Oceanic, Multispecies, Resilient Resistance: Whales, Noise Pollution, and Tiny House Warriors

Abstract

Oceanic, Multispecies, Resilient ResistanceWhales, Noise Pollution, and Tiny House Warriors Leesa K. Fawcett (bio) and Morgan Johnson (bio) The Orcas Return In January 2021, northern resident Orcas returned to the Broughton Archipelago of British Columbia after twenty years of absence. This social group, known as the A5 pod, includes members, now pod matriarchs, who had been identified as youngsters decades earlier in the area. On this epic return the group brought a brand-new calf with them, pictured in Figure 1.1 The northern resident Orcas are classified as a species at risk; they live in a watery liminal zone between vulnerability, resilience, resistance, and extinction. Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell write that, compared to land mammals, whales have nowhere to hide (either sonically or visually) in the water except with each other, so sociality, followed by culture, became hugely important.2 They convincingly discuss how this culture allows for intergenerational teachings: arguably, some of the pod members remembered how to return to this Pacific Ocean area, which was once rich with chinook salmon. Indigenous knowledge and western science suggest the whales left because the fish farming industry used deafening acoustic deterrent devices to harass sea lions and seals to scare them away from the caged salmon. These whales are contending with new life, old memories, more salmon, and a quieter ocean space to swim through. Ernest Alfred, a member of the Namgis First Nation, said "the return of the Northern residents is a sign that salmon stocks are rebounding."3 [End Page 111] Alfred has mobilized his own form of resistance to the drastic decline in salmon populations by protesting against the fish farming industry—he and others occupied a fish farm for 284 days.4 Scientist and activist Alexandra Morton, who has protested the fish farming industry for decades, says, "In ecosystem collapse you need to know where to plant your body."5 Three First Nations and the BC government have worked out an agreement to protect wild salmon and recognize Indigenous values and rights by removing seventeen fish farms from the Broughton Archipelago by 2023. Fish farming can be a noisy, polluting business. So far five fish farms have been decommissioned and five more will be decommissioned in 2022.6 The ocean commons will be quieter. We often find ourselves despairing between the vast assemblages of multispecies entanglements and our academic articulations of oceanic past, present, and futures. Throughout this research process we have been guided and inspired by the poetry of award-winning poet and the city of Halifax's eighth poet laureate, Sue Goyette, whose words evoke the smells, textures, sights, and tastes of an ocean world and the looming force of slow violence that has become part of it. As Rob Nixon posits, "[t]he narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen."7 In the context of multispecies knowledges, relentless capitalist takeover of the commons, and assemblages of resilience, Goyette's poem "fifty-five" from her collection Ocean poignantly and recursively maps our way through this paper. The epigraph that begins the following section is the start of her poem, reminding us about what we have forgotten. We weave fragments of Goyette's poem throughout this paper as an imaginative invitation to witness "sights unseen" and thoughts unthought. Resilience as Resistance to Violence Our elders insisted the ocean was still there.That we were born with a seed of it and when we spoke,its waves pressed against our words for a further shore.But we had let ourselves become subdivided and suburban,buckling our talk into seatbelts, mad always for safety.When had our schedules become the new mountains? —Sue Goyette, "fifty-five" from Ocean [End Page 112] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. A5 pod mother (A69, dubbed Midsummer) swims with her new calf (A126). The calf's grandmother and pod matriarch (A43, dubbed Ripple), who would have been a teenager the last time the pod frequented their regular hunting ground in the Broughton Archipelago. In the 1970s the A5 pod, like so many others, suffered attacks and captures as humans began to bring Orcas into aquariums. The...