The Harrison Bergeron Effect is already a reality for the world's whales. The other day I read the following from The Rise of Endymion:

. . . humanity's giant oil tankers and ocean going ships deafened the world's whales by filling their seas with mechanical noise, thus drowning out their Life Songs- destroying a million years of evolving song history before human beings even knew it was being sung. The whales all decided to die out after that; it was not the hunting of them for food and oil that killed them, but the destruction of their songs.

Obviously, like Star Trek IV, this is a fictional forecast of an extinction which hasn't actually occurred. Not yet, anyways. Yesterday, I was reading the Globe and Mail, and came across this small blurb in the science column:

Bang -- you're beached! Researchers in the United States are trying to see if the air guns that ships use to pierce the seabed in their search for oil might create sound waves that confuse whales. The bangs could explain why a pod of whales near where a ship was firing its guns recently became so confused that the animals drove themselves up on the beach.

There was a time when ambient noise levels in the sea were low enough that whale pods could communicate across entire ocean basins. But not anymore. Acoustic pollution from ships, subs, SONAR and more are muddying the waterwaves, so to speak, and we are only beginning to catch on to the detrimental effects this is having on the world's whales. As far as doing anything to reduce noise pollution, we have yet to take the first steps.