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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.
Before I make the long trek to visit Hermann Meuter at his research station on a lonely stretch of British Columbia’s north coast, he tries to lower my expectations of seeing a fin whale. Perched at the southern tip of Gil Island, he’s observed thousands of whales from his lab in Whale Channel, but visitors have been skunked before. As we motor into Whale Channel on a bright May day, Meuter changes his tune. He’s feeling confident, almost positive in fact, that we’ll see a whale. While he was collecting me at the ferry, his wife called to tell him she had spotted fin whales from shore. Meuter has an inkling that the whales are still here, still circling, perhaps right beneath the boat.
Dressed in his usual boating attire of a bright-red survival suit and tall rain boots, Meuter doesn’t have to wait long before a puff rises from the water, as though the ocean has spritzed perfume into the air. A few hundred meters away, three black backs slice the surface, and Meuter quietly shifts the boat into gear. He motors up to the pod—his research permit allows him within 50 meters—and cuts the engine. For a few exhilarating moments, time slows as the whales and boat glide next to one another. Two adults and a calf surface two, three, four times, and on the fourth exhale they crest just a little higher, their sleek backs catching the morning sun before disappearing below.
Meuter snaps photos of the encounter, all of which will be added to a growing catalog of fin whales he’s photographed over the past two decades. After they disappear, Meuter barely has time to lower his camera before another whoosh of whale breath breaks the silence. “Ha, ha!” he yells triumphantly, spinning to see two more fin whales surface on the other side of his boat. “I love it!”
In repose, Meuter has the poker face of a stoic German. At about two meters tall with a graying goatee, the 57-year-old cuts an imposing figure. But it’s an impression that he instantly dispels with his self-deprecating sense of humor and raw unabashed love for whales. Like now, when the sight of a fin whale has him practically dancing across the boat deck.
For over 20 years, Meuter has documented humpbacks, killer whales, and fin whales from Cetacea Lab—the research station he built with his former partner, Janie Wray. From the island, it’s an hour by boat to Hartley Bay, a Gitga’at First Nation community of about 130 people. From there, it’s a four-hour ferry ride to the port city of Prince Rupert, just south of the Alaska-BC border. Meuter and Wray chose to set up shop here because the waters are deep, quiet, and perfect for whales.
If it is possible for a whale to be subtle, the fin whale is subtle. All the things that people love about whales—the haunting calls of humpbacks, the showy acrobatics of killer whales—fin whales don’t do. Their calls are too low for the human ear to hear. They rarely leap or frolic. “They’re a different world of whale,” says Meuter. When fin whales surface, they release a soft exhale through a blowhole that barely breaks the surface. The largest stretch to 27 meters long, about the length of two pickleball courts. And yet, their appearance above water is so understated for the second-largest animal on Earth that they are sometimes mistaken for minkes, a whale about one-third the size.
Fin whales swim through every major ocean, but we know little about where they go or where they breed. Generally, they prefer colder climes over warmer ones and areas rich in krill, their main food source. Giants that they are, fin whales are more suited to life in the open ocean, which is what makes their affinity for this northeast Pacific fjord so special.
The Kitimat fjord system is a long, winding network of channels, islands, and inlets that stretch 140 kilometers from the open Pacific to the industry town of Kitimat at the end of Douglas Channel. Not only is this the only known fjord system in the world where fin whales regularly visit, it’s where commercial whalers once hunted them mercilessly. After the last BC whaling station shut down in 1967, no one spotted a fin whale here for nearly 40 years.
In 2006, Meuter and Wray became the first people to document the fin whale’s return to the fjord. It was a moment both extraordinary and terrifying because it coincided with the planning for one of the most controversial resource projects in Canadian history: Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipelines, whose westbound pipeline would carry up to 525,000 barrels of diluted bitumen every day from Bruderheim, Alberta, to Kitimat, British Columbia. Tankers would load up with dilbit in Kitimat and sail back through the tight maze of the fjord before sailing to Asia.
Meuter, Wray, and the Cetacea Lab team poured years into halting Northern Gateway, along with a coalition of First Nations, environmentalists, communities, and unions. In 2016, newly elected Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau pronounced the project dead at last. But the decade-long fight against Northern Gateway had so exhausted its opponents that another proposal around the same time—to ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) out of Kitimat—slipped through without much protest.
