Michael J. Moore is a veterinary scientist who spent his entire career studying and advocating for the North Atlantic Right Whale. This is a critically endangered species, on the brink of extinction, due in large part to commercial fishing and shipping in the waters where they live. We talk about the critical role right whales play in the ocean's biodiversity and why biodiversity is so important to human survival. We explore what it means to have a relationship with the natural world, how we can conceptualize extinction in a way that our brains can grasp, and how he's working with industry to advance fishing technology to reduce whale death and ultimately save our ecosystem.
You can find his book, We Are All Whalers, here.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about life and death.
Today I'm talking with Michael Moore. He is literally a whale scientist. He has a veterinary degree and the PhD. So in addition to being super smart, he's also kind and so real. I love whales. I always have. One of my bucket list items is swimming with whales. But after talking to Michael, I have this renewed sense of urgency.
He spent his adult life studying and advocating for the North Atlantic Right Whale, which is critically endangered. I like to look for wisdom in unexpected places. And it turns out that a whale scientist actually has a lot to say about death.
Welcome to Peaceful Exit, Michael.
[00:00:59] Michael Moore: Well, thank you. It's good to be here.
[00:01:01] Sarah Cavanaugh: I think a lot of listeners might be wondering why I'm talking to a whale scientist about death. Uh, but, but there's quite a bit to talk about.
[00:01:10] Michael Moore: Yeah, I'm afraid there is. Yeah.
[00:01:12] Sarah Cavanaugh: Before we dig into death, I want to ask you about awe, because whales inspire awe for me.
I'd love to know if any of your whale encounters over your long career inspired awe for you.
[00:01:24] Michael Moore: Hmm. Well, as an undergraduate. I had this, um, ridiculous autonomic response whenever I came close to a marine mammal, my heart rate would go up and I couldn't control it. It was really bizarre, but finally I realized about 10 years later that didn't happen anymore.
And that was kind of sad because, you know, they always did inspire or, I mean, they still do, but somehow it had become more of a. A thing to just, that's what I did. Whereas when I was younger, it was, oh my God, I got another chance to have a different experience with a marine mammal of one kind or another.
Um, more recently, um, sunsets and right whales and tails going in the air and a whole bunch of animals having a social time together is an enormous, um, privilege. And most recently, as I've become proficient in using small drones to fly over right whales, looking down vertically, the oar. Of the vertical perspective, looking through the water without so much reflection and seeing a hundred percent of the outline of the body, as opposed to a flipper or a tail or head is truly awesome.
There's nothing quite like it. And I, what I love to do is we usually have two controllers for the drone and one person's flying it, which is often me. But if you have a visitor on the boat, you say, hey, take a look down this, this, this tube here, and you can just hear them sort of relaxing and. And watching, and especially when it's a mother and calf, you know, where they're going along together and the calf's suckling or whatever, it's, um, it's an awesome moment.
And this new technology, can we fly at about 120 feet? So they really, they're not bothered by it at all. And you just get to watch them quietly going about their business.
[00:03:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: That sounds so incredible. Well, I, I, I can feel the salt in the air and yeah, and see the, the whale. And you must be finding out more information too, from that perspective.
[00:03:36] Michael Moore: Well, the sad thing we've learned is that we've been flying over right whales since just 2000, but we didn't do much after 2002 until 2016. So there was a gap, but we established a baseline for the growth rate of right whales. Back then, by revisiting the same individually identifiable animal more than once, and the expectation is that their growth rate and the sort of growth curve is going to be about a meter, a yard shorter than it was when we first started doing this work.
So essentially, the population, the species is runted, and it's because of a number of. Sublethal stresses such as noise, entanglement, drag, and climate change driven migratory pattern changes so they can go where the food is, have to go further north to find good food, and also, you know, sublethal ship strikes as well.
So it's a mess. It's a real mess.
