Jess [00:00:12] Hello, and welcome to Science Write Now. My name's Jess White, and I'm speaking to you from Kaurna country in Adelaide, and today I'm in conversation with Rebecca Gigg's about her wonderful debut non-fiction novel 'Fathoms: The World in the Whale'. I bought the American one, the hardback one because it's very beautiful. So Rebecca is a writer from Whadjuk Nyoongar Country in Perth, and her essays and articles have appeared in Best Australian Science Writing and Best Australian Essays, as well as The Atlantic, Granta, New York Times Magazine and Griffith Review. And she writes about how people feel towards animals in a time of ecological crisis and technological change. Her topics span jellyfish swarms, how sea turtles fare in heatwaves, the history of leeches as weather prediction devices and whether cows have friends. So Fathoms, this lovely book was published last year with Simon & Schuster in the US and Scribe in Australia and the UK. And in the US, it was awarded the prestigious 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction. It was also listed as a finalist in the Kirkus Prize in the Pen/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. And in Australia, it won the 2020 Mark & Evette Moran NIB Prize for Literature, the Royal Zoological Society's Whitley Award for Popular Zoology, and it was shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize, which is amazing. So congratulations, Rebecca. That's fabulous. I'm very happy to be talking to you today. And this is a book about whales, and it spans how their bodies work, their long sojourn on Earth. So they've been around for 50 million years, and the sounds they make, what they look like and how their lives are interlaced with ours. And that's often in horrifying ways, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. But first, I'm interested in hearing about what prompted this obsession with whales, because it has gone on for some years, and in one of the chapters you talk about describing seeing a whale skeleton in the museum in Perth with your sister. So did it begin there or did it begin at some other point? Can you tell us a bit about that?
Rebecca [00:02:30] This book really has two inception points. The first is described in the preface to Fathoms, and that is this encounter with a stranded humpback whale off the coast of Perth some years ago now. This animal had beached, and I went down with a group of people to push it back off a sand bar under the superintendence of various wildlife officers, and then it re-stranded higher up the beach and it was suffering, and it seemed likely that it would die. A huge crowd came down to see that whale. People brought their children, they brought their pets. You know, people had dogs on leashes. And I got talking to everyone in the crowd about their theories for why it is that whales beach. Some people told me that they felt this whale might have been malnourished; it was a little bit skinny for its age. Others believed that it had been chased by predators like killer whales. Someone even told me that they thought that while beachings were connected in some way to falling stars. So I really began with these different models for understanding causation in the natural world. Be that maternal, so feeding an animal, be it predatory or something slightly more kind of cosmological. But at that point, I was really taking notes, thinking to myself that I would write a long short story. I thought that I was going to write some fiction. And I dutifully wrote down bits and pieces about what I saw and observed and bits of dialogue, bits of conversation. And I tried to make it into a short story, but it didn't have a crisis point other than the suffering of the animal. Anyhow, I sort of set it to one side thinking, well, there's an interesting ethical story there about the decision or not to euthanize an animal that is clearly visibly suffering. And then some years later, there was a news story describing a sperm whale that had washed up off the coast of Spain, just south of Granada. This animal was dead when it appeared on the coast. And biologists wanting to understand how it had died did a necropsy on it. So they cut into its stomach. You know, humans have an autopsy, but animals have a necropsy. And they found inside its stomach this bewildering medley of objects. They found coat hangers, bits of a mattress, an ice cream tub. But most alarmingly, to me and most people, I think they found an entirely bundled up greenhouse. So tarpaulins, ropes, flower pots, the whole structure rolled into a bundle and inside this sperm whale. And when I read that in the news and then went on to have a look at the inventory that was in the scientific report those biologists produced, I thought to myself, you know, here is this sort of symbol of 1980s green activism consuming the way in which we talk about climate crisis. So literally, the metaphor of the greenhouse effect is the motif that we use to describe our overheating Earth. And had I put that into a novel or a work of fiction, it would be considered too heavy-handed like it's almost a real amalgamation of synthetic object and animal. So, yeah, I really at that point, I went back to the Perth material and found that I had the beginnings of a narrative non-fiction project. And in time, the project broadened to be much more about the ways in which our lives connect to stupendous wildlife in really remote wildernesses far from human habitation. In a much more broad sense, it's not just a book about whale welfare or animal rights, or yeah, it's more about global change and how that's affecting our connection to animals.
