Listening Globally with Whales
This ever-growing interactive globe highlights the countless humans and whales encounters, and the ways they changed how we relate to them, with focus on the musical and legislative ways. Click on it to interact and explore!
In the 1970s, the theorization of humpback whale vocalization as song and the widespread reception of their singing through the album Songs of the Humpback Whale slowly eroded the idea of whales as silent unintelligent beings. People listening to these recordings and imaging themselves through the experience of a whales in the ocean predated by industrialized commercial whalers, practiced erosic listening, letting themselves be moved by the their vocalizations, grieve with them, and then take actions to change. Arguably, listening to whales sings and attempting to listen with them, contributed to a massive re-orientation of people’s moral compass. Many started to care about whales and the ocean, and collective action through Save the Whales and other movements. So many listened for change, believing that a better future was possible. Learn more about how that happens historically, musically, scientifically, and ancestrally.
But what does it mean to listen for change more broadly? In a world where so much is wrong, we ask to also focus on the countless ways in which collaborative hopeful change is already happening, not to bypass the bad, but to foreground the reality that change, and doing better, is possible, and many already are doing it. Listening here is not hearing, it is an intentional discerning compass that practices listening for what is already in motion and for those initiatives within humans and more-than-humans that are eroding the status quo and helping create a better future. In this sense, listening for change is an orientation towards what is already changing. Imagining ourselves through the other, being-with rather than observing or being distant.
Check out Blue Corridors, a global collaboration working on protecting whale migration that offers an interactive experience that collects 30 years of data to show the many different threats humans cause to whales and how whales move across the ocean.