[00:04:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: You give us a long history of whales going back a thousand years. We hunted them almost to extinction. And then to present day where the You know, North Atlantic right whale is critically endangered and it's hard to imagine that we might see the end of the right whale story.
[00:04:56] Michael Moore: Yeah, and in in a matter of decades, it's not even centuries or millennia, it's decades. Essentially the the trajectory in the last 30 years went from 250 animals in the whole species to just shy of 500 by 2010, and it's been dropping since then through 2022. And now, the numbers for this year haven't been published yet, but, you know, they've leveled out.
And so that's quietly encouraging. You know, essentially, the white whales did better than we did in terms of producing calves versus how many we've killed. But, you know. The current pattern doesn't include the fact that we killed five this spring, and five out of three hundred and forty is a very significant number.
[00:05:45] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, an entire species not existing anymore is just like an idea almost too big to grapple with. And what struck me was the statistics about how many whales are entangled, and it's extremely fatal.
[00:06:00] Michael Moore: The numbers are something like this, that 85 percent of the population has been entangled at least once.
Some individuals have been entangled up to 12 times. And I can't give you a direct number of animals that have been killed by entanglement, but it's approximately an average of, you know, 5 or so, 5 to 10 a year. And that is an underestimate by a factor of three, you know, it's a brutal, brutal thing. And it's nobody's intention for this to happen, but it's inevitable, statistically, if we continue to have consumer demand that requires seafood that's caught by traps, there's no reason why we can't.
Mitigate that if we're prepared to pay for it, the technology is there to fish for that rope in the water column. It's It's not the fishermen's fault. They're just responding, you know in a capitalistic way to Profit they can make on the on the demands that come from consumer. So it's all of us in terms of how we value Not only endangered species, but biodiversity.
We need to look at a much broader level at the ecosystem damage that removal of species of any kind brings. And we don't necessarily know the reality of it, but it's, it's not just about endangered species. Obviously, the right whale is an iconic species, just as the lobster is. How, how do we factor all of this in?
Into our management of, of the, uh, the business of being humans. And there's lots, lots, lots, lots of politics involved too in economics.
[00:07:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Yeah. If the North Atlantic right whale goes extinct, uh, it's like another nail in the coffin of the human species, but if the humans go extinct, the whales will come back.
Is there a version where we both? coexist?
[00:07:58] Michael Moore: Absolutely. There's no question about that. And, you know, to take, to take the logic of inclusion, you could say, well, who cares, right? Well, is it gone? But what that's symptomatic of is a diseased ecosystem that is losing biodiversity. And if the white walls are gone, you know, you're going to lose the farmers of the sea into that degree, you know, that.
The whole plankton productivity and the cycling of energy from the bottom to the surface and so on will be impacted and sooner or later it will if we carry on with the overall mismanagement and bad behavior of the species of humans. And how they relate to terrestrial and marine ecosystems. We may not be the last to go, or we could be the last to go, but I don't think so because our food support systems are going to be gone because of that lack of biodiversity.
I mean, one of the things that strikes me around here recently is the total lack of bugs. You know, mosquitoes are no longer an issue for us. They're gone. I mean, it's great. You know, you sit outside on the porch and it's lovely, but it's a fake. False sense of security, those kinds of things are happening.
You know, the lobsters in the Gulf of Maine don't bother to hide anymore because there aren't any codfish to eat them.
[00:09:13] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah.
[00:09:14] Michael Moore: I'm not saying I don't want to eat seafood because we all do. And it's all part of our nutrition, but somehow we've got to factor in the economic value of biodiversity in all of these decisions.
For instance, there was a sort of rogue rider thrown into a defense act in 2022 that banned any kind of. Right whale conservation in the place of the lobster industry till 2028. But if those discussions had included some kind of real value to biodiversity in them, it would have been a different decision, but it didn't because it was driven entirely by Political lobby of the age of the industry, the operators, the investors that depended upon lobsters for their income.
