Becoming Related
“Relatedness, or becoming related, can mean something more substantial
than being related by blood. ”
Here they are again, the stranded whales. In the photos, they still look like whales, the biggest of all fish out of water, helpless on the sand where they don't belong. My mind files each image under, Oh, no! Another stranded whale! and it joins the already-too-many in my aching, overwhelmed heart. So many dead whales simply cannot fit.
But the photo of the stranded whale the other day, that was different. It changed something. The whale corpse bore no resemblance to an actual whale. It was vacant, an enormous black and white duffel bag collapsed on the sand, a deflated pile of empty skin. And now, even though it's dead, it lives on as the iconic image that represents all whales who should not have died as they did. Where else can it go?
Some whales die because of military sonar. Some are entangled in fishing lines. Some whales die with bellies full of plastic. Increasingly, whales are being hit by container ships that refuge to slow down or navigate around migration routes: that would cost time and eat into profits. We prefer to eat mangoes in January more than we care about the suffering of whales.
An inverse proportionality kicks in: as the file gets bigger, the despair is spread thinner. My heartache is diluted by the overwhelming number of strandings because they jostle for attention with all the other unbearable news. Human concern about whales, diluted or otherwise, is meaningless so long as we continue to buy what comes to us in container ships, or to consume cheap fish regardless of how many whales or turtles or dolphins must drown.
We have allowed ourselves to be convinced that each intolerable thing is a separate event. Eventually, the sheer number of them makes abdication inevitable. We will continue to be overwhelmed until we recognize that it's all a single calamity. Each school shooting, each rape, each extinction - each nonoparticle of indigestible plastic, is contained in the body of each murdered whale just as each murdered whale is contained in all that is sacrificed at the altar of power and profit.
Western industrial culture requires us to devour the living world that includes us because our culture depends on disconnection. That's how we have come to accept the unacceptable. We justify our failures as isolated events because it serves us to do so: it's our lifeline that is now our deathline. The dying will end and the flourishing resume when we understand that survival of the fittest is survival of the related-est.
Up here, where I live, we have dead whales, too. A few months ago, a dead humpback appeared in a local cove. It was fall but not whale fall, which is what they call it when whales die naturally, sink slowly to the ocean floor, and gradually fall to pieces, feeding multitudes for a very long time. In a normal whale fall, the body drifts to depths of more than 5000 feet. Because deep water is so cold, the body remains intact for a long time - long enough for each corpse to develop its own localized ecosystem that eventually helps it come alive again, because whale bodies feed plankton and plankton feeds whales.
Whales that die naturally tend to die along migration routes. Carcasses have been observed on the ocean floor at intervals between five and twelve kilometers apart. Their proximity allows new and colonizing species to move laterally from one body to the next: the corpses of whales are undersea steppingstones along an evolutionary path. Scavengers feed during the day, predators feed at night, so they don't compete or conflict. The unity of the Natural World persists in its disintegration. There's plenty of whale for all.
Scientists wanted to study the whale who died here, so the Coast Guard decided to tow the carcass to shore. My friend saw it. That afternoon, he had gone surfing with friends. As they sat on their boards in the water, they saw the Coast Guard boat coming toward them, pulling its disintegrating prize. As they got closer, the surfers saw a clutch of great white sharks leaping into the air, tearing basketball-sized pieces from the shrinking whale. That's how close they were. The surfers paddled like hell towards shore - the Coast Guard hadn't thought to warn them. Then again, no one warns the whales, either.
Underwater, the gap between whales and container ships is narrow. In our minds it is wide. But the gap that matters is the one between the container ship and us: it's the gap that contains our complicity, the abyss where we hoard the accumulation of things that keep this economy alive thanks to the killing of whales. Like the plastic we cannot and ought not absorb, we keep the truth at whale's length from our hearts.
If whales feel our sympathy, it's a splash of cold water in a warming sea. They cannot feel it in the way the whales felt the cup of fresh water ritually offered to the ones that were hunted in the Chukchi Sea, when people still remembered that whales get thirsty when they die. Ritual gifts offered sincerely create enduring connection. Courtesy extended across realms is reciprocated.
Maybe that's where becoming related can help us. Becoming related isn't an object. It's not a destination. It's neither a process nor a journey, though it shares certain qualities with both. Becoming related is a state of being. Like non-violence, becoming related is an identity. When an identity feeds both humans and whales, it feeds Life.
