When Despair for the World Grows in Me
Tahlequah, the twenty-seven year old matriarch of the family of southern resident orcas called J pod, has lost another calf. In 2018, Tahlequah lost a female calf just minutes after she was born. Tahlequah then carried her three hundred pound dead baby throughout Puget Sound in a funereal act of grief that lasted an astonishing seventeen days and covered a distance of over a thousand miles.
Point White Pier, Bainbridge Island. The place from which I first saw an orca pod in the wild ten years ago this month. (photo: Alex Mondau)
“Confronting so vast and final a loss as this brings sadness beyond the telling.” –Joanna Macy
A male calf born to her in 2020 lived. While any calf born to the resident pods is celebrated, the births of female calves to the endangered residents are especially celebrated; they represent a hope for increased future numbers of the animals, whose populations have been in decline for decades. There are now just seventy-three orcas in the three families that call this region home.
This past Christmas Eve, Tahlequah gave birth to another female calf. While the region celebrated, marine scientists hedged their enthusiasm at the news of Tahlequah’s newest baby. The calf seemed small, appeared to be having some difficulties swimming, and the mortality rate for orcas is fifty percent in their first year of life. A week after she was born, on New Year’s Eve, this female calf was confirmed dead.
And once again, Tahlequah carried her through the water in an apparent act of grief. She was last spotted on January 10th near San Juan Island, nudging her dead baby through the waves and currents with her nose, pointed toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca with the rest of J pod.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the Wendell Berry poem The Peace of Wild Things. I’ve loved this poem since the moment I first read it, seated in a pew in one of the Catholic churches on Whidbey Island at my husband’s grandfather’s funeral. It had been a favorite of Grandpa Don’s and instantly became a favorite of mine. I recognized in the famous lines my own inclination to seek out the solace of nature in times of difficulty.
But recently that inclination has felt…insufficient.
There is no more “escaping to nature.” Everywhere I go I am reminded of the enormity of the problems faced by the living world. The woodland reserve a short walk from my home is so overgrown with invasive ivy that very little of the natural diversity of woodland plants remains. Ivy covers acres of ground, choking out less tenacious plants, starving them of light and space to grow. It grows high into the treetops and due to its evergreen nature can, I recently learned, create a sail effect that leaves the trees more susceptible to toppling in winter’s heavy winds.
In a beautiful corner of conserved lands near my home, an invasive stand of bamboo slowly spreads through the forest. (photo: Alex Mondau)
In the upper and wildest reaches of the Olympic Mountains, non-native mountain goats are decimating fragile alpine plant colonies and the glaciers are melting at such a pace that topographical maps can’t keep up with their receding parameters.
And in the briny waters of the Salish Sea that stretch between here and there, Tahlequah is mourning the loss of another calf. The Seattle Times has published nine articles about her plight and public grieving in the last two months, naming a decline in the orcas’ preferred diet of Chinook salmon and the added difficulty of hunting a dwindling food supply in the cacophony of noises created by the large shipping vessels that ply the waters of the region. Ironically, these same articles are peppered with flashing ads for the very goods carried in on the complicit vessels.
“It is hard to function in our society without reinforcing the very conditions we decry, and the sense of guilt that ensues makes those conditions–and our outrage over them–harder to face.” –Joanna Macy
Berry writes: I come into the peace of wild things / Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
Perhaps not with the forethought of grief, I think (though truly, who am I to know?), but they certainly are taxed with grief. Tahlequah has made that abundantly clear. The consensus is growing even among scientists, a typically reticent bunch when it comes to assigning human emotions to animals.
Wild places and wild things have ceased to hold the promise of escape from the cares of life. Rather, they have become yet another source of those cares, of grief, of the sense of impending doom.
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I’ve read and reread an essay by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy this week: Working Through Environmental Despair. It’s over twenty years old at this point, an inclusion in the 1995 collection Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. It couldn’t be more timely.
I read it a fourth time today after reading another Seattle Times article that reported on the abrupt decommissioning of the State of Nature Report–a nation-wide, two year labor of dedication and love, led by University of Washington researchers attempting to amalgamate a comprehensive snapshot of US natural systems and resources. A multi-agency SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of sorts, killed by the Trump administration.
The melting foot of a glacier on the flank of Mt. Olympus. The rate of glacial melt in this park is so severe that map makers are having a hard time keeping up (leaving back country travelers exposed to risk that is difficult to assess). (photo: Alex Mondau)
Macy writes about the inclination on our parts to shrink from environmental news. A common response, she says, is the sentiment, “I don’t think about that, because there is nothing I can do about it.” (I am guilty of this. I have said this aloud, probably dozens of times, in the last few years alone.)
But to hold such a sentiment, Macy writes, “is a non-sequitur: it confuses what can be thought with what can be done. When forces are seen as so vast that they cannot be consciously contemplated or seriously discussed, we are doubly victimized; we are impeded in thought as well as action.” She makes a further point that to psychically numb ourselves by shrinking from the pain of the natural world also limits our experiences of joy, “for if we are not going to let ourselves feel pain, we will not feel much else either.”
For Macy, who in this essay names a need for collective “despair work,” once these feelings are brought to the surface they are transmuted, freed from entrapment as individual neuroses, and able to be rechanneled into action. She writes, “To experience pain as we register what is happening to our world is a measure of our evolution as open systems,” that is, as an acting part of a dynamic web of life. From this place, of acknowledging and finding expression for the despair we feel, we are freed, impelled, to action.
Not to get over it, not to move past it, but to move, constructively, through. Like the UW researchers who have vowed to continue their reporting on the State of Nature. Like the regional marine biologists who are finding the tenacity to call Tahlequah’s grief what it is, and are seeing it as a desperate and clear communication, imploring us to do all we can, immediately, to stabilize the population of our region’s most iconic species. Like a friend who is working to bring about an electric revolution in the ways we move through the waters in and around this country, and another who is documenting disappearing dragonflies and butterflies in an attempt to bring our attention to the airborne wonders that once filled our meadows and wetlands.
Before I can “rest in the grace of the world,” I need to face my despair and then find my way to action. That’s where the freedom from fear of what the future holds that Berry writes about is to be found.
