Notions of identity in an age of globalization are visited throughout: “tell us who / we become in the bubble / wrap of our beholders,” Miki writes. The homogenizing force of globalization is not without resistance, however: a Tokyo food vendor’s specialty is served “only here.” In the same long poem, “Viral Travels in Tokyo,” Miki prescribes a kind of individualist retreat as vaccine against the viral spread of uniformity and commodity culture: “we need to place / our mind inside / our mind so that / the rhythm takes / our voice.” Miki’s speaker is both 21st-century tourist, “an unreliable / witness to fashion,” and a prophet in the marketplace, decrying current societal obsessions.

His language—elliptical, paratactic—is critical theory with line breaks. It often deflects comprehension, permitting only fragmentary understanding painstakingly teased out. Its relationship to its own methods is ambiguous. One can’t help but read the “docile insights / of the forlorn cultural critic eating / concepts on the planked boardwalk” as reflexive commentary.

Dany Laferrière. Photo by Karen Bambonye.

It seems strange to be given the task of “introducing” a man who has written more than 10 books and recently won major literary prizes in France and Quebec, but there it is: I, and presumably many in English Canada, had forgotten about Dany Laferrière.

I’d been a big fan of his a decade ago. I’d read all his books. I’d included a section from his autobiographical novel A Drifting Year—a wondrously sparse book about a Haitian immigrant’s first long cold year in Montreal—in Concrete Forest, the anthology of urban Canadian fiction I edited in 1998. But since then, nothing. Between 1997 and 2009, there were no new English translations of Dany Laferrière’s books and, consequently, I forgot all about him.

What happened to Laferrière? I didn’t realize how productive he’d been until just recently, when I came across some mention of his work and looked him up. And there he was—living in Montreal after a stint in Miami, enjoying, at 58, an impressive resurgence. While most of us weren’t watching, Laferrière had written seven more books, including one that was turned into a 2005 feature film starring Charlotte Rampling (the film shares a title with his provocative novel Heading South). In 2009, without most of us even noticing, Laferrière won the major French literary award the Prix Médicis for his part-novel, part-memoir L’énigme du retour, in which the death of an author’s father prompts a return to Haiti 30-plus years after he left the country of his birth.

I’m anxious to read the book but my French is pathetic. And, two years later, there is still no translation, a state of affairs to be parsed at length some other time. Right now, I’m here to (re)introduce you to the works of Laferrière. I recently pored over the two new books that publisher Douglas & McIntyre released in translation. One was the previously mentioned Heading South, a book set in Baby Doc’s Haiti that looks at the lives of middle-aged Western women and the Haitian rent boys who service them. The other is the 2010 release I Am A Japanese Writer.

Both are classic Laferrière. Written in sparse yet poetic prose, sly and earnest at the same time, they parse the mixed messages of post-modern identity with lustful exuberance. I recommend both, but Japanese Writer is the better book and the better example of why Laferrière is so worth reading. In this restrained novel, told in short chapters of three or four pages each, the author creates an alter-ego who has, based solely on the title of his proposed book—“I Am a Japanese Writer”—scored himself an advance. Word spreads about this non-existent book and controversy grips Laferrière’s imagined Japan, a country at once provoked and obsessed with the idea of a black man who had never even set foot on their soil daring to proclaim himself one of them. This is what Laferrière does. He writes movingly and cleverly about race, nationality, and, ultimately, the multiple conflicting ways we form our identities. His prose, in this case ably translated by his longtime translator David Homel, is deadpan and devious.

It drives us forward into narratives that defy us to come to easy conclusions. “I don’t give a shit about identity,” our protagonist tells the woman sent to his apartment to photograph him for a Japanese magazine. “Look me in the eye: there is no book.”

Lucky for us, after a decade-long absence, there is a book. Look me in the eye and tell me there’s another Canadian writer with as deviously delicate a take on the post-colonial diaspora and the perils and potentials of multiculturalism.

As of today it’s official: every province and territory across Canada is on board with the 350.org climate movement. This Sunday, 350.org events will be held throughout Canada and around the world.

Last year, we saw the beginning of this movement. On Oct. 24th, 2009, several thousand youth took over Parliament Hill in Ottawa to give our leader a strong message: that we want action now.

