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Matthew Halliday, author of “The Hard Sell of Whale Sanctuaries,” explains how a missed opportunity during the pandemic led to an even richer story.
Early last year, I was planning one of those journeys that make the precarity of the writer’s life worth it: a trip to a remote Icelandic island, where I was to go behind the scenes to witness the opening of the world’s first open-water sanctuary for whales retired from show-biz captivity.
It would be the culmination of years of effort for the project’s proponents, and it came with an irresistible narrative hook: the magnificent bay where the belugas would live was the same one that Keiko, Free Willy’s famous killer whale, had stayed in nearly 20 years ago, during an attempt to reintroduce him to the wild.
Then came COVID-19, and the trip was kiboshed. The sanctuary opened, but I wasn’t there. Fortunately, it turned out that I didn’t need to go to Iceland at all.
Just up the coast from my home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in a small community called Port Hilford, another cetacean sanctuary—one of a growing number cropping up globally in recent years—had been announced. The Whale Sanctuary Project was spearheaded by a who’s who of the world’s marine-mammal cognoscenti, and was animated by a deep sense of ethical urgency.
But sanctuaries, as I learned, are no simple solution. They’re ambitious, expensive, and technically challenging. They’re dogged by doubters. And if they’re to make a difference for more than a handful of the thousands of animals in captivity today, the concept will need to scale dramatically. That means every proposal will need to confront the same daunting challenge: convincing human coastal dwellers that they can live happily alongside cetacean neighbors.
On Nova Scotia’s eastern shore, the Whale Sanctuary Project encountered both excitement and resentment, open arms and threats of violent reprisal. I never got to Iceland, but in my own backyard I found what may be an even richer story about the complexity of coastal politics, the mysteries of cetacean intelligence, and the tension between big ambitions and practical reality. |
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