A 40-foot humpback washed up on a New Jersey beach last week, and within hours the crowd had split into two camps.
By nightfall, the whale had a name on social media, a drone video with a million views, and a small army of people climbing over its body for selfies.
A marine biologist on the scene described the smell as overwhelming.
A magnificent creature dies in agony — likely struck by a ship, tangled in fishing gear, or poisoned by warming water — and our first instinct is to extract content from the corpse.
Let's be clear about what happened to this animal.
Humpbacks migrate thousands of miles along the Atlantic coast every year.
They sing complex songs, nurse their calves for nearly a year, and live into their fifties.
They are among the most intelligent beings in the ocean.
And we have turned their migration route into a shipping lane, their feeding grounds into a warming, acidifying bathtub.
Scientists have documented a spike in humpback strandings along the East Coast since 2016.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called it an "unusual mortality event." That's bureaucrat-speak for "we are killing them faster than we can count." But the whale itself isn't the story anymore.
Something has gone wrong with the way Americans relate to the natural world, and a dead whale on a beach is as good a mirror as any.
We used to treat such moments with reverence.
Local papers printed solemn obituaries for beached whales.
Now we livestream the bloating carcass and argue in the comments about whether touching it is "insensitive" or "just curiosity." Curiosity is fine.
There's a difference between wanting to understand a creature and wanting to stand on top of it.
Consider what the whale's death actually represents.
The ocean absorbs roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide we pump into the sky, and it's choking on it.
Warmer water pushes the small fish humpbacks feed on into new territory.
Hungry whales follow their food into shipping channels.
And still we show up to the beach with our phones out.
But there's a reason the same crowd that swarmed the whale would never dream of climbing on a human corpse at a funeral.
We just don't apply that knowledge to animals.
The humpback is not endangered anymore, technically.
Instead, it became permission to stop paying attention.
Delisting, it turns out, is just a bureaucratic way of saying "good enough, move on." Meanwhile, the whale on the beach rots.
Tomorrow there will be another dead thing, and another crowd, and another round of think pieces about whether this time we finally crossed a line.
The humpback whale didn't die so we could film it.
It died because we weren't paying attention — and then we paid attention for all the wrong reasons.
The real question isn't what killed that whale.
It's what we've become that makes a corpse into a backdrop.
Final Thoughts
If we can't treat a dying giant with dignity, we've got bigger problems than a single beach.