Future of Whales’ Lagoon Grows Murky

A friendly boatman tells a little girl that if she blows bubbles in the sea, a whale might come. She does and it does, swimming close enough to the boat that the little girl can reach out and touch its great benign, barnacled snout.

The girl strokes the creature as if it were a family pet, and one of the largest mammals on Earth--almost twice the length of the 20-foot boat--lolls on its side, bumping gently against the gunwale, the long crease of its jaw forming a smile line.

This wind-swept inlet 600 miles south of San Diego is a preposterous, wondrous place where the divide between fantasy and reality vanishes, where scientists are left standing clueless at the dock and some preternatural law maybe best understood by children takes over.

The same creatures who were all but hunted to extinction in these waters more than a century ago now rise up from the deep, piggybacking their newborns, to welcome the descendants of the hunters, oblivious to human purposes which, in some cases, remain troublesome if not downright threatening.

A 17-mile-long indentation in Baja California’s Pacific coast, the lagoon is the last virtually undisturbed refuge for gray whales who come by the thousands, migrating here from Alaska to mate and have their young. It is part of a protected area, a biosphere reserve.

But the designation does not preclude all development. Here on the lagoon’s edge, the Mexican government, in partnership with Mitsubishi Corp., a Tokyo-based investment company, is renewing a campaign to build the largest salt-mining operation in the world.

In this storybook environment, it is easy to portray any commercial intrusion as a giant grinch. Such was the purpose last week of a gathering of environmental leaders from the United States and Mexico.

Accompanied by a bevy of invited celebrities, the group of about 50 assembled at a whale watching camp on a rocky spit called Punta Piedra to begin building an emotional consensus against a project that scientists, while apprehensive, are not certain will harm the whales.

“We do not have the right to destroy something we cannot re-create,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer for the national Resources Defense Council and son of the late attorney general, said in an opening salvo against the saltworks. “If we destroy the whales, we ourselves are going to be diminished.”

No Clear-Cut Guidance

Kennedy, along with actors Glenn Close and Pierce Brosnan and filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau, were--after the whales--the stars of an event calculated to kick off an international campaign to block the salt production facility.

Meanwhile, 50 miles up the coast, gray whales and saltworks, for better or worse, have been sharing the waters off the town of Guerrero Negro for 40 years. It is the expansion of that operation to Laguna San Ignacio that has set off the storm of protest that led to last week’s seaside summit of environmental groups.

Unfortunately, the history of human presence at Guerrero Negro does not provide a clear-cut guide to the well-being of whales that are forced to live in an industrial neighborhood.

At Guerrero Negro, when ships began intruding on their calving grounds, the whales all but abandoned one small lagoon while thriving in another, larger one.

But whales aren’t the only creatures at risk. The mangroves and desert surrounding San Ignacio support thousands of birds and animals, including endangered pronghorn antelope and black sea turtles.

There are people here too, a few hundred intrepid fishermen and their families in a handful of primitive fishing camps without electricity, potable water or health services.

The saltworks would augment existing operations that already ship 6.5 million metric tons of salt to Japan, Canada and the United States for use in producing plastics, sodium hypochlorite and road salt for highway ice. Company officials also dangle the prospect of 200 jobs, $100 million in export revenues and modern conveniences.

“It’s a good idea. There will be more jobs, and something for me to do when I get too old to fish,” said Celso Torres Aguirre, a resident of El Cardon, a local fishing village.

But Aguirre is also conscious of the high risks involved--of spills and contamination that could spell disaster for the abalone, scallops, clams and other valuable shallow-water species that people like him depend on for their livelihoods. “If they aren’t careful how they manage fuel or other chemicals,” he said, “it could damage the sea.”

Salt production would require the pumping of enormous quantities of seawater, resulting in a potential change in salinity and water temperature in the upper lagoon that “may impact bivalve and fish spawning, growth rates, resistance to disease and survival,” said Bruce Mate, the director of marine biology at Oregon State University and a member of an international team of scientists asked by the Mexican government to assess the risks of the proposed project.

Most troubling to environmentalists, the project would require construction of a mile-long pier near the mouth of the lagoon and the routing of cargo ships across the whales’ path.

For the people who gathered here last week to touch the whales of San Ignacio, the argument over the salt works transcends science and economics.

“We will take back the blessing of the whales and the sacredness of this place,” said Close at the end of the visit she and her 8-year-old daughter Annie made to the lagoon.

For environmental groups, the recruitment of celebrities can be an effective way of reducing complicated debates over natural resources to passionate sound bites by teary-eyed starlets and outraged leading men.

Yet, at Laguna San Ignacio, Close wasn’t saying anything that even the more case-hardened whale watchers did not feel at some level.

