Crises force humans to evacuate our comfort zones, leave status behind, and gather together on the ground.
These days, my fears swim close to the surface. Today’s climate and health crises turn my stress that is otherwise manageable into looming storms. Clouds rumble and churn colors deeper shades of gray, drag out my fears, and suck me into the center of a disaster that I am powerless to solve.
My posture curls, nerves send cold shocks up my spine, and the urge to cry crumples my voice. Eco-anxiety in a pandemic seems too challenging, but I refuse to accept this as my story.
A storm is a force that crashes waves and conducts lightning. This is gravitation and electricity that connects us all. I want to use the current and learn to ride with my breath and limbs intact.
Oatmail
If you are new to Oatmail, welcome to the newsletter that shares wisdom from nature’s masters and models. Through these words, I hope you will develop coping mechanisms to be well in today’s world. By integrating the world’s successes into your internal life, you may cultivate the foundation upon which to create a sustainable future for all.
Today’s lesson: resilience. I share what I have learned from gray whales who connect to each other and their environment to achieve feats as magnitudinous as their massive 90,000 pounds and 49 feet—the weight and length of fully-loaded semi-trucks.
Resilience from the Arctic Ocean
Gray whales hail from the Arctic Ocean and migrate south during winter months. Raw elements characterize the gray whale’s home in the Arctic waters, and they hold this territory as the successors to 30 million years of ancestry and as the title-bearers of mammals with the longest migration distance.
The Arctic is the world’s smallest ocean and plummets to -22° F / -30° C in the wintertime (although this number is trending upwards with global warming). Insulating blubber up to 10 inches thick provides gray whales with the resilience to withstand these temperatures.
Building Up Armor
While humans don’t have blubber, our psychological equivalent could be the “baggage” or trauma that influences our identity-forming narratives. Our “weight” may exist in the appearance of things that weigh us down and are perceived and hidden as points of shame. Rarely are these elements acknowledged for their service in gaining resilience to endure hardship.
It is a testament to our pursuit of purity and love that we seek out what soothes us in environments devoid of comfort. Rather than give in to coldness, the choice to gather what is good and kind communicates who we want to be. Ironically, softness compounds into a makeshift armor that guards us so that we can survive amidst harsh elements.
Blubber is fibrous and fatty connective tissue and oil-filled cells allowing gray whales to live. Blubber is designed into a whale’s anatomy. Analogously, It is only natural and emblematic of evolution to draw weight to ourselves.
Coping Mechanisms Versus Community
Self-protective armors distance us from our external threats, but coping mechanisms can only buy us time. For long-term resilience, individuals require community support in addition to personal defenses and to learn to balance the two.
Gray whales are superb models of community functionality, and by learning from them we too may develop internal resilience through externally connecting to place and others.
Place as Community
The difference between desiring resilience and possessing resilience came to me through an appreciation of my own environment and how it enables me to progress. We humans tend to interpret our surroundings in absolutes and binaries, and these snap judgments sometimes hold us back from appreciating the complex dimensionality that we navigate. By relinquishing judgment, we free ourselves to observe opportunities that would otherwise be obscured by pain and discomfort.
Here, again, I look to nature for its wisdom. For instance, the Arctic is stereotypically characterized as “barren,” “challenging,” and “deadly,” but these identifiers ignore the unparalleled beauty that this delicate ecosystem manifests. Few creatures can live in the extreme cold and dark, but the few that acclimate to these conditions such as phytoplankton and algae sustain entire organisms and ecosystems including 17 species of whales, fish, birds, seals, walruses, and more.
Removing bias is not always easy. The willingness to have an open mind and override implicit biases is an act in transcendence to touch into truth and creativity that few achieve and maintain.
One woman who grew up in the Arctic’s “harsh climate” is now a globally-renowned spokesperson for her home’s beauty. Sheila Watt-Cloutier stretches public perception of the Arctic and defends Inuit rights. The Inuits, native to the Arctic, are losing their physical homes and cultural identities to global warming. The Inuits’ lived experiences can serve as guides and indications of how we are affected by and address climate change. In recognition of her work, Watt-Cloutier has been given numerous awards, positions, honorary doctorates, and even a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2007. About her work, she says,
“I do nothing more than remind the world that the Arctic is not a barren land devoid of life but a rich and majestic land that has supported our resilient culture for millennia. Even though small in number and living far from the corridors of power, it appears that the wisdom of the land strikes a universal chord on a planet where many are searching for sustainability.”
You can read Watt-Cloutier’s memoir, The Right to be Cold.
Others as Community
Gray whales’ primary food stock diminishes during the later months of the year due to changes in sunlight, and this environmental cue initiates their migration to warmer Hawaii and Baja California waters. Warmer waters also mean livable conditions for their young, who are born without the blubber necessary to survive the Arctic. Posterity, the continuation of life, leads them elsewhere.
The journey poses several threats to the species: the whales eat very little for the 12,000 miles because food is no longer in dependable locations, they travel through foreign and predatory waters, and their coastal route takes them dangerously close to human activity. Over the past 5 years, an estimated 205 gray whales were killed by ship strikes because their migration takes them through places with high maritime traffic.
As treacherous as the journey may be, whales must migrate if they want to survive as a species. Their odds of survival are greatly increased by their cooperative behavior. Whales migrate together in a “pod,” and their large numbers ward off threats. Although group behavior does not inherently indicate an emotional connection, the whales’ socialization indicates a strong bond. This connection is especially evident with mothers rearing their young.
