Essays

A fin whale dives into the deep blue, holding the last breath he took on the wave-tossed surface.  He’s been feeding near a seamount not far south of Iceland, and wonders who else is in the neighborhood.  Propelled by the steady pumping of his whole body, he surges downward.  Since the water is cold up here near the iceberg zone, it doesn’t take long before he enters the sounding layer, which is, as always, alive with distant voices. We humans gave this zone a cute acronym: SOFAR, standing for Sound Fixing and Ranging, which hints at the ways our military has found it useful. More sober scientists have recently taken to calling it the Deep Sound Channel.  This layer stretches horizontally throughout virtually all of the world’s interlinked oceans; it’s the zone where sound moves at a slower rate, with temperature and salinity combining to form a layer of water that has a sort of ceiling and floor off which low-frequency sounds can bounce and travel for very long distances. 

As our whale friend crosses the upper boundary, he slows and swings to let his tail drop to a bit below the horizontal.  He listens.  Humpbacks, not too far off, are the loudest voices he hears. Then, very faintly, comes the sound he is hoping for: fellow fins, quite distant, perhaps off the coast of Spain.  Their calls are, of course, something that his auditory system is finely tuned to pick out of the rich mix of ambient sounds—his ears are especially sensitive to these low frequencies, while his brain can pick the patterns of these calls out of noisy backgrounds—and his heart quickens at the sound of his kin.  Fin whales may be able to stay in touch over entire ocean basins; Roger Payne suggests that this may be why we’ve never found any fin or blue whale breeding grounds (they don’t need to gather in one place, for they find each other by these long-range calls).  Yet this ability isn’t like some sort of super-power—it depends on being able to pick up sounds that are very faint, just barely audible above the background chatter of all the creatures, waves, and other sounds in the sea.  When a Norwegian tanker motors across the sound field (at high latitudes, its sound can slip into the channel), or when a seismic survey commences on the continental slope off Scotland, with airgun blasts four times a minute piercing the seafloor with in search of hidden oil and gas deposits, these low-frequency sounds can drown out the faint calls of distant fins. 

It’s likely that airguns at this distance would not be especially bothersome to the Icelandic fin, just an overlapping series of pulses that becomes an element of the overall background noise (at larger distance, the individual pulses of sound “blur” together).  Yet, according to Cornell’s Christopher Clark, the combination of various human noises can reduce the zone in which a fin might hear his kin by a factor of up to10,000.  Picture a circle that stretches from Nova Scotia to North Carolina: this is the fin’s potential range of social communication.  Now, see it shrink to little more than a dot one ten-thousandth its former area, to an size not much larger than the hook of Cape Cod: this is the distance in which the fin can communicate with his kind when the sea is at its noisiest.  Granted, this is a worst-case scenario; yet every incremental addition of noise (whether a sudden appearance of airgun noise, which can last days to weeks at a time from any given survey, or the slow, relentless increase in shipping noise experienced over the course of each whale’s lifetime) will reduce the size of his socialization circle.  Even a distant ship or seismic survey can increase the background noise by a few decibels, and in so doing, prevent the fin from eharing kin at the edges of perception; the acoustic horizon shrinks, for as long as the added noise persists.  Perhaps the intrusion will limit his choice of mates, leading to a gradual decline in the vibrancy of the fin whale gene pool; or, perhaps it will not have any particularly dire effects.  Maybe his day is simply a bit more lonely than it might otherwise have been. 

Should we care more about his mating success than his lonely day?  Are we content to simply try to be sure that the fin won’t be so close to an explosion or airgun array that his hearing might be damaged, while responding to our subtle, pervasive shrinking of his auditory world with an offhand, “sorry about that”?  What do we choose to care about in this story?

Variations on this theme are being played throughout our oceans, as they are on land, where we are far more aware of the insidious spread of human (or, more accurately, mechanical) noise.  Indeed, it is likely that our sonic impacts are far greater at sea, thanks to both the longer distances that sound can travel, and to the profoundly auditory nature of life under the waves.  Over the past few years, court cases, symposia, ongoing research programs, and more than a little public passion have all been devoted to debating questions about how much human sound is changing the natural balance of ocean habitats.  Yet as scientists, agency planners, and environmental advocates squabble amongst themselves, often talking past each other, we might see the process as so much sound and fury, signifying . . . . something, perhaps, but quite likely very little to do with the experience of the animals and habitats they’re all working to protect.

