🌿Wild Ones #90: Environmental Communication Digest

Soundings: Journeying North in the Company of Whales + Environmental keyword: Acoustemology + Ecolinguistics + Hearing Heat + More!

Oct 31, 2024

Whale illustration, Edo Era, 18th-19th century. Artist unknown. Source: Tokyo National Museum.

Hi everyone, happy Halloween! And welcome back to Wild Ones, a monthly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in environmental communication. If you’re new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Ones here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:

🌱Environmental Keyword

‘Acoustemology’: (acoustics + epistemology) a “knowing-with and knowing-through the audible”… acoustemology emerged in the context of [Steven Feld's] work on the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea and their intricate knowledge of the sounds of their rainforest environment.” – from Questioning Acoustemology: An interview with Steven Feld.

“The sense of place: the idiom is so pervasive that the word "sense" is almost completely transparent. But how is place actually sensed? How are the perceptual engagements we call sensing critical to conceptual constructions of place? And how does this feelingful sensuality participate in naturalizing one's sense of place? These questions guide my inquiry into the sensing and sensuality underlying how places are named and poetically evoked by Kaluli people of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. My desire is to illuminate a doubly reciprocal motion: as place is sensed, senses are placed; as places make sense, senses make place. Because sound and an ear- and voice-centered sensorium are central to Kaluli experience and expression in the tropical rainforest, the goal of this exploration is to interpret what I call an acoustemology, by which I mean local conditions of acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination embodied in the culturally particular sense of place resounding in Bosavi.”
–Steven Feld, in “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” In Senses of Place, edited by Stephen Feld and Kieth H. Basso. (1996).

📚 What I’m reading

I’ve had whales on my mind for most of October while slowly reading through Doreen Cunningham’s wonderful 2022 memoir, Soundings: Journeying North in the Company of Whales. The book traces Cunningham’s journey with her two-year-old son as they travel north following the annual grey whale migration from Mexico to Alaska.

Cunningham’s memoir begins with an experience early in her journalism career as a BBC climate correspondent when she covered a story examining the impacts of climate change on an Iñupiat Indigenous whaling community in Utqiaġvik on the North Slope of Alaska. The chapters alternate between her time in Utqiaġvik, and her journey years later following the grey whale migration from Baja, Mexico to Alaska with her two year old son in tow.

A wonderful map of Doreen Cunningham’s journey, created by the creative cartographer Jamie Whyte.

At one point in the book, Cunningham writes about research on the diversity of whale song and vocal repertoires. Suddenly curious about the soundscape of a whale’s underwater world, I put the book down and got sidetracked for a good chunk of the day researching (or googling) my way into into the fascinating field of whale communication science, from the cultural transmission of songs across generations of humpback whales, to emerging research exploring possibilities for ‘interactive playback experiments with sperm whales.’ Much of this research expresses a desire to understand what whales ‘mean’ with their clicks, calls and songs, and therefore how we might one day understand, and maybe even participate, in whales’ otherworldly conversations. Coming back to the book again after a while from my googling digression, I read another passage from Soundings that sends me off into the whale web again. Cunningham writes,

“In the dark of winter, under the sea ice of the northern Bearing Sea, there are voices. Aġviġit [plural, singular: aġviq], bowhead whales, Balaena mysticetus, like to sing. Many mammals have calls but few sing. The repertoire of an aġviq is rivalled by only a few songbirds.”

Here, Cunningham cites the work of Kate Stafford and her colleagues at the Norwegian Polar Institute and Oslo Natural History Museum whose research explored the songs of Bowhead whales off the coast of eastern Greenland. “If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz,” says Stafford,

“We were hoping when we put the hydrophone out that we might hear a few sounds [but] when we heard, it was astonishing: Bowhead whales were singing loudly, 24 hours a day, from November until April. And they were singing many, many different songs.”

I was especially curious about what an increasingly noisier ocean means for whale communication. Is it impacting their hearing? Do they have to ‘yell’ at one another to get their message across the ocean? Are strandings an indication of an increasingly unbearable acoustic environment for whales? As the noise from oil platforms, cargo ships, sonar, deep seabed mining, and whatever other anthropogenic sources of steadily increasing background noise reverberate through the ocean depths at louder and louder frequencies, how are water-bound beings like whales adapting? Or are they?

