Award-winning author James Michael Dorsey is known in the Monterey County community. You may have read one of his books (he has published four to date) or listened to part of his six-month-long travel presentation series in the Monterey Public Library where Dorsey discussed vanishing cultures, from Northwest China to Papua New Guinea, from Lapland to Burkina Faso.
“I spent much of three decades visiting vanishing remote tribal cultures, mostly those with no written language through 60 countries,” he says.
Dorsey has simultaneously pursued a second career as a cetacean naturalist, working on whale boats from several California locations while being the resident naturalist in the gray whale sanctuary of San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja Mexico for 22 seasons.
That produced his fourth book, a memoir titled The Lagoon: Encounters with the Whales of San Ignacio, which is a definitive work on gray whales and the indigenous people of Baja California in Mexico. “I return there annually to lecture and take people on the water to interact with the whales,” Dorsey says.
“The Mexican lagoons are the only place on Earth where wild animals in their natural habitat routinely seek out human contact and I have spent hundreds of hours on the water in direct contact with them,” Dorsey says. “Monterey used to be a shore-based whaling station and now it is a marine sanctuary. We have gone from killing these intelligent animals to protecting them.”
The interview will start promptly at 12:30pm, followed by an audience Q&A until 1:30pm.
Read more at jamesdorsey.com.