“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
As our power-mad president tapped out that genocidal threat, a whale shark in the Persian Gulf was navigating waters it has known for millennia. It is the largest fish alive — the size of a school bus, spotted like a galaxy, moving with a gentleness that is hard to reconcile with its scale. If a diver comes too close, it curves its huge body to avoid them. Its wide-grin mouth is fangless. It feeds on plankton, with no capacity for threat, and yet its lineage survived the dinosaurs.
It may not survive us.
The ceasefire announced this week between the United States and Iran is scheduled to last two weeks — the duration of a single pay period, or the bloom of a rose. The timeline of the creatures that swim the Gulf waters is measured in millennia. Sixty million years in the case of the endangered whale shark. Fifty million in the case of the dugong.
I’d never heard of a whale shark or a dugong until I looked up the Gulf’s most precious species. Like large, bristled manatees, the dugongs have more in common with elephants than any whale. The Persian Gulf holds the world’s second-largest population of them. In the fragile waters now crammed with oil tankers brimming with billions of liters of oil and war waste from 40 days of reckless destruction, the dugongs graze on seagrass in the shallows. Indeed, biologists report that they eat in such deliberate, complex patterns that they prevent monocultures from forming and maintain nursery habitat for dozens of other species.
The mother dugong nurses her young, not for two weeks — but for two whole years. She is almost certainly the origin of the mermaid myth. Sailors glimpsed a large, warm-bodied creature nursing its young at the surface — and carried that image home through every maritime culture on Earth.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, who appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends earlier this year, might call what the dugong does reciprocity — the kind of tending that extractive capitalists have spent centuries refusing to see or value. In her book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, and in our conversation, she teaches us that the natural world is in constant reciprocal exchange. Care is not a human invention. The dugong and the seagrass meadow have been in that exchange for longer than our species has had language to describe it.
Civilizations come in many forms. A city, like a reputation, can be rebuilt; a warmonger defeated or unseated (please!) But a species — a multi million-year evolutionary experiment, a creature that has been tending its ocean since before our genus existed — cannot be negotiated back into existence.Thinking about all that we — certainly I — do not know about the whale shark and the dugong, I remember my conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs about her book “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals”. In that conversation (which podcast subscribers receive in full) Gumbs asks us to look at marine mammals not as curiosities but as teachers; beings whose ways of breathing, moving, and tending their young carry a wisdom we have barely begun to hear. She writes:
I don’t know what that will look like, but I do know that our marine mammal kindred are amazing at not drowning. So I call on them as teachers, mentors, guides, and I call on you as breathing kindred souls, may we evolve.
I have learned very little about the whale shark and the dugong. Dugongs communicate in chirps, whistles, and trills that scientists don’t fully understand. Biologists are bewildered by whale shark reproduction. No whale shark has ever been observed giving birth in the wild. They are, in a real sense, still mysterious to us. Extinction would end that mystery permanently.
Now, at least four oil spills have been confirmed in the Gulf since hostilities began. Our necrophile president bragged about torpedoing the Iranian frigate Dena early in the war. The Dena sank close to the coast of Sri Lanka, sending an 20 km oil slick towards that ecologically-important coastline. That same hot-headed killer and his Beirut-bombing pal launched multiple missile strikes at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, where a direct hit could have released radioactivity across the entire region.
The same dance with death is playing out in “our” Gulf, too. The Persian Gulf is a body of water that is semi-enclosed, shallow, with almost no natural flushing mechanism — meaning that what goes in, stays. The looney logic that concentrated the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure in these ecologically fragile waters is being replicated along coastal Louisiana, where liquefied natural gas export terminals are being built into wetlands already vulnerable to storm surge.
We reported on those risks last summer when we looked at LNG expansion on the same coast that, twenty years ago, was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. By disrupting Gulf-based LNG supplies, the US/Israeli escapade is accelerating madcap LNG production on US shores.
There’s no truce – however shaky – in our war on the climate or the rising tides.
April is Earth Month. All month, on our podcast and our radio broadcasts, we will be airing our best Earth-related episodes.
A whale shark can live for 100 to 150 years. Their species has been around for 60,000 millennia. The dugong tends her meadow (and her young) and communicates in a language we haven’t learned yet. The ceasefire is two weeks long. The least we can do — the very least — is notice what is at stake in those waters beyond the oil price.
