There is some risk for any reviewer to critique a book to which he or she has contributed, but quite honestly I felt humbled to be included in this collection of "the best of Orion Magazine". The essays include thoughts on everything from digging up a wild Christmas Tree by Barbara Dean, to being both an environmentalist and a real estate developer by Wallace Kaufman; from the performance shamanism of David Abram, to a science fiction story by yours truly, Jim Nollman, about tagging whales as viewed from the late 21st century.

I took this book along as my only reading on a 100 mile solo backpack across the northern tip of Baffin Island this summer. It was a good choice, probing and insightful; helped my eyes, ears, and heart open more fully to the silent wilderness.

...Magic then, in its most primordial sense, is the experience of living in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every natural form one perceives, from the swallows swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass and indeed the blade of grass itself--is an experiencing form, and entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different than our own. (David Abram)

...The number of people with firsthand experience in the land continues to dwindle. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities. The family farm is in a state of demise, and government and industry continue to apply pressure on the native peoples of North America to sever their ties with the land. In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come to be something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling–the packaging and marketing of land as a form of entertainment. (Barry Lopez)

...When Saint Antony cleared a little garden, desert animals trampled the beds. Antony caught one of the unknowing offenders and asked the animal why he was harming Antony when Antony was doing nothing to harm him. The solitary saint then commanded the animal not to come into the garden again, and in apparent obedience to his orders, the local wildlife ceased trespassing on the cultivated area. In another version of the story, Jerome reports that the animals, wild asses in this instance, returned after the rebuke from Antony, but only drank water and never again molested the vegetable patch. The animal's obedience to Antony's word was a sign of the man's holiness. (Susan Power Bratton)

... It is now extremely difficult for us to grasp the late twentieth century worldview that depicted nonhuman species as unpossessed of any powers of perception beyond the bare rudiments of consciousness. Immersed as humans were within the deadness of this view, how easy it was to go about the late twentieth century business of eradicating so many species.

(Jim Nollman)

Yet another important book from Beyond Words, who seem to be remaking the image of the coffeetable book from a piece of literary furniture to a source of deep inspiration. I consider this particular edition to be the most quotable book of the year for all aspiring nature writers and seekers. One small complaint, is that the writer, Harvey Arden is actually the editor, and credit thus seems misappropriated. This book mostly contains the words and stories of living and recently deceased native elders. The photographs give context to their words.

...The spiritual heritage of Native American People is here--it has not been extinguished. I believe the spiritual fire still burns and is beckoning for America, indeed, the world, to come closer to listen, to learn, and to share the warmth and comfort...the grandfathers and grandmothers are in the children. If we educate them, our children tomorrow will be wiser than we are today.

...You got to be careful with these things. There's no heavier burden than being a healer. (Vernon Cooper, Lumbee)

...Birds have always been important to the Indian because they go where they wish, they light where they may, and they're free. We take these feathers from the birds. We use them in our ceremony because they remind us of the Creator. The eagle flies highest in the sky and so he is the nearest to the Creator and his feather is the most sacred of all. (Buffalo Jim, Seminole)

...God made everything so simple. Our lives are very simple. The only law we obey is the natural law, God's law. We abide only by that. We don't need your church. We have the Black Hills for a church. And we don't need your Bible. We have the wind and the rain and the stars for our Bible. The world is an open Bible. (Mathew King, Lakota)

...There is no word for "nature" in my language. Nature, in English, seems to refer to that which is separate from human beings. It is a distinction we do not recognize.The closest word to the idea of "nature" translate to refer to things which support life.

(Audrey Shenandoah, Onondaga)

Lone Wolf Circles is the chief troubadour of the Deep Ecology Movement. This collection of his drawings, poetry and ruminations tells his story well, and gives all of us an inkling of one powerful path to spiritual and environmental peacemaking.

...Run, lion! Run! These mountain sides would not be the same without your sensual touch, your sacred touch. Run from the killers and the condos that spell your doom in dollar signs. Your every move is a perfected ballet, a complete poem one must deserve to see. The deer owe their strength and alertness to you. The wild turkey owe their pounding wings to you. Run, Lion! Run! You are the spirit that fills me.