It’s easy (some would say necessary, or sensible, or realistic) to set aside the murkier questions that arise—questions about our right to dominate the soundscape, questions about whether the real issues are actually moral rather than scientific—and to settle for discussions, analysis, and regulations that focus only on the most gross impacts of our actions.  Thus environmental debates center on parts per million of chemicals in our air, on breeding success of endangered species, on models of sound propagation and maximum decibel levels that we can expose various species to.  This is surely a practical approach.   But do the the questions we are asking offer us the sorts of perspectives that might inform truly caring—what I would dare to call truly human—choices and actions in relation to our companions here on a shared planet?

I’m not going to pretend to have the answers.  These are large and many-layered questions, ones that can’t really be definitively answered.  They do, however, need to be asked, and to be considered.  That is the point of this essay.

When you step outside your door, it’s likely that you’ll hear quite a few different human noises joining whatever natural ambience may be present.  Perhaps there’s a road with fairly steady traffic a half mile away, contributing a gentle rumble.  Maybe someone down the street is cutting some trees or mowing a lawn, adding the steady whine of a two-stroke engine.  Dogs bark, kids yell, planes pass over, stereos play, motorcycles race by.  It’s also quite likely that you’ve pretty much gotten used to all this, and on most days you barely notice (not counting when Joe gets out his infernal leaf-blower or the college kids have a late-night party!).  Most of these sounds are fairly distant and so not especially grating; you can carry on a conversation in your backyard without noticeably needing to raise your voice.  That’s just how it is.

There are many people who’ve looked long and hard at ocean noise who’ve come to a pretty much similar conclusion about the effects of our human noises on wild creatures there: it seems like they’ve adapted without much fuss, and are carrying on with their lives, albeit in somewhat noisier surroundings. (The Gulf is also, of course, plagued by pollution-fueled “dead zones,” and similar stresses that surely impact population numbers; I am not in any sense suggesting that it’s a pristine, healthy ecosystem.) The Gulf of Mexico is about as industrialized and noisy as an open body of water can be, with a steady schedule of seismic surveys blasting airguns, heavy tanker traffic in and out of several major seaports, high-speed boats going to and from oil rigs, not to mention construction of said rigs in ever deeper waters; yet whales, dolphins, fish, and crustaceans all live there in seeming abundance.  For some, this is enough to put all questions of ocean noise pollution squarely on the “no big deal” shelf.

Fish and whales swim away from the really loud noisemakers we send to sea, like airguns and intense naval sonars.  Operators of these systems gradually “ramp up” the sound, to give notice to those who live nearby that the noise has arrived, and to try to assure that no animals will be so close that they may get physically damaged by the sound waves.  Indeed, these are not your backyard leafblower kinds of noises; while it’s difficult (some would say impossible) to reliably compare airborne and waterborne noise levels, suffice to say that these industrial noises are closer tow being under a fighter jet runway than anything you’re likely to hear in your neighborhood.  Of course, sound gets fainter as the distance increases, so generally if a whale—or a fish, or a turtle, or…—is beyond a kilometer or so (i.e., a half mile) from even the loudest sound sources, they won’t be hurt.  Many whales, however, seem to prefer to stay ten to thirty kilometers from airguns or sonar transmitters.  And fish tend to clear out from seismic survey areas, moving up or down the coast to other areas with suitable food supplies.  Sometimes, though, just to keep us guessing, dolphins play alongside active seismic vessels (often in a sound “shadow” along the bow), or whales edge closer rather than fleeing, to check out the sound.  And a twist in the other direction comes from beaked whales, who have been lethally injured, most likely by surfacing too rapidly to escape the sound of active sonars, at distances considerably more than the 1-3km considered a “large” safety zone.

So everything’s fine then.  These critters have a whole ocean to live in, and our loud activities just pass through for a few days or weeks at a time.  No problem.

If Joe showed up in your living room with his leafblower, you could just move to the den and close the door.  Or maybe take a walk until he was done.  If Joe’s cousin on the next block decided that he wanted to do some especially thorough leafblowing, and kept it up day and night during the weeks of autumn’s incessant leaf-dropping (as airguns and shipping also offer no acoustic respite upon the coming of darkness), the noise might be rather faint—you could probably even sleep through it—but you might well wish he would stop, by God.

