Several hundred scientists, government officials, and environmentalists gathered for an unusual two-day conference in Newport, Oregon, last week, entirely focused on a single species: gray whales.

It was an urgent meeting. The number of gray whales along the U.S. West Coast has recently plummeted by the thousands, falling by half in the last decade. The leading theory is that climate change has been causing the whales’ food source in the Arctic to dwindle. And the situation seems to be getting worse. This past summer, 187 gray whales washed up dead on beaches across the region. So far, the Trump administration has largely ignored the problem. 

The attendees at the conference, who came from across North America, were there to share as much as they knew about the animals. Bill Keener, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Center, a nonprofit in …

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