As the climate, human health, and environmental impacts of so-called transitional fuels like LNG have become clearer over the past decade, public support has waned for British Columbia’s development plans—albeit a little too late. In 2025, LNG Canada will start operations at its newly built export terminal in Kitimat. This will require a massive tanker about 300 meters long and carrying up to 68 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of methane through the fjord system every day. Two more LNG projects are planned in Kitimat—a pipeline owned by Enbridge and a floating export facility by the Haisla Nation, whose village sits on the banks of the fjord. If both move ahead, these new developments will bring about 350 tankers transiting in and out of the fjord every year on their way to Asian markets.
LNG development has already buoyed economic prospects for the Haisla Nation and the town of Kitimat, but the trade off in whale lives will be severe. A 2023 study from the North Coast Cetacean Society, which incorporated sightings from both Cetacea Lab and Fin Island Research Station, which Wray opened in 2017 after she and Meuter parted ways, estimated that increasing tanker traffic will kill more than two fin whales and 18 humpbacks each year due to ship strikes. “These unsustainable losses will likely deplete both species in the coastal region of BC,” the authors wrote.
Meanwhile, the federal and provincial governments are sending mixed messages on whether to protect or sacrifice whale habitats. The vacuum of leadership on the issue has forced Meuter, Wray, and their long-standing network of volunteers and researchers into a disheartening but necessary role. After decades spent documenting the return of fin whales, they may very well witness the animals’ gruesome end by fatal ship strike.
Known as the greyhounds of the sea, fin whales are one of the fastest whales on Earth, reaching up to 40 kilometers per hour when escaping killer whales, their only predator besides humans. In the early days of commercial whaling, they used their exceptional speed to escape whalers. But after steam-powered ships took off in the 1860s and then factory ships in the 1920s—which processed blubber at sea and lengthened the hunting season—fin whales didn’t stand a chance. They quickly became the most hunted whale of all time, with nearly one million slaughtered throughout the 20th century, reducing their global population by 70 percent.
In British Columbia, six whaling stations operated on and off between 1905 and 1967, killing nearly 25,000 whales, most of them Pacific fin whales. In the Kitimat fjord system alone, around 100 were killed and processed into oil and animal feed at Coal Harbour on northern Vancouver Island. During one particularly brutal summer in 1964, 24 fin whales were killed in the fjord. The Gitga’at First Nation witnessed the slaughter up close. Cameron Hill, a Gitga’at councilor, remembers his father’s stories about the butchering in Whale Channel where Cetacea Lab is based today. “He watched these huge whaling ships, with these big whales beside them, all bloated, and then they would carve them up,” says Hill. “The whole cove was red and he witnessed that for days.”
In 1967, the last whaling station in British Columbia closed under pressure from new regulations, and plummeting numbers of whales and prices for blubber. For the next four decades, no one recorded a fin whale near the Kitimat fjord system, including the Gitga’at First Nation, who fished and traveled the waters regularly, or the BC Cetacean Sightings Network that has collected whale sightings since the mid-1970s.
The same year the BC whaling industry ended, a boy who would devote his life to the whales of the Kitimat fjord was born in a West German village near Düsseldorf. As a child, Meuter was first drawn to whales when he came across a picture of a sperm whale next to a human in a natural history book. There was something magical about people sharing the planet with such enormous animals, and the image was forever seared in his mind.
In his mid-20s, that childlike awe carried him to the West Coast where he worked for years at OrcaLab on the Inside Passage of northern Vancouver Island. There, he learned everything he knows about whales and running a research station from the marine biologist Paul Spong and Spong’s wife, Helena Symonds. Meuter never completed any formal education in marine biology, nor did he feel any need to after watching Symonds at OrcaLab. “Her knowledge of whales was just incredible,” he remembers. “She didn’t have a [marine biology] degree, and I was just amazed by that.”
Inspired by OrcaLab, Meuter and Wray decided to strike out on their own by cofounding a long-term research station farther up the coast. Their original mission was to study killer whales in a largely undocumented setting. Surrounded by deep channels, the southern tip of Gil Island looked perfect. Meuter and Wray approached the former Gitga’at chief Johnny Clifton for permission to operate in the nation’s traditional territory. It took less than 15 minutes to get Clifton on side, remembers Meuter: “I think he was thinking that there’s value for his people to know more about the whales in his territory.”
