It was by far his least "successful" book, and also the one he was by far the proudest of. It's one of my all-time favorites, and I'm glad a few people have mentioned it, as it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. His China trip was in 1988 (just a few months before Tiananmen), when there were about 200 dolphins left and a nature preserve was just being completed for them. Here are a few selected quotes from the chapter:
In the middle of one of the biggest, longest, noisiest, dirtiest thoroughfares in the world, lives the reincarnation of a drowned princess--or rather, 200 reincarnations of a drowned princess. Whether these are 200 different reincarnations of the *same* drowned princess, or the individual reincarnations of 200 *different* drowned princesses, is something that the legends are a little vague about, and there are no reliable statistics on the incidence of princess-drownings in the area available to help clear the matter up. If they are all the *same* drowned princess, then she must have lived a life of exquisite sinfulness to have had the conditions of her current lives repeatedly inflicted on her. Her reincarnations are constantly being mangled in ships' propellors, snared in fishermen's nets full of hooks, blinded, poisoned and deafened. The thoroughfare in question is the Yangtze River, and the reincarnated princess is the baiji--the Yangtze River Dolphin.
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[after explaining how the river's cloudiness makes sight almost useless, and how the baiji had to rely on echolocation to navigate and communicate, Adams notes the problems caused by cramming it full of diesel engines, in a discussion with his co-author Mark Carwardine]
D.A.: It would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque. [...] All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things, constantly confusing information. After a day or two he'd be completely bewildered and disoriented, and start to fall over the furniture.
M.C.: "Well, that's exactly what's happening, in fact. [...] A dolphin's echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the seabed, so things must be pretty serious if it can't tell that it's about to be brained by a boat! Then of course there's all the sewage, industrial waste, chemical fertilizers being washed into the Yangtze, poisoning the water and poisoning the fish..."
D.A.: So, what do you do if you are either half-blind or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light-show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head, and the food is bad?
M.C.: "I think I'd complain to the management."
D.A.: They can't.
M.C.: "No. They have to wait for the management to notice."
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As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze, I recognized with the vividness of shock that somewhere beneath or around me, there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain, and fear.
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The very existence of the dolphin had not been known of until relatively recently. Fishermen had always known of them, but fishermen do not often talk to zoologists, and there had been a recent painful period in China's history, of course, when nobody talked to scientists of any kind--merely denounced them to the Party for wearing glasses. The dolphin was first discovered [in Dongting lake] in 1914, when a visiting American killed one, and took it back to the Smithsonian.
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[The dolphin's hyper-endangered status was only discovered in 1984, and a crash-program to build a semi-nature refuge near Tongling to try to save it had nearly been completed when Adams visited about 5 years later. A large portion of the required funds were raise
Funniest? It had some fantastically funny bits, true, but mostly I found it heartbreakingly, unutterably sad... especially the parable at the end, Sifting Through the Ashes, which I think reads completely differently to someone who's made it through the rest of the book first. Overall, it's one of my all-time favorites. (There was an impressive e-version of the book done up as well. It can be found as abandonware here.)
When Adams went to see them in 1988, there were 200 dolphins left, and energetic efforts were being made to save them. Sadly, as impressive as those efforts were, it still seems to have been too little, too late. But at least they tried...
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[after explaining how the river's cloudiness makes sight almost useless, and how the baiji had to rely on echolocation to navigate and communicate, Adams notes the problems caused by cramming it full of diesel engines, in a discussion with his co-author Mark Carwardine]
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[The dolphin's hyper-endangered status was only discovered in 1984, and a crash-program to build a semi-nature refuge near Tongling to try to save it had nearly been completed when Adams visited about 5 years later. A large portion of the required funds were raise
When Adams went to see them in 1988, there were 200 dolphins left, and energetic efforts were being made to save them. Sadly, as impressive as those efforts were, it still seems to have been too little, too late. But at least they tried...