Wondering about these questions, I googled a bit deeper and discovered an interesting 2016 article in the journal Environmental Humanities by Max Ritts and John Shiga entitled ‘Military Cetology.’ The authors examine how the science of cetacean bioacoustics, which explores how whales ‘use sound to see’ has been entangled from its beginning with the US Navy’s intense interest in understanding the sound-making abilities of whales as ‘acoustic animals.’ This interest in whales, of course, grew from a militaristic desire to control the oceans in the decades following World War II, and a recognition that the whales’ unique sound-making and listening abilities could have a “definite bearing on our national defense.” In the subsequent decades, the US Navy funded institutes like the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard, or the Bio-Sonar Lab at Stanford (both of which no longer seem to exist), revealing the blurry boundaries between the US Navy and academia that characterised the emerging field of cetacean research in much of the later half of the 20th century.

If the military and the field of cetacean bioacoustic science had a collaborative relationship in the beginning, over the past two decades that relationship has disentegrated, Ritts and Shiga write. In 2005, the the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), filed a lawsuit against the US Navy because of its use of mid-frequency ‘ear-splitting sonar,’ inflicting ‘acoustical trauma’ on whole populations of whales. The use of this sonar has been linked to mass-strandings, such as when over 150 melon-headed whales beached themselves in Kauai when the NAVY used mid-frequency sonar during the annual RIMPAC games in Hawai‘i. Sidetracking again, I read through the extensive NRDC report about “The Rising Toll of Sonar, Shipping and Industrial Ocean Noise on Marine Life.” The report is a fascinating piece of scientific communication. The authors of the report write:

“Some biologists have compared the increasing levels of background noise in many places off our coasts to a continuous fog that is shrinking the sensory range of marine animals…It has become increasingly clear that the rise of ocean noise presents a significant, long-term threat to an environment that is utterly dependent on sound”

“An environment that is utterly dependent on sound.” When I read that it reminded me of the sound anthropologist Steven Feld’s notion of acoustemology, a word which combines ‘acoustic’ and ‘epistemology’ to point to a way of “knowing-with and knowing-through the audible.” When cetacean researchers began listening to whales, these were efforts to eavesdrop on whales’ underwater interactions. The hope was to begin deciphering what this darker and wetter world might be like from a ‘whale’s ear view.’ But in the process, listening to whales has radically transformed not just how we understand whale communication, but how we understand the ocean itself as a vast, richly interconnected communication network of sound-dependent beings. Acoustemology is not the catchiest word, but it does point to the idea that through learning not just to listen to other species, but listen with them, we might begin to catch a glimpse of how other species experience the world. In other words, if we take a key ecological lesson from living in our radically entangled and interdependent world, better listening out for other species might help us to learn about what matters to them, and therefore what should probably matter to us too.

As an environmental keyword, the idea of acoustemology suggests new ways to think about an old question about animal minds, namely: what is it like to be a whale (or a bat, or a dog, or a sea turtle….)? In his foreword to a 2010 edition of biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s 1934 book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Dorion Sagan writes about blue whales’ capacity to communicate across hundreds of miles of ocean. In that book he introduces Uexküll’s idea of Umwelt to capture a sense of the distinct ‘perceptual universes’ that different animals inhabit thanks to their radically diverse bodies and sensory sensitivities to their environments. In trying to imagine what a blue whale’s sensory experience of the world might be like, Sagan writes,

“For any punk rock or heavy metal fans out there, consider this. The threshold of pain to the human ear is 120 to 130 decibels. A jet engine is about 140 decibels. Concert music, at its loudest, is 150 decibels. Blue whales, comparatively, belt out their vocals at 188 decibels. Their communications are time-delayed because of water. They may, in their giant Umwelten, have fabulous multisensory pictures of major portions of the ocean, images that, even if we had direct access to them, we couldn't process, because our brains are too small. They may experience time in an extended way compared to our sense of time, even as their native ocean-imaging abilities likely far surpass our own” (23-24).