...Being the son of the hidden wild things,

I was the one chosen
Unexpected,
The snow blew in like sleep
Against the Winter Pale.
All things hush
At this mellowing tune
of falling crystal,
A lively dance that blends.
The fasting wolf,
Teeth bared to an ally wind,
gumming its essence,

then biting its freezing fate.
Watch: fur hood blown back
My face hardens into illusions of warmth,
the ashen color of firepit rock.
Gone like smoke,
The paltry whims of my species.
I am snow's promised groom,
inheritor of children's crystalline delight.

This a difficult book, at once a brilliant moral discourse on the problems besetting contemporary culture and yet suffering from the disease of punditry--finding redemption through the advantage of analyzing a problem succinctly without ever solving it.

Anderson takes the point of view that our culture has become so saturated with belief systems that we now tend to wear them as fashion and treat them as fads. As a result, we perceive our belief systems as social constructions of reality.

If Anderson would only stick to his analysis, this would be one of the great books of our time. Unfortunately, he also insists upon playing libertarian judge with every belief system he confronts. Nothing that imposes sanctions on our current behavior (or his theory) makes the cut into the next century. It makes me wonder if any critic of belief system would ever be able to believe anything on its own behalf.

...One of the many questions the green/bioregional story fails to confront is personal choice. Although strong in its advocacy of genetic diversity, it is weak in the area of psychological and social diversity. The Greens have little to say about how to deal with people who just don't want to live simply in their bioregions, who want to live in another bioregion, or to travel all over and be world citizens or to identify with communities--of science, art, and religion, for example--that have no geographic base at all. No way to deal with such people except to sermonize about their wrongness. The trouble with ideological stories that decide how everybody should live is that sooner or later the person who tries to turn the prescription into reality finds it necessary to use force.

...A new superculture comes into being, wraps itself around the globe

...Like hermit crabs who skitter about in tidepools wearing the shells of dead snails, we don old belief systems that do not always fit too well, and go about our business. Most of us now are not so much believers as possessors of beliefs. Conversion comes easy and often. The seeker after religious faith tries on not one religion, but any number of them. Conservative intellectuals point proudly to their renounced Marxism. And a dazzling toolkit of contemporary methods--everything from the brainwashing of individuals to the propagandizing of entire nations--is employed to get people to drop this belief, pick up that one, adjust to fit another.

Every so often, we receive a coffeetable size book in the mail from a publisher named, oddly enough, Facts on File. Two of their more recent offerings are exquisite examples of the fine art of jumbo-sized nature books, and definitely deserve some promotion. The first thing you notice about Bird Flight, by Robert Burton ($24.95), is the deft choice of seemingly impossible photographs of birds landing and taking off and soaring and flapping and gliding. While the photos come from many sources, the text is all Burton's. He translates what may sometimes seem the utter mystery of flight into a concise language reminiscent of aeronautical engineering. Yet the way he weds the awesome mechanics of flight with such zoological issues as preening, predator evasion, and feeding behavior makes for a great read. The picture of a barn owl preening its feathers has to be one of the great bird pictures of the world.

The Restless Kingdom, by John Cooke, utilizes the same basic format of quite unbelievable photos drawn from many sources all brought together under the banner of animal mechanics. Unfortunately, at $49.95 it probably won't be seen very many places besides libraries. This book offers its readers a more general exploration of animal movement than the above one. Cooke's writing is often poetic and yet he still offers a concise explanation of how and why animals evolved to move as they do. If this book stands out, it is primarily because there are so many sharp photographs of creatures you never thought existed until you see them here. I was especially taken by his description of an entire class of tiny insects that developed to live and move entirely along the surface film of fresh water. The trick is getting your body to produce 'surfacants', chemicals that markedly reduce surface tension. When surfacants are released by the backside, the water rushes in, which in turn propels the animal forward.