Jess [00:06:46] Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I've just got to fix up the screen. Hang on a sec. Okay. Yeah. So that scene you describe about the greenhouse, that was absolutely horrifying for me as well. And the most important thing I learnt from this book was the entwinement of human and whale lives. So you talk about in the 19th century how when people really started capitalising on whales' bodies and they used those bodies and lamps and women's corsets and insecticides and candles, and I read a lot about the 19th century, so I assumed that was when whaling stopped. But then you said it actually increased in the 20th century and that between 1900 and 1990, there are an estimated three million cetaceans were killed and removed in the world's oceans, and that's more whales that had been hauled in previous centuries. Absolutely horrifying. So there was there's something you're doing with scale, and I've only seen one whale before, and that was when I was doing the Cape to Cape and southwest Western Australia. There was a whale that had beached and it was decomposing on the shore and I wanted to go and have a look at it. But we weren't allowed to. I grew up in the country so you get interested in dead bodies and those kinds of things. So I didn't understand the immensity of a whale's body until I started reading this book, but not just in terms of the body itself of the whale, but the way it and it kind of pervades our civilisation. It was just so, so interesting. And you create that sense of scale through a huge amount of research. And I was wondering how you went about doing the research because there is a lot of scientific data in there, so I was wondering, do you have a background in science or do you collaborate with science organisations? Do you have access to science journals? How do you go about doing that kind of research?
Rebecca [00:08:46] I don't have qualifications in science. What I do have—and I credit my Year 12 biology teacher who was an amazing teacher—is an ability to ask a scientific question. I think I got a really good grounding in the fundamentals of scientific methodology in my secondary education and a sort of curious questing sensibility around around science. But I'm afraid I never had the mathematical aptitude to kind of be carried that d and further study. And so over the years, I have maintained that interest through my sort of writing practise being focussed on science communication, or sort of an interest in popular science, which is very much what I read. But ultimately, when I began writing this book and I was thinking of it in that part of the bookstore where you find books that are really just attempting to put a glass pane between a complex scientific finding and a layperson reader and articulate it in a very kind of like plainspoken lucid way. When I tried to write like that, I found that on the page it was such a deadening experience, and I kind of fought with it for nearly a year, actually in the beginning before I realised that actually my particular niche is the way in which scientific information forms over a topography of cultural story and that sense that, you know, scientific knowledge doesn't just fall into the public sphere, you need directionally like just received wisdom by the populace at large, but that there are existing stories that shape the way in which we receive it. So when a whale washes up and it's full of debris and you know, it has all these sort of domestic objects like mattress bits and flower pots, well, of course, that recalls all the stories we have already about whales that show up full of people. These great morality myths that appear in everything from Leviathan, you know, the Bible story through to some indigenous myth making and the tall tales of old salt fishermen as well. And that kind, of for me, it made that story much more alive than any time I'd read about, you know, the global... The North Pacific garbage patch, for example. I couldn't feel it, you know, like the scale was too big. It was much too abstract an idea. And then when you hear of the whale that washes up with the greenhouse in its stomach? Well, it's so visceral the mind can latch to it in a really empathetic way. And so I decided to try to write from this space, which is a space that is science literate but ultimately interested in analysing the narratives that shape our environmental understanding that aren't just scientific. Hmm.
Jess [00:12:13] Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. The weaving of the culture and the facts, and also the the sensory aspects of encountering whales, which we'll get to, you know, in a little bit. There's also poetry in there, and there was such description of the whale form, which is just extraordinary. Like, I didn't even know what a whale full was. And so when the whale dies, it falls down through the fathoms and it furnishes the ecosystems with decaying matter. And when you when you describe the little worms on the bottom of the ocean reaching up for this mass, it was kind of that whole thing. That whole description was electrifying, and I had the sense that it was really captivating for you as well, learning about learning about that science to do with the whale fall.
