Don Baur Obituary, Death – I first got to know Don Baur in 2015, when I was in San Francisco for a conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy along with my good friend and fellow researcher Naomi Rose. We were hosting a workshop for attendees of the conference. The topic of discussion at the workshop was what it could take to establish a refuge where whales from maritime amusement parks could spend their retirement. Don was invited to deliver a brief presentation on the legal implications of this matter at our request.
Don was the only one who had a better understanding of the potential challenges we could face than anyone else. To begin, he had previously worked for the Keiko Project as legal counsel (which was managed by Charles Vinick, now our Executive Director). Don assisted Keiko throughout his adventure, which began in a small concrete tank in Mexico City and ended with the orca’s release into the ocean off the coast of Iceland. Keiko had played the role of Free Willy’s orca, Keiko, in the film. Following the training, Don and I had a chance to sit down together, and I mentioned to him that I had been carefully considering the ways in which we could establish a refuge. It is impossible to overstate how encouraging he was. He insisted that I had do it over and over again. He was wholly absorbed in the activity. And all throughout that very early phase, when we were beginning to put the organization together, Don assisted us in guiding what we needed to do in order to make the notion into reality.
In the early board meetings that we had, when we were still getting our bearings, Don served as a kind of a barometer for determining whether or not the ideas that were being proposed were outlandish. Because of his extensive experience and even-keeled demeanor, he was nothing more than a steadying influence. It enabled you to relax and enjoy yourself. After that, he introduced me to Charles Vinick, with whom he had collaborated on a variety of projects, ranging from those involving marine animals and conservation to those involving renewable energy. And not long after Charles became a board member of the Whale Sanctuary Project, Don put a lot of pressure on him to think about applying for the position of executive director.
According to Charles, “it was what pushed me to change course from the things I was doing at the time in order to take this on as my full-time occupation.” Almost immediately after that, we started the process that would last for the next two years in order to discover the ideal spot for a sanctuary. We investigated potential locations all throughout the Pacific Northwest, including in British Columbia, the United States, and finally Nova Scotia. And when we went through them with Don, he would always jump right to the problems that we would have to deal with at the various potential locations we were looking at. He was aware of all the obstacles that we would face in the United States with regard to the preservation of marine mammals and the regions in which it would be difficult to acquire the licenses that we would require. And despite the fact that he was not an authority in Canadian law, he was able to extrapolate from the information he already possessed in order to provide us with helpful direction as we focused our search on Port Hilford Bay.