In conclusion, consider Bird Flight a zoologist's text beautiful enough to be displayed anywhere, while The Restless Kingdom is the epitome of a high quality coffeetable book definitive enough to draw the serious attention of zoologists.

Speaking of large formatted books, a few readers have asked me where I get all the crazy line drawings that so often pop up in The Interspecies Newsletter. Actually, my very favorite source is Richard Huber's Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological Creatures (Dover), which has page after page of bizarro drawings taken from sources as varied as Picasso, ancient Egypt, and the Sepik highlands of New Guinea. I fell in love with this book, not only because its selections represent the outer reaches of human imagination, but because the drawings are newsletter size and can be easily handscanned into a desktop publishing program.

Lionni is best known for his cut-paper illustrated children's books (my own kids love the story of Swimmy, the fish who organized his school to fit together to form a giant fish).

On first glance, Parallel Botany seems to be a biology textbook describing an obscure class of plants. In fact, the book is a peerless parody of a dull biological treatise; a dry text about nonexistent plant characteristics, with much added information about nonexistent habitats, nonexistent tribal people who used the plants for various nonexistent medicinal purposes, and finally, the nonexistent Western Botanists who brought the nonexistent plants back to nonexistent civilization. The book is an eccentric masterpiece, although, most unfortunately, it may also be out of print. Sometimes I wonder if I own the only copy that was ever printed, and yet I can only find mine on the first day of every other month. An example merely whets the appetite for more:

...Kamikochi decided to take a closer look at the flowers and so started walking toward the hilltop. On the way he realized that something very bizarre was taking place. Unlike what usually happens when we approach an object we have seen from a distance - it gradually appears larger until, when we are near enough to touch it, it assumes its proper dimensions - these plants did not seem to get bigger as the biologist approached them. When Kamikochi reached the hilltop they turned to be just as small as they had appeared from a hundred meters away.

One of the best resources for anyone interested in learning more about ravens; and especially about how one field biologist went about studying one group of ravens over several year's time. Heinrich first became interested in ravens one winter when he noticed them sharing their food and then setting forth in the very atypical behavior of summoning other ravens to join the feast. Over the next four years he sat out in the Maine snow and learned to identify the meaning of several of their calls as well as various postures and their often playful social behavior. If you have ravens near your house, read this book. But don't let it be your only source; go get a book of Haida or Kwakiutl myths to round out your interest. Otherwise, you will learn a lot about ravens and almost nothing about the protocol of coexisting with ravens.

Although Ravens in Winter possesses the aura of a book that will win all the nature-writing prizes, But it lacks something essential. Heinrich expends far too many pages describing the cold rigor of his research, and ignoring how he actually feels about his subjects. Having said that, the book should be very appealing to young biologists searching for methodological tips from a mentor. He is obviously happiest convincing his own peers about some strange raven behavior, or figuring out an apt way to display the hard data of his research.

What I'm trying to say, is that he tries too hard to play the role of the doubting zoologist involved in the "knotty problem" of discovering a rationale to describe the behavior of dumb animals who somehow still seem to act smart. When Heinrich tells us that the ravens appear wise, (as they so often appear in American Indian mythology), it is always within the context of being a species within the small-brained bird class. Thus, ultimately, wisdom gets categorized as a characteristic describing human beings, although other species, including ravens, sometimes appear to be emulating it.

If you read this book, also read the myths. Here's an excerpt:

...it dives and rolls like a black thunderbolt out of the sky or speeds along with liquid, gliding strokes. The raven is the paragon of the air, and more. It is assumed to be the brains of the bird world, so its deep, sonorous penetrating voice demands immediate attention and respect, even though we have little or no idea what it says. It has greater variety of calls than perhaps any other animal in the world except human beings.

A remarkable little book from a publisher that seems to specialize in remarkable little books that discuss the reinvestiture of the spiritual into our lives. This one focuses on the power of sacred places around the planet. I regard Swan's book as one of a small breed of books that successfully translates traditional spirituality into modern terms without losing the heart in the process. It makes me want to visit more of these sites and stay longer.

