From fox food to democratic icon, the gray whale's symbolic metamorphosis merely spans the conversation of human need and desire. The whale, after all, remains but a whale. With all of these competing cultural interests stridently asserting their stakes in the gray, science might well have served as the lingua franca. Such is not the case. Science has frequently been ignored and compromised.
Environmentalists are as careless with the data as bureaucrats and business leaders.
These are the stories we will tell you, the stories overheard, witnessed, and researched on the gray whale, its resurrection, and the threats to its continued survival.