The early days of Cetacea Lab were rough. Meuter and Wray were essentially camping on an uninhabited island during that first year. Before they built a sheltered viewing platform, the pair would sit on an exposed bluff with a great view of the water but buffeted by wind and rain, watching for whales. There was no internet, no cell service, no buildings, no outhouse.
“It was all very low-key because funding was hardly there for us,” says Meuter. They lived cheaply, catching their own food and calling on friends to help construct the first building. But the hardship was worth it. They saw killer whales, but also North Pacific humpbacks, whose population was bouncing back after the ravages of whaling, swimming right in front of Cetacea Lab. Over time, they installed a hydrophone and piped the underwater world to speakers hung around the camp, even tacking them to trees outside. A never-ending background track of burbling water filled the air. When a whale call floated over the speakers, Wray and Meuter would stop whatever they were doing—chopping wood or filleting a gigantic halibut—and rush to the viewing platform to record the sighting.
Then, in 2006, Cetacea Lab made a breakthrough: the first confirmed sighting of a fin whale in the region in nearly 40 years. Meuter suspects that they may have seen fin whales before that, but their boat was too slow in the early days to keep up with the speedy cetaceans.
The return of the fin whales opened up new avenues for Cetacea Lab to understand a typically offshore and largely unstudied species. It’s generally accepted that there are three distinct and geographically separate subspecies: one in the North Atlantic, one in the North Pacific, and a third in the southern hemisphere. Other big baleen whales, like humpbacks and blues, stick to a general schedule of high, cold latitudes for feeding in warmer months and warm, low latitudes for breeding in cooler months. Not so with fin whales, whose migration patterns are mysterious. They seem to avoid the equator year round and take off for points unknown in the winter to breed. Then again, other groups might buck this trend entirely, remaining in the Arctic or Antarctic year round. The fin whales of the Kitimat fjord system are especially faithful to its deep, narrow waterways. “This is really one of the few places in the world where you can see fin whales from shore,” says Meuter.
Since 2010, Meuter, Wray, and the other researchers here have assembled a catalog of fin whales. A dorsal fin is rare on baleen whales, so the fin whale’s comparatively large one serves as their main identifying feature above the waterline. This photo identification work reveals that between 100 and 120 individual fin whales visit the Kitimat fjord system, with the numbers peaking in late summer. That’s too many whales for Meuter to remember offhand, but he can identify a few distinctive fins on sight. Like Methuselah, an older whale with a very wrinkled lower back and dorsal fin, and Top-Notch, a newly arrived mother with a calf and a distinctive notch right at the top of her dorsal fin.
As with many mysteries surrounding fin whales, there are various theories as to why they returned to these old hunting grounds. One is that as the outside ocean has grown more industrialized—crisscrossed by supertankers and fished to the brink—the Kitimat fjord system has become a safe haven. The waters are deep, quiet, and well stocked with krill. The most common vessels seen in the fjord are smaller fishing and pleasure boats, and tugs under 60 meters in length. Cruise and cargo ships do transit the waters but in limited crossings—fewer than 170 in a given year. In 2019, the last pre-pandemic year with average shipping traffic, only seven tankers passed through.
Ironically, just as fin whales are recovering from whaling, a new threat has arisen in the form of gargantuan super ships. Today, tankers and cargo and cruise ships have dispensed with the elegant lines of seafaring vessels past and resemble blocky skyscrapers laid on their sides, bludgeoning the ocean into submission. Not only are today’s ships bigger than ever before but there are more of them, with a fourfold increase in maritime traffic over the past few decades. All over the global ocean, fin whales are struggling to navigate around the new titans of the sea.
Along with this growth spurt in ship size has come a disturbing uptick in struck whales washing ashore or, in some cases, hanging from the ships themselves. In 2019, a cargo ship sailed into Portsmouth Harbour, England, with a young dead fin whale folded across its bow—the third fin whale strike reported in British waters that year. In 2021, an Australian naval ship sailed into San Diego, California, with two dead fin whales pinned to its bow. In 2022, a young 13-meter fin whale washed up near Pender Harbour on Vancouver Island with blunt force trauma, likely from a ship strike. Some 20,000 whales are killed by ship strikes every year—a number that is likely an underestimate because the vast majority of struck whales vanish, sinking to the bottom. Fin whales lead the pack in international ship-strike reports, probably because they’re big, spend more time at the surface, and travel along high-traffic coastlines. Over the past 70 years, fin whales have gone from being the most whaled whale to the most struck whale in the world.
