Creatures that eat jellyfish—like sea turtles and some whales—gobble them up, and since the balloons don’t digest, the creatures stop eating and die. Some 50 million balloons are sold in California alone each year. Polyurethane balloons take hundreds of years to decompose. Mylar ones never do. Get Well Soon is full of irony. It will outlast humanity, much less the person it was gifted to. 11 Our actions have consequences, we all know this. But will readers fill fewer balloons? Be more careful not to let them go outside? Maybe. Or maybe not. That’s not the point. In putting together this environmentally-focused issue of SDM , we didn’t want to sell our readers the idea that we can buy our way out of the climate crisis, a trope that’s all too common in the media and especially in advertising. Buller said it well: “One of the central tasks of ‘green capitalism,’” she told me, “is to devise and offer ‘solutions’ to the escalating climate and ecological crisis that minimize any disruption to the way we currently organize our economies and societies.” She continued, “A big part of this involves selling the idea that all these crises require are market fixes and technical innovations—a politically sellable idea that has little basis in scientific reality or, for that matter, questions of justice and/or building a better world.” The way we spend our dollars matters, make no mistake. Planet- forward ideas and products deserve to be celebrated, but they only go so far. The truth is we’re not going to recycle our way out of climate catastrophe. Truly meaningful solutions can’t be purchased online. Our hyper-consumptive way of life, the racist systems that prop it up, and the industries that profit from
Capitalism painted green won’t solve the problems bare capitalism creates.
Along the way, the adults teach the calves songs and customs, whale traditions and know-how that go back before the dawn of man. The mothers teach them how to jump, how to communicate. Binoculars in hand, I would watch for hours from a hammock on my deck. 9 Ever more infatuated. In her 2022 book, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism , author Adrienne Buller writes about the IMF placing a whale’s monetary value at around $2 million USD. Capitalism, of course, has a way of reducing everything to market-compliant units, even something as invaluable to the spirit and imagination as whales. As someone choosing whales as a focal point, I asked her why she had done the same. “They’re a species that has, for generations, been under severe threat through processes intimately related to the development of industrial capitalism,” she responded. “From the profound devastation of global whale populations under commercial whaling to the accumulation of PCBs and contemporary pollutants in their blubber creating a ledger of our impact on the oceans, whales have an acutely visible relationship with the development of capitalism and its planetary impacts.” Whales tell us about ourselves. 200-ton, eight-figure storytellers. THREE BALLOONS, ONE WHALE ate fall is hit or miss for San Diego whale watching, but the dolphins alone are worth the price of L
admission. Numerous dolphin species can be found off the coast of San Diego year- round. On the boat, we were surrounded by the hundreds. Polished bodies swimming beneath and alongside the boat, baguette- length baby dolphins everywhere. In our two-plus hours, we encountered one whale—a Bryde’s (pronounced broo-dees ) 10 —plus a mylar balloon reading Get Well Soon and two other semi-deflated balloons floating some five miles offshore. Our boat driver, Tai, a handsome, mustachioed OB guy, slowed to pick each out of the water, knifed them, and shoved them in a built- in cooler. “Good ocean karma,” he called it. “We pick up like ten per day out here.” As an ocean lover, I experience visceral pain hearing such things. Balloons in water are dangerous. Their color eventually bleaches so they resemble jellyfish.
9 I was an unpaid caretaker of this property, for what it’s worth. 10 Until writing this I thought it was pronounced brides. The whale gets its name from a Norwegian guy who set up a whaling operation in South Africa around the turn of the 20th century. Naming a whale in this manner sounds to me like when a city is named after the first person to facilitate genocide in the area. Bleak, offensive, and uninspired.
11 It’s worth noting that the helium Tai poked out is a finite resource that’s running low. Helium is used in life-saving medical equipment like MRI machines. But once it’s gone it’s gone. Fewer people will be getting well soon.
52 DECEMBER 2022
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