Currents
How to cite this section: Farnum L., Becca, and Marie Comuzzo, “Listening for Peace,” Listening With Whales, 22 September 2026, https://listeningwithwhales.org/currents/#listening-for-peace.
Listening for peace
Building bridge between people who deeply care about whales is also a practice of peace building. Whales have historically brought people across many countries and nations together to find ways to collaborate and limit exploitation. Today, these negotiations continue. In Polynesia and Oceania at large, environmental leaders, kings and queens, musicians, and other cultural bearers are working to push governments to recognize tohorā and koholā (whale in Māori and Hawai’an) legal persons throughout their whole migratory path. Read here the declaration and explore more about more-than-human legal rights.
At the same time, artists, musicians, scientists, poets, historians, traditional cultural bearer, who are also grieving environmental activists, are creating knowledge and performances to move people to action. Across these pages and the different ways of listening, many different approaches and forms of listening highlight a common thread: our oceans are becoming noisier and this is having very dramatic repercussions on cetaceans and other marine inhabitants’ health.
In their sonic project “Whale Song, War Song” and musical performance and composition “Echolocations,” respectively Becca L. Farnum; and GRE, Drew Crawford, Pablo Galaz, and Benjamin Olive invite people to listen from the perspective of a whale, who slowly gets engulfed by sonic pollution and anthropogenic (human created) noise.
Written by Rebecca L. Farnum:
“In 1958, Prince Wan Waithayakon of Thailand made history at the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea by advocating for “the common heritage of mankind” as a guiding principle. The idea became enshrined in international environmental law, with the International Seabed Authority formed to oversee collective benefit.
“The Area”, as the seabed beyond national jurisdictions is known, took on a special legal status – one that would seem to pave the way for a new approach to global ‘commons’, and has informed international cooperation over aerospace and the Arctic.
But despite this remarkable normative advancement in international law, serious concerns about peace and conflict in the deep sea continue to arise. Colonial histories of enslavement and forced migration have transformed the ocean floor into a mass grave chronicling one of humanity’s most horrific and long-lasting atrocities.
Today, new forms of extractive colonialism continue to wreak violence, as demand for critical minerals places political pressure on the ISA to permit more and more mining ventures, resulting in noise pollution and habitat destruction.
Whale Song, War Song is an audio artpiece informed by sound ecology and political economy documenting the sonic warfare that corporate greed is raging on our beloved Ocean.”
Echolocations, co-composed by GRE, Drew Crawford, Pablo Galaz, and Benjamin Olive tells the story of a whale who can no longer connect with other whales because of the ever-growing cacophony in the ocean, but also the in the casual apparently autonomous and extrapolated, empty aleatory ever-changing structure. The performance mirrors and exasperates these histories of colonial oppression by marginalizing, engulfing, capturing, silencing, and eventually swallow the oppressed: the whale, who is the only obvious “person” in the space, but is also the one whose rights to exist are in jeopardy. The others are not clear identified people, they are agents of oppression, or momentary friends, or yet, the peaceful environment that is home becoming a war-zone of sonic violence. Read more here.
These projects both arguably invite people to “erosically attune” and grieve with whales to awaken our shared political imagination and work alongside each other to create a better future, one that cannot happen without building capacity for discomfort, change, and accountability. For more on strategies for collective change, check also out AK Press Emergent Strategy Series; “Flipping the Tide”; and “Immersion in Discomfort.”
“My hope, my grand poetic intervention here is to move from identification, also known as that process through which we say what is what, like which dolphin is that over there and what are its properties, to identification, that process through which we expand our empathy and the boundaries of who we are become more fluid, because we identify with the experience of someone different, maybe someone of a whole different so-called species.”
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Undrowned
to be continued…
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