Fin whales can live over 100 years, so it’s possible that some survivors from British Columbia’s whaling years returned to the fjord. Meuter has his own theory for why they returned: “I firmly believe that it takes these whales a long time to trust these waters again,” he says. If Meuter is right, then their trust is sadly misplaced. Hundreds upon hundreds of tankers will soon thread through these quiet inlets and channels, headed to the port town at the heart of British Columbia’s boom in LNG.
At the end of the Kitimat fjord system, above tidal flats covered in beached logs and backed by looming snow-capped mountains, sits the town of Kitimat. White school buses ferry workers to and from job sites at the nearly finished LNG Canada export terminal. Over the past five years, Kitimat’s population has nearly doubled with temporary workers housed at the edge of the town. The unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the province. On the north side of the channel runs a long industrial road lined by chain-link fences and topped with barbed wire. Behind it, factories, cranes, and smokestacks rise. On the opposite shoreline, directly facing the industry, is Kitamaat Village, home to the Haisla Nation.
For the past 70 years, the Haisla have watched the development of major resource projects on their traditional territory. It started with the arrival of Alcan’s aluminum smelter in the 1950s, which settled the town of Kitimat to house workers. The Eurocan pulp and paper mill opened in the 1970s, followed by a methanol plant in the 1980s. By 2010, Eurocan and the methanol plant had left town, sending Kitimat into an economic tailspin as businesses, workers, and families fled.
Then, in 2018, LNG Canada invested CAN $40-billion to build an export terminal—the largest private sector investment project in the country’s history. Over the next five years, 6,000 workers poured into Kitimat to build the facility, the Coastal GasLink pipeline, and the massive worker camps. The bustle is back in Kitimat, and this time around, Haisla’s leadership is determined to share in the fortune.
“We’ve witnessed a methanol plant, aluminum smelter, and a pulp and paper mill be developed and built and operated in our territory for 20 to 50 years. And essentially, we’ve sat on the sidelines, witnessed the destruction of our territory, our environment, and our cultural resources,” said Haisla chief councilor Crystal Smith on the RBC podcast Disruptors. Throughout her tenure as chief, Smith helped broker agreements that enabled LNG Canada to construct an export facility on Haisla land and set the nation on a pro-industry path.
By partnering with Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corporation, the Haisla people are now the majority owner of Cedar LNG—a $5.5-billion floating export facility that will be moored to a jetty across from Kitamaat Village. If all goes according to plan, Cedar LNG will be up and running by late 2028, becoming Canada’s first majority Indigenous-owned LNG project. Logistically, that means the facility will receive over 11 million cubic meters of fracked gas via the Coastal GasLink pipeline every day, where it will be chilled into a condensed liquid and pumped onto a weekly ship bound for markets in China, Japan, and Korea.
This is a huge turnaround from Haisla’s days of fending off Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project. In the past, the nation filed appeals, protested, and threatened to blockade pipeline construction. The Haisla people have a long history of environmental activism, with past leaders creating the Kitlope Heritage Conservancy—the largest coastal temperate rainforest on the planet protected from logging.
So why did Haisla’s current leadership embrace LNG tankers but reject Enbridge oil?
A big factor, according to Haisla’s environmental manager Candice Wilson, is that LNG Canada learned from Enbridge’s combative dealings with First Nations. “We essentially have a good working relationship with LNG Canada that, if we have issues, we have the ability to talk through any potential impacts,” says Wilson. She highlighted how LNG Canada listened to the nation’s concerns by pausing the export facility’s construction during the spring eulachon run. This small silvery fish is rendered into eulachon grease, a treasured Haisla commodity used in cooking and medicine.
The very nature of liquefied natural gas works in its favor, too. LNG is a very different product than crude oil because it evaporates when there’s a leak, rather than tarring waterways and animals. The specter of oil-slicked birds and destroyed fisheries caused by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska was scary enough to unite a broad coalition against Northern Gateway. The provincial government also promoted LNG as a homegrown, climate-friendly alternative to the Alberta oil sands, even though methane—the main component in LNG—is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide when it leaks into the atmosphere. Former BC premier John Horgan gave a CAN $6-billion tax break to LNG Canada right before it made its $40-billion investment in Kitimat. The province is now considering discounting electricity rates that will save LNG Canada tens of millions of dollars each year, while LNG Canada is mulling over an already-approved expansion that will double the amount of gas passing through Kitimat.
