The Whale of the Whale
This is the untold story of the remarkable interspecies connection, indeed love, between humans and whales at a beautiful, isolated lagoon along the Pacific Coast of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.
After making a 5,000-mile-long migration – the longest of any marine mammal – newborn gray whales and their mothers continue to reach out to the touch of visitors to Laguna San Ignacio. The “friendly gray whale phenomenon” is unique in all of nature.
It is the tale of how this most pristine nursery for the gray whale was saved from a multimillion-dollar industrial salt factory proposed by the Mitsubishi Corporation and its Mexican government partner.
Sparked by concerns of local fishermen, the initial efforts of a few scientists and environmental advocates mushroomed into a global campaign reaching millions of people, one of the first to make full use of the new internet.
In the end, it was a mysterious powerful encounter with a 30-ton whale in 2000 that swayed a nation’s president and the world’s largest multinational to choose to protect nature and not exploit it.
Twenty years later, this is considered one of the greatest environmental success stories in history and a springboard for world-known climate activist Xiye Bastida to learn about the threats for the gray whales going to Baja to the Arctic and how her journey mirrors the current climate crisis.