Even eco-protesters show by their
actions the disconnection between humanity and the rest of the animate world –
which just wants us to leave it alone
Wednesday 18 May
201614.31 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 18 May 201614.33 BST
This spring is proving to be
spectacular when it comes to its quota of sea monsters. As if reports of a sea
serpent in the
Thames and the Loch Ness monster being “found” weren’t
enough, reality bites back with some true-life beasts beyond all expectation.
A bizarre beaked
whale washes up on an Australian beach like a primeval message
from prehistory. A narwhal,
complete with spiralling tusk out of some medieval bestiary, turns up in a
Dutch estuary. And last Sunday a bowhead
whale– an animal that may reach 300 years in age, and which
surpasses all description with its huge, arching mouth filled with plates of
fibrous baleen four metres long – surfaced
off Cornwall, 1,000 miles and an ocean away from its
designated domain.
What’s going on? What summons
these weird deputations from the deep? They appear to be advance warning of
something we already know – acidifying, warming seas, and irrefutable climate
change. But they also bear witness to our mythic relationship with nature. Just
as the middle ages had their
Kraken, and we had the Loch Ness monster last century, so the modern
world seems to be supplying new monsters of its own – by virtue of our
dysfunctional occupation of this watery planet.
The beaked whales, strange
cetaceans defined by teeth that in some species grow over their mouths like a
muzzle, are perhaps the last large unknown animals. There are species of beaked
whales yet to be seen alive, known only from a handful
of carcasses cast upon on remote strands.
Equally, the
narwhal is legendary on account of its ivory tusk – in fact, a
grossly extended and highly sensitised tooth erupting through its upper lip,
and once touted as the true horn of the unicorn. The 16th-century explorer
Martin Frobisher gave one to Elizabeth I, so valuable it could have bought her
a new castle.
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