When one of the five Flippers, a female Bottlenose Dolphin named Kathy died, O'Barry could no longer deny what he saw as the severity and potentially fatal consequences of the captivity industry he had helped to establish. O'Barry maintains that Kathy died from a form of suicide. He supports this claim with the widely acknowledged fact that all cetaceans are voluntary air-breathers and all dolphins are of the order Cetacea. Unlike humans, and many other land-dwelling mammals, dolphins have the ability to choose when they take a breath, or consequently when they do not. According to O'Barry, after weeks of showing signs of depression Kathy swam into his arms, opened her blowhole to take a breath and then never took another.

I'll borrow Toynbee's term Mother Earth. She's the first protagonist. She's alive, she's life itself. She conceives and births everything that grows. Many call her Nature. Christians call her Wilderness. Toynbee's other name for her is Biosphere. She is the dry land, the water and the earth enveloping our planet. She's the sole habitat of living beings. Toynbee describes her as a thin, delicate sking, no higher than planes can fly and no lower than mines can be dug. Limestone, coal and oil are part of her substance, they are matter that once lived. She selectively filters radiation from the sun, precisely in such a way as to keep life from burning. Toynbee calls her an excressence, a halo or rust on the planet's surface, and he speculates that there may be no other Biospheres.

Toynbee says Mankind, human beings, in other words We, have grown very powerful, more powerful than any other living beings, and at last more powerful than the Biosphere. Mankind has the power to wreck the delicate crust, and is doing it.

Originally posted by pai mei


A free dolphin plays with humans if we meet in the ocean. He is used to travel 40 miles a day, not because he is desperate for food as the machine wants us to think. That's just his life. He likes it.

[edit on 16-2-2010 by pai mei]