"...Modern medicine gives little attention to the power of place in aiding healing. This is out of keeping with its traditions, as its Greek father, Hippocrates believed that some places had healing values for certain diseases, while others seemed to make people worse."

This is a "bridging" book that illuminates the long overdue connection that must develop between animal rights advocacy and spiritual ecology. It starts from the premise that animals are people, and then draws a respectful picture of their richly varied personalities, intellect and especially their artistic talents. In that last, lies my only nagging complaint. Kowalski puts too much emphasis on any animals "talent" to emulate humans. On the other hand, what Koko the Gorilla has to say about death puts the entire thesis of the book on very firm footing.

Rick O'Barry is a political animal, easily the most dedicated of the animal right's activists who avow the position of keeping dolphins free and in the ocean rather than in the filtered pools of human beings. This is the position we at IC also take, if never so actively. We have long been supporters of O'Barry in his role as the planet Earth's most outspoken advocate against the oceanariums where dolphins jump through hoops, an act which the industry's promoters somehow manage to couch as an educational opportunity. Perhaps so, although the children who watch are learning something far more important about human greed than animal behavior.

We likewise applaud his successful efforts to put an end to the navy's programs that teach dolphins how to kill and maim, as well as his vigilance against the scientific community's ill-conceived programs that train captive dolphins complex intellectual games in order to add a bit more rationalist data to the world's already bloated baggage of unethically-won facts. Now that we all know that a dolphin can see its own image in a mirror while a crocodile or a worm perceives another crocodile or another worm how has that helped the cause of dolphins, worms, or crocodiles? Buy this book, not only for a tale well-told, but also to support Rick O'Barry's work.

...It was the dolphin's show; divers were like supporting actors, comic relief for the clever stars. (pg 82)

..."Flipper" was family entertainment, a show that children and their parents could enjoy watching together. The "Flipper" stories were about people who love and trust each another and who have a problem that can be solved only by their pet dolphin. There was never an underlying message to the stories, unless you count the basic message that life is good and so are we.

...Like any other fictional character, Flipper existed only in art. Though he seemed as real as life, or more real actually, as art is supposed to be, Flipper was an illusion, an elaborate fabrication, the work of hundreds of talented people, who came thousands of miles and spent tens of thousands of dollars all to create the legend of a fabulous creature combining both actual and imaginary delphoid powers with that of a family pet specially blessed--as all of them are when we love them––with human intelligence. That Flipper was more imaginary than real can be said of anyone who presents himself to the public. Cary Grant used to say that even he wished he could be the Cary Grant portrayed in films. When I try to nail down who Flipper really was, I think not of dolphins who played the role or who were perhaps tricked into it, nor the fictional character we see on the screen; I see mainly myself.

...Joe and Rosie were nobody anymore. For all those years their lives revolved about the wishes of their human counterparts, their own lives became a humanized mess. Their confinement was especially unfortunate. As we discovered early on, they were less than compatible.

If you have ever felt slightly overwhelmed by a close encounter with a whale at sea, then take a look at this book to see how many other people have described the same event. The rise in whalewatching worldwide has made Whale Tales a natural to find the light of day and, in fact, when I first heard about the book, I wondered why no one had thought of publishing such a collection before. Now that I've read it, I think every whalewatching operation in the world should give a copy of Whale Tales to its patrons the night before they set out to sea. The books greatest strength is that it contains first-person accounts from ordinary folks. This democratic format adds an innocent honesty–like that found in an American primitive painting–to the often inexplicable electricity that so often develops when humans meet whales.

This strength also stokes the book's only flaw. Non-writers may feel the exact same wonder and awe with the whales as writers do. But they do not possess the literary experience (or just plain talent) to delve deeply into the place where language excavates profound emotion and that is often what this formidable interaction between species demands. As it is, the same basic event retold forty times begins to repeat itself.

