'War of the Whales,' by Joshua Horwitz
Published 3:19 pm, Thursday, July 17, 2014
War of the Whales
A True Story
By Joshua Horwitz
(Simon & Schuster; 426 pages; $28)
The idea that the ocean is too noisy is not intuitive. And yet, as Joshua Horwitz explains in his intriguing new book, an "acoustic smog" is spreading across much of the sea. Shipping, oil drilling and military sonar activities create an underwater cacophony of sound that can baffle and spook marine mammals - including whales, the kings of the sea, which use their own form of sonar to navigate.
Horwitz's focus in "War of the Whales" is the U.S. Navy's use of sonar, which can spot underwater objects by means of sound waves. He begins with a mass stranding of beaked whales in the Bahamas in the spring of 2000. To the amazement of marine biologist Ken Balcomb, who was living in the area, more than a dozen whales washed up on the islands' shores over a two-day period.
Balcomb and his allies tried to push some of the exhausted creatures back into the water, even as eager sharks circled. Some died; when possible, Balcomb severed and froze their heads, then rushed them back to the United States, to preserve forensic evidence. A U.S. naval destroyer, Balcomb noticed without surprise, was in the area at the same time.
Thus began a tortuous search for an explanation. The whales' heads were flown to a lab in Massachusetts. A CT scan would find blood in the ears, indicating, according to the biologist performing the scan, that the "ears were traumatized before the whale hit the beach." The Navy had been performing training exercises in the area using active sonar, which sends out sound signals that scour the ocean for concealed submarines, whose location can be calculated via the signal's echo.
The basic technology, writes Horwitz, was "invented in 1912 in response to the Titanic disaster," as a way to spot icebergs. So ear-splitting is active sonar at low frequency that in 1993, a diver more a few hundred miles away from a sonar event described it as feeling "like being between two catapults on an aircraft carrier." To the whales in the Grand Bahamas canyon, it was likely disorienting in the extreme.
Getting the Navy to acknowledge responsibility for the whales' deaths, and agree to try to reduce problems in the future, became a protracted process. Admirals' priority is national security, not environmental niceties. Horwitz, the co-founder of a firm called Living Planet Books, clearly takes the side of the "whale-huggers." The book's heroes, Balcomb and a California lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council named Joel Reynolds, do not deny the Navy's national security needs; Balcomb in fact had done acoustics work for the Navy during the Vietnam era. But they argue that even the military must respect a 1972 law aimed at protecting marine mammals.
Horwitz's account seems breathless at times, as he squeezes maximum drama from his characters and their motivations (not to mention their turbulent love lives). But he offers excellent capsule descriptions of various scientific specialties, and scientists. Particularly interesting is a profile of Walter Munk, the "Einstein of the oceans," who forecasted waves during World War II and went on to devise stratagems for tracking the Soviets' stealthiest submarines. Munk still lives in Southern California.
The book also goes behind the scenes to look at the conflicts and contradictions in the nation's oversight of the seas. The Navy, Horwitz writes, has essentially controlled the purse strings for many oceanographic scientists, whose work is also used by the federal government's underfunded fisheries regulator.
"The potential for conflicts of interest," he writes, "was ubiquitous." The secrecy the Navy tries to maintain around its activities is also illuminating. For example, the key report from the Navy and the federal fisheries regulator on the Bahamas stranding was published at 5:30 p.m. on the Friday before Christmas - a journalistic dead zone.
Tensions between the Navy and the environmentalists continue. The book winds down with a legal case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, that allowed naval exercises off Southern California to go forward without requiring nearly as many environmental protection measures that the Natural Resources Defense Council and its allies had hoped. It was a painful if unsurprising loss for the environmentalists, but Horwitz maintains that because of lawsuits and public attention, the Navy is under more scrutiny and therefore is compelled to take more heed of environmental concerns.
And so the show goes on. Just last month, environmentalists protested as naval exercises involving more than 20 nations began off Kauai, Hawaii. The Navy says that while some disturbances are likely, it expects no marine mammal deaths to result. Horwitz and his protagonists would likely regard such claims with a skeptical eye.
Kate Galbraith is an energy and environment journalist in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in the Texas Tribune, New York Times and the Economist. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org