Orca Week, Motherf*****s!/ SEJ Presents: Orca Week!

Last week, the Sustainability and Environmental Justice (SEJ)  Collective hosted a talk by Dr. Michael Weiss ‘16, Research Director at the Center for Whale Research on the San Juan Islands. Since his time at Reed, when he completed a thesis on the social structure of Washington’s Southern Resident killer whale community, Dr. Weiss has followed his studies through a PhD at the UK’s University of Exeter and into a position in close contact with the marine subjects of his research. As Research Director, Michael oversees the day-to-day coordination of the Center’s ongoing observations of the Southern Resident orcas, including the ORCA SURVEY, the longest-running data set of any marine animal population in the world, and the more recent Aerial Observation Study.

Inspired by Dr. Weiss’ work, the SEJ Collective organized a week of orca-themed events around his campus visit, dubbed Orca Week. In keeping with SEJ’s focus on interdisciplinary learning, Orca Week provided an opportunity for students across academic fields to learn about local ecology and consider themselves in relation to their environment. Although Dr. Weiss’ work is in biology, his findings about orca socialization have implications for many other areas of study, and draw attention to the underlying connections between environment and human behavior. The SEJ Collective saw Dr. Weiss’ campus visit as a chance to integrate scientific learning with studies of the environmental humanities, and Orca Week gave many students the opportunity to think outside their own subjects and work towards an understanding of environmentalism as an inherently interdisciplinary practice.

The week kicked off with a screening of the documentary Blackfish (2013), which addresses the mistreatment of killer whales kept in captivity at SeaWorld and other marine theme parks. The movie was shown at Garden House as part of the ongoing Ecocinema Series hosted by SEJ Scholar Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey ‘24. The series screens films addressing environment, land, and human-nature relations every other Monday at 7:30 pm. Students attending the Blackfish showing found it to be not only a crash course on the history of and issues with orca captivity, but also a window into the complex emotional lives of these creatures and a powerful call to action for their conservation and continued freedom.

Upon Dr. Weiss’ arrival on campus on Thursday, he first attended Professor Sarah Wagner-McCoy’s class “Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll.” In this new Environmental Humanities English course, developed through the Mellon EH Summer Incubator, students read the classic Melville text through an ecocritical lens, and looked at the shifting boundaries of human identity when members of our species move from land to sea. Dr. Weiss’ scientific knowledge of human-whale interaction provided a transdisciplinary perspective from which to consider Moby Dick and the conversations it generates about personhood, interspecies relation, and human construction of the nonhuman.

Dr. Weiss then gave his talk “Taking Animal Societies Seriously in Conservation: Case Studies in Killer Whales” on Thursday night to a crowd in Vollum Lecture Hall, providing insight into his research on the complex, intricate social systems and structures of animal communities. In this talk, Dr. Weiss examined how we might incorporate understanding of animal societies into conservation, using Southern Resident killer whales as a case study. He discussed how an understanding of social structure can provide conservation tools for more effective management and intervention, before moving on to discussing societies and cultures as conservation targets. Ultimately, his talk posed the question: how do our conservation strategies and actions change if we treat animal societies and cultures as having intrinsic value worth conserving?

To conclude his visit, Dr. Weiss attended a student Q&A in Prexy, where students came to eat Grand Central Bakery pastries and learn more about the Southern Resident killer whales. In addition to providing details about his work, Dr. Weiss also discussed his personal transition from a Reed education into a high-profile career in his field of study, a process that for many students can feel opaque and confusing.

The SEJ Collective is honored to have had the chance to host Dr. Weiss, and are grateful for the time and energy he put into his visit. In the wake of Orca Week’s success, we hope to host similarly brilliant and topical speakers in the near future alongside related programming. A big thanks to Dr. Weiss for making Orca Week possible!