This week’s New York Times Magazine, Sunday July 12, has a cover with a whale tail and the heading, “What are the Whales Trying to Tell us?”
The story inside, on page 26, is headed, “Watching Whales Watching Us." It is by Charles Siebert, who has given us numerous animal friendly New York Times pieces, including previous Sunday Magazine cover stories on elephants and on chimp sanctuaries, and weekday op-eds dealing with various animal cruelty issues. You’ll find a DawnWatch retrospective of sorts of his animal friendly work at http://tinyurl.com/m3qpar
The current article opens with distressing information about whales beaching themselves as a result of navy sonar, even getting the bends as they are "sent into suicidal dashes toward the ocean’s surface to escape the madness-inducing echo chamber that we humans have made of their sound-sensitive habitat." We read of the Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn hard-won environmental laws that heavily restricted the Navy’s use of sonar devices in its training exercises. But Siebert manages to see at least some light:
"Still, the majority’s verdict somehow seemed incidental to the greater, tacit victory for environmentalists of having gotten the nation’s highest court to even consider the well-being of whales in the context of a debate about national security, something that would have been unthinkable not so very long ago."
The rest of the article deals with population and extinction information, and also, largely, and touchingly, with descriptions of interactions between humans and whales in the ocean that have clearly been sought out by the whales. Siebert's description of his own experience is beautiful.
The article is well worth reading. Please at least check it out at http://tinyurl.com/lruabe and forward it to your friends; papers notice the numbers of clicks and forwards a story gets. The popularity of Siebert's animal stories is surely driving their recurrence on the Sunday New York Times Magazine's cover. The response from readers keeps the discussion alive in the magazine in the following weeks, so please send a note to the editor, appreciative of the coverage and also including a line or two about our treatment of whales, the oceans, the earth, her inhabitants, or whatever topic you are moved to address.
The Magazine takes letters at magazine@nytimes.com
Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Remember that shorter letters are more likely to be published. And please be sure not to use any comments or phrases from me or from any other alerts in your letters. Editors are looking for original responses from their readers.
I was recently inspired by another whale story, as covered in the superb new movie "The Cove." People following my blog may have noticed that I have had a slow start blogging, but I will be writing about that film sometime before its release date at the end of this month, so please stay tuned to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com/blog
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)
Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com for a fun celeb-studded promo video and information on Karen Dawn's book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals," which was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of 2008."
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Date: Mon Jul 13 17:47:41 2009