While the leafblower analogy is rather catchy, it’s worth bearing in mind that sound is as important to ocean creatures as sight is to us.  So imagine how it would affect you if instead of being able to see everything around you fairly clearly at say, a mile distant, a blinding light source, or a dense fog device, was introduced that limited your field of view.  Now, distant hills are barely discernable or gone, and the street ahead is murky, difficult to pick out the sidewalk or the trees.  They’re still perceptible, let’s say, but it takes more concentration to see them.  Maybe you even get used to this compromised view.  But your life is surely changed.

These examples are (at least somewhat) tongue in cheek and likely a bit (or a lot) simplified; yet they point to things that deserve our consideration.  Even if our intense transient noises (like airguns), and our moderate chronic noises (like shipping), pose little direct physical or population-level threat to sea creatures—and this “if” will get a bit of scrutiny in a few paragraphs  when we look at the synergistic effects of stress—we may still want to take a close look at the ways that these sounds affect the lives of those who’ve lived in the sea for millennia.

It’s often noted by researchers, agencies, and environmentalists, that the sea is an acoustic medium.  Because light gets filtered out not far below the surface, most ocean species rely on sound as their primary medium of perception.  Yet the acoustic sensitivity of fish, for example, does not rely on ears alone.  “Lateral lines”, running down the sides of their bodies, respond to subtle changes in pressure, giving them a rich physical expansion of the auditory system, which allows them to sense small sonic and physical disturbances in the watery matrix around them .  Whales and dolphins have complex boney structures and fat deposits in and around their heads that serve as sound conductors and receptors; most biologists and acousticians express profound curiosity and wonder at these complex auditory systems, while as yet professing only the beginnings of an understanding about their functioning.

There is an important question, simply unanswered so far (and perhaps unanswerable): does the profound acoustic sensitivity of sea creatures give them perceptual skills that help them to hear what they need to through our noise, or does their sensitivity cause them to be easily overwhelmed by noise that they’re not adapted to?  The answer isn’t likely to be a stark one-or-the-other, and it’s apt to be different for each species.  There is some anecdotal evidence that most sea life can deal fairly well with our noise, but we are incapable of knowing what subtler effects may be taking place in the experiences and communication of individual animals, or the ways that dealing with noise adds stresses that contribute to population-level effects.  This very uncertainty spurs contradictory reactions among humans, a contradiction that’s at the heart of debates about ocean noise.  Some, invoking the ill-defined yet sensible “precautionary principle,” urge us to refrain from actions that could cause harm unless we can be sure they won’t be damaging; others hold that until harm is clearly shown, there’s no reason to imagine the worst in what we don’t know.

This may be as good a time as any to give a nod toward the challenges that we air-hearing creatures face in trying to understanding the experiences of water-listeners.  Sound behaves vastly differently in water than in air.  Most fundamentally, sound moves much faster in water, because it’s a much denser medium.  Similarly, sound waves carry more energy in water; you can almost picture how in air, sound waves are quite ephemeral, while in denser water they have much more of a physical presence.  This is one reason that decibel measurements in water are higher than in air for a noise of similar intensity (decibels measure acoustic energy, not particular “volumes” of sound—so a sound of roughly similar “volume” will have a higher dB level in water due to the larger amount of acoustic energy carried by the sound waves).  At the same time, though, sea creatures are much more “acoustically linked” to the surrounding water than we are to the air; that is, their bodies’ density closely matches that of water, while we are of course much more dense than air.  This allows them to be sensitive to tiny changes in acoustic pressure; it also may allow even rather powerful sound waves to move through their bodies without impacting them as dramatically as they do ours.  The paradox you may sense here is real; much of this is still guesswork.

So what we’ve got so far is that sound waves carry more energy in water, but the pressure they exert on sea creatures may (or may not) be less dramatic, compared to our experience.

Sound also travels farther in water than in air; again, because the medium is more dense, the sound waves do not dissipate so quickly.  Higher frequency sounds (like fish-finding sonar) dissipate over relatively short ranges, usually within a few tens or hundreds of meters; lower frequency sounds (like airguns, large ships, and some sonars) can travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers; and mid-frequency sounds (including many boats and some sonars) fall between these extremes.  But in all cases, a given sound is heard over a much larger area in the water than it would be in air.

