Whale watching tours in Baja are huge business. So are eco-lodges in the Amazon, run by indigenous tribes who now need English lessons so they can improve customer service for tourists. Polar bear safaris are booming, because people will pay through the nose to go and see the bears before they go extinct: Time Limited Special, Book Now While Stocks Last.

Does it matter?

Apparently the grey whales in Baja are seeking contact. Maybe they know what’s going on, know we’re in charge of it and are making a last ditch appeal. Or maybe they bring their young to the boats so they’ll get a good look at the enemy and know the whites of its eyes. After all, they can’t escape us, so they may as well as know what we are.

Coalitions of multiple individuals and organizations have repeatedly fought the US government in court, to block the use of deep sea sonar, which affects the whales in ways I can only dimly imagine. Loud noises, including distorted music, were played to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay–it was part of the torture. Being an animal that navigates the silent depths of the ocean using sound, singing to one’s kin over hundreds of miles of stillness, how would you feel if suddenly your world were invaded by loud, incessant, uncontrollable, meaningless noise? Maybe the whales can tell the good guys from the bad and are saying, ‘thanks’.

But I can’t help thinking its all a matter of degree. The US government is one thing, but then there are the smaller, well-meaning whackos, with their smaller disturbances. The people that go out in motor launches and put loudspeakers into the water to make music to the whales. The ones that ‘communicate telepathically’ with them. The ones that want to swim with them. It’s like the paparazzi around Princess Diana; apparently harmless, but in actual fact such a nuisance that their cumulative effect may approach unbearable.

Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf have a shocking art installation at the Vienna Zoo that reflects the fact that truly wild animals–and truly wild spaces–no longer exist. Humans have invaded everywhere. The animals are now seen in conjunction with human junk: a defunct car floats in the rhino pool, a drum of toxic waste nestles at the bottom of the fish tank. The art jolts us out of our fantasy that somewhere there is a pristine area out there, so things can’t be all bad.

There’s a truth about the work of these two artists that feels good, even though the images are troubling. Their work exposes the voyeuristic, narcissistic nature of phenomena like the polar bear tours. They are the ultimate in consumerism: getting up there adds to the emissions that are destroying the habitat of the bears these people purport to admire, but they do not care. ‘Who cares if we speed their death, we want to see them for ourselves before they’re gone.’ It’s like scoffing the last piece of pie, even if you’re not hungry, just in case someone else gets it first.

The same with the indigenous Amazonians. I guess it’s great that they’ve got tourism, and want to learn English, but it seems, well, so colonial. We want to visit their ancient culture, but in doing so, we unavoidably destroy it. One day you’re learning English, the next you’re watching MTV and eating McDonalds, and after that your indigenous culture is nothing more than an exhibit in a pay-per-view museum that your own kids can’t afford to visit.

I’d like to see a whale, and see it see me. I hear it’s the experience of a lifetime. But do I have the right to impinge upon them in their own home, while they’re mating? I imagine for them it’s like mosquitoes, all these small, tinny-voiced humans swarming about. I imagine, given everything, they’d love to find the DEET.

There are two types of conservationism: the one which seeks to preserve nature for human good, and the deep ecological one that believes the wild world has its own rights, independent of our uses for it. It may well be that the second is already obsolete, because it is too late. We are inexorably going into a future in which we will live on a designed planet, every inch of which is controlled and managed, if only to prevent poachers and squatters from impinging on areas marked out as preserves. Paradoxically, that will be the only way that we will be able to preserve any degree of natural space as our population expands to the predicted 9B.