08/11/2018
I’ve resisted this eulogy. I don’t want to think it through. I want the baby to fall to the bottom of the ocean and for life to go on. I don’t want to sit with the horror of extinction. But, it is day 17 and there is only grief. Bottomless endless grief. And Tahlequah won’t quit until we look, until we REALLY look at what we’ve done to her baby. We’ve dammed the rivers, we’ve poisoned the ocean, we’ve turned their home into a zoo. We’ve run our barges loaded with the imported goods we bought off right through their hunting grounds creating so much noise pollution they can’t hunt and they can’t communicate with each other. Now Canada will run the pipeline into their neck of the Salish Sea. There will be more barges and more oil spills until no life is left. The mansions that sit on the coast of the San Juan Islands will have first-rate views of a dead ocean. There will be no whales, no sharks, no salmon, no starfish, no kelp, no oysters, no life. The are the keepers of this sacred place. They are the people who live underwater. They are smarter than us. By a lot. With brains four times our size. The media wants to make this a story of scientific discovery: Tahlequah’s mourning is proof that animals have complex emotions! Are you fu***ng kidding me? Tahlequah’s mourning is proof that humans have self-serving simple-minded self-destructive brains incapable of the complex emotion required to be truly intelligent beings. Today it is Tahlequah’s baby. Tomorrow it will be your baby. And you don’t want to see it, but it’s all right there. We must look. We must. We are barreling towards a dead ocean and a burned planet. I know you feel helpless to change it. We all do, but we must. We must act now. We are running out of time.
Please call Jay Inslee’s office 360-902-4111 and tell him to breach the dams. The studies have been done. The road to salmon recovery can be swift. He is considering immediate breaching, our calls are working, do it for her.
