First, a 'soft opening,' then 2 victories at sea

Ummm, so soft and luxurious: cashmere!  Everybody’s wearing it, buying or craving it.  Two-ply, three- ply and no doubt multi-ply too.  In short, cashmere has caught on, big time, most noticeably during winter holidays.    

Cashmere goat

That’s not good.

As one scientist explains, “Demand for Cashmere Is Harming the Environment” – specifically, the cold, arid pastureland of the steppes of China and Mongolia, where herders have historically raised sheep, horses, yaks, camels and other animals.  

But since it takes goats to produce cashmere fabrics from their soft downy undercoat, and cashmere is so in demand, herders increase the number of goats in their livestock.

And that’s not good either.

Unlike other animals, goats “eat plants down to the roots so they cannot regrow, degrading habitat and causing soil erosion.”  That leads to soil damage, and goats that graze on inferior rangeland produce inferior fibers, which find their way into to affordable-but-lesser cashmere sweaters. 

Yak

So the degeneration of pastureland – and cashmere – continues, while efforts to come up w/ sustainable production practices are only beginning.  One suggestion consumers are likely to reject is to forgo cashmere altogether, even though they could opt instead for soft fabrics from sheep, yaks or camels: greater quantity for less ecological damage. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/opinion/holidays-environment-cashmere.html

As with African elephants, “conservation” is a meaningful word today.  Now, move mentally to the US Pacific Northwest, where veterinarians have taken on a massive challenge: helping conserve a population of endangered orcas, aka “killer whales.”

Orca

About 75 in number, these so-called “Southern Residents” have earned scientists’ interest, motivating them to devise new ways to “perform veterinary exams on a wild, multi-ton marine mammal that might surface for only seconds at a time.” 

The scientists have developed methods -- including an experimental “breath-collecting drone” – to capture parts of the “clouds of mist” expelled from the whales’ blowholes!  They’re also moving toward more ways to assess these whales to learn what’s normal for them and to decide when intervention may be called for.  

BTW, the videos with this article are noteworthy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/science/orcas-killer-whales-veterinarians.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20231226&instance_id=111016&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=20760274&segment_id=153562&user_id=a360dad7b26df61ea65737080d3deedd

In the belly of the . . . whale

Giant squid

In Daniel Kraus’s novel, Whalefall, a young man named Jay enters the ocean off California to find his suicidal father’s remains.  Minus a few key elements of his diving gear, he plans to search the sea floor where he knows his father, secretly weighted down, slipped off the small boat a friend was piloting.

Once beyond the coast and near the canyon, he encounters a giant squid, is wrapped in a tentacle and sucked into the mouth of a sperm whale.  (It doesn't matter that he's only "by-catch" in the whale's pursuit of the squid.) 

Sperm whale

With his oxygen running out, his strength ebbing and his injuries mounting, Jay struggles inside the whale's first of four stomachs, adapting the detritus he encounters into escape tools and playing back his father's extensive whale knowledge and respect. 

Even though I know zip about diving and simply skimmed over chapter names and other exotica, Whalefall was compelling reading -- a real adventure story, with fascinating details about sperm whales, especially this one, allied with Jay in his escape efforts.

(Years ago, my husband and I traveled to the canyon off the NJ coast in a friend’s commercial fishing boat – a night-time voyage to a tremendously deep place that I was too naïve, or dopey, to be apprehensive about. 

(While there were no encounters with squid or whales, it was exciting enough: while we napped below in the dark, a large mackerel hook fell from a ceiling mount onto my chest – a big rat in transit, I was sure.  Later, starting at dawn, the crew winched huge lobster traps up onto the long deck. . . .)

A timely resolve

Finally, since it’s that time of year, this line from New Yorker online “humor”: “One whale says to another: “My New Year’s resolution is to lose thirty-eight thousand pounds.”

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