The sea is a fairly loud place, even in its pristine state.  Snapping shrimp create a steady racket that sounds like sizzling bacon, seaquakes send out pulses of noise louder than any human sound, whales sing at levels at times approaching that of naval sonars and airguns, and storm-tossed waves and rain can also raise ambient noise levels to high levels.  If this is the case, then the occasional addition of some human noise, be it shipping or seismic surveys, should be something that sea life can readily adapt to.  As noted above, this may well be the case in a general way.  Whales show a tendency to do their singing at times when the natural ambience is relatively quiet, and so they can likely incorporate periods of human noise into their patterns of communication (assuming we don’t fill the day and night with sound, an assumption that is questionable in places).  Fish, too, with their incredibly sensitive lateral lines, may well be able to tease out the information they need from all sorts of random noise, including human noise.  How much of a difference can a slight increase in ambient noise from, say, distant shipping or airguns, really make?

As it turns out, quite a bit.  Chris Clark, the Cornell bioacoustician mentioned earlier, has created a little graphic plot that shows the call of a whale, which begins as an 180db cry (in the near-surface ocean, not the deep sound channel).  The graph shows how the sound level decreases with distance; as with loud human noise, the decrease is very rapid at first, dropping toward 100dB within a few kilometers, then it levels off, so that the sound stays above 80db for a very long distance.  What Clark adds next is the interesting part.  He imposes a horizontal line at 90dB, which “drowns” the lower part of the whale call’s curve.  This, he says, is the background ambient noise, fairly typical of a continental shelf area.  With 90dB of background ambient noise, the whale’s call can be heard for 35-40 miles.  If a ship passes by, even rather distantly, and increases the ambience to 92dB, the whale’s communication range drops to closer to 30 miles.  A somewhat closer passage of a ship, raising the ambience to 98db, drowns out the whale’s call beyond about 15 or so miles.  There are many human noises that begin loud enough (supertankers at 150-180dB, sonars and airguns at 230dB) to be heard at 95-100dB many tens of miles away (hundreds or thousands if the noise enters the Deep Sound Channel).

Yet again, so what?  So the ambient background level of the ocean has increased, and the ocean creatures can’t hear each other quite so far away.  Is this a problem?  I guess that depends on our perspective.  Some suggest that it may not be a big deal, while others are upset enough to be calling for a cessation of seismic airgun activity and limits on naval sonar use.  For those who remain relatively sanguine about the effects of our noise, a central theme is that we’ve been making these noises for decades and that things seem to be OK, while those who question our noise are more apt to point at the clear evidence that ocean creatures try to avoid these noise sources when they can.  Both have a point.  In some ways, the two views can’t really be debated or reconciled; they are looking at the situation from entirely different points of view, from vantage points that are not in opposition so much as looking at the world through different frames.  The resolution is not likely to come by hashing out the facts, or the feelings, but by expanding the picture to include both perspectives.  Perhaps this could be encouraged by stepping outside the human frame, bringing scientists and animal lovers together to cultivate some understanding and empathy of the experiences of ocean beings.

It’s not easy being an ocean fish these days, but for newly spawned damselfish, it’s all they know.  For the first few months of its life, the young fish has traveled away from its home reef, staying tucked away in nooks and avoiding the congregations that attract predators.  Now, it’s time to return to its place of birth and join in the flashy abundance that attracts snorkelers to reefs worldwide.  How does it know where to go?  Our fish friend and its ancestors have kept scientists guessing about this for decades, and the jury is still out.  One recent idea, backed up by studies that play recordings of reef ambient sound to fish fry, is that they recognize the acoustic signature of their own localized home habitat, and find their home by listening for it, perhaps in the course of otherwise random swimming patterns (that is, swimming in various directions randomly, until they get close enough to hear the distinctive sounds of their spawning reef).  The ability of our young damselfish to hear its home reef may well rest on hearing its unique sound at its faintest—and as with the fin whale, human noise could reduce the range at which the reef sounds rise above the background noise.  Some biologists think that a fish is unlikely to hear its reef from much over a kilometer, so any reduction would greatly diminish its chances of knowing when it was near home (it would have to stumble so close to the reef in order to hear it that it isles likely to find it).

