A self-driving car killed a beloved SF cat. It’s part of a long history of tech companies using the Bay as a testing ground at our expense. People have had enough.
From the North Bay down to Santa Cruz, humpbacks returned in droves to feed on northern anchovies and other small schooling fish, before returning to warmer waters to raise their young. (Cassidy Hersey / Bay Area Current)
At a speed of twenty miles an hour, a humpback whale will launch from the depths of deep ocean waters, breaching the surface only for a brief moment. On piers, beaches, and boats across the Bay Area in summer, spectators watch in awe as the animals hurl themselves out of the water for reasons we still don’t fully understand. It looks to me like they might just be having fun — the way crows and ravens sometimes play with strong air currents, falling and flipping against heavy winds.
Last summer, wherever you went along the coast, even within the Bay itself, you would see the breaching of whales, almost always humpbacks. From the North Bay down to Santa Cruz, humpbacks returned in droves near the shore of our cold waters to feed on northern anchovies and other small schooling fish, before returning to warmer waters to raise their young. They came so close to shore, people assumed, because their prey had moved with a cold upwell of nutrient-rich water that moved along the coastline.
However, for many years, this was a rare sight. Humpback whales, like their cousins across the Atlantic and Pacific, were teetering on extinction. You can blame this one almost entirely on the Industrial Revolution.
Humpback whales, like their cousins across the Atlantic and Pacific, were teetering on extinction. You can blame this one almost entirely on the Industrial Revolution.
Without whale blubber, industrialization would likely not have been possible. Until the discovery of crude oil in the 1850s, whale fats were an important fuel for lamps to light up growing cities, lubricant for the gears in machinery, and fertilizer. As capitalism as we know it took root, the desire for near non-stop labor demanded long-lasting oils to fuel lamps in factories. And so long before the mining of petroleum, whale blubber was the answer. It burned without smoking and became the main source of light. Oil lamps in cities, in factories, in homes, all glowed by the burning of these massive ocean creatures' fatty layers. As cities grew, the demand for more blubber followed. It was the all-in-one oil of its day, before it was traded in for our newest and most damaging vice, petroleum. While the oils changed, many whale species teetered on the edge of collapse in the mid-twentieth century. And whaling, despite the demand for blubber and meat being less, still persisted across much of the world and the California coast.
It wasn’t until the 1970s, when Western European society was coming to the realization that we might not be intellectually or emotionally alone on this planet (go figure), that the first recorded sounds of whale songs were recorded. This moment shocked many with its beauty, making people wonder how intelligent and how rich a whale’s life might actually be. In 1971, with the passing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (which would be signed into law by Richard Nixon the following year), whaling was officially banned in the United States. Once the epicenter of West Coast whaling, San Francisco Bay was closed to the trade. Now over fifty years later, Humpback whales, along with many of their marine mammal cousins, are bouncing back.
Their numbers have increased from a couple thousand off of the California coast to now near 26,000, a small glimmer of hope as we repay debts for the extractive pains Western capitalism has wrought to this place we love.
Cole Hersey is a writer based in Oakland, California. His work focuses on environmental topics and the arts. His work has been featured in Bay Nature, Earth Island Journal, and elsewhere.
