Roger Payne

While Payne didn't coin the term "save the whales," which gave birth to millions of bumper stickers, buttons and derivative products, his work on whale conservation laid the foundation for the save-the-whales campaign, one of the first popular environmental movements to take hold in mainstream America.

The Payne family's photogenic Argentina trip was widely documented, but what really made Roger Payne famous was his 1967 discovery, along with researcher Scott McVay, that male humpback whales in their breeding season produce long sonic arrangements that could only be called songs. These songs, Payne and McVay announced, repeated long "themes" and lasted up to 30 minutes. Sung by an entire group of male humpbacks at once, the "exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound" (as Payne later described them) varied from year to year, with a few new phrases added each breeding season, and a few others dropped. Hinting at what Natalie Angier in the New York Times later called "the music instinct," the whale songs contained many elements -- rhyme, rhythm and structure -- found in human music. The humpback songs suggested a trend in nature toward composition. Music, Payne claimed, was not the exclusive province of human culture. Already, he was beginning to chip away at the notion of human specialness.

Even with hindsight, it's hard to say what came first, a budding New Age movement or Payne and McKay's humpback music. Either way, the strange yet vaguely familiar songs became an anthem of the post-Vietnam era, like some primordial message of peace from the deep. Whales went pop. Judy Collins laid a bed of whale music behind her voice in "Farewell to Tarwathie." "Over the years you have been hunted," lamented Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in 1975, "By the men who threw harpoons/And in the long run we will kill you/Just to feed the pets we raise/Grow the flowers for our vase/And put the lipstick on your face."

But scientists were less enthusiastic. "When it first came out it very near ruined my career, to suggest that whales could hear each other across oceans," says Payne, whose findings were ridiculed by other scientists, making it increasingly hard to get government grants for his research. Even today, Payne describes the period with the bitterness of someone who's been vindicated. "Eventually, it's discovered and pointed out that it's not baloney. At which point, of course, it turns out that all the people who were against you, well, they knew that all along, and they were just being extra careful. So it's very tiresome."

By the time his fellow researchers had come around to the idea of humpback songs, Payne had already transformed whales into the poster animals of the conservation movement. And it worked: In 1986, the International Whaling Commission declared a "zero quota" on commercial whaling -- a term coined to appease Japanese objections to a moratorium.

Payne has never stopped studying whales -- both as mascots for environmentalism and as research subjects in their own right. Along the way, he has been knighted in the Netherlands, received a MacArthur grant in the United States, helped produce IMAX films and television series, founded an advocacy group called the Whale Conservation Institute and trained a generation of whale researchers. One such protégé was his first wife, Katy Payne, who studied as an apprentice and research assistant to her husband's whale studies. It was Katy who, one day in 1984, felt a "shudder" in the air of an Oregon zoo and guessed, correctly, that the elephants nearby were communicating in a "silent thunder," a tone low enough to be inaudible to humans but capable of traveling great distances. Her own account of that discovery, and of her years of studying elephants and lobbying against the ivory trade and the practice of culling, is documented in her book "Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants."

After the Paynes divorced, Roger married Lisa Harrow, an actress from New Zealand, whom he met at a Greenpeace rally. "There was this tall, slightly shambolic figure, coming up to ask me something or other," recounted Harrow to the Australian magazine the Age. "I just knew, right away, that I had found my man." Six weeks later, the couple married. It's to Harrow (along with writer Cormac McCarthy) that Payne's book "Among Whales" is dedicated.

There is a similar quality to the accounts of whale watchers, astronauts, monastics and mountain climbers: a desire to be overwhelmed, to experience an extreme feeling of smallness in the face of something almost incomprehensibly huge, a sensation that philosophers have called "the sublime." "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger," wrote Edmund Burke in his essay "On the Sublime and Beautiful," "whatever is in any sort terrible -- is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling."

There's pain, both real and potential, in whale watching, as there is in mountain climbing or spending one's days in a hair shirt. But also the pleasurable pain Burke wrote about, "productive of the strongest emotion": Whales dash hubris, reminding us of our own vulnerability and smallness. It's this that keeps Payne coming back to the ocean.

Next Page: The return of whaling

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