Of course, once the grown damselfish makes it home, it’s not all peaches and cream (or, plant bits and fish scales).  Habitat loss (as reefs succumb to warmer waters), food shortages (caused by prey also losing habitat), toxins from terrestrial run-off and distribution of ocean-borne pollutants, all make the prospects for our fish friend dicey.  And now, for the first time, biologists have confirmed that ship noise doubles the stress levels of fish.  This new study looked at freshwater river fish, but if the results are replicated with other species, moderate levels of ocean noise will become a much more important issue, at least to biologists, thanks to the newts and the city folk. 

A remarkable story of frog tadpoles stands as a stark warning signal about the unexpected effects of an otherwise modest stressor.  In two related studies, tadpoles of green frogs were exposed for 16 days to the common pesticide carbaryl at a concentration only 1/3 as great as is commonly found in nature suffered 10% mortality. But when only the smell of a newt, predators of these tadpoles, was added, tadpole mortality increased to 80%, meaning that the introduction of the predator’s smell somehow increased the lethality of carbaryl eight fold. This synergistic effect was even more pronounced with bullfrog tadpoles. Here, carbaryl alone caused only 2% mortality (indistinguishable from carbaryl-free controls) yet the same low carbaryl concentration when combined with just the smell of predatory newts caused 92% mortality, a 46-fold amplification of the effect of the pesticide.

It is especially fascinating that the introduction of simply the smell of the predator, which in itself could not cause any direct health effect (besides perhaps stress), can so dramatically increase the detrimental effects of an otherwise modest pollutant.  An obvious analogue in the sea is noise as a non-lethal stressor (with shipping being the most prevalent source, though extended exposure to other sources such as airgun noise should also be considered).  Can noise-induced stress synergistically increase the detrimental effects of known pathogens such as infections, pollutants, or parasites?

It is interesting that right whale populations are increasing rapidly in the southern hemisphere where contaminant concentrations and ships traffic noise are lower than both are in the Northern Hemisphere (where right whale populations are currently diminishing rapidly). The assumed differences in concentration of pollutants and shipping noise in the two hemispheres fits well with the theory that the different fates of northern and southern right whales may be due in part, to synergistic impacts of shipping noise and pollutants.

And to those who point to observations suggesting that fish (or whales or turtles or…) are likely to habituate to noise, so that they exhibit little or no behavioral response to noise that—when first encountered—triggered an avoidance reaction, a human experiment is a cautionary tale.  Human subjects asked to sleep while exposed to urban street and night noise showed increase in stress hormones, difficulty falling into restful sleep, and reported high levels of disruption and annoyance.  Within a week, they slept well and said the noise no longer bothered them.  However, the stress hormone levels remained unchanged at their elevated levels. 

This “fish tale” is admittedly built of compound extrapolations and suppositions based on studies unrelated to the ocean fish populations exposed to increasing levels of noise from shipping, recreational boating, and seismic surveys.  Yet the possible implications are not farfetched, and deserve more attention and study.  In an ecosystem already stressed to the breaking point, we can’t afford to ignore the role of synergistic effects—and if noise is playing anywhere near as dramatic a role as smell in the tadpole studies, ocean noise could leap from being an “incidental” low-level concern to become a major issue.   Not that we would –or could—stop all our noise, but the role of Marine Protected Areas might be expanded to include the creation of noise-free zones, or at least seasonal regulation of noise, aimed to match times that are especially biologically significant, such as spawning or mating.  Though I suppose our young damselfish might not so easily identify times when its activity is more or less “significant.”

We need to remember that the effects of our actions tend to ripple and interact in ways that we cannot predict, or often even fully recognize.  This is surely the case with making extreme noise in the sea.  After all, we know that the ocean is a highly stressed system; all additional stresses, even ones like modest ambient noise increases that may be fairly negligible on their own, are likely having cumulative and synergistic effects.  The fact that “we’ve been doing it” doesn’t mean that it’s harmless, or a good idea. The first step, the one we are now just in the midst of, is to become more conscious of what we are doing.  As we acknowledge that we are affecting other life forms, we can begin to make decisions about our actions with more self-awareness—and, perhaps more importantly, more awareness of the experiences of others.