But the politicians on the Hill haven’t given us that. If anything, the Canadian government has done the opposite, subsidizing $1.5 billion to the fossil fuel industry and cutting investments in renewable energy. Even worse, as we all know too well, the Copenhagen Climate Summit was a complete failure. It took us years, if not a decade, backward in negotiations.

So what do we do now? Is there any point to fighting or should we just give in to this suicidal path we seem to be on? These are the questions that have plagued me since I left the summit last December. It’s fair to tell you that I haven’t written much about this recently because I’ve been in a kind of “eco-coma.” I felt so pessimistic about our future, as I’m sure a lot of us have, that I found it difficult to have even the slightest bit of hope any more.

But maybe that was my mistake. I placed too much hope on some political leaders changing it all. I realize now that we’ve got to get to work ourselves for the change we want. We can’t leave it up to the top-tier powers that are so obviously controlled by the fossil fuel lobby. Throughout history, this has always been the way. It takes strong movements of millions to make change. This year is no exception. Despite our corrupt government, Canadians and people around the world are not backing down. Our movement is only getting stronger.

On Oct. 10th, there will be events happening across the country. In the Yukon Territories, people will weatherize low-income homes. In Nunavut they will take the day to walk instead of drive. While in Prince Edward Island, they will cycle on hybrid electric bikes across the coastal shorelines to promote alternative energies.

In Pakistan, women are learning how to use solar ovens, students in Zimbabwe are installing solar panels on a rural hospital, and sumo wrestlers in Japan are riding their bicycles to practice.

Sure, solving climate change won’t come one bike path at a time. But as Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, wrote, “It’s a key step in continuing to build the movement to safeguard the climate.”

This is probably the most important year yet to preserver in our fight. We’ve seen devastating floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia, and a heat-wave around the world.

But with this movement growing globally, today I am proud to write that I have hope again.

Japanese vending machines, at your service any time. Creative Commons photo by David Ooms.

In North America, we barely notice vending machines. They dispense soft drinks, water, sometimes coffee (or laundry soap in laundromats). In Japan, however, vending machines have been elevated to a fine art. To an outsider, these machines, called jidoohanbaiki, are ubiquitous — incredibly, there is one vending machine for every 23 Japanese citizens. In Tokyo, you typically see them every couple of blocks, often lined up half a dozen or more in a row. Having experienced them, I think Canadians are missing out on the opportunity to purchase everything from french fries to condoms to fresh flowers without having to talk to a salesperson.

In addition to the expected pop, juice, and water, in Tokyo you will find dozens of exotic green tea flavours (I developed a taste for one called “melon milk”), iced and hot coffee (as many as six or seven varieties in a single machine), cigarettes, alcohol (beer, whiskey, sake), food (rice balls, ramen soup, octopus dumplings, french fries, eggs, 10-kilo bags of rice, and more elaborate meals that you heat by pulling a string that activates a blast of hot steam in the container), fresh flowers, umbrellas, comic books and magazines, DVDs and CDs, clothing (hats, shirts, ties, socks, lingerie), razors, and even toilet paper. Jidoohanbaiki are so sophisticated that some of them can make change from a ¥10,000 note (the highest currency). An age-verification card is used for cigarettes and alcohol, but a new generation of machines now have “face-recognition scanners” to check an individual’s age.

Why does Japan have the most advanced vending machine culture in the world and we don’t? The big surge in them started with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, when millions of people needed to be served food and other goods, but since then the range of products and number of machines has dramatically expanded. One theory is that the Japanese corporate work ethic means that many white-collar workers — known as “salarymen” — go home very late at night, often after sake-drinking marathons with colleagues (hence the cut flowers and beautifully gift-wrapped sweets in many jidoohanbaiki; peace-offerings to bring home to an irritated spouse). And to serve a population as large as Japan’s — 127 million — it’s essential to have easy, 24-hour availability. And the famously modest Japanese prefer buying certain products (tampons, condoms, pornography) from a machine rather than facing a sales clerk. Of course, there is an environmental issue with so many vending machines humming away day and night. To adopt them here, we’d probably need Energy Star models, ones that are fluorocarbon-free, even solar-powered. In fact, these are already being installed. Where? In Japan, of course.

