 | In December 2003, I interviewed Alexandra for Women of Vision, Creativity and Courage. WMH: What is your vision?
ABM: To be able to understand the intelligence in a non-human mind, to know what another species is thinking. On land, we have the largest most intelligent brain. In the ocean it's the whale. Currently, I am not aware of a method that can access this information.
Where is the information for their language, is it in the silences between calls, is it in the pitch, is it telepathic?
WMH: And a second question?
ABM: What is their belief system?
WMH: What touches you most about the orca?
ABM: Their sense of family it's pivotal for them. And they appear to have a tremendous capacity for love within each pod [family].
WMH: How has courage played a part in your vision?
ABM: I am afraid of both whales and water.
WMH: WHAT!?
ABM: It's true.
WMH: How do you deal with it?
ABM: I deal with it every day, my curiosity leading me on.
WMH: How does creativity come into play on your journey?
ABM: I was raised to think that I could succeed, that there are endless paths and when I encountered a brick wall, I was told to try another path. You could say that creativity was bred into the bone.
WMH: Would you give me an example?
ABM: Yes, when I first moved out here my focus was to study whales, then I noticed that they were disappearing, along with the overall health of the wildlife environment. There were disturbing signs. For example, algae blooms: an explosive growth of one organism what we would a call a cancer inside our bodies. Sometimes it has a poison, sometimes it slashes fish gills to ribbons, sometimes it suffocates fish species. The bottom-line is, it's a run-away growth that kills the very living system in which it's contained.
This creates a domino effect: the pink salmon the main food source for whales, bears, and eagles was becoming infested by the millions by lice. The culprit of all of this was the fish farms. The raw sewage from the fish in these farms create the algae blooms, which have such a large impact on the surrounding environment.
I decided I had to do something about this. First I wrote letters ten thousand pages worth of them then I went to meetings, then I met with politicians, then I decided to get the answers myself, to do the science myself, to demonstrate to the world what the heck is going on here. If people are willing to see salmon farms destroy this coast, so be it, but I was not going to let this go on in secret.
WMH: I thought farmed fish were an environmentally-friendly alternative to wild salmon?
ABM: Please visit www.farmedanddangerous.org , look at the facts there, and you be the judge. Here are only a few facts taken from the site: "There are presently 85 open net cage fish farms operating in the coastal waters of British Columbia, producing waste that is equivalent in impact to the raw sewage from a city with five million inhabitants." "Acoustic Harassment Devices (AHDs) have been used to scare off predators such as seals and sea lion. These underwater noisemakers are extremely loud and can lead to loss of hearing in marine mammals. Research shows that they also change the behaviors in some marine mammals such as killer whales (orca) and harbor seals, driving them out of an area. "Preliminary research indicates farmed salmon have up to 10 times more PCBs and dioxins than wild salmon. People who eat between 1 and 3 servings of farmed salmon per week are exposed to an amount of contaminants which exceeds the safety level set by the World Health Organization."
WMH: How did you respond to these problems?
ABM: If the health of the Pacific Northwest coastline is allowed to deteriorate unchecked, the wild salmon and surrounding wildlife will be headed the way of the buffalo. And they are the ecological blood-stream. If they go, there is a domino effect.
I was deeply concerned about this possibility. I took the measurements of the problem, and compiled a comprehensive database of the salmon, the sea lice and the various diseases they were catching, carrying and spreading. I cataloged them, taking smear samples, securing them in vials, labeling and dating each one, from which fish (adult or juvenile, male or female), and from which areas these samples were being found.
This was an immense endeavor, and no one could have accomplished this kind of exhaustive work alone. Thankfully, I was helped by many good people who shared my concern. You get nowhere without allies, they are the life-line to realizing a vision.
I then located individuals whose whole life's focus was studying sea lice and the environmental repercussions that would necessarily follow from massive infestations. They in turn were very excited to have all this information, and they readily gave me the recipe for how to research this evidence more thoroughly. The end result was a series of papers I wrote with these international PhD's, people with a legitimate and scientific background as my co-authors, a feat unusual in that scientists rarely publish outside of their field of expertise [Alexandra has been able to accomplish all that she has in her field without a formal academic degree, an unheard-of feat], insuring that these facts could no longer be ignored.
WMH: How did the fish farms react?
ABM: Not well. They felt I was threatening their jobs. This is ironic, because they were destroying the very environment they depended upon for their livelihood.
I am a mother first and foremost and the future of my children is at the heart of all that I do. My passion, my reason for moving to Canada from the United States, was to study whales. I never wanted to get involved with fish farms, corporate headquarters and swabbing lice off of dead fish!
However, when I noticed that the very environment that home to these intelligent, magnificent creatures was being disassembled, I could not in good conscience stand by and watch idly. I am a fingertip of the human collective, beaming signals back from this beautifully pristine part of the planet, reaching out to communicate that an important element in our life-support system is being rendered incapable of supporting life. People are often immobilized by the illusion that they are powerless, but that is not so. The power of one is all we have, but we all have it. We possess the choice to fuel our own demise or not, through what we choose to buy and eat. The power to tip the scales for a healthy planet is in our hands.
If you are interested in learning more about and supporting Alexandra's cause please go to www.raincoastresearch.org.
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