Not everyone in Kitamaat Village agrees with the Haisla Nation’s new direction. When I visited the village of around 700 people in May 2024, Haisla was still waiting on the final investment decision (FID) about the Cedar LNG project from its partner, Pembina Pipeline Corporation. Major resource projects live or die on FIDs, and the leadership, as well as the community, was cagey about answering questions about such a divisive issue.
Gerald Amos was one of the exceptions. “I think the people who got elected see LNG bringing big money into our community, but money isn’t everything,” the 75-year-old Haisla elder says from his living room overlooking the fjord. After quitting his job at the Alcan aluminum smelter when he was a young man, Amos built his life around the ocean, becoming a fisherman, a chief, and an environmental activist. The Haisla culture and the ocean are inseparable, and Amos would like to see that tradition continue: “The future of this community is really still dependent on the health of the ocean.”
The Haisla leadership’s pro-industry stance has deteriorated relations with neighboring First Nations. The Haida Nation, from the archipelago of Haida Gwaii to the north of the Kitimat fjord system, is bracing for spillover impacts from the hundreds of tankers set to cross its waters. The nation is already seeing invasive species like European green crabs—spread through ballast water—in the ecosystem and it worries about whale strikes, tanker groundings, fuel spills, and the broader impacts of developing fossil fuel infrastructure in a time of climate emergency. In 2023, a Haida leader told Canada’s National Observer that he respects a First Nation’s right to manage their territory, as Haisla has done with Cedar LNG, but that “a decision made in one place has impacts in another.”
The residents of Hartley Bay will soon watch as megatankers cruise past their village at the entrance to the Kitimat fjord system. According to Gitga’at councilor Hill, the Hartley Bay community felt pressured to agree to LNG tanker traffic because Haisla’s leadership had already signed on. “They knew [LNG tankers were] going to go through the heart of our territory to get to them and they didn’t tell us,” says Hill. “The relationship between all of us is still very cold.”
Like many First Nations in the region, the Gitga’at First Nation has signed on to a provincial government agreement nominally supporting LNG development in return for training, education, and other community benefits. In 2019, LNG Canada agreed to fund a marine emergency response and research facility in Hartley Bay, staffed by Gitga’at members, that will monitor tanker traffic and the marine environment. In 2024, the Canadian Coast Guard opened a station in Hartley Bay with a dedicated ship. The community has long lobbied for a coast guard station, particularly after the BC ferry Queen of the North sank right outside Hartley Bay in March 2006 and Gitga’at members in small boats helped rescue 99 people. But, notes Hill, “it didn’t happen until LNG started coming around.”
LNG Canada is required to produce a marine mammal management plan for the incoming tanker traffic, but neither the public nor researchers will have an opportunity to review it. Vice president of corporate relations Teresa Waddington wrote in an email that LNG Canada is still working out final details with the various Indigenous and regulatory groups.
Ship speed is of paramount importance when it comes to avoiding whale strikes. According to a 2020 report using global ship-strike data recorded by the International Whaling Commission, a large ship traveling at 16 kilometers per hour has a 21 percent chance of killing a whale—a threat that increases to 79 percent at 27.8 kilometers per hour. LNG Canada said it plans to slow tankers to under 18.5 kilometers per hour while traveling through the Kitimat fjord system, but that decision is ultimately left up to the ship captain who sets the speed based on the weather conditions, port schedules, and the ship’s maneuverability. The tankers LNG Canada plans to use maneuver best at speeds of between 22 and 26 kilometers per hour. The fatal flaw in any marine management plan will be the voluntary speed limits.
The large-scale industrialization of the Kitimat fjord system is now underway, with implications far beyond the lives of vulnerable whales. Along with the three LNG projects in varying stages of approval in Kitimat, LNG Canada is mulling over a government-approved expansion that would exceed the province’s climate targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 2007’s levels by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050. Hundreds of tankers streaming through this backwater fjord will set a dangerous precedent to expand LNG infrastructure even further. The g Nisg̱a’a Nation to the north is completing an environmental assessment on its own LNG export facility in the Nass River along the BC border with Alaska. As pipelines and ports take root along the northern coastline of British Columbia, it will be almost impossible to turn this ship around no matter the cost in whale lives.
