Saving the Song of SEA GIANTS.

• Author: Hardman, Chris
• Position: Whales

Intellectuals and politicians joined together across borders to protect the gray whales that nest in the Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California

Gray whale, once there is no more left of you than an image of the dark shape that moved on the waters in animal paradise, once there is no memory, no legend to log your life and its passage because there is no sea where your death will fit I want to set these few words on your watery grave: "Gray whale, show us the way to another fate." --Homero Aridjis Poetry, a poet once said, is the song of our species. How fitting, then, that one of Mexico's foremost poets, Homero Aridjis, would place his song in defense of another species, whose song has long been endangered. Aridjis's words became a poignant call to action in his country's fiercest environmental battle to date. Bringing together an unprecedented coalition of Mexican, North American, and European environmentalists, the battle would eventually cause a Mexican president and one of the world's most powerful corporations to bend to the will of the public.

On Mexico's Pacific coast, in the state of Baja California, hundreds of gray whales travel thousands of miles to give birth in salty, nutrient-rich lagoons. Each October pregnant females leave their feeding grounds in the Arctic and begin the longest migration of any mammal on earth as they make their way five thousand miles south to Laguna San Ignacio. A few weeks later adults, immature whales, and yearlings will make the same journey. While in Laguna San Ignacio, the whales exhibit a behavior not seen anywhere else on earth. Friendly to humans, they frequently approach boats and allow their barnacle-covered backs to be touched, their bellies scratched--for up to a half an hour at a time. Tourists come from around the world for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see and touch these thirty-ton, forty-six-foot long gentle giants.

Laguna San Ignacio is the last pristine breeding ground of the gray whale. Often called an endangered species success story, the gray whale was nearly hunted to extinction in the 1930s. Once they were protected from commercial harvest by an international treaty in 1946 and the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the population quickly grew to more than twenty thousand today in the eastern Pacific. Unfortunately the western Pacific population is very near extinction, with only four hundred individuals remaining.

In 1995 Aridjis and his wife, Betty, learned that Exportadora de Sal (ESSA)--a company owned jointly by the Mexican government and Mitsubishi--was going to build the world's largest salt plant next to the lagoon. ESSA already had a salt production facility at Guerrero Negro, some ninety miles north of the lagoon, at Laguna Ojo Liebre. As founders of the Group of 100 (Grupo de los Cien), the couple had established themselves as effective environmentalists. With a membership made up of some of Mexico's most distinguished intellectuals and artists--including Carlos Fuentes and the late Octavio Paz--the group has worked on environmental issues concerning pollution...