...They had their mouths open with eel grass hanging out of them: eel grass in their baleen. We were photographing this because we thought it was interesting behavior. Then one whale came by and charged at us. We thought, "Well, maybe he's going to be friendly." He swam around the bow, then came back and charged again across the stern.

...This time the whole boat shuddered and the mast and the rigging vibrated violently as though it were about to go over the side. At the same time, the stern of the boat was lifted about six feet out of the water. The wheel was wrenched from the helmsman and spun freely. We were dead in the water without steerage and without any rudder control. We realized that we had run into a California gray whale which had been resting just beneath the surface, and he had then attacked the stern of the boat.

This book is for the metaphysician who resides somewhere in all of us, although front-and-center in just a few of us. It tackles the transcendentally slippery albeit definitively archetypal subject of animal souls and afterlife. Animal Immortality is well-researched and well-written which, on its own, bucks a too-common trend of the mystical literary genre to be poorly composed while always grasping for straws. Best of all, the book is thought-provoking which is precisely why my own rational mind permitted itself to get swept along by the author's basic premise. If you're looking for a provocative hit about how animals think, feel, behave, be (and not to be), then check out this book. Reading it aloud to your kids is light years more vital than taking them to SeaWorld.

...A new picture of life is unfolding. Until recently we have thought of life in terms of physical substance. Somehow, out of the bundle of mechanical and chemical properties, sprang our emotions and thoughts. This was the position of science and therefore the basis of most people's beliefs. While an opposing camp suggested that the mind was independent of the physical body and merely occupied it as a medium through which to function within material existence, this was a position reserved for the religious and metaphysically inclined. For the most part it was held that the secrets of life would need to be found within the atoms, molecules, and cells of living organisms.

...If all life forms have no real limitation in time and space and everything can affect everything, then we are faced with the awesome conclusion that states of physical, emotional, and mental health are subject to alteration by energy fields both close at hand and extended to an unknown distance in space.

...At the first light of dawn the chimpanzee troop returned. In funeral silence they all assembled in a wide circle around the doll. Slowly a few of them ventured closer. Finally, a mother with a baby clinging to her abdomen stepped forward out of the silent circle. Cautiously she approached the 'victim' and sniffed at it Then she turned to the assembled horde and shook her head. Thereafter, each ape slowly departed. Only one chimpanzee crippled by polio remained sitting beside the corpse.

The author suffers from autism, although she may be unique for having taken the nearly miraculous leap to self-healing and now lives a relatively normal life. The in-depth description of her own thought processes demands that the reader wholly reassess what the mind is and does. Whereas most people think in lingual terms, Ms. Grandin thinks in pictures. Mention the word bridge and most people conjure up an abstract bridge. But Grandin has no such abstract facility. She sees, in excruciating detail, every bridge she has ever experienced firsthand. As if her description of the autistic mind is not enough, the author then goes on in great detail to postulate why her own thought processes closely reflect the way certain animal species perceive the world. Grandin works as a consultant for the livestock industry, serving as a kind of savvy translator for the perceptions of cows. That she has achieved such a success in her chosen field makes it very clear that does know something special about how a cow thinks. This book is must reading for anyone who wants to know more about the thought processes of animals. Reading Thinking In Pictures bolstered my own long-held conviction that certain cetacean species are masters of communication although they will never talk as fluently as a two year old human child. It's the wrong question.

...When a well-respected animal scientist told me that animals do not think, I replied that if this were true then I would have to conclude that I was unable to think. He could not imagine thinking in pictures, nor assign it the validity of real thought. Mine is a world of thinking that many language-based thinkers do not comprehend. I have observed that the people who are most likely to deny animals thought are often highly-verbal thinkers who have poor visualization skills.

...Throughout my career I have worked on systems to improve the treatment of livestock. The principle behind my designs is to use the animals' natural behavior patterns to encourage them to move willingly through the system. If an animal balks and refuses to walk through an alley, one needs to find out why it is scared and refuses to move.