Since its rudimentary beginnings, the Cetacea Lab has grown into a comfortable research station. A handsome wood-shingled viewing platform overlooks Whale Channel. Most days during the summer, you can find Meuter there, hunched over his spotting scope as he surveys the channel. Starlink internet has arrived and so has electricity powered by a nearby waterfall. Cetacea Lab has formalized into a registered nonprofit and has a board of directors, staffed by Gitga’at members, and an operating budget, funded by grants and donations. Its sightings of whales end up in scientific and government publications.
In the coming years, research from Cetacea Lab, as well as Wray’s Fin Island station, will document the impact of tanker traffic on whales in the Kitimat fjord system. Even though the stations are close to each other, they’ll observe two sides of the same story. LNG tankers will bypass Cetacea Lab and instead will run past the Fin Island Research Station in Squally Channel—a narrow waterway for a 300-meter tanker and a 27-meter whale to share and a space that researchers worry will become a “kill box” for whales. Wray will have eyes on the choke point, while Meuter will monitor whether tanker traffic will force whales into the quieter Whale Channel.
Now that the population is trending up on Canada’s west coast, the federal government is considering dropping protections for Pacific fin whales down a level in Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA)—from threatened to special concern. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, an independent body that provides scientific recommendations to the government, suggested the downgrade based on a survey in American waters that found a growing offshore population that might spill over and boost the Canadian population. However, there’s no indication that the American and Canadian groups are linked or that a spillover might happen. At this new threshold, the feds would no longer need to identify or protect fin whale habitat just as tanker traffic is set to increase.
In October 2022, Fisheries and Oceans Canada opened a public consultation on downgrading fin whales. Throughout the 60-day consultation period, the federal government recorded nearly 900 responses—far more than a typical consultation receives—and 90 percent were against lowering protections. Until a decision is made, likely after the next federal election, the threatened listing will stay in place. However, the designation is largely toothless. In the 18 years since fin whales were first listed as threatened, the federal government has never fulfilled its legal requirement to identify critical habitat for Pacific fin whales—which is the first regulatory step to protecting whale habitat, like the Kitimat fjord system. Coincidentally, the rebounding Pacific humpback population went through the same SARA downgrade in 2014 just as Enbridge tankers were set to sail through the fjord. Those tankers never arrived, but the population declined 20 percent anyway, likely due to marine heatwaves and shrinking food availability caused by climate change.
The federal government is also investigating the creation of a new national marine conservation area reserve near the Kitimat fjord system. The proposed reserve is huge, stretching over 1,000 square kilometers along British Columbia’s central coast. Conveniently, the boundary stops right where LNG Canada’s proposed tanker route begins at Squally Channel. Even if the reserve does become a reality, shipping would still be allowed within certain areas.
In lieu of government protections, the Cetacea Lab and Fin Island research stations will be left to document an exploding number of ship strikes in the coming years, along with the Gitga’at Guardians, a community group in Hartley Bay that monitors the nation’s land and water. Meuter has never personally witnessed a ship strike himself, but he has seen the grisly aftermath when a young dead humpback washed up on shore. If there is a ship strike, he vows to document it and make it public. Even without the 350 tankers per year that are expected to arrive in the fjord by 2030, accidents still happen here. Last summer, three humpback whales were struck and killed over the course of 10 days by a ferry, a cruise ship, and a third unknown vessel.
The best estimates today put the fin whale population in the Kitimat fjord system at 30 percent recovered. That means an abundant community of 400 fin whales once flourished in this remote corner of the global ocean. That community could flourish again. Over the past two decades, the slow, steady recovery of the fin whales has become a rare good-news story in these parts, says Cameron Hill back in Hartley Bay. He’s watched the abalone, the crab, and various fish populations in Gitga’at waters decline, mourning the loss of each one and wondering about the cultural heritage disappearing with them. But the whales, he says, “give me hope. Because if they’re thriving, there’s still hope in that ocean.”
The sad irony of the fin whales’ return to the Kitimat fjord system is that society has, by and large, moved on from the commercial whaling that drove them from these waters over 50 years ago. But whales will still be destroyed here—this time as collateral damage in British Columbia’s emerging LNG market. Before that happens, there’s a slim but ever-shrinking chance to right the wrongs of the past and protect fin whales at last.
Reporting for this story was supported by the Sitka Foundation and the Science Media Centre of Canada.
This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.