The ‘multisensory pictures of major portions of the ocean’ that whales might think with and through is a fascinating idea to wonder about. But another thought soon pops up in my mind that is much less wonderful: that just as we beginning to shed light on the diversity of animals’ mental worlds, these worlds are disappearing. It’s an idea that’s been written about before by journalists and researchers, but it’s one that environmental scholar Eileen Crist puts well, I think:

“In the last two decades, two momentous realizations have presented themselves to humanity. One, we are in the midst of an anthropogenic crisis of life —an extinction spasm and ecological unraveling that is heading the biosphere into an impoverished biogeological era. And two, in the course of history, especially the history of domination-driven Western culture, humanity has tended to deny or underestimate the mental life of animals.
Besides the coincidence of their timing, the coming into knowledge of biodiversity's collapse and of the hitherto-unrecognized richness of animal minds appear entirely unrelated events. Yet there is an urgent connection between the contraction of life's diversity and the dawning appreciation of animal minds: just as we are beginning to recognize that we share the Earth with beings of extraordinary physical and mental complexity, we are losing that shared world.”
– Eileen Crist, Ecocide and the Extinction of Animal Minds, in M. Bekoff (ed) Ignoring Nature no More: The Case for Compassionate Conservation (p. 45).

I’ll stop rambling on whales here, but I thought I’d share some other books on whales that I’ve read, or hope to read at some point in case they pique your interest. And if there are other whale books out there you recommend, please share your in the comments!🙂:

Have read and can recommend!:

Floating Coast: An environmental history of the Bering Strait, by Bathsheba Demuth (2019).
Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. By Susan G. Davis (1997)

On my reading list!:

The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, by D. Graham Burnett (2011)
War of the Whales: A True Story, by Joshua Horwitz (2014)
Fathoms: The world in the whale, by Rebecca Giggs (2021)
The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. By Adrienne Buller (2022):

“A team of researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently posed a simple question: what is the value of a whale? The researchers settled on an even $2 million per specimen (great whales only), summing to an impressive $1 trillion for the existing global 'stock'. They based their calculation on whales' contributions to eco-tourism revenue (ironically detrimental to whale populations themselves) and their robust capacity for carbon sequestration: over their lifetimes, on average great whales capture the equivalent of 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide more per pound than a tree. Recognising the potential for this stock, if allowed to return to its pre-whaling population, to sequester 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, the IMF researchers earnestly suggested investment in whale conservation over other carbon capturing methods. They estimated the cost of such conservation at a modest $13 per person on Earth. $13- that's the value of a whale, as it turns out, to you or me.” – Adrienne Buller, The Value of a Whale

-And this short film on Underwater Noise by Ocean Care:

And a couple more whale resources I’ve shared here before on Wild Ones:

🐳Scientists Find an ‘Alphabet’ in Whale Songs: Sperm whales rattle off pulses of clicks while swimming together, raising the possibility that they’re communicating in a complex language. Carl Zimmer, NYTimes. May 7, 2024 (Read the research article in Nature here: “Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations”)
Save The Wild Podcast. Episode 4: Helping Whales By Helping People:

“Whales of Guerrero is an inspiring research program on Mexico's Pacific coast. From studying humpback whales to promoting education and public health, this organization empowers the community of Barra de Potosi to solve its own problems. This inspiring program is a model for how conservationists can protect wildlife by meeting the needs of local people.”

🎧 What I’m listening to

Episode 9. Why Open + Climate?

“On this season of Data Dialogues, we're exploring the intersections of the open and climate movements. Each episode, hosted by Madhuri Karak, features an interview with a practitioner who is using an open tool or open approach to tackle a climate problem. Whether on local or global scales, these stories highlight why open in all its forms—open science, open source, open data—is key for climate action.”

Camille Dungy on her garden, writing from the provinces, and the poetry of Anne Spencer. Poetry off the Shelf podcast.
Beings Seen and Unseen: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh. Emergence Magazine

“Look, for many of us, no matter how hard we try, we’ll never be able to be in communication, if you like, with beings of other kinds. That faculty has been educated out of us. You could say all of modern education is essentially aimed at suppressing that faculty. But there are people in the world—and there have always been people in the world—who have been able to communicate with nonhuman beings. We know that.”

Translation, Rage, and What Is-Was-Willbe: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka. Edge Effects podcast
How Net Zero Killed 1.5. An interview with James Dyke. Planet: Critical podcast (interesting discussion about ‘climate messaging’ from the 30 min mark.)