...People ask me all the time whether the cattle know they are about to be slaughtered. What I have observed over the years and at many meat plants is that the things that frighten cattle usually have nothing to do with death. It is the little things that make them balk and refuse to move, such as seeing a small piece of chain hanging down from an alley fence. For instance, a lead animal will stop to look at a moving chain and move his head back and forth in rhythm with its swing. He isn't concerned with being slaughtered; he's afraid of a small piece of chain that jiggles and looks out of place.

...When I put myself in a cow's place, I really have to be that cow and not a person in a cow costume. I use my visual thinking skills to stimulate what an animal would see and hear in a given situation. I place myself inside its body and imagine what it experiences. It is the ultimate virtual reality system, but I also draw on empathetic feelings of gentleness and kindness I have developed so that my simulation is more than a robotic computer model.

...Animals have the ability to generalize even though they do not use language.

...It is very likely that animals think in pictures and memories of smell, light, and sound patterns. It seems silly to me to debate whether or not animals can think. To me it has always been obvious that they do. I have always pictured in my mind how the animal responds to the visual images in his head. Since I have pictures in my imagination, I assume that animals have similar pictures. Difference between language-based thought and picture-based thought may explain why artists and accountants fail to understand one another.

Books have been written on every conceivable aspect of interspecies communication, most of them trying to answer the basic question of whether animals can communicate. The Interspecies Newsletter sometimes focuses on that question. But just as often, we prefer to turn that concept on its head to pose another critical question that doesn't get asked often enough: who among us is capable of listening to them?

In his recent book Listening to the Land, (reviewed next) Derrick Jensen asserts that some individuals and even entire cultures listen to nature far differently than we do. These people are more receptive to the animals. They tend to treat nature and all that comprises it as an extension of their own immediate family, neighborhood, and local community. The result is that they listen differently, observe differently, and most importantly interact differently. Both their relations with animals and their basic comprehension of what is possible in interspecies communication is entirely different. To such people, the question of whether or not animals communicate may seem like utter nonsense because it is so obvious that they do.

Peter Beamish merges all these questions into a single thesis that affirms communication between species as a function of an entirely new idea of what it means to listen. But be prepared, his book is abstruse and the concepts he presents are formidable in the same way that quantum physics is challenging for a layman to comprehend. The communication abilities of humpback whales, and even the whales themselves, are described in the same extra-perceptual way an atomic physicist might discuss subatomic particles or Stephen Hawking talks about time going both forward and backward. We may understand what Hawking and the others are saying, but it doesn't exactly make sense because it bears so little relationship to the way our own senses actually perceive the world.

Likewise, the concepts about interspecies communication that Beamish presents do not often gibe with the way we actually listen to the world. On that note, it seems important to add here that Beamish is both a physicist and one of the world's most distinguished whale scientists. he has been working with humpbacks for decades off the east coast of Canada. His ideas seem to encompass concepts we often regard as telepathic and even clairvoyant. In that regard, his work reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake's concepts of morphic resonance. It also reminds me of the bubble art drawings that grace the cover of this newsletter. The rat is a good example.

Here is what most of us think of when we consider the way that whales (or any animal) communicates. The animal makes a series of sounds. These sounds encode signals, signs, messages, and possibly symbols. We hear them. But in Beamish's "rhythm-based communication" (RBC) we don't necessarily hear any special sound. In fact, we may not hear anything at all because our ears are not necessarily the receptors of this form of communication. The result of this communication may be that the cells of our body vibrate more in synchrony with their cells. Just as important as WHAT the animal does (or sings or vocalizes) is WHEN the animal does it. That, of course, is the basis for his utilization of the idea of rhythm.

Or here's another way to think about it. I recently spoke to Beamish on the phone. He told me that of all the concepts presented in my writing about whale communication, the one that seemed most aligned to RBC was my statement that, while working with orcas, no type of music worked better than any other type. What seemed to interest the whales most, was not our musical virtuoisty (or lack thereof), but whether the musicians onboard were having a good time together. In other words the musical groove was everything. "Yes," he commented. "The groove is a good way of thinking about RBC."

