsubishi.

To focus international media attention on the whale lagoon, Reynolds and Scherr enlisted movie stars—particularly Pierce Brosnan, who became the face and the voice of the campaign—and celebrity lawyers like NRDC’s longtime staff attorney Robert Kennedy Jr. They recruited Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and heir to the family filmmaking franchise, who agreed to bring a film crew to shoot at the lagoon. Reynolds reached out to marquee scientists, like Roger Payne, who’ d jumpstarted the Save the Whales movement back in the early seventies with his discovery and promotion of humpback whale songs. Payne, in turn, recruited dozens of other internationally renowned scientists and persuaded them to sign an open letter denouncing the saltworks project.

March 1997 at Laguna San Ignacio, Baja California, Mexico, with Pierce Brosnan during the campaign to block a proposed salt works project planned at the site of gray a whale nursery.

With his son, Sam, greeting a “friendly” Pacific gray whale in Laguna San Ignacio.

Reynolds and Scherr brokered a crucial strategic alliance with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), a deep-pocketed animal protection partner that was founded in 1969 to stop the commercial seal hunt in Canada. IFAW paid to have the scientists’ letter published in full-page newspaper ads around the world, which generated more waves of letters and petitions.

The coalition partners embarked on a worldwide tour to spread the gospel of saving the whale lagoon, beginning with a trip to Mitsubishi’s corporate headquarters in Tokyo to deliver a mountain of letters and petitions, then on to Kyoto for the UN World Heritage Commission meeting to lobby for the lagoon’s “in danger” status. A year later, they made another pilgrimage to the commission’s meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco.

Back in the States, they launched a consumer boycott of Mitsubishi businesses, from cars to banks. They knew they couldn’t afford to mount a nationwide boycott, so they launched one in California and threatened to take it national. They deployed operatives across Mexico to drum up grassroots support, bought billboard, radio, and print ads in Mexico City, educated fishermen in Baja about the pollution threats from the saltworks, and convinced Mexico’s most popular Telemundo soap opera to write the gray whales of Laguna San Ignacio into its storyline and shoot an episode on location. By the winter of 2000, five years after the Mexican government entered into partnership with Mitsubishi, polls showed that 70 percent of Mexicans opposed construction of the saltworks.

In the end, it may have been the whales’ face-to-face charisma that tipped the balance. In late February, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo made his first visit to the lagoon, along with his wife and children. After just a few minutes on the water, the whales began to approach the president’s
panga
. The children ran to the bow of the boat to greet them. When Zedillo’s wife leaned out of the boat to kiss one of the whales, the president snapped a souvenir photo.

In early March, just days before the whales came ashore in the Bahamas, Reynolds was preparing to board a plane to Baja for the latest round of media offensives when he got the news: President Zedillo had canceled the saltworks. Reynolds, Scherr, and their coalition partners decided to continue on to Laguna San Ignacio as planned. When they got off the plane in Punta Abreojos, they were met and serenaded by the local schoolchildren. School was canceled, and the whole town threw a fiesta to celebrate the victory.

It was a sweet win. Now, for the first time since the campaign had begun five years earlier, Reynolds could stop fighting for the lagoon and simply enjoy the whales.

•  •  •

When he came ashore from his afternoon on the lagoon, Reynolds was looking forward to a cold beer and a game of horseshoes. The camp manager met him on the beach to say he had a call on the satellite phone, the camp’s only link to the outside world. Reynolds groaned. A satellite call was never good news. As he slouched toward the tent where the satellite phone was housed, Reynolds scanned his mental checklist of where each of his three children should be this time of day in Los Angeles. Warily, he raised the phone to his ear.

“Joel, this is Michael,” Jasny announced. So it was work, not a family crisis. Reynolds tried to imagine which lawsuit in his caseload might have gone off the rails. “How are the whales?” Jasny asked.

“The whales are wonderful. Go ahead and spoil my day.”

“There’s been a mass stranding. In the Bahamas.” While Jasny briefed him on the incident, Reynolds stared out at where two whale spouts punctured the lagoon’s surface. As Jasny described the sequence of strandings, Reynolds visualized the arc of color-coded pushpins spread across the map on Jasny’s office wall back in Los Angeles. He tried to imagine what could cause whales to strand along a 150-mile stretch of island beaches.

