There were comings and goings in Malibu this week.
We have a new city manager, Reva Feldman, who has years of service in Malibu and is well-known and well-thought of in Malibu, which bodes well for a smooth transition in leadership. On the other side of the coin, Sandra Lyon, the superintendent of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, has decided to leave the district with a couple of years left on her contract and take a new job as the superintendent of the Palm Springs Unified School District. Understandably, she’s had a difficult tenure as superintendent in a difficult district to manage.
These days, to be a leader in the public arena takes political and media skills. It’s no longer just enough to be competent at your job. Over the years I’ve met with and talked to Reva many times. I’ve never met or talked to Sandra Lyons. We tried to set up meetings but she could never quite work it into her schedule. It’s just no longer possible to do your job in the public arena from afar, behind a wall of people protecting you. You have to reach out and engage or problems fester and grow, which is what I think happened in the district with the inevitable result.
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I don’t often recommend a movie or documentary, but we just watched a Netflix documentary called “The Whale” that was produced by Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson and narrated by Reynolds. It underscored the problems we have on the interface between different species of mammals — man and killer whales.
Luna was an Orca, a young killer whale that became separated from his pod in the waters off of Vancouver Island in Canada, for reasons that were not quite clear, and found himself alone and very lonely. Orca whales are apparently very social creatures, used to living in familial groups and reliant on each other for support. Then Luna did what appeared to me to be a very sensible and intelligent thing: He looked around, took stock of his situation and tried to create his own pod, except the other members of his pod were humans.
Some of you will say, “That’s crazy, whales don’t plan.” But as you watch the documentary it’s pretty clear he is intentionally engaging people, he loves to be touched and talked to, he appears to be able to tell people apart and begins to develop relationships with specific individuals. Underwater microphones picked up his sounds, which were constant clicking sounds that sounded to me very much like language, and though we have no idea what he was saying, in time we might break the whale language code or conversely, the whale might learn to understand English.
I saw a documentary once where a dog had a vocabulary and could pick out a particular toy from a pile of toys when told what toy to bring back. If a dog could understand language, then a killer whale —which I suspect is smarter then the average dog — certainly could eventually learn some language. But the problem isn’t communication; the problem is we don’t really know what to do when wild animals interface with people.
Is it bad for people to interface with animals? I guess that depends on how we define the animals as either wild or domestic. At one time, way back when, dogs were wild until some prehistoric man saw one outside of the campsite and threw it a bone. The lightbulb when off and a useful relationship was born. It’s difficult to say whether man domesticated the dog, or whether the dog figured that hanging out at the campsite was easier then chasing rabbits all day.
Apparently, the Canadian wildlife people felt that human contact was bad and would ultimately be a disaster for the whale, so people were threatened with big fines if they interacted with the whale. The problem is that no one explained that to Luna the Orca, who had absolutely no intention of giving up his friends, no matter what the biologists said, so it turned into a big game of cat and mouse. Ultimately, after a few years and many back-and-forths, with many alternative scenarios, Luna had an accident with a tugboat and was killed, so maybe the officials were right in the long run. The moral of the story is that it’s not so easy to distinguish wildlife from domestic animals and we all have some very conflicting emotions whether it be about Orca whales or gray whales or coyotes or mountain lions and then how we should try and live with them — or not.
Watch the film if you get a chance.