👀What I’m watching

Hearing Heat: An Anthropocene Acoustemology: “Hearing Heat is an intermedia composition that meditates on the climate of history, listening to histories of listening from the Papua New Guinea rainforest to nuclear Japan to ancient and contemporary Greece. It proceeds through continual recombinations of visual and sonic media, with photographs, graphics, animation, and cinema dialoguing with ethnographic field recording of indigenous song, ambient environmental sound, cinema soundtracks, electroacoustic and radio composition, and vocally performed text.”
The Scientist's Warning: “The Scientist's Warning is a film about the journey one scientist takes after one of his research papers sparks a global movement to address the challenges facing our planet.” By Oregon State University and the Alliance of World Scientists.
Greta Thunberg Talks to Photojournalist Motaz Azaiza About Gaza and the Climate (Oct 26, 2024)
Denali, a film by Ben Moon:

🔍 Tools, Networks & Resources I’m exploring

“The cumulative effect of prevailing approaches to climate planning and action is to downplay rights-based, place-based, demand-side, and people-centred climate action strategies. With climatic tipping points looming, these are strategies the world cannot afford to miss – especially when the evidence shows they produce durable, sustainable climate action outcomes. How best to not only fill these gaps but transform climate planning itself – and urgently? One answer is clear: give cultural voices a seat at the climate planning table.”

H-EcoLit: A network for Environmental Humanities, Literary Theory and Cultural Criticism, supported by the H-Net at Michigan State University.

📰 News and Events

🚨Conference: 18th Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE) at the University of Tasmania, June 23-27 2025. Abstract submission deadline extended to November 7!

Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024 Winners Gallery

Amid haze of war, Lebanese activists helped turtle hatchlings journey to sea. By Amélie David in Mongabay. (Sept. 25)
Reporter who revealed deforestation in Cambodia now charged with deforestation. By Gerald Flynn and Nehru Pry in Mongaby (Sept 27) (for more context).
Scientists criticise UN agency’s failure to withdraw livestock emissions report:
Academics say there has been no serious response from FAO to their complaints of ‘serious distortions’ in report. By Arthur Neslen in The Guardian (Sept 30)
A helpful explainer about ‘Amoc’: ‘We don’t know where the tipping point is’: climate expert on potential collapse of Atlantic circulation: Oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf explains why Amoc breakdown could be catastrophic for both humans and marine life. By Jonathan Watts in the Guardian, (Oct 23).

📚 Research

Surveying ecolinguistics. By Sune Vork Steffensen, in the Journal of World Languages (October 14, 2024).

“This article presents a comprehensive and detailed survey of ecolinguistics, defined as an enterprise oriented to how language plays a role in the interactions between human beings, other species, and the natural environment.”

‘Wonderful Productions of The Frigid Zone’: Polar Ice and Climate Change in Early Nineteenth-Century British Discourse. By Björn Billing in the new journal Climates and Cultures in History.
The semiotic repertoire of dairy cows. By Leonie Cornips, Language in Society (online first) 1–25:

“This article moves from the familiar—the human—to the very different in so- ciolinguistics—the dairy cow. Based on multispecies ethnography, the aim of this article is to advocate the animal turn in sociolinguistics (Cornips 2019). The guiding question is how do non-human animals, that is, dairy cows— mutually and with humans—imbue their intraspecies and interspecies inter- action with meaning that makes sense for the two species.”

The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth, By William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W Gregg, Johan Rockström, Michael E Mann, Naomi Oreskes, Timothy M Lenton, Stefan Rahmstorf, Thomas M Newsome, Chi Xu, Jens-Christian Svenning, Cássio Cardoso Pereira, Beverly E Law, and Thomas W Crowther. In BioScience (October 8, 2024).

“Despite six IPCC reports, 28 COP meetings, hundreds of other reports, and tens of thousands of scientific papers, the world has made only very minor headway on climate change, in part because of stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel based system.”

Challenging the neutrality myth in climate science and activism. By Christel W. van Eck, Lydia Messling & Katharine Hayhoe in npj Climate Action (October 5, 2024).

“We argue that Büntgen’s (2024) claim that climate science must be separated from activism is fundamentally flawed. Activism does not inherently lead to biased science and striving for value-free science is both unattainable and undesirable. Instead, we advocate for redefining the boundaries of acceptable influence of values in scientific communication and offer practical strategies to move beyond the misleading myth of neutrality.”