But I will say no more since that I am already near the limit of my own comprehension. My intent is to whet your appetite but not to muddy the waters with my own garbled interpretation of a thesis that Beamish, himself, takes such pains to explain.

But before permitting Beamish to present parts of this thesis in his own words, let me conclude by stating that anyone with a mechanical and physical interest in interspecies communication (as opposed to an intuitive interest or a harmonic interest or a mythical interest or an emotional interest or an environmental interest) needs to read his book.

One note. Most of the quotes below are actually taken from a talk Beamish gave about his book at a recent United Nations conference. I favor them here because they explain his thesis in a concise and condensed form and thus seem more apropos to excerpting. But they are excerpts and are only meant to portray a silhouette of a very difficult subject. Enjoy!

...Consider a different form of communication where energy also travels along the known sensory pathways but where information is encoded in "perceptions of lateness" measured in rhyrthmical, two-dimensional, rotating time called RBT or "rhythm-based time". Let a) the two dimensions of RBT be (mainly) orthogonal to conventional time and b) the "RBT Plane" containing this new type of time proceed in a forward direction along the arrow of conventional time at the above-mentioned conventional rate (diagram 1).

Synchronization is defined as occurring at the same time. Two synchronized turning wheels have locations on one wheel that repeatedly occur at the same relative positions of turning, and at the same times as similar locations on the other wheel. We can characterize this concept by saying that each wheel's phase (position of advancement within a cycle) remains identical. The wheels are said to be "phase-locked" during synchronization (for example Sismondo, 1990).

Let biological rhythms be represented by rotations in the RBT plane. Each rhythm is characterized by angular velocity and phase angle .

...In order to have this new type of communication initially, biological rhythms must be shared by two organisms so that synchronization (phase lock) occurs between the two rhythms, one within each organism. Then and only then can information encoded in RBT pass between the organisms.

...Some humans report knowing who a distant message sender is at the very instant that a message is received. Additionally, humans and animals, on occasion, reflect emotional responses at the instant of traumatic death of a companion, regardless of spatial separation. Such observations conform with the RBC concept that some organisms can send and receive messages as if they are physically together.

...Body languages, using a variety of signals are likely to transmit rhythms and thereby may communicate feelings without the recipient of the communication being consciously aware of messages related to specific signals.

...Information flows during sleep.

Correspondence to Dr. Beamish can be addressed to:

Ceta-Research, Box 10

Trinity NewFoundland, A0C 2S0.

Derrick Jensen is that rare interviewer whose depth of insight brings to mind Bill Moyers. Jensen possesses the rare gift to bring as much thoughtfulness to his questions as his notable cast of interviewees bring to their answers. His subject matter runs the gamut from nature to culture to social justice. By the time most readers reach the end of this book, having spent time listening in on conversations with thirty of the wisest people of this age, he or she will have little lingering doubt why these three subjects must be properly integrated if we are to have any real hope of granting our children a bright future.

...(Paul Shepard) I think that planetary ecological disaster is a reality. But the popular imagination is in error. It is not something that may happen. We have been in the midst of it for the last century. Because of our Biblical and Hollywood imagery of catastrophe, we suppose all such disasters to be a kind of Armageddon, with walls collapsing and people screaming. It's not like that at all. It's much worse, a creeping thing that we identify as something else–inflation, poverty, recession, levels of mental ill-health, suicide, crop failure, political upheaval, famine, social discontent–anything except its true nature, the disintegration of natural systems. It has nothing to do with the media question, "Will mankind survive?" Because a species as tough as ours is not yet ready to join the cavalcade into eventual extinction. Of course I have hope. Why not, it's cheap and available. It is also the last resort. It allows one to be seen as chipping away defiantly at "the problem" rather than taking one's misanthropy off into the rubble to await some final bell.

...(Frederick Turner) All of us, though, do have some kind of special knowledge of what it once meant to be so connected. This knowledge is in our archaic brain stem and can never be expunged. It can be covered over, and is covered over, with layers and layers of cultural applique, and maybe with the development of the cerebral cortex, but it can never be erased. Wherever we come in contact with the natural world, it is awakened.