“Such a spectacle. Such trust,” said marine biologist Gustavo Danneman after four whales--two mothers and their calves--approached his boat simultaneously. Danneman has been doing research in the lagoons for nine years and believes that the Guerrero Negro saltworks has neither disturbed the whales there nor harmed the environment.

Back From Brink of Extinction

With its warm, protected waters, San Ignacio is one of four bays and lagoons on the southwest coast of Baja California where gray whales have historically come to breed and rear their young. San Ignacio is the third-largest of the four lagoons, and it does not attract the most whales. But its shoreline has the least development, and the whales have long been known to be the friendliest to human visitors.

To the south, Bahia Magdelena has been altered by industry, phosphate mining and the construction of an electrical power plant. And to the north both Laguna Guerrero Negro and another large inlet known as Ojo de Liebre border the existing salt production works.

Until 1994, the Pacific gray whales that migrate to the lagoons in winter were on the endangered species list. Commercial whaling had driven the species nearly to extinction by 1930. But subsequent bans on international whaling and other protective measures restored the population to more than 20,000--about what it was before the onslaught of harvesting in the mid-19th century.

In 1988, the government created the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected area in Latin America. Over 6 million acres--slightly larger than New Hampshire--it extends from Ojo de Liebre across miles of lava-strewn desert, jagged mountains and salt flats to Laguna San Ignacio. The purpose was to encourage conservation of endangered plants and animals, but also to allow some human activity.

At the time the reserve was established, the saltworks near Ojo Liebre had been in business for more than 30 years. Several years later, Compania Exportadora de Sal, jointly owned by the Mexican government and Mitsubishi, proposed building the new 130,000-acre facility along the north and east shores of Laguna San Ignacio.

Environmentalists were infuriated when less than a page of the company’s 465-page environmental impact assessment was devoted to the consequences for nature. It said there would be no impacts on whales or other wildlife becauseaffected habitats are “terrestrial” with little biodiversity and no productive use.

Two years ago, Mexico’s National Ecology Institute--the equivalent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency--ruled that the economic benefits did not justify “the loss of such a large natural area inside a biosphere reserve.”

However, the same year, Mexico’s secretary of commerce said the project should proceed.

Now, with agencies of the same government both sponsoring and opposing the project, officials of Compania Exportadora are working on a new environmental assessment that they hope will satisfy government concerns. It is expected to be completed in about a year.

At the same time, the project’s opponents, with their filmed displays of tender encounters between humans and whales, hope to create a political climate that will not tolerate commercial development at San Ignacio.

Steve Wechselblatt, Mitsubishi’s U.S.-based vice president for public relations, argues that the campaign has been misleading in several respects.

“This is not an industrial operation,” Wechselblatt said. “It is a facility that uses the renewable resources of sun, wind and seawater.”

Saltwater pumped from the ocean is filtered through a series of ponds, allowing evaporation and salt crystallization.

Other experts agree with Wechselblatt that the ponds have contributed to the formation of new wetlands which, in turn, have drawn more birds.

On the other hand, the Group of 100, a Mexican environmental organization composed of some of the country’s most prominent writers and scholars, has claimed in a lawsuit that fuel leaks and brine spills since 1984 have led to massive fish die-offs.

The impact of the existing operation on whales is also subject to dispute.

Bruce Mate points out that the whales abandoned Guerrero Negro Lagoon when it was used as a salt shipping port between 1954 and 1967. The whales have since returned, but not in large numbers.

But Mate and other experts note that when the shipping port was moved to the larger Ojo de Liebre, the whales stayed put--evidence that “gray whales appear capable of adapting to human disturbances,” according to one research paper by scientists at the University of Arizona.

Although the operation would bring a measure of progress welcome to some residents, there are those like Francisco Mayoral, a member of a local fishing cooperative, who believes he can support his family by fishing and guiding during the whale season.

“They say they will build a better road,” Mayoral said, referring to the bone-rattling gravel washboard that connects the lagoon to the nearest town, 2 1/2 hours inland.

“I prefer the road we have, bad as it is. There are fewer cars and less pollution.”

Mayoral believes the future of the lagoon lies in the new oyster farms that are slowly being cultivated, and in the low-impact tourism offered by the three tent camps set up for whale watchers on the south shore of the lagoon.

Indeed, several people who attended the gathering of environmentalists last week talked of the importance to humans of preserving this austerely beautiful place where people go to sleep to the throaty sighs of 40-ton beasts moving in the dark waters just beyond the shore.

“The reason we are here is for us,” Kennedy said. “The whales enrich us culturally, economically and spiritually. We are not here for the sake of animals but for humanity.”