“The right whale is one of the rarest whale species, and it has a special distinction in the history of human affairs. Every species of animal that we have brought to extinction has occupied a limited area--an island, an archipelago, a continent. We have never in our tenure on earth brought to extinction a truly cosmopolitan species, one with a worldwide distribution. 'The closest we've ever come is with the right whale,' Roger [Payne] explained over dinner, 'and we came so vanishingly close. It would have represented a new benchmark, a new low, the lowest, the most careless, the most outrageous thing that humanity had yet done to the planet. The fact that our generation is now making the effort to prevent that extinction is evidence that we're waking up at last. In that sense, the right whale is an important bellwether of the human condition.'”