I am an animal lover. Fiendishly so. Grey whales caught my radar when I was closing on my sixties.
This is a brief recount of how this happened.
I was getting on 17years. My brother Gopi had got hold of an ad that spoke of recruiting apprentices for a dredging course of 3 years with a stipend.
Pops was in his easy chair with a Drink Of Old Monk Rum and listening to Ravel’s Bolero which was loud enough to shudder the district.
Given his rather voluminous condition and egged by Gopi, I broached the subject. His diktat, “about time,” and a hand dismissal.
He was an Agronomist by profession. By way of explanation to my questions, he simply put it it easy- those 6 inches of top soil is my keep. The rest is for nature.
I picked up the speciality of underwater excavation keeping Pop’s advice.
Environtal Damage – Two Hoots | You just shot your foot
At a very young age, I could spot how false claims were being perpetrated. I was engaged in the dredging pool of the Calcutta Port Trust, a thriving port given the hinterland it served.
Someone forgot that a river, a mother river does not take kindly to tutoring.
The silly fools did not understand that taming a river is an imposssibility. You cannot train a river especially the Ganges. That was my early learning, and a passion.
We went up the Misissipi, down the Orinoco and upto a crazy settlement in the Amazon, some distance in from the estuary, called Manaus where they actually have an Opera House. We loaded iron ore there. The plunder goes unchecked. Human right activists are simply chopped up.
Picture Credits: https://www.britannica.com/place/Amazon-River
El Nino and El Nina are meteorological motions.
So bushfires in Sydney and mudslides in Bolivia happen.
It was Vanoord, a European Major in dredging, wind farming and other tech startups that sent me to the sea of Okhotsk, sadly to make a trench for oil.
This area was the last refuge of the Grey Whale.
Do readmy previous piece https://seadog.in/2021/08/20/the-gray-whale/