Book review: How the US Navy Is Killing the World's Whales
reviewed by Lindsay Abrams
Author Joshua Horvitz on the epic showdown between
marine life and national security
You never truly win a conservation
battle,” says Joshua Horvitz. The best you can do is “win the right to fight
another day.” That’s certainly true of the 20-year battle between
conservationists and the U.S. Navy, over the military’s use of sonar and the
deadly effect its equipment has on the oceans’ whales.
It was, in fact, just two conservationists: Ken Balcomb, a
whale researcher and himself a Navy veteran, and Joel Reynolds, an
environmental lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who worked to
link Navy training exercises to the mass strandings of whales on nearby
coastlines — and who took the battle all the way to the Supreme Court. The
stakes — the existence of a majestic species versus national security — were
massive, passions were high and each small, incremental victory came only with
great personal sacrifice. It was, in other words, quite the story — one that
took Horvitz nearly seven years to tell.
“War
of the Whales,” his resulting book, depicts not just the epic story of this
ongoing fight, but of the sincere, often under-appreciated dedication required
of those who choose to take on such battles, and the ways in which such
dedication can ultimately pay off. That Balcomb and Reynolds lost their
Supreme Court case does little to undermine the progress they made in
protecting not just whales, but all marine life, Horvitz argues — and makes it
all the more important that the effort continue today. Salon spoke with Horvitz about what he calls “a story of
love and obsession gone bad” on the part of the Navy, and about what Balcomb
and Reynolds’ response can teach us about the other high-stakes battles of our
time. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows:
What drew you into this story?
I’m an author as well as a book packager, and like
anyone else who works in long-form storytelling, I’m always looking for a great
untold story. I stumbled on this really as a headline: “Whales versus Navy,”
about the legal case between the NRDC and the U.S. Navy. It was a long-running
lawsuit, and it read sort of like a divorce headline, and as I dug deeper into
the story I realized it really was in some ways a story of love and obsession
gone bad — the Navy’s own obsession with whales and dolphins went back to the
beginnings of the Cold War... read more:http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/24991-how-the-us-navy-is-killing-the-worlds-whales
