Touched / Tocado: Revelations at San Ignacio Lagoon: Spirit, Science, People, Politics [Paperback]

Laguna San Ignacio, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, comes alive in the essays within Touched/Tocado. Michael Branch writes the essays are "ingeniously organized as a four-stranded narrative which deftly braids the perspectives of a poet, a cetologist, a fisherman, and an activist to offer an informative and inspiring story of how this unique whale nursery was protected and preserved." 

ENGLISH

Laguna San Ignacio, along the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico, is one of the most extraordinary places in the world. It is the centerpiece of the Vizcaíno International Biosphere Reserve, which holds beautiful and complex stands of mangroves and dazzling assemblies of seabirds and shorebirds, their wings aglow with ocean light. Within the waters of the Lagoon thrives a full suite of marine life in all its mystery and richness. Not long ago, it was all at risk, but was conserved from ruinous development by a legendary effort of science-based conservation.

Such is the setting. The Laguna has an eminent place now not just in Mexico, not just in the Americas, but in the imagination of the world. It is the winter breeding and birthing ground of the gray whale. Just here, and nowhere else on Earth, the whales will approach a boat: they will come to be touched, to play, and to romp and frolic with their newborns, who rise to our hands with antic curiosity and affection. They bring not just themselves: they bring a new world, the one even now in creation. 

Here is the Laguna. It is a place of transformative power and beauty, of wonderment of being literally in touch with so intelligent and generous a life form.This book is meant to show the whole: in four essays, it unites spirit, science, people, and activism. It is the union we can use to make a future together. 

A Non-Profit Publication – Proceeds will be donated to gray whale research al³’