Don Baur, the Whale Sanctuary Project’s legal counsel, passed away on December 15th after a long battle with cancer.
By Lori Marino
I met Don Baur in 2015 when I was putting on a workshop with my friend and colleague Naomi Rose at a conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy in San Francisco. The workshop was about what it might take to create a sanctuary where whales from marine entertainment parks might be retired. We had asked Don to give a short talk about the legal aspects of this.
Don knew more about the issues we might face than anyone else. Just for starters, he’d served as legal counsel to the Keiko Project (which was managed by Charles Vinick, now our Executive Director). Keiko had been the orca in the movie “Free Willy” and Don had helped all through his journey from a small concrete tank in Mexico City to his return to the ocean off the coast of Iceland.
He kept saying, “You have to do this.”When Don and I sat down together after the workshop, I told him I was seriously thinking about how we could create a sanctuary. He couldn’t have been more encouraging. He kept saying, “You have to do this.” He was totally engaged. And all through that first early period, when we were starting to put the organization together, Don helped guide what we needed to do to bring the concept into reality.
At our early board meetings, when we were just feeling our way, Don was like a barometer of whether you were suggesting something crazy or, or not. He was just a steady influence by his knowledge and his temperament. It made you feel comfortable. Then he introduced me to Charles Vinick, whom he’d worked with on many projects from marine mammals to conservation to renewable energy. And soon after Charles joined the board of the Whale Sanctuary Project, Don pressed him to consider taking on the executive directorship.
“That’s what led me to changing direction from the things I was doing at the time to take this on full-time,” Charles says.
Soon after that, we began what would be a two-year effort to find the best possible location for a sanctuary. We were looking at sites all over the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. and British Columbia and then in Nova Scotia. And when we talked them through with Don, he would always cut directly to the issues we would face in any site we were considering. In the U.S. he knew all the challenges we would face in marine mammal protection and in locations where it would be challenging to get the permits we’d need. And even though he wasn’t an expert in Canadian law, he could extrapolate from his knowledge to provide us with helpful guidance as we narrowed that search to Port Hilford Bay.
He would always cut directly to the issues we would face in any site we were considering. Charles and Don were on the phone to each other almost every week. “In many organizations I’ve been involved in,” Charles says, “the general counsel is mostly a legal advisor. In Don’s case, he was always far more engaged in every aspect of the organization, not only its legal responsibilities or requirements. So, he becomes like a board member who doesn’t necessarily vote but is an advisor on every element of the work.”
When he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, he never let it interfere with his work. He was even on the phone with Charles the Sunday before he passed away. “He had been advising us on things related to our Whale Aid work with Tokitae (“Lolita”) at the Miami Seaquarium. And he was still fully engaged on that day, taking notes and discussing how he could help. It is very difficult to come to grips with his absence and so very sad that he is not still with us.”
Don’s bio is stunning in its breadth and depth. He was a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Perkins Coie. He had served as General Counsel of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission and as an attorney advisor in the Office of the Solicitor for the U.S. Department of the Interior advising the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And he worked in dozens of related fields ranging from renewable energy to Native American law issues.
Don taught federal wildlife law at the Golden Gate School of Law. He was also on the summer faculty of the Vermont Law School, where he taught ocean and coastal law. Delcianna Winders, the director of the school’s Animal Law and Policy Institute, writes: “Don spent hundreds – most likely thousands – of hours doing pro bono work to help whales, sea otters, and other animals, and oceans, parks, and other environmental interests … He championed the creation of our animal law and policy program.”
After she heard that Don had just passed away, one of his former students wrote to me saying: “Don touched so many lives and I am grateful to have been among them. [He was] the most reliable, genuine, inspiring, supportive, caring, selfless person I have ever known. His legacy will live on through the work of so many who he elevated and mentored.”
It’s difficult to see how any other one person can fill the void that’s left in Don’s absence. “It will take multiple people from multiple places,” Charles says. “But it won’t be a single phone call like ‘Hey Don, what do you think?’ That was how I worked with him for decades.”
Don was not only our lawyer, general counsel, advisor and friend, he was also a mentor to so many young people who are now attorneys in the fields related to the Whale Sanctuary Project. These are people who will carry his legal legacy forward. We can only hope that they will adopt a small part of his compassion, grace and selflessness.