[Creative Commons-licensed photo by David Ooms]

Audience members watch a Pecha Kucha presentation in Tokyo. (CC) Photo by Ami Harikoshi

On an outdoor patio in Kampala, observers lounge in the near-darkness, watching as an image is projected on a bare white sheet slung between two trees. In Reykjavik, a spellbound audience fills a basement bar and waits for the first slide to illuminate the wall. And in Toronto, a crowded pavilion is abuzz as the lights dim and the first presenter takes the stage. In 181 cities speckling the globe, Pecha Kucha is bringing people together for art, design, and change.

The concept is simple: presenters each show 20 slides, and each slide is shown for 20 seconds. Originally created as a way for designers and architects to share new projects and ideas, Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) has expanded to include participants from virtually every field. Presenters include artists, politicians (Toronto mayor David Miller, for example), comedians, and journalists, among others. Though the concept is only six years old, 2008 saw an impressive 370 Pecha Kucha nights around the world.

Perhaps more remarkable than Pecha Kucha’s rapid global proliferation is the face-to-face exchange of ideas and creativity that happens at every event. Word about the presentations has spread largely through the internet, making Pecha Kucha a rare example of a web-based phenomenon that encourages real human interaction.

It has also proved to be a fantastic showcase for unknown talent. “One of the biggest surprises,” says one of Pecha Kucha’s creators, Mark Dytham, a British architect who has been living and working in Japan for the last 20 years, “was that in some of the smaller cities, people would say, ‘That was amazing! We had no idea there was so much creative talent working right here.’ It’s as if people don’t realize what they have right at home, because we’re not really communicating effectively anymore.” Dytham co-founded Pecha Kucha with Astrid Klein in their creative studio in Tokyo.

At a recent Pecha Kucha night in Toronto, Dytham’s cure for ineffective communication was put to the test. Bob Hambly, of the graphic design firm Hambly & Woolley Inc., a thin middle-aged man in a black polo shirt, was the first to present. In a slightly nasal voice, he explained that his presentation would be on “the design and art of nature,” at which point a 10-foot image of a parrot in a wooden box was projected onto the screen behind him.

Hambly launched into a mile a minute lecture on the natural world as creative inspiration. The screen flashed 20 images, among them: Australian salt ponds, an Audubon print of a swan, a nautilus shell that spirals in a perfect Fibonacci sequence, and a dead lamb encased in glass, courtesy of conceptual artist Damien Hirst.

Hambly’s speech proved too long, and his words streamed out with increasing speed to catch up with the slides. The presentation’s climax came when, during a projection of his birdnest collection, Hambly pulled out a real nest, crushed it, and watched it bounce back into its original form, demonstrating the Weaver bird’s knack for resilient design. The audience cheered and Hambly concluded with a quote from architect Frank Lloyd Wright: “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”

Hambly’s presentation served as a six-minute and 40-second highlight reel of a career’s worth of creative inspiration. It is this enforced brevity that discourages obfuscating digressions and promotes precision. Pecha Kucha distills the motivating idea to its essence; clarity, if not always depth, is a happy consequence.

With an event almost nightly somewhere in the world— including regular presentations in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Halifax—Dytham hopes to harness the worldwide enthusiasm for Pecha Kucha to address social, political, and environmental issues that could benefit from the design community’s attention. “I’m tired of going to design conferences and seeing another really funky-looking chair, another really funky-looking building,” says Dytham. “We want to support people who are making things that will improve people’s lives and the world in a tangible way.”

[Photo source: Ami Harikoshi. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0]

Sea Shepherd activists confronting the Japanese whaling fleet, Winter 2009

I just posted Emily Hunter’s feature story from the May-June 2009 issue, because it has some bearing on the current controversy over the EU’s banning of commercial Canadian seal products. Trade Minister Stockwell Day says Canada will take the issue to the WTO to try and force the EU to accept Canadian seal pelts, furs, and Omega-3 pills derived from the hunt. About 6,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador make a substantial part of their income from the annual seal hunt, which kills 300,000 seals per year, and is condemned by animal rights groups for the cruel methods used.

