Weird Ecology: On The Southern Reach Trilogy – Los Angeles Review of Books

ON A BITTERLY cold day in January 2013, a dolphin was discovered
swimming in the famously noxious waters of the Gowanus Canal in
Brooklyn. A crowd soon gathered by the Union and Carroll Street bridges
and along the banks of the canal. The NYPD showed up to monitor things; a
news helicopter hovered overhead. Living nearby at the time and alerted
by a friend’s text, I went over to have a look. The sight was hard to
credit. There it was, unmistakably a dolphin, swimming slowly back and
forth in one of the most phantasmagorically polluted waterways in the
world. Signs of the dolphin’s distress were evident — a bloody dorsal
fin, periods of what appeared to be torpor alternating with spells of
agitation. After several hours — people standing vigil, snapping
pictures with their phones — the dolphin stopped moving. A hush fell on
the crowd; even the cops looked stricken. The dolphin bobbed in the
grey-green water, inert, manifestly dead. A necropsy later revealed it
to have been ill: riddled with tumors, malnourished, its kidneys
failing.