Electric feels: The role of visual methods in energy ‘futuring’. By Joe Bourne, Jordan Collver, Mary Flora Hart, Ola Michalec, Aude Nasr, and Lizzie Ormian in GeoForum, Sept 30, 2024). “‘How would you feel about computers telling you how to save energy?’—was just one of many questions we asked our participants engaging with four artworks commissioned for the 'Electric Feels' project. In this paper, we tell our story of this unique art-research collaboration, share the illustrations themselves and reflect on the power of visual methods to galvanise a new type of public conversations related to emotions, energy and digital innovation.”
Activating Ecocentrism: How Young Women Environmental Activists Produce Identity on Instagram. By Brittany Hannouch & Tema Milstein in Environmental Communication. (Sept 25, 2024)
#Nature is trending: Social media, viral landscapes, and digital environmental activism in Oman. By Sean Smith, in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (August 5, 2024).

💡 Ideas

What’s everyone got against throwing soup? Let's actually look at the evidence base behind radical tactics. By James Özden in Understanding Social Change.
On Climate Week and Toxic Positivity, by Amy Westervelt in Drilled (Sept 29):

“I often feel in these spaces like I shouldn't share bad news or point out wrongdoing, and especially like I shouldn't temper some of the enthusiasm around incremental improvements by pointing out their downsides. But I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade, and I'm not "being negative," I'm telling the truth because that's my job. Here's another truth: we need both good news and some realism about the struggles still to come; we need to hear about all the available solutions and we need to make sure none of them are bullshit, because we do not have time to waste.”

What do we really learn from trail cams? Documenting wildlife can bring us back to nature. By Ruxandra Guidi in High Country News. (Sept 27)

An interesting thread on ‘responsible scientific activism in an era of planetary emergency’ from Aaron Thierry, a PhD candidate in climate communications at Cardiff University:

How do you describe a sacred site without describing it? Western journalism puts Indigenous reporters in a tricky position where values don’t always align. By B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster in High Country News. (Sept 27):

“Handling information amid these tensions, created by different value systems, is the challenge and responsibility of a journalist. Of course, we can’t get into all this in the draft itself. So the challenge remains: How do you write about a sacred site without saying why it’s sacred, in a way that will help non-Natives care? There’s no clear dividing line between too much information and not enough. It’s the liminal space in which a lot of Indigenous affairs reporting takes place.”

5 ways to get out the vote for climate in the final days before the U.S. presidential election: Stressed out about the election? Turn it into action. By Claire Elise Thompson (Oct 30)
How Factory Farming Ends: The fight against the meat industry has been rocky. Can it be won? A series of articles from Vox's Future Perfect:

“If the cost to animals wasn’t bad enough, industrial animal agriculture also spells peril for us: It fuels antibiotic resistance and zoonotic disease threats that keep scientists up at night. It’s a massive environmental liability, emitting what researchers estimate is between 14 percent and 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and devouring more than one-third of the planet’s habitable land.”

🗃️ From the Archive

“The story of climate change, both its history and its future, needs to be told by people who have already experienced injustice and disempowerment, people who are justifiably angry at the way the system works. And some of those stories are beginning to be told.”
– Amy Westervelt, The Case for Climate Rage (2019). In Popula

💬 Quote I’m thinking about

“If we grant that language is a group-evolved phenomenon that records signs older than and more time-tested than any individual human, we must boggle at the bewildering possibilities of potential biocommunication systems of an estimated extant ten to thirty million species, trading signs with each other and across species boundaries. As Nietzsche intimates, it begins to look increasingly ridiculous for us to indulge our delusions of possessing a radical cleverness, some sort of ur-Umwelt that would separate us as if by an "abyss" (as Heidegger puts it) from other animals.”
Dorion Sagan, in the introduction to A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, by Jakob von Uexküll 2010, p. 23.

“Undersea noise pollution is like the death of a thousand cuts. Each sound in itself may not be a matter of critical concern, but taken all together, the noise from shipping, seismic surveys, and military activity is creating a totally different environment than existed even fifty years ago. That high level of noise is bound to have a hard, sweeping impact on life in the sea. Regulating these sound sources can be difficult, but one has to start somewhere. Every breath we take is dependent on the ocean. And unless we really understand how that vast system works and take better care of it, it isn’t just the ocean that’s in jeopardy. It’s our whole future that’s at stake.”
– Dr. Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist, national oceanic & atmospheric administration

Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this digest useful, please consider sharing with others who might find it interesting too😊 I'd also love to hear from you. Leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest, what areas of environmental communication you’re involved in/most interest you, or anything you’d like to see more of in Wild Ones:)

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