Before Reynolds could ask if there were any sightings of naval vessels in the area, Jasny reported that he’ d been making calls all day, but the Navy’s press office was in lockdown. No one he knew there would talk to him about the Bahamas. “But my friend at Fisheries sent me a permit that the Southeast Office issued last month to the Office of Naval Research. It’s for a sea test near the Bahamas for something they’re calling Littoral Warfare Advanced Development. I’m still figuring out what that is.”

“We obviously don’t have enough facts,” Reynolds said. “We need to know more about what the Navy was doing there—a timeline of events and locations. And soon, before the Navy starts narrating the story for us.”

Jasny agreed and promised to keep digging. He looked across the NRDC office, already empty on a Friday evening, and he could see the rest of the weekend flattening out in front of him. Reynolds suggested he start by drafting a letter to the Secretary of the Navy; hopefully something that the Humane Society would co-sign. “I’ d like to have something we can send out on Monday,” he said. Jasny said he’ d already started drafting one.

Jasny had saved the good news for last. “There’s a whale researcher in the Bahamas—on Abaco Island—who posted a report on MARMAM. He says he and his team collected heads from two of the whales.”

For six years now, Reynolds had been shadowboxing with the Navy over its sonar exercises. Six years of researching case law and cultivating science experts and wrangling with Navy lawyers. After all that time and effort, he still lacked a trail of physical evidence to support a lawsuit. Perhaps, he hoped, that trail might begin in the Bahamas.

Jasny waited out the silence until Reynolds spoke. “I’ll try to get back on tomorrow’s plane,” he said. “Until then, keep up the spadework.”

Reynolds hung up the satellite phone, opened a cold Pacifico, and squinted at the sun that was setting over the lagoon. A whale breached, defied gravity for a moment, and then fell back with a soundless crash.

He turned away from the lagoon and ambled toward the horseshoe pit, where a couple of the
panga
drivers were already pitching perfect, lazy loops that clanged against the stake. Reynolds hoped that with a bit of luck he could win a game or two before dinner, before the storm approaching from the Bahamas drowned out the dream of Laguna San Ignacio.

10

The Whale Coroner Arrives

After the tumult of the stranding and the days spent collecting heads, flying over to Grand Bahama to meet Darlene Ketten’s plane felt to Balcomb like a vacation. He hitched a ride with another pilot friend for the hourlong hop to Freeport.
¹
The northernmost island in the archipelago, Grand Bahama lies just 56 miles offshore from West Palm Beach. On a clear day like this one, Balcomb could just make out the Florida coastline from the cockpit of the plane as it began its descent.

Inside the airport, Balcomb was confronted by the dueling the front-page headlines of the
Freeport News
and the
Nassau Tribune
:

“Whale Beached at High Rock,” declared the
News
.

“Whales Come Ashore in the Bahamas!” shouted the bigger, bolder-faced
Tribune
, above a page one photo of a beached whale, and an article that began:

Ten whales were beached or stranded in shallow waters in the Bahamas during the last two days in a phenomenon that has baffled fisheries experts. While various whales have beached in the Bahamas from time to time, this is the largest number to occur at one time.

Freeport veterinarian Dr. Alan Bater said he never heard of so many beachings at one time in his 30 years in the Bahamas. “It seems very strange to me that nine should beach in one day. We don’t get nine in a year.”

As he walked toward Ketten’s arrival gate, Balcomb realized that he was nervous about meeting her. The two occupied opposite positions in the universe of marine mammal research. He labored in the shadows of photo-identification field surveying, recognized primarily for his long-running orca census and his chapter in the
Handbook of Marine Mammals
. Ketten was a bright star in the constellation of elite bioacousticians who lectured at international conferences and published in the most prestigious journals.

Their paths had crossed only once, after a lecture Ketten delivered on beaked whales’ hearing at the marine mammal biennial four years earlier. She’ d presented with flair, punctuating her impressive data analysis with witty asides that reminded the serious scientists that they could still get excited by the miracle of cetacean anatomy. Balcomb had waited for her entourage of grad students to thin out before introducing himself and asking her about the source of one of her PowerPoint slides—the one illustrating the ear canal of Gervais’ beaked whales. It was a brief exchange between two beaked whale nerds. What he remembered best was that she quoted a passage from his Baird’s beaked whale chapter back to him, verbatim. Ketten asked him when he was publishing his Bahamas research, and he mumbled something about wanting to compile a more complete data set. Then he invited her to come down to see the Cuvier’s and Blainville’s herself. “I’ll get there eventually, as soon as there’s a volunteer,” she replied with a smiling reference to her stranded research subjects.