The indignation in Canada over the EU’s decision has been, on the surface, about the economics of the decision: it will hurt the livelihoods of Canadian hunters, many of them Inuit. Whatever your opinion of the cruelty of the hunt—and I’ll be honest, the notion of clubbing an animal to death strikes me as the definition of cruel—this ban will throw people out of work or substantively lower their income in a province that needs jobs more than ever, and that’s a problem.

But it’s not really about economics: this is a sovereignty issue, about whether the EU gets to effectively shut down a foreign industry its members don’t like. Because frankly, the amount of money involved here, about $5.5 million worth of seal products that Canada sold to EU consumers last year, is a miniscule fraction—by my back-of-the-envelope math, about 0.0005%—of total Canada-EU transatlantic trade ($111 billion in 2008). As Emily explains in her article, Japan is in the same boat: the whale hunt there has no real economic impact: the actual market for whale meat is tiny, and the producers make almost nothing selling it. But despite the economic lunacy of sending all these ships around the world for a grand total of $51,000 profit, it continues because Japan doesn’t want to accept the authority of the international community that has declared whaling unethical, unnecessary, and cruel. In both cases, the verdict is in: whaling and sealing are not really viable businesses, but both countries persist in their nationalist posturing out of what seems to be pure stubbornness. There are other ways to help the people whose jobs are at risk, ways that don’t require Canada to mount a complex, longwinded, and no doubt expensive appeal to the WTO.

A whale being hauled up the slipway of the Japanese whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru. Photo by Joshua Gunn

It’s a sight I’ll never forget: a whale being hacked up in front of me, cut into tiny squares, its excess blood and guts discarded. One minute, it was a whole whale; 20 minutes later, nothing but a spinal cord and the harpoon that killed it.

It was February 6, 2009, and I had spent two months in the Antarctic Ocean with Sea Shepherd, the radical conservationist group. Sea Shepherd is notorious for the extreme tactics it uses to stop whaling in the southern oceans each year. Its ship, the M/Y Steve Irwin, had chased and harassed the Japanese whaling fleet for weeks to prevent them from hunting. But on this particular day, the whalers killed in front of us, and at first we could only watch from a distance. But it soon became a confrontation.

The Yushin Maru No. 3, a harpoon ship, attempted to transfer a dead whale to the mother ship, Japan’s whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru, the floating factory that processes whale meat at sea. The Irwin moved to block that transfer by manoeuvring into the Yushin Maru’s path. Within seconds, the boats collided with a loud crash and screeching noise that rang through our ears. The Irwin tipped 30 degrees on its side—it felt as if the ship was going belly-up. I was on the outside deck of the Irwin, hanging on to a railing watching the water approach from below. The Yushin was pushed down into the water by the force of the impact. I can only imagine the crew must have thought they would have to abandon ship. But 22 seconds later, when the two boats scraped apart, all had survived, with only minor damage to the vessels. It was a collision of two boats—but also a collision of worlds.

The Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, along with many of its supporters, argue that the annual whale hunt by Japan is the country’s national heritage, and that efforts to end Japan’s whaling is colonial Western arrogance. The critics, such as Sea Shepherd, claim that the Japanese government is simply playing a “culture card” to stymie criticism. They believe that conservation—preserving wildlife—outweighs any such cultural differences.

However, are eco-issues, like whaling, really a simple matter of culture versus conservation? Are these two opposing sides? Can they be reconciled? And if they are in opposition, is it right for cultural concerns to trump environmental ones? I take the issue personally. In high school, I lived in Japan for a year on an exchange program. I lived with a Japanese host family, attended a Japanese-speaking high school, and grew to love the culture, country, and my new friends: Japan became a second home for me. But my first home is the environmental movement. My parents, Robert and Bobbi Hunter, were ecoactivists who had fought on the first anti-whaling campaigns against the Soviets in the North Pacific in the 1970s. My father co-founded Greenpeace, which has campaigned against the global whaling industry for decades.

So you can understand why, on one hand, I felt it was important to be part of the environmental battle for the whales. But on the other, I believe cross-cultural understanding and co-operation is vital. The issue is more complex than black and white. Japan claims that its annual whale hunt is for scientific purposes. The “research” hunt is run by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which is heavily subsidized by the government of Japan. The ICR studies whale-stock demography and health. To do this, the Japanese whaling fleet targets around 900 Minke whales annually. In addition, each year a different endangered species of whale is targeted, including humpback and fin whales.