This change is, frustratingly to many, a gradual one.  It’s a process that’s been underway for the past fifty years in our society.   As we have become more aware of the effects of our actions, we have begun to make choices with more consciousness (we stop adding DDT to the soil, work to capture pollutants before they leave our smokestacks, adapt forestry practices to protect streams).   It’s often the environmental activists who take the lead, most adamantly asserting the need to change our actions, to open our eyes and ears to what’s been ignored, to honor the needs of other life on the planet.  And, over and over, they are treated with disdain or condescension by the powers that be—they’re often considered to be acting on “emotion”, as if this was a childish reversion rather than a reflection of a mature humanity.  And, often enough to matter, those who are crying out from this deep caring place alienate potential allies by repeating exaggerated claims, oversimplifying complex science in ways that distort the story, or distrusting the process of scientific analysis so deeply that they come off as just as dogmatic and closed-minded as they claim the “powers that be” are.

Yes, science can be dispassionate, blind to the larger consequences of the tiny details being explored in any particular study.  And yes, the quest for “proof” of causal links within extremely complex natural systems is exceedingly slow and often destined to be a futile chase down ever more fascinating rabbit holes.  Yet most scientists are driven by a deep curiosity about how life works, with biologists being especially sensitive to the negative effects of disrupting natural systems.  While some in the science community may be caught in their webs of reason, many are very attuned to the same caring, moral core that drives the “defenders of wildlife.”  We, and they, need to talk to each other, and this is happening more in recent years.

This conversation, between the rational inquiry of science and the urge for balance and communion that has always been at the heart of human existence, is the conversation that’s driving the long-term maturation of our society. It’s been clear for generations that the power of science’s understanding needs the tempering influence of the caring heart in order to steer us clear of tragic self-destruction. Luckily, there are many scientists who are working on this tempering. We need to listen to scientists who are speaking from their hearts, and the rest of us also need to better understand the ways that science moves forward with care and rigor.  Indeed, throughout the development of the rational, mechanical worldview that began in the 16^th century, and perhaps peaked in its influence during the current generation, there have been voices—artists, writers, countless rural communities, the occasional leader or scientist—reminding us of simpler and more profound truths.  Indeed, many scientists, often older ones reflecting on a bigger picture than they had seen while in the rush of youth, have joined this chorus.

A central quest of our time is the challenge and opportunity of empowering our heritage of communion with the rest of life with a sharper understanding of its workings, or, as it looks from the other side of the coin, guiding our rational knowledge with the sense of direction made possible by the light of caring.  warning: headed for shoals churning with empassioned outrage and stubborn hope… Even as the momentum and inertia of the industrialization of the planet keeps pushing us toward an abyss that when acknowledged can quickly swell to mythically overwhelming proportions—the fiery pits of Mordor have nothing on us—our society is emerging from its time of being blinded by the light of reason, by fascination with inquiry for its own sake, without consideration for the effects of our actions; we’re remembering, in the nick of time, that our mental gifts are but one piece of what it is to be human.  Moreover, we humans are part of a diverse web of life here on this planet, no more central to the grand story than earth is central to the solar system, or the Milky Way is central to the unfolding of the universe’s dance in space.

Remembering this, we are humbled, and so can embrace—and once again be embraced by—the richness of life around us.  As we continue inexorably down this road (the road charted by Wordsworth, Whitman, Thoreau, and Muir, and more recently by Gary Snyder, Susan Griffin, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, E.O. Wilson, and countless other individuals and communities of friends, thinkers, and actors), we are finding science enlivened by the contributions of researchers with passionate concern for the state of the wild, and our social and political debates are taking on more of an ethical tone.  We can see this happening, most famously in the explicit role of moral questions in American political rhetoric, but also in the gradual expansion of the kinds of environmental protection that are part of the conversation, a change in the texture of conservation practice, from roots in banning specific poisons and legislating to stop species from going extinct, to modern notions of managing for ecosystem health, with more emphasis on the grey areas where humans and the natural world overlap. 

There remains a desire to design our regulatory standards, and our calls for further environmental protections, on a framework built of solid scientific evidence, be it population levels dropping to biologically tenuous levels, or sound levels causing identifiable physical damage.  But there’s a serious catch in this: as we learn more about the interconnections of the natural world, our science is unlikely to be able to tease out the sorts of solid evidence we’ve had about simpler considerations of impacts on a single species (or single individual).  It’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to know what effect decreased communication ranges have on whale populations, when these populations are also being affected by ship strikes, collapsing food chains, changes in ocean temperatures, and a host of other factors.  Neither will we ever have definitive measures of temporary hearing loss in great whales, though this is part of the “concrete” standard being used by regulators today.  Does this mean that there is no reason to consider changing our ways of using sound in the sea?  Or that caring about the effects of our sound is somehow irrational or misguided?

