I am determined. Next winter, Tim and I will travel to Baja California and Laguna San Ignacio to witness for ourselves a ritual almost too impossible to believe: mother whales encouraging their newborns to interact with humans. NRDC preserved the laguna from development as a salt factory in 2000 and since then my colleagues have reported consistently amazing journeys and opportunities to go eye-to-eye with a whale.

In the New York Times magazine today, journalist Charles Siebert authored a lengthy report on the mysteries of whales. He describes his first trip to view the gray whales at Laguna San Ignacio and writes:

The baby gray glided up the boat's edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbilled-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I'd never felt so beheld in my life.

In his article -- What Are the Whales Trying to Tell Us? -- Siebert asks a marine mammal behavioralist named Toni Frohoff if perhaps the whale interaction at the laguna is somehow a symbolic act of forgiveness for human sins against the species. She replies:

There are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possiblity. And even if it's not that exactly, I believe it's something. That there's something very potent occurring here from a behavorial and a biological perspective. I'd put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined.

If indeed the whales are offering us forgiveness, they are a munificent bunch. For while whale hunting is thankfully no longer as common, we continue to torment whales and other ocean creatures with horrific sound in the form of sonar and other human-caused ocean noise.

Siebert credits NRDC with leading a long fight against sonar and notes that one of our legal challenges even made it to the Supreme Court last year. The case, United States Navy v. NRDC, resulted in unfortunate ruling on the facts but Siebert says the "majority's verdict somehow seemed incidental to the greater, tacit victory for environmentalists of having gotten the nation's highest court to even consider the well-being of whales in the context of a debate about national security, something that would have been unthinkable not so very long ago."

Siebert is correct. The movement to protect whales and other ocean critters has come far but much still needs to be done. Please take a moment to watch Lethal Sounds, NRDC's video narrated by Pierce Brosnan on sonar and other human ocean noise, and to take action to further protect the whales.

For while no one knows exactly what the whales are trying to tell us, it is probably safe to say that a vast majority of us hope they are around for a great deal longer to keep trying.