Once the scientific data is collected, the whale meat is then sold for commercial use by Kyodo Senpaku, the same private firm that runs the fleet. Selling whale meat for commercial use after collecting it for scientific use is acceptable under current international whaling laws. Recently, however, the hunt has also been called “cultural” by the ICR, which says that Japan is simply continuing its centuries-old cultural practice of whaling. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, among others, dismiss these claims as a smokescreen. If it is in fact commercial and not scientific, that would make the hunt illegal: there has been an international ban on commercial whaling since 1986.

Believing the law is on its side, Sea Shepherd was the lone group to oppose the Japanese whaling hunt in Antarctica this past winter. Sea Shepherd fights the whaling industry everywhere, whether Norwegian, Icelandic, or Japanese. Sea Shepherd’s members don’t buy the cultural basis of the hunt any more than they buy its scientific value. And so the group engages in radical direct action to stop the hunts, such as ramming ships at sea and sinking ships in port, which is why some governments have labelled Sea Shepherd “eco-terrorists.” Its activities have undoubtedly stopped or limited whaling activity around the world.

Some critics, such as Milton Freeman, a specialist in ecology and culture at the University of Alberta, view groups like Sea Shepherd as difficult cases. He worries that their anti-Japanesewhaling line leads to rhetoric that is simply anti-Japanese. Freeman views anti-whaling actions as not just an animal-rights issue, but also a type of cultural bullying. It’s Western ecogroups campaigning against the remaining whaling nations, such as Japan, demanding they cease their hunt and assimilate Western cultural beliefs about whales and conservation.

This is what’s increasingly known in academic circles as “political ecology”—essentially, the politics of nature and the different ways people understand and treat nature. For some, a whale is just another fish in the sea, a resource like any other to be harvested. Others put a different value on a whale, and see a socially complex, highly intelligent sentient being that deserves the chance for a full and healthy life.

Freeman argues that our own Western views on whaling don’t give us the right to attack Japanese beliefs about it: “Seeking to stop a culturally valued activity, in any society,” he says, “is to attack those people’s culture and identity.”

Jun Hoshikawa doesn’t feel attacked. “What is taking place in the Southern Ocean is not part of Japanese culture and traditions,” says Hoshikawa, director of Greenpeace Japan. “There is a difference between coastal whaling in Japan and the industrial hunt in the Southern Ocean. Coastal whaling has taken place for centuries and continues today on a small scale with boats and spears. That can be argued to be part of Japan’s culture and identity … The industrial hunt in the Antarctic was introduced by western countries post-World War II, and is run by the government of Japan today using a six-ship fleet with exploding harpoons and guns, and it kills whales on a mass scale. It was and is purely a commercial industry. I do not call that culture.”

Hoshikawa says 82 percent of people in Japan do not eat whale meat. The profits come mainly from delicacy food restaurants or “public provisions,” where whale meat is provided to high school cafeterias, jails and the military. Mainly, it “goes to people who cannot reject the whale meat,” Hoshikawa says in a phone interview from Tokyo.

In the past, the whale-meat industry regularly produced ¥7 billion annually (US$74 million) in profit. But in recent years, profits have dropped off due to decreasing demand in Japan and unfilled catch quotas because of interference from groups like Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. In 2007, the industry saw profits of just ¥5 million (US$51,000). The government of Japan has heavily subsidized the ICR’s whale program over the years to allow its work to continue, despite the financial loss. The real reason Japan persists with whaling, says Hoshikawa, is not because it is a profitable industry any longer, but because “the whaling issue has been framed through a lens of nationalism. It has less to do with whales or the industry and more to do with protecting the sovereign right of a country.” With so much negative international attention focused on Japan because of its whaling, the country is being pressured by other nations to stop the whaling project. In the last few years, nationalism has crept onto the scene: although the hunt is commercially unviable, countries like Japan that still run whaling hunts now see it as a political defeat to cave in to international pressure.

This is not an abstract issue for Canada: many of the same dynamics are at play when it comes to Canada’s annual seal hunt. On this issue, we are regarded with much the same contempt by the international community that Japan bears for its whaling.

