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At 9:30 a.m. the next day, May 10, 2000, Balcomb stepped to the microphone in the Zenger Room of the National Press Club. He was dressed as usual in casual outdoor clothes. He spoke softly, with little inflection, about "this opportunity to show you firsthand what I saw on March 15 in the Bahamas." He called it "the most unusual event in my life." He played his videotape and distributed copies to reporters. "The main point of all this," he concluded, "is that these animals for the first time were in a fresh enough state where actual damage can be determined. And that's what's going to happen . . . . We will be able to find out what specifically was the bullet that came from the smoking gun."
Balcomb had been careful to report only what he'd seen. He'd been calm and rational. He had talked movingly about his passion for beaked whales. Near the end of the press conference, though, he returned to the microphone. "One more thing," he said. "I was proud to be a military officer in defense of our country . . . . But as I see this [LFA] system developing, I'm not even proud to be an American, if we're going to destroy our whales and dolphins like this."
At the Fisheries Service, Roger Gentry couldn't help but flinch. He appreciated his old friend, yet was wary of him. He never knew what Ken might say or do. That made Gentry jumpy. Like Darlene Ketten, he felt squeezed. It was up to his office to recommend whether the Navy should get a permit for LFA.
In early June, three weeks after the press conference, Gentry took Balcomb aside at a joint meeting of scientists and Navy officers in Washington, D.C. Ken was hurting himself, Gentry advised. If Ken wanted to play a central role in the investigation, he had to "cool the rhetoric." He had to start being "more cooperative with others on the team."
Balcomb never did. In the ensuing weeks and months, he kept turning up the pressure. He posted a detailed report about the Bahamas stranding on MARMAM, an Internet discussion group for marine mammal biologists. He posted another on his own Web site. He wrote letters. He sent e-mails. He sat for print and TV interviews. He mailed copies of his videotape to members of Congress. He urged concerned citizens to "contact your Congresspersons."
A fundamental theme drove his insistently public message. According to the Navy, it had been operating not LFA but older mid-frequency sonar in the Bahamas, and at distances and sound levels that scientists considered safe for whales. Yet these levels obviously hadn't been safe. Balcomb thought he might know why. He thought the sonar waves at certain frequencies might have resonated around the whales' ears, causing tissues to tear much as a wineglass will shatter at a particular pitch.
If this resonance theory were true, it would apply equally to LFA as to mid-frequency sonar. And if it weren't true, then something happened in the Bahamas that couldn't be explained. Either way, the Bahamas stranding raised questions about LFA by suggesting scientists knew less than they thought about sonar's impact.
Ken Balcomb hammered at this notion time and again. On one level the response brought him much satisfaction, for he was being heard. On another level, he felt great disappointment. In the aftermath of his press conference in Washington, he began to realize that most of his colleagues were shunning him. They did more than refuse calls and cut him out of the loop. They railed at him and about him. It felt to Balcomb like character assassination.
Ken Balcomb's great transgression had been to go public. This appalled his colleagues, for it violated their fundamental way of doing business. To them, Balcomb had broadcast premature conclusions. He'd also reported on Darlene Ketten's work, which he had no business revealing. He was derailing the dispassionate scientific process, disrupting the private back-and-forth flow of ideas. What's more, he knew better; for all his maverick ways, Balcomb was one of them.
Or rather, he had been one of them, until he began his campaign. Now few wanted to work with him. Some colleagues called him a grandstander, a loose cannon. Some began to question his motives, asking how much news organizations had paid for his videotape. Some questioned his qualifications, pointing out that Balcomb didn't have a doctorate, that Balcomb wasn't a real scientist, that Balcomb had done nothing for 40 years but photo-identify whales. Bob Gisiner at the Office of Naval Research told him that their revered UC Santa Cruz professor Ken Norris would be ashamed of him. Roger Gentry told him he was just plain wrong to suspect a cover-up.
No one expressed more dismay than Darlene Ketten. That Balcomb publicly distributed a videotape of her at work, making preliminary observations as she dissected, drew her wrath. She didn't appreciate Balcomb's releasing information for her, especially while people were clamoring from all sides. "We weren't stonewalling," she'd say later. "People just don't realize how long it takes to get the data together and figure out what we have."
Balcomb's campaign finally created as much of a political problem as a scientific one for his colleagues. Their outrage at him grew proportionately to the pressure brought down on their shoulders. Some 10,000 letters in defense of the whales poured into Gentry's office, many declaring that the very integrity of the oceans and the global ecosystem was at stake. Ketten found herself obliged to give 44 briefings to Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Bahamian government and a blur of federal agencies. The Navy made itself widely heard, both defending LFA's safety and talking of its "immediate critical need." Calls mounted in the Defense Department for a dilution of environmental laws affecting the military and the seas. So did complaints--one from Assistant Secretary of the Navy H.T. Johnson--that submitting to public environmental review was "like giving away your war plan to the enemy."
In such an arena, it was folly to act as if the major decisions by federal agencies would turn on scientific data. This debate finally was about competing public interests. Depending on perspective, the absence of clear proof became reason either to deploy or delay LFA sonar. The quarrel bordered on the metaphysical: In the face of limited knowledge, do you hold back or inch forward?
There was an even more fundamental question, rarely voiced: So what if a few whales are harmed by sonar? Many more marine mammals annually are hit by ships, caught in drift nets and blasted by noisy commercial freighters. Laws exist to protect these animals, but like most, they're open to interpretation. Even if scientists could prove LFA harmed whales, some in the country would still find reason to argue for its deployment. "I'm not putting my life on the line for endangered species," one Navy commander declared before a congressional committee. "Sonar allows us to keep our sons and daughters out of harm's way."
No wonder Roger Gentry felt squeezed. For 25 years before coming to Washington, he'd devoted himself single-mindedly to an academic study of the northern fur seal, and he looked now as if he dearly missed those seals. "This is not the role I wanted or sought," Gentry grumbled in the weeks before his office had to rule on the Navy's use of LFA sonar. "I'm basically a field biologist. We're stuck in the middle between competing forces. There's so little science. You have to make educated choices. You can only make educated choices."
In mid-August, 2001, Joseph S. Johnson, the Navy's LFA program manager in the Pentagon, called Ken Balcomb at his San Juan Island home. While shepherding the sonar system through the environmental review process, Johnson had received a number of Balcomb's animated written discourses. Now he wanted to meet this maverick scientist.
Balcomb appreciated the invitation. Being shunned and denounced by his colleagues had upset him. Being cut off from Darlene Ketten had especially hurt.
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