The scene: a silver-lilac dawn over the Indian Ocean. Everything exquisite, before an innocent (and privileged) 鈥渟wim with wild dolphins鈥� experience. Only it鈥檚 not just your hotel boat, because all the captains have radioed each other and about 40 boats are converging on a homecoming pod of dolphins. See their great silver backs sewing through the shimmering colours, so many of them! All the tourists are shouting in excitement as the boats surround the pod, and then massive splashing as we jump in.
The pod of bottlenose dolphins comes streaming and chirping and buzzing around us all, lifting and bouncing us with their wake. It鈥檚 like being in the middle of an aquatic motorway where, instead of cars, there are powerful beautiful animals, any one of which could kill with a glancing collision. One goes by inches from me, squeaking and buzzing directly into my chest cavity as she looks me in the eye 鈥� and I see her calf tucked in behind her pectoral fin. And at that moment, I understand: This is so wrong.
听***
Advertisement
Back at the hotel, I learned this pod of bottlenose dolphins had arrived one day, after an unreported oil spill up the coast, and driven out the small resident pod of spinner dolphins who had previously lived in this bay. The oil spill was unreported so as not to upset the tourism industry, but it had clearly upset the marine citizens into a forced migration. Two very different tribes鈥�
Definitely not, I said to myself as the spark of the story kindled in my imagination. Far too difficult, you鈥檇 have to understand a whole ecosystem and then鈥� Yes. Face what humans are doing. 聽聽 I鈥檇 had quite enough of that researching my first novel, The Bees, in which a relatively simple plot about a laying worker in a hive whirled me into the all-too-real pollinator crisis that worsens to this day, then forced me to confront the hyper-object that lay behind it: the climate crisis. Which in turn led to my second novel, The Ice, set in the Svalbard Arctic, and included, in my field research, far too much I have not been able to forget, about whaling. A subject I never intended to revisit.
Except that鈥� dolphins are a species of whale. And there are all kinds of other whales in the Indian Ocean, with their ancient migratory pathways. Cut across by shipping. Disturbed by deep-sea seismic exploration, which is possibly even suicidally painful for some species of whales, like pilots. Then there are the Orwellian naval 鈥渨ar games鈥�, perpetrated on ocean life by many militaries.
My research couldn鈥檛 remain focused on cetaceans, because everything is connected. Migration events in one species lead to change in another, as our everyday news reports in the human world. A heating and acidifying ocean throws out the balance of the whole world. A swim-with-the-dolphins experience has now forced me into an existential fight-or-flight decision. Write this book, or run away.
Write it. Because I believe it is the supreme arrogance of our species that we believe we are the only storytelling, or rational, or spiritual, or scientific creatures; that we are the only animals with culture or capable of love, altruism, jealousy, cheating or joke-telling. We cannot go on as flat Earthers who cling to the belief we can use and abuse the natural world and slice it up into pets or livestock, seen and unseen.
The deeper I got into the research of each species, the more awed and the more outraged I became. I learned about the magnificent survival ability, as well as the frequently violent politics, of bottlenose dolphins, and how they are used by various militaries. I learned of the extraordinary aerobatic displays that give the smaller species of Stenella longirostris its common name of spinner dolphins, who are matriarchal, and apparently peaceful. I learned how male humpback whales have literally global singing contests, with a single individual capable of getting the whole world population of humpbacks adopting his song within a year.
There is too much beauty and wonder in our natural world to take its destruction lying down, or fatalistically. Anna Sewell published Black Beauty in 1877 and the Victorian reading public woke up to seeing carriage horses as sentient beings in need of protection. AI and machine learning are bringing the breakthrough in animal language ever closer 鈥� but why must we wait to acknowledge what every child intuitively knows? The natural world cries out to us. If we can only acknowledge that we hear, our hearts will come back to life and we will act in time.
is the latest pick for the 快猫短视频 Book Club. Sign up and read along with us 丑别谤别听