“Every state is sovereign and can do whatever it wants” says Calestous Juma, former special advisor to the chair of the International Whaling Commission and professor of International Development Studies at Harvard University. “You can’t condemn sovereign states for exercising their rights because they will just go ahead and do it.” The International Whaling Commission is the international body that regulates whaling. Over the years, the IWC has sent letters of protest to Japan against the hunt in the Southern Ocean. In the IWC’s 2007 letter, it wrote that the lethal hunt of whales was unnecessary for Japan’s research, and called upon the government of Japan to suspend the whaling program.

But there are no real consequences for flouting the IWC rules, since as Juma says, there is no separate enforcement body for the treaty. The IWC comprises 84 member states that meet once a year to set quotas and regulations on whaling. But without an enforcement body, the regulations are toothless. Norway for example, works outside of the IWC and engages in commercial whaling despite the moratorium. Japan, in contrast, attempts to work within the framework by using the scientific loophole. This is because Japan has a real interest in doing things legally. “They want to be a good global citizen,” says Juma.

Ironically, the Japan Whaling Association states on its website that the purpose of the Japanese scientific research in whale stocks and health is to gather evidence that will lift the moratorium so that commercial whaling can resume. Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, director-general of the Institute for Cetacean Research in Tokyo, says that because the ICR believes whale stocks to be plentiful and healthy, “there is no need or reason to prevent sustainable commercial whaling in the Antarctic under IWC management procedures.”

The international community has reacted, but so far the results have been lacklustre. Panama de-registered the whaling fleet’s cargo vessel late last year, but Japan re-registered it under its own national registration; the Australian and New Zealand governments toughened their stance against Japan’s whaling, threatening to take action legally in international courts. But so far, these diplomatic and legal actions have been unsuccessful or stalled. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in June 2008 that Australia and Japan would simply have to agree to disagree.

Over the winter, a small group of IWC countries have been working at negotiating an agreement with Japan that would gradually phase out whaling in the Southern Ocean by reducing the catch by 20 percent per year for five years. In exchange, Japan would get permission to kill an increased but yet-to-be-determined number of whales off Japan’s coasts in the Pacific Ocean.

The package was developed at the request of the American chairman, Bill Hogarth, a Bush administration appointee. It was intended to be a step forward in ending Southern Ocean whaling and break the deadlock with Japan. However, most environmental groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believe this was a compromise that would both allow Japan to continue its commercial hunt, and effectively lift the global moratorium on commercial whaling. But Japan refused the deal. Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries minister Shigeru Ishiba said, “We cannot accept any proposal that would allow outside countries to prohibit Japan from continuing its research hunt.”

So the question becomes: is whaling simply a question of sovereignty? In this case, does diplomacy trump ethics, leaving the international community powerless to stop the killing? The Japanese whaling industry has cunningly used the term “culture” as a get-out-of-jail-free card—by framing this as an issue of culture or sovereignty, it aims to make any antiwhaling group look like they are colonialist and discriminatory. But the reality is that the hunt is senseless slaughter in service of fake science, a dead industry, and nationalist posturing. The whales should not bear the punishment for our foolishness.

How far are we willing to go—how much environmental damage are we willing to do—in the name of culture, heritage, national pride? None of these things will be of much use in an environmentally devastated land- and seascape.

More than 30 years ago, in 1977, my parents fought to end whaling in Australia. Their protest, in Albany, Western Australia, led to international attention, that culminated in the end of whaling in Australia. It is now one of the strongest anti-whaling nations in the world.

At the end of the anti-whaling campaign I went on this year with Sea Shepherd, I found myself in Australia and decided to visit Albany. What I found there was a miniature eco-haven: a dozen wind-power generators spinning on the horizon and organic crops in the fields. One of the old harpoon ships of the Australian whaling fleet, Cheynes IV, is now an on-land museum, and boats go out every day filled with tourists for whale-watching. The whale-watching industry has now surpassed the profitability of the whale-killing industry of 30 years ago.

I took a boat ride myself to see the whales. We got to see them up close, close enough that I could touch them. They played together in their pod, diving and chasing, waving their fins out of the water as they breached, tails in the air. It’s another sight I’ll never forget.