...(Jerry Mander) People are now faster than the natural world, literally. That's not just an intellectual separation. It's a real separation. A concrete separation. A physical separation. It's a separation of the body and the nervous system from their former relationship to the natural world into a dimension that moves faster and is tenser and therefore more prone to react speedily and violently to circumstances. This new dimension is not conducive to pleasure, or calm, or contemplation, or understanding, or depth.

We have long needed a general overview of all the information collected on the communication capabilities of animals. This overview contains material not only about the usual gang of smart chimps and dolphins grabbed from the wild to learn the bidding of their laboratory masters, but also includes sections about songbirds, insects, dogs, and even squid who use their ability to change color as a sexual communication.

This little book is succinct and pretty with illustrations; published as part of a larger series edited by the staff of Scientific American. That explains why the writer sometimes displays his stance a bit too much like a harsh patriarch who has no patience for imaginative explanations of phenomena that strays outside the borders of his rationalist boundaries.

...Springboks, small antelopes of the Kalahari desert, communicate their excellent health to hunting dogs or hyenas with a curious behavior called "stotting." Instead of running flat out when they see a predator, some springboks punctuate their escape with soaring leaps in the air. Jumping higher than their neighbors backs, with legs held stiff and parallel like a gymnast's, the springboks appear to say, "there's no use chasing me, I could obviously outrun you."

...most scientists concluded that Lilly's speculations were extremely unlikely and completely unsupported. The great popular success of Lilly's 1961 book, Man and Dolphin, contributed to the widely held belief that dolphins are especially intelligent and perhaps that animals in general have languages akin to human language. While Lilly's work may have increased public awareness of the need to protect and conserve dolphins, it did so at the cost of public misunderstanding. Dolphins–and for that matter all animals–need not be like humans to deserve our respect.

...Male stoneflies actively search out their mates. A male of one species makes the first move, a brief crescendo of dull taps: "ba da da Da DA DA dum." Another species marches to a different drum beat: "ta TA TA TA," and the female responds "ta-a-ta-ta-ta. Stonefly specialists have studied about 150 species, each with its own pattern.

Nature cries out for better storytellers working the human information paths and capable of reaching large audiences. It seeks talented people capable of telling the truth about habitat and species destruction, but without turning sentimental or, appositely, coldly objective.
Carl Safina is that rare talent, a biologist who advocates change with a deep abiding passion for his subject; a great storyteller who tells his mesmerizing tale of real people harming and protecting nature with a clear literary voice. The book focuses on the death spiral of tuna, swordfish, salmon, forests, coral reefs, inevitably zooming in close to show the human face that makes it all seem so discouraging. But somehow, the book’s tone rarely falls to gloom and doom. Song for the Blue Ocean gets my vote as the best nature writing of 1998. I feel honored that the books editor, Jack Macrae at Henry Holt, is also my editor.

...Joe’s still hopping mad about the impending season closure, which means canceled bookings and returned deposits that have already been spent. He says he doesn’t want to kill more fish, he just wants to have the season last.

...Gerry addresses the delegation, saying again that if we must err, we must err on the side of employment.

...The faster young salmon got downriver in the currents, the better they survived. That’s what they were engineered by evolution to do. Water spilled past the dams would take young fish with it–just like the river. But engineers and power advocates refused to let young fish have the water for migration out, because that’s water that could instead make electricity.

Derrick Jensen is that rare interviewer whose depth of insight brings to mind Bill Moyers. Jensen possesses the rare gift to bring as much thoughtfulness to his questions as his notable cast of interviewees bring to their answers. His subject matter runs the gamut from nature to culture to social justice. By the time most readers reach the end of this book, having spent time listening in on conversations with thirty of the wisest people of this age, he or she will have little lingering doubt why these three subjects must be properly integrated if we are to have any real hope of granting our children a bright future.

...(Paul Shepard) I think that planetary ecological disaster is a reality. But the popular imagination is in error. It is not something