We Are the Walrus
The Falling, Flailing Sea Creatures Are a Heart-Rending Sign of What’s to Come
See how they fly / I’m crying
Walruses are not mountain goats. They have no business climbing high seaside cliffs, because as difficult as the climb up is, the climb down is impossible. Walruses have poor distance vision when on land, and once elevated to that great height, they can no longer see the path they took, or any path down. What they hear is the sea, calling to them. They hear other walruses, on an impossibly crowded beach far below, returning to the waves. They hear the calm, deep serenity of those waves. And so, knowing nothing more than that, the walruses shudder, heave themselves forward — and then they drop. All that ungainly, sea-intended weight, sliding, slipping, falling, smashing, bouncing, flying and then smashing again.
They are not meant to be there. To die that way. And it’s our fault that they are.
I am he as you are he as you are me / And we are all together
Netflix’s Our Planet series is not like other nature series, not even with the calm, measured voice of David Attenborough narrating as he has done so many times before. In its second episode, the ending — with walruses falling to their brutal deaths — traumatized viewers who were not prepared for a seemingly gentle nature show to bludgeon them with such horrific footage. (The graphic video is here, but please be aware it cannot be unseen.) But of course the producers’ reason for this, for essentially ambushing their viewers, was plain: the walruses are a portent, a sign of great falls yet to come. Learn the lesson now or tumble over the edge yourself some day.
Walruses would ordinarily rest on sea ice while foraging for shellfish in the summer. But with the ice either thinner or altogether gone, they were forced onto narrow strips of land that could not contain their vast numbers. (It’s called a haulout.) Spontaneous stampedes caused injuries and deaths, and some desperate walruses found places where they could climb higher and get out of the mad crush. But again, getting down is a very different thing than climbing up.
See how they run / Like pigs from a gun
Similarly, some predictions indicate that on the African continent, at least eleven nations will face serious threats to food security because of changing climate conditions. As masses of people turn into food refugees, areas that still have farmable land will be overrun, overwhelmed. The U.S. military has issued numerous documents acknowledging, and attempting to prepare for, the serious disruptions that such climate upheavals will bring.
Disappearing islands and atolls. Severe drought. Coastal erosion. As land suitable for human use shrinks, we will get crowded into increasingly-smaller habitable areas. Some will desperately scale heights that they should not scale, and a great fall will result.
Expert, texpert choking smokers / Don’t you think the joker laughs at you
Some have called into question the walrus story, chiefly Susan J. Crockford, a Canadian zoologist. She maintains that Netflix has conflated scenes from two separate incidents (one about the enormity of a particular walrus haulout, another about falling walruses being scared over a cliff-edge by polar bears) in order to create “tragedy porn,” and calls the entire sequence “contrived nonsense.” But in her own blog post about the Netflix documentary, Prof. Crockford quotes extensively from a Gizmodo article about polar bears driving walruses over a cliff edge in Siberia — an article that directly attributes the incident to climate change. The very first sentence reads “Climate change is having all sorts of bizarre and terrifying consequences in Siberia.”
Ultimately, Prof. Crockford’s complaint is a distinction without a difference. Whether walruses are confused and falling, or are scared into falling, climate change is still a major contributing factor. The increase in size of recent walrus haulouts is well documented; also well documented is polar bears’ own difficulties in finding prey due to diminishing sea ice. It would come as no surprise that these two trends would come into conflict.
It is also worth noting that Prof. Crockford has frequently been affiliated with The Heartland Institute, a deep-pocketed climate-change denial organization. She was even a signatory to their infamous “Manhattan Declaration” in 2008 that called global warming “highly beneficial.”
At worst, the producers of Our Planet are guilty of having elided some facts in order to create a more emotionally compelling presentation (also known in the media world as “editing”); but the facts they elided are themselves attributable to climate havoc, so the ultimate point is not affected. If two roads lead to the same place, does it matter which road is taken? But this is what the denialists do: they pounce upon minor issues to attempt to discredit the larger point. To them, two roads never can lead to the same place, and it’s a crime even to try. By planting a small seed of doubt, they are trying to make you unsee something you’ve already seen.
Goo goo ga joob
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Prof. Crockford’s complaint has merit. The story of the walruses, then, might sound more like this:
Walruses are not mountain goats. They have no business climbing high seaside cliffs, because as difficult as the climb up is, the climb down is impossible. [All the more impossible when several ravenous polar bears, themselves waiting for the delayed sea ice to form, have also come up the path, and now stand between the walruses and their only non-lethal escape. As the bears charge,] the walruses shudder, heave themselves forward — and then drop. All that ungainly, sea-intended weight, sliding, slipping, falling, smashing, bouncing, flying and then smashing again. They are not meant to be there. To die that way. And it’s our fault that they are.
I’m crying
NEXT: Global Warming: a Soliloquy
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