Boston ? Once upon a college time there was a restaurant in Harvard Square that sold whale steaks. Honestly. Whale was right there on the menu, along with cod and hamburger.

I don’t share this factoid of food history to send little children screaming out of the room. Or to satisfy the curiosity of the epicureans. (OK, it tastes like liver.) I serve it up rather to note how the ethical appetite has changed.

Mind you, this was before Willy, and before environmentalism. Today a whale steak sounds like spotted owl patr panda sorbet. If it appeared on any menu this side of Tokyo, the customers would be hungry for the chef’s head. The only utensils diners would require would be pickets and pitchforks.

In the years since I dined out on this creature, “Save the Whales” has become a rallying cry of environmentalists. And a sneer on the lips of those who disparage “tree-huggers.” Indeed, saving the whales has become a cause and a clichBut maybe now we should think of it as an instinct.

Days ago, about 50 pilot whales were found heaped upon each other on the sandy and blistering shore of Cape Cod. Soon dozens of vacationers and volunteers raced to the water with buckets and coverings, anxiety and energy. Thousands more watched until the tide turned and most of the pod was urged back to sea.

When the whales mysteriously and disastrously returned the next morning, so did the rescue workers. And when the drama ended tragically with death and mercy killings, there was a shared human sense of loss.

This moment of transformation sent me to the historic map. Thoreau once wrote of Cape Cod, “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.” This rescue effort took place on the same treacherous shoreline where men of Thoreau’s generation once hunted and beached pilot whales to harvest the oil from their heads. It happened within an easy sail of Nantucket, the historic capital of the whaling industry.

One man who had tried to herd the huge extended family to safety said, “If we were told to do it again, I would be jumping into the water in a heartbeat, head first.” Another witness said that you cannot see them without wanting to do something.

The cultural descendants of whalers have become would-be saviors. The hunt was “natural” to one generation. Can preservation become equally “natural” to another?

Just last summer we spent $200,000 trying to save a single right whale that became entangled in fishing gear. In Seattle and Vancouver this year, there is a natural soap opera playing out to a huge audience: Will Springer, an orphaned orca whale, find acceptance in a new Pacific pod?

I am no environmental romantic. No Hollywood conservationist. Not even a vegetarian. I fish with an unseemly lust for the catch and a deep resistance to the release. Furthermore, I wonder sometimes whether poster mammals like whales and pandas don’t distract attention from the endangered habitat to the inhabitant.

But each time I read or see one of these stories, it suggests to me the human instinct to save. It raises the question about how to engage and exploit the preserving piece of (our) nature.

I can’t say that this is a promising season for environmentalists. A few days ago, Ford decided to stop making the mammoth Excursion, a vehicle bigger than a pilot whale at 19 feet long and hungrier at 10 miles a gallon. But the SUVs drive on. California has a new strict emissions standard. But oilmen running the White House drill on.

The administration prepares us for war with Iraq by warning of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and the Senate talks about the potential effect of this war on gas prices. But nowhere on Pennsylvania Avenue is there a call for patriotic conservation. Where are the leaders telling us we got pulled into this danger zone by the nozzle on the gas pump?

In the early 1800s more than 15,000 right whales were killed each year to light the lamps of America. Between 1925 and 1975, after factory ships took over, 1.5 million whales were killed, many species to the edge of extinction. We look back at these forefathers and don’t see bounty. We see waste. Is that how we will be seen by our children? As people with an outrageous appetite for excess?

It’s easy to attract a crowd for a local beaching. Harder to keep a crowd for global warming. This whale of a story did not have a happy ending. But this day, I find hope in the bucket-line of people who got quickly, simply, automatically involved. Doing what comes naturally.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.