Rebecca [00:13:06] I think I started writing in this genre. I had this idea that I would need to substantiate every fact by personal witness. And by that, I mean that it would either need to be written, you know, you toggle between scenes where as a narrator, you're going somewhere, you're having an experience, you're seeing a thing like a beached whale, an exposition where you know, you have this sort of much more information-dense delivery of knowledge data. And it wasn't until I had this one day actually in Sydney. It was a really, really hot heatwave day, and I went to the library and just by chance, I was sitting on a long table and a friend of mine, the poet Aidan Rolfe, turned up his Sydney-based poet and he's a wonderful writer. But anyway, he was sitting opposite me on the desk, and we were both working on our laptops. And I just thought to myself, You know what, for today, given this serendipitous encounter, I'm going to try to ventriloquism Aidan. And I was writing that whale fall sequence. And I just thought, You know what? It doesn't need to be because of course, whale fall is by and large unwitnessed. It's something that happens far deep, deep in the sea, you know, if it is witnessed at all, it's by deep sea submersibles after the event, kind of analysing all the lifeforms that have accrued around the carcass. And so I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to take the poet's prerogative to really spin this out lyrically and take my time stepping through what it must be like for this carcass to be decomposed and deteriorated and pulled apart by carnivores in the water. And we have all this wonderful science on what that process actually looks like. But I don't think anyone had written it kind of in a narrative or a yeah in a lyric way. And once I had that piece of writing, I really felt like now I'm away. Like, now I have this project. It's got an energy to it. It's got this sort of, you know, thank you for the word electricity, that is how I felt writing it. And that became the sort of engine that kind of drove the rest of the book to give myself the liberty to speak in that way.
Jess [00:15:30] Yeah, yeah. Did you need to check everything as you went along? Because I do archival research and I am obsessed with footnoting everything, because I don't want to lose the facts as I'm constructing a story. So did you feel the need to go back to scientists to ask them to check your work as you wrote it?
Rebecca [00:15:51] Yes, because this research is that I write simultaneously with the research process. That's not two distinct phases. But what I'll do is I'll periodically have these junctures in the project where I draw out and I try to get a global perspective again because you can find yourself really, you know, in the weeds with it. And potentially, you know, the great danger is that you cherry pick your information for a story that isn't verifiable on a kind of broader take of the field. So, yes, I would go back and sort of look at things from this much more kind of field-level perspective periodically. I interviewed a lot of scientists along the way. Both, you know, people who are at the tail end of their career, who are emeritus professors and also people just getting started. And I don't, you know, I don't run text by scientists, so I don't take my drafts to scientists and say line by line, is this how it should be expressed. But I like to think that my process of research to the best of my ability, it heads off any potential mistake of fact. You can never guarantee that in its totality. But to give you an example, when you talk to a scientist and you ask about population estimates for humpback whale populations, they will give it to you in a phraseology like "the confidence limit of the estimate is 2,500 to 250 and of a particular date, the number of humpbacks visiting the East Coast population." And the moment you say something like "the confidence limit of the estimate," and you're writing towards a non-scholarly audience and non-academic audience, you're just going to get people going to shut the book at that point. So there is a little bit of like finding ways to integrate data in a way that's consumable.
Jess [00:18:15] Yeah. And when you were talking about the whale poo, but that just was a brain explosion. I didn't know that it could do that and that these long plumes of poo like fertilise again. It's like this idea of distribution once again. But you also mentioned that it was changing the atmosphere. Can you describe how it's doing that?
Rebecca [00:18:38] Yeah. I think some of the most revelatory science that I've come across in the course of researching the book, I understood whales to be wholly marine organisms. They feed from underwater food webs. When they die, they get decomposed by seabed organisms. I had no idea that something about their life cycle would be connected to the chemical composition of the atmosphere. But it turns out this is true. And not only is it true, it's quantifiable and it makes a huge difference. What happens is that whales feed at depth. They go down—these are the large whale species—the water column, they might be eating squid or krill or copepods or other little titbits of life in in the deep sea. But while they're down, they're feeding, they shut down their other bodily functions, largely because they're under pressure, so they don't excrete, they don't defaecate down where they feed. Instead, they come up to the surface. And then, as you say, they release these like long, wafty, the faecal plumes by the surface. What that means is they're moving nutrients from the deep sea up to the light-filtered layers of the sea, where photosynthetic organisms can utilise those nutrients as a kind of manure and it catalyses the growth of plankton. Plankton are responsible for the emission of oxygen and the sequestration of CO2 to a far greater degree even than rainforests. So much so that an uptake of plankton by just one per cent is estimated to be equivalent to the injection of two billion mature trees into the system—the global system. So some scientists think that we should be protecting whale populations, not just because they're charismatic animals or that they're the largest animals on the face of the planet, but because their numbers help maintain this very important plant-like organism plankton, which is important for the chemical composition of the air and for the offset of emissions. So yes, some people even think that they should be included in the Paris Accord as a result.