And I respect all of that and I understand it, but as a society, we have to truly value biodiversity and ecological. Balance if we're going to survive as a species,
[00:10:20] Sarah Cavanaugh: So you write about the save the whales movement in the 1970s where people were pulled into the cause because of the recordings of the humpback whale songs and I remember hearing yeah, my first whale song and being completely transported.
[00:10:40] Michael Moore: Well music does that and these humpbacks make music. There's no question.
And you know I think I said it in the book, but when I first got to spend sort of intense time with Humpback Whales was on Silver Bank in North of Dominican Republic and barefoot in a boat at the whales singing close enough, you can feel it through your feet. I mean, Roger Payne, who published those recordings with his wife actually got them at the first stage from a Navy acoustics engineer in Bermuda.
Watlington was his name, Bill, I think, Bill Watlington. And he said, Oh, Roger, you should look at this stuff. And, you know, I said, Roger. And Katie did, did the thing with it and, you know, they, they did, as I quote in the book, it became the soundtrack of the hippie movement, really.
[00:11:34] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. I love this story because it's literally art saving the world.
It's art saving, um, the ocean, the species, we hope. I interviewed Kumi Naidoo and Luisa Zondo from South Africa, and they're in this effort actually to connect their activism to art and culture. Because if we inspire people to change, that's the only, the only way to change hearts and minds. And especially about, for people who may not, encounter whales in their lifetime to bring it to them in the form of art.
It's pretty beautiful.
[00:12:10] Michael Moore: Well, one of the experiences I had in the last year was I helped getting a dead right whale up the beach and, uh, Martha's Vineyard has died over 17 months from an entanglement and it washed ashore with a rope tightly around its tail and the local Wampanoag tribe, native folks showed up and we were able to work with the government and with the tribe such that the tribe offered up land.
To have the necropsy done there and the whale was buried on their land and the baleen and the bone was collected for traditional art purposes. And I imagine that as the material is being prepared and so on that they will be able to, you know, profit culturally and do what they would do a thousand years ago.
And. I sincerely hope that there will be connectivity and, and creativity and emotional learning about the relationships between different cultures and whales and, and all of those things. I
[00:13:21] Sarah Cavanaugh: Love that. You post the question in your book, what does it mean to have a relationship with the natural world? And what does that look like?
You may. You talked about the native communities in Alaska who've hunted bowhead whales for generations.
[00:13:36] Michael Moore: I had the opportunity to go to a, um, whale captains every five year meeting where they meet with stakeholders for the North Slope borough water. And, uh, what really impressed me was the, the defensiveness of the Iñupiat to find a place between the whales and the industries oil and gas that we're wanting in, and they were so defiant and so immovable in their legacy that they had conserved of these animals, and they weren't going to let anybody mess with that. I got off the plane and was met by a whale biologist, Craig George, who had worked for decades as the science liaison with the folks there.
And I said to him, you know, These hunters are the whale's best friend and you look at me and says not many people from the lower states figure that out and I, I guess, um, to really get down into the nitty gritty of animal conservation, you really do have to show mutual respect for all of the players and today.
That relates to the work we're doing to remove rope from the water column. The key players in that work has been the fishermen who were willing to work with us to enable them to get back into areas that have been closed for right whale conservation and they can't put in vertical buoy lines from say, January through May in New England.
And those people, the bonding and the connections that we've established with those guys are all dependent upon their goodwill.
[00:15:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, I very much respect you as a bridge builder because you see both sides.
[00:15:35] Michael Moore: Well, my mother always used to say, well, if you can't figure something out, move physically, change your perspective.
And traveling does that, obviously, but you can even do it by walking on the other side of the house. And you'll recognize that there are other pieces to that.
[00:15:51] Sarah Cavanaugh: I think, uh, on a large scale, stop doing that in our culture.
[00:15:56] Michael Moore: Yeah.
[00:15:56] Sarah Cavanaugh: How has being so close to whale death for a long time shaped your view of death?