I think not, for there are other foundations to stand upon in creating public policy than those built of scientific certainty.  There is no evidence that tells us that the threat of capital punishment does or does not decrease violent crime, yet societies the world over have made their choices on the issue based on a sense of what is right or wrong, morally: for some, it’s “right” that a murderer should pay the same price he meted out, while for others, it’s simply “wrong” to kill a human, no matter what he or she did.   Closer to the issue at hand, the “temporary” moratorium on commercial whaling, imposed in the 1980’s in the face of declining stock levels among most whale species, has not yet been lifted.  Why?  The whale stocks which Japan and Norway (both countries that have long social traditions of living off the sea, including eating whale meat) want to hunt are quite healthy, and though both sides couch their positions in claims about the science behind this conclusion being either solid or shaky, the reasons for making the decision about resuming whaling has really shifted to a moral foundation.  To Norway and Japan, it’s simply not right for the rest of the world to impose its values on their cultural heritage, and to most of the rest of the world, killing whales for meat has come to be seen as almost akin to cannibalism, and “just wrong.” 

This may indeed seem to be a slippery slope; after all, many who might like to invoke a moral high ground for taking better care of the wild are dismayed at the religious right imposing its morals about abortion or sexual orientation on the rest of the country.  Perhaps this is why we continue to rely on science, as an attempt to step outside family squabbles about right and wrong.  What we need to realize is that science has been used, in many cases, as a front for the real issues at play, whether they involve corporate economic considerations or moral stands against rending the fabric of life.  It’s time to unmask this charade, and to allow the underlying ethical debates to be conducted openly and freely. Not to throw science away, but to use it in ways that it is fit for (it can give us some pretty good clues about life’s workings, even if not as certain as some would like or claim it to be).   My guess, based on what public opinion surveys seem to suggest, is that were we to craft environmental policy based on ethical foundations, we’d find a genuine mandate in this country for limiting destructive activities and providing a stronger safety net for the needs of the planet’s diverse ecosystems, including the sea.

So while lawyers, lobbyists, and agency personnel continue their Sisyphean task of looking for scientific clarity (the latest notion from NOAA is to divide marine mammals into five categories, based on the sorts of sounds they use, then divide human noise into four categories, and create a grid with specific noise criteria for each animal and noise class, based largely on extrapolating data from limited studies on a few animals and noise sources; a case of logic run amok, it appears), I want to encourage humans of good heart who don’t have the kind of patience that’s needed for that sort of jousting, to let their concern show in whatever ways is natural for them.  Don’t be cowed into thinking that “merely” caring about the day-to-day well-being of ocean life is somehow unimportant.  It is time to speak from our hearts about the choices being made by our fellow humans, and the ways that their choices carry assumptions that we don’t agree with.  Assumptions about the relative importance of human needs and the needs of other species, assumptions about the use of violent technologies in service of ends (like pumping every last drop of oil) that should have been discarded decades ago, assumptions about who is “qualified” to speak about these issues.  Those making the decisions show no signs of waking up to the consequences of their actions, even though the consequences grow more obvious by the year; small acknowledgements of harm and minor tweaks of business as usual is not going to cut it.  It’s getting more and more “appropriate” to cry out from a place that is far deeper, and more universal, than the place driving today’s decision-makers.  It’s time to move beyond the realistic, the practical, the economical, and into a more foundational place of right and wrong.  Everyone is entitled to speak freely on this basic question.

Meanwhile, some of us will continue trying to bring common sense and caring into the regulatory arena by speaking in the constrained language used by those writing regulations, and others will continue calling on the courts to assure that the letter of law is being adhered to.  Scientists who are genuinely alarmed at what they’re hearing in the sea and reading in the literature will write papers, speak at conferences, and build friendships with laymen at work in other arenas.  The larger questions we’ve been avoiding will assert themselves into our stubborn/numbed/plodding cultural habits.  Caring humans will ask why it takes so long, and animals living in the sea will continue to endure, adapt, and live their lives as they have for millennia.  There’s no quick fix, but there are surely choices to be made.  How will we live here in this place? How much consideration do these others deserve from us? Do we care?