Jess [00:21:00] Yeah, that's fascinating information.
Rebecca [00:21:03] It's it makes me realise as well that, like I think increasingly this will be the conservation ethic because people are moving away from the idea that we should protect animals simply because they're, you know, they've got a kind of storied history or perhaps we have some limited understanding of what intelligence is in an animal population, and we see it, we identify with it in elephants, we identify it in whales and dolphins. But ultimately, this ecological function is so much more important, and it may mean as well that we need to protect many more organisms than a kind of, you know, a limited population that would prevent that species from going extinct. We can imagine that, you know, no whale is extinct, but there's only 10 in each species, or it's just not going to provide the kind of ecological function on the scale that we need it to keep our ecologies in harmony.
Jess [00:22:06] Yeah, it was really interesting when you talk again about the embeddedness of different parts of an ecosystem. Yeah, and I try to appeal to human self-interest. I say, 'well, if the trees die, we die too'. I think humans are fundamentally selfish and that's how you get them to change or think about looking after the planet. But I was also quite depressed when I got to the end of the book, especially with the descriptions of these, you know, greenhouses in whales and plastic bags and esky lids. And I wasn't sure quite what to do by the end. So how do you deal with these depressing facts, or how did you deal with them while you were doing the research?
Rebecca [00:22:51] Well, there are two things to say about. One is that the book is written two steps back from a particular activist ambition. And the reason for that is that I wanted to meet people where they are. And I wanted the book to be a space where a reader might consolidate their nerve. So in terms of, you know, it would have been quite easy to lay out in the back of the book, like 'so you feel moved to act on behalf of our maritime ecosystems... here are the organisations to join. Here are the actions to take. Go out and do it.' But ultimately, you know, I've seen a lot of people burn out by throwing themselves into that ambition without really first taking an accounting of their resources, their privilege, their communities, their networks, and perhaps most importantly, their talents. Because I think if you know you work in the dedication of your talents, if you make yourself useful in the dedication of your talents, then you will find a meaningful way to contribute. It may be that you're actually just like an absolute queen at spreadsheets. Like, that's your thing, right? Well, you know, it doesn't make sense for you to go out and perhaps spend day after day waving placards at the front of Parliament House. Perhaps your talent is best utilised by giving half a day to an environmental NGO offering to do the books you know, do their MYOB or something. And so I wanted people to kind of have that opportunity. And I say at a certain point in the book, there's a very sort of direct to camera moment where I talk about hope and I talk about the ways in which, you know, hopefulness comes out of usefulness. It's not something that you kind of like acquire and then that gives you reason to act. It's actually the other way around. You act and then you find the people and then you find the community and then you find meaningfulness. But your question is, well, asked, how do I, in the process of reading a lot of depressing science, metabolise that? And what do you do as a writer when you're sort of faced with reckoning with difficult topics? I think there was a certain point where I just put up a bit of a firewall between myself and the sort of emotive material. I do remember sharing a chapter with a mentor of mine. Part of the way through. And she said to me, 'You know, gosh, I just, I just cried, you know, learning about these whale calves that are being attacked by seagulls off the coast of South America. It just was so painful to read about.' And at that point, I realised that I'd actually detached too much because it hadn't upset me to that degree, writing it. And I sort of needed to see it reflected back to really come to grips with it. So, yeah, I think there's a necessary kind of emotional separation from your material. And I often say to students of mine who are dealing with difficult topics, be that personal topics or, you know, kind of state-of-the-world topics that, however hot your head is, you sort of have to counterbalance it and write as though you had ice cubes on the back of your hand. That the more passionate the subject is, the more kind of upsetting the subject is, the more you need to cool down and slow down and step through it. Because I just don't think that the sort of jeremiad of environmental writing really has got us where we need to be. Yeah, so I kind of argue for a bit of a slower metabolism of the facts.
