Local author pens book on whale entanglement

MOUNT DESERT – Some proposed federal fishing regulations might sacrifice the Down East lobster industry in order to attempt to save endangered North Atlantic whales, a local author said recently at a reading at Port in a Storm Bookstore in Somesville.

“Some of the regulations will have dramatic impacts on Down East lobstermen,” Tora Johnson said before the event. “It could and probably will drive some people out of business.”

Johnson, a resident of Sullivan, read from her new book, “Entanglements: the Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen.”

The book, which has made Johnson a Barnes & Noble Discovery Book Author of the Year, carefully examines the history and the ongoing complex relationship between whales and the fishing industry.

Along the way, it gives an alarming glimpse into a future that seems ominous for both the whales and the fishermen.

The problem whales have is simple: They often bump into fixed fishing gear and get tangled up in it, which can lead to sickness and death for the giant mammals.

“It seems like it should be so easy to solve this problem,” Johnson said.

But a true solution has proved elusive, and the reality of gear entanglements is posing a grave threat to the health of the right whale population.

Before commercial whaling operations began, the population likely numbered more than 10,000. It hovers between 300 and 400 today, Johnson said.

In order to save endangered whales and keep the threatened fixed-line fisheries profitable, a beginning step would be to smash a few stereotypes, according to the author.

One of the first to be jettisoned should be the notion that fishermen don’t care about the environment or the fate of the whales in the North Atlantic, she said.

“I didn’t know fishermen, as a group, to be against the environment,” Johnson said. “Fishermen have said to me over and over, ‘We don’t want to kill whales.'”

Another stereotype to cast overboard is the theory that whales are gentle creatures that make it easy for rescuers to cut them loose of their binding ropes.

“People believe that whales sort of should just roll over and allow the disentanglers to disentangle them,” she said. “Entangled whales can be exceedingly pugnacious, exceedingly violent. They are big, powerful, wild animals.”

Johnson has found herself in a unique position to break the stereotypes and bridge the gap between the fishing community and environmental activists.

She is a former commercial fisherman who comes from a fishing family, and an environmentalist and teacher who is deeply concerned about the fate of New England’s right and humpback whales.

“For a time, their numbers in the North Atlantic were creeping upwards,” she said. “Now they’re creeping down again.”