[00:16:05] Michael Moore: Well, the first time I was face to face with whale death in depth was the right whale that was pulled up the beach in the east side of Cape Cod Bay, maybe 98, 97, something like that. And it took us three days to finish the job because it's a big animal, but also we didn't really know what we were doing.
And on the fourth day, there was one person left on the beach with a large tractor trailer truck and a big excavator and front end loader. So my job was to load the truck. And so we made a bunch of trips back and forth and I just ride in the front bucket. With the bones from the beach to the parking lot, which isn't maybe a quarter of a mile ride, so I did that about 20 times and each time we deposited another bucket load of bones into the trailer, it was a sort of incremental addition to the depression, you know, I was Helping bury one of the remaining few of this species that had the risk of going extinct and so by definition I was doing something that potentially wasn't going to happen again after a few more decades and That was the most intensive piece that I ever felt in that context because it was the first time it had really Got to me as to what that was thereafter Um, I became increasingly inured to that kind of emotion because I had to, otherwise it really wasn't going to be survivable.
But periodically the shield would break and I'd come back into that zone again. And there was one case in particular and I, we had a badly entangled right whale that we tried to disentangle and the animal was disentangled, but it died of its entanglement wounds two weeks later. And in the process. We had used three different needles to give different kinds of drugs to the animal and one of the needles I'd shot it and I'd placed it too far back So there was too much movement of the tail going up and down and the needle had got a bend in it So the needle was still there two weeks later and obviously it had caused a lot of pain to the animal I looked at it and said, well, good job Michael.
That was really dumb. And that was hard It was really hard and you know, I wanted it documented As dispassionately and as accurately as possible. So later, I'm going to write up this whole case and we are two papers about it because I want everybody to know what happened and why and so on. Eventually, I did publish it about a year later.
[00:18:50] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. What you're describing is turning your grief into action by writing that article.
[00:18:55] Michael Moore: Right, right, right.
[00:18:56] Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm curious. I love language and there's a important word choice here because you talk about whale necropsies versus human autopsies is having a separate word for what is essentially the same thing, a way of othering whales or making humans superior, making animals less than?
[00:19:18] Michael Moore: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, and that. With that comes the whole debate about anthropomorphism and we all treat our dogs and cats like we would expect to be treated as humans. There's no fundamental difference between a dog or a cat or a whale. They're all sentient and they're smart as hell.
They just can't talk English.
[00:19:40] Sarah Cavanaugh: I noticed at the end of your book, you write from two different whales’ perspectives and you wanted to start each chapter that way, but the editors kind of pushed back on that.
[00:19:51] Michael Moore: I think it was a harder pushback from the reviewers and the editor, although the editor, I think, saw an easy path in that regard.
And I respect that, you know, having rampant anthropomorphism throughout the whole book was going to be hard to sell to his managers.
[00:20:06] Sarah Cavanaugh: So why do you think people push against anthropomorphism? Is it, are we crazy to think that whales have feelings that we might be able to understand?
[00:20:18] Michael Moore: I don't think we're crazy at all.
I think we're jealous of our own uniqueness. As a species, and so that's why we push back against anthropomorphism. The scientists are not supposed to have any kind of emotions there, but that's changed a lot. And one of the best boosts I got post publishing that book was a number of letters from senior retired colleagues at my institution.
Giving me a huge thumbs up and they were the generation that one would expect to get the thumbs down in terms of the answer for more of it, but they had retired and reflected. And I think probably I was at the sort of break point if you like, um, of attitude in that regard. And that I think was an indication to me that maybe I've done something worthwhile and that I should carry on in that direction.
Despite some of the norms, my sense is that animals that have been damaged by trauma deserve anthropomorphism.
[00:21:32] Sarah Cavanaugh: We need to feel into what they're feeling.
[00:21:34] Michael Moore: Yeah, well, what they're feeling should be graded in the context of what we would feel in the same situation, because we did it. They deserve that.
[00:21:47] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah.
Well said. Well, I'm kind of switching gears here a little bit. Growing up in England, you had a lot of unsupervised time as a teenager on a boat and on the water. I loved how you wrote about coming home just for a meal and a shower every now and then. I grew up in a similar way. My mother had a triangle and she'd ring the triangle when it was dinnertime and call in all the kids.
[00:22:11] Michael Moore: Yeah. So, my mother basically put ten pounds in my pocket and went. Got on the train and off I went, and you know, I was 15 and my brother was Studying in London and he'd meet me at Waterloo and take me to Liverpool Street and put me on the train and my sister would meet me up in Norfolk and she'd drive me out of the boat and we'd stop by the grocery store on the way and I remember it was, you needed three pence coins to put into the coin box to call so the deal was that I put three pence in the call box and called my sister who was living about 10 miles away.
Yeah, I'm still alive. See you later.
[00:22:47] Sarah Cavanaugh: Proof of life.
[00:22:48] Michael Moore: And then she'd call my mother because it was more expensive to do that.
[00:22:53] Sarah Cavanaugh: How do you think that shaped your relationship with the natural world?
[00:22:58] Michael Moore: Um, well, I certainly find peace in nature where I don't find anywhere else. That's for sure. You know, today, there's nothing better than going for a walk on the beach with the dogs. That's where I can create words.
[00:23:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: In your book when you talk about your work, your connection to the natural world comes through.
It's so present. And so does your pragmatism, which you say you got from your mom. I can just imagine how hard it must have been to lose her when you were barely 20 years old.
[00:23:31] Michael Moore: Certainly with my mother. I was in denial that she'd even died for two years, you know, but at the same time she'd she's shown me how to die.
Um, no question about that. She she had a humor about things. So, um, it's it's hard to to laugh even now and you know the first time she she came back to the hospital having been opened up and all I can do for you to shut her up again and so she was in bed at home and People would show up with flowers and after about two or three weeks, she looked at me and says, you know, Michael, I think they might think I'm going to live a bit longer because they stopped sending cut flowers and now the flowers in part
And she giggled and you know, and also, you know, her ability to look out rather than in, um, well, how's my sister doing? What's your dad thinking about all this? And is your brother okay? And you know, it was just, it was an incredible privilege to observe and learn from her how to die gracefully. Okay.
[00:24:42] Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, we talk a lot about the idea of legacy and peaceful exit, and we're trying to expand that definition beyond career title money.
It also can be an emotional legacy what you leave behind in the hearts of the people who love you. Um, and you wrote so beautifully about your mom's legacy of love and how she cared for your dad who had bipolar disorder. Um, as you said, you were young when she died. How old was she when she died?
[00:25:11] Michael Moore: 56.
[00:25:12] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, my mom was 67.
Too young.
[00:25:16] Michael Moore: Yeah.
[00:25:16] Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you still talk to your mom?
[00:25:18] Michael Moore: Oh yeah. Recently I've talked to her a lot because I've been going through some medical stuff that threw up a couple of walls that I think have actually been knocked over nicely, but she reminded me what I had learned from her.
[00:25:33] Sarah Cavanaugh: Would you share one of those things?
[00:25:35] Michael Moore: It is absolutely peaceful, graceful, respectful, and patient. Two weeks ago, I could have had lung cancer, until proven otherwise, which I don't. And during that diagnostic process, I was also diagnosed as having a mass over my large intestine. And so that, that was an interesting, interesting passage. And most of what I've had in the last week or so has been very good news, but, you know, having put that, um, flag over the parapet has brought all of us into a new place and how to populate that place in a way that's respectful, loving, patient, and fun.
And, you know, there's not much point in making it any other way if you possibly can. And that's certainly what my mother did. But, you know. I mean, reality is if you think you're dying, which no, I wasn't, and I'm not, um, you tend to behave differently because, you know, you're wandering around looking at the trees saying, well, that's nice, looking at the paint in the kitchen saying, well, someone's going to paint this, it probably won't be me, and those kinds of things, sometimes the dress rehearsals and sometimes the for real, you know, it's somehow the more, I guess, natural or, um, pragmatic.
I guess pragmatic is a good word. Yeah. That's what my mom was a practicist, if nothing else. She taught me that.
[00:27:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, I'm so happy to hear this was a dress rehearsal.
[00:27:16] Michael Moore: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, I, I'm still chasing down another diagnosis, which, uh, is being elusive. But I've, I've had incredible support from the various medical teams.
[00:27:29] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Do you think having such a passion for the right whale, for the, the solutions to Reducing harm. Does that make it harder for you to leave?
[00:27:44] Michael Moore: Um, no, it's actually more of a relief because, you know, the, um, the struggle for somebody else is to, to do that. And, you know, all of us have been deeply involved in this world.
Exhausted and tired, you know, and a little tired and, you know, um, when I retired June 1st, I went emeritus and the, the beauty of that is that I'm no longer feeding the soft money meter, you know, finding funds to pay myself and the administrators. I can now find funds to the extent I feel like it and do what I want to do.
And so that pressure valve has been released very substantially and I'm really, really enjoying that. I went to work yesterday. I guess it's not play. I don't know. But, uh, I went to play. I sort of had fun. I met a bunch of colleagues and ran into a student that had interviewed me a while back. And she wanted to talk about next steps.
The last thing I want to do is paint the house or weed the garden for the rest of my life.
[00:28:52] Sarah Cavanaugh: What does a peaceful exit mean to you?
[00:28:55] Michael Moore: Um, it means grace, and it means leaving the people behind in as peaceful a place as they can be.
[00:29:04] Sarah Cavanaugh: You studied premature whale death, um, but what is a peaceful exit for a whale?
[00:29:11] Michael Moore: Well, we don't know much about growing old as a whale, um, because we don't let them do that anymore. One whale that we tagged and it was entangled so we could track it, um, it did thousands of miles before it finally died. In deep water and down it went. So, you know, that one was a gravitational one and it was on the, on the sea floor and would have become part of the ecosystem through being decomposed upon and scavenged.
[00:29:38] Sarah Cavanaugh: Is that what they call, is that, is that what they call whale fall?
[00:29:41] Michael Moore: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:42] Sarah Cavanaugh: Could you describe what a whale fall is?
[00:29:44] Michael Moore: Yeah, sure. Uh, I'm not a whale fall expert, but, uh, basically if a whale dies and it is negatively buoyant, it'll sink. And it's negatively buoyant if it doesn't have enough fat in it to make it float.
So in that case, if they sink in deep enough, cold enough water, they may never float back up again. And so then you get a whole body of a whale that can then get, um, colonized by bacteria and larger animals, crustaceans, crabs, and worms, and all kinds of other things that basically disassemble it until you get to the point where there's just bones and there are special kinds of worms that are in those bones.
And so it creates a nutrient rich oasis in another way, it's a corporate deep sea bottom.
[00:30:39] Sarah Cavanaugh: Wow. What a wonderful metaphor for finding meaning or purpose in death.
It has been such a pleasure to talk to you. I, um, I have lots to chew on and, um, really exceptional work you've done in your lifetime. I have a great deal of respect for you. So thank you so much.
[00:31:04] Michael Moore: Well, thanks for the invitation. Appreciate it.
[00:31:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can find me on Instagram at @APeacefulExit. And you can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit.net. Our senior producer and editor is Katy Klein. Our sound engineer is Jeff Gall. Additional support from Cindy Gal and Ciara Austin.
Original music provided by Ricardo Russell. with additional music and sounds from Blue Dot Sessions. If you'd like to support our show, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does make a difference. And as always, thank you so much for listening.