Jess [00:26:41] Yeah, I found it very affecting and I'm trying to work out why. It was the image of the whale with the plastic in its tummy. And it was the sense of scale. And it was also, I felt bad that I didn't know this stuff. But you're also very attuned to the sensory world. So when you talk about the whale watching and this mother, this huge mother with her calf comes by. And you're absolutely terrified—I would have been too, I would have been totally freaking out. And then she sails past and watches you with her eye, so there's a real attention to vision and connection; well, it wasn't a connection, it was a recognition that you couldn't possibly connect with this otherworldly creature. But I've noticed, like throughout this book, you tend to sound with the sound that the whales make when they're calling to one another. And in your essay in Fire, Flood and Plague, you talk about the birds and listening to the birds. And I was wondering where that interest comes from, your attentiveness to animals and the way they process the world around them?
Rebecca [00:28:07] Yeah. Well, I mean, a sharp critic of this book noted that there was a disjunction between the desire to enter into the worlds, the perceptual gestalt of the animal, on the one hand. And then also the realisation that to try to do that, to try to look through the eyes of the animal was a kind of colonising act was a kind of, you know, there inside the animal is already the trace of the human and that is the plastic pollution. So it's also a humiliating kind of space to be and ultimately kind of impossible to think about the sensory world of a whale from the embodied reality of a human being. And I, I agree, I think that there is a kind of irresolvable tension there. I wanted to in terms of sound and the other panoply of strange and wonderful senses that whales have—including the apprehension of the magnetic fields of Earth, which is something that we can only imagine what that must be like—I wanted to give people a renewed feeling for the strangeness of the world as it is experienced by animals, but also a sense that environmental crisis is experienced differently, according to the sensitivities that a particular species is equipped with. So if you are an animal like a whale that lives in the deep dark sea and feeds at great depth and rarely comes to the surface, sound is just your primary sense. You're not using your visual senses very much. You live in a world that's exquisitely attuned to sound. So what happens when there's sound pollution? It's just so much more of a dramatic effect on a creature like that. And so I also wanted to sensitise the human audience to environmental change as it might be experienced by other animals. You know, there's a lot of literature in this genre that really reaches for the deep future and asks, How will we survive? What will we survive with, what will be left after these radical changes take place? I wanted to stay in the present and say how are animal lives being changed now in the wilds? And what do we owe them? What kind of life do we want to ensure for them in this sort of, fallen Eden that we live in? So yeah, that's why the interest in animal senses came from.
Jess [00:30:59] Yeah, yeah. I don't think we can ever get away from anthropomorphism. It's just not physically possible.
Rebecca [00:31:08] Yes, the author, Laura Jean McKay, who has a wonderful novel out at the moment, called The Animals In That Country, she would say to you, the problem is not anthropomorphisation, it's anthrocentrism. It's putting ourselves at the middle of everything. And I think I agree with her. I think that there is a kind of, well, the American literary critic, Lawrence Buell, would say that there's a kind of disciplined extra inspection. So he argues that if you write from a scientific mindset and you learn everything you can learn about an organism, then it might be possible to not introspect, but 'extorespect'—kind of think about how it experiences the world. And really, that was the kind of ethos that I was hoping to bring to Fathoms.
Jess [00:32:05] Yeah, I thought it was beautiful. I really loved it. I loved reading it. So I encourage everyone who's watching to come buy it. Yes. And are you working on anything else or are you having a rest?
Rebecca [00:32:16] I am starting something new. Yeah, but at the moment, it's just like a wall of post-it notes. It looks like one of those crazy, you know, you've seen the meme with all the red threads, that's like the great kind of criminal mastermind. And that's what it looks like. And the more I keep adding to these post-it notes, I feel like I'm building myself into a cave. But I am starting a new book, but it's still a very green little thing. But meanwhile, I'm writing kind of longer articles. I've just reviewed a couple of books for The Atlantic on trees, another book about insects for The New York Times review of books. I'm doing some short commissions as well.
Jess [00:33:00] That's good. Yeah, that's great. All right. Well, thank you very much for talking.
Rebecca [00:33:05] I'm grateful for your time, Jessica!