Where Compassion and Conservation Meet

It has been a year since a humpback whale calf named Tango was struck and killed by a boat near Juneau. I stopped by a small island to look at the beached carcass three weeks ago. The skin had turned orange-brown, sagging beneath a rib cage gradually collapsing onto the beach.

Tango’s death troubled Heidi Pearson, a whale researcher at the nearby University of Alaska Southeast. I recently wrote a story for Sierra Magazine about the conflict between being a top notch scientist and an empathetic observer. The story explores how to square the objectivity required to be a respected marine biologist with the compassion that close observation of large mammals demands?

You can enjoy the story here.