Females close out their 12-13 month gestation period with a marathon swim so that they can be the first to arrive in the tropical waters and prepare to give birth. Upon arrival, the mothers wait months for their babies to build up enough blubber and strength to make the journey home. Moms even gained the nickname of “devil fish” for gray whales because of how “aggressively” they protected their young when harpooners nearly eviscerated the species 150 years ago.
Gray whales’ entire lives are cooperative, both intraspecies and with other organisms. Even on an individual level, the gray whales’ blubber is leased out to smaller, more vulnerable species that depend on them for survival. Lice and barnacles take up real estate on the whales’ blubber, giving the whales their gray color and name. Humans cannot acknowledge this animal without noting the interplay between organisms that is integral to the whale’s existence.
The World’s Dire Need for Interdependent Action
Interdependence has carried gray whales through their 30 million year legacy and returned them from the brink of extinction twice over the past 150 years, but even the indomitable gray whales need our support this time. Since 2019, nearly 500 gray whales have washed up inexplicably dead on North American shores. Although the final verdict as to why this genocide is occurring is out, scientists theorize dwindling food supplies, polluted waters, viral or bacterial infections, and collisions with fishing ships.
If you think that the gray whales will rebound as they’ve done in the past, consider their current situation through this analogy: If the gray whale species were a plant, it has survived because whale hunters would trim the plant, but it could replace the loss. Now humans are burning the bulb—the whales’ Arctic home—and the roots—the ocean that the whales migrate throughout. The gray whales will not survive this loss, and neither will we.
The time for action is overdue. We’ve lost time, lives, habitats, and species. We can’t afford to lose more.
I fear that humans may be too complex to ever live in such seamless connectivity as gray whales do. My home country of the United States holds individualism above our inherent connectivity and systemically overlooks our responsibility to the biodiversity that has enabled our survival. We manifest diseases of greed, egocentrism, divisive politics, hypercapitalism, and apathy often to pay our bills and feed our families.
Our Interdependent Identities
It was not always this way; our individualistic cultures and economies have been made possible through a collaborative past. Climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis tells us in the anthology All We Can Save that
“It’s our ability to cooperate that anthropologists say has allowed humans to survive even the harshest environmental conditions and to fend off predators that could take us out individually.”
Interdependence is coded into our genetics. We have strayed so far from our roots that we face self-(and total)destruction. We are a highly adaptable species and have the choice, with each rising of the sun and moon, to return.
Rather than wilt under the pressure, I can lean into the current of my city. I can listen to its people and help when there is a need. When I do not believe in my own power, I can relinquish my ego and support those more vulnerable than myself. When I feel cut off from my community in quarantine, technology enables me to share my voice with the members of my “pod” wherever they may be. The people that I share interdependence with might be my family, my partner, my friends, neighbors, peers who are involved in grassroots organizations, and members of my local legislature... even though we may not be able to safely gather face to face.
The Expanding Power of the Pod
Progress born of interdependence grows: Minnesota representative candidate Kate Knuth writes,
“My education today comes from witnessing and working alongside people who are trying to re-weave democracy from the ground up and secure a safer climate through their work—from the local to the global.”
Change that begins in a local community carries over to the national community and the global community. It’s the opposite of Ronald Reagan’s “Trickle-Down Economics,” and this principle actually works. We can see evidence of this “Expanding Power of the Pod Effect” in every ripple and in every act of kindness born from paying it forward.
It’s our choice whether we want to continue to live or not. Our—because as we’ve seen with the pandemic, it takes cooperation to ensure collective survival.
Join in the solution. Trust not in ego, but in intersectional action that will gradually heal our collective organism.
While we cultivate long-term resilience, we need immediate solutions in the meantime. Here is our human homework: Comment about how the task made you feel or write in with other opportunities for impact.
Human Homework
Pick the subheaders that speak to you in this article about the Blue New Deal, then contact the White House to tell Biden to push agenda on a Blue New Deal that features those components: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Extra Credit if you send a similar message to your senator or representative. These contacts really do make a difference!
Save the Whales and broadcast from your bumper by buying a Whale Tail license plate.
Sign this petition to ask UK’s Environmental Secretary George Eustice to create and enforce “no-catch” marine reserves in at least 30% of UK waters (This is a petition created by Ali Tabrizi, the creator of the ~somewhat controversial~ Seaspiracy documentary)
Share the LA Times article about the mass genocide of gray whales to spread awareness
Be conservative about your seafood consumption
Learn more about rising sea levels and national fishing regulations in your spare time. A good link to follow up on is the All We Can Save anthology, which you can purchase to read from experts on the frontlines.
Links:
LA Times via Anchorage Daily News; Something is killing the gray whales
LA Times; Gray whales
Oldest.org; 10 Oldest Whale Species in the World
Eagle Wing Tours; Eight things that may surprise you about grey whales
Reference.com; What is the temperature of the Arctic Ocean
NOAA.gov, Whale anatomy
Lit2Go; Moby Dick Chapter 35: The Masthead
OceanElders.org; Sheila-Watt Cloutier
University of Minnesota Press; The Right to be Cold
Oceanus; Life in the Arctic Ocean
Arctic Ocean Diversity; Amphipods
Endangered Species Research; Co-occurence of gray whales and vessel traffic in the North Pacific Ocean
Coffeepot Chronicles, How do whales know where to go
Clipper Vacations; 14 Fascinating Facts about Gray Whales
Grey Whale.com, Gray whale barnacles
Kendra Pierre-Louis
Kate Knuth for Mpls
All We Can Save
Lessons from the Arctic: Resilience
Carolyn Cole, photographer for the LA Times article that inspired this post, suggests "Cut back in carbon footprint, go vegetarian, don’t use plastic, etc. You can volunteer for whale counts if you live on the coasts."