WHALES IN THE CITY

Driven from the waters around New York by pollution and overfishing, whales have come back in the wake of a concerted clean-up campaign.

In a somewhat disjointed yet heartening narrative that abruptly switches collective voice midstream from a cetacean “we” to a human one, Castaldo describes how New York (“A great BIG city. Bigger than us great BIG whales”) grew to became a hostile place for marine life, its waters “sickly sweet with smelly, stinky waste.” So away the whales went, until people began cleaning up the trash. “We protested, marched, and voted.” Thanks to concerted efforts and the 1972 Clean Water Act, aquatic populations began to grow again. “We marveled at our river with pride,” and the whales, too, returned. In Groenink’s art, humpbacks arc with sinuous grace through sludgy (later sparkling) waters, poking their heads up to peer back at boatloads of whale watchers. As noted in a dense afterword—which also includes a timeline to 2022 and tributes to some of the activists who led the Hudson River cleanup—sei, North Atlantic fin, and right whales have recently been spotted, too. The groups and crowds of (human) New Yorkers in the illustrations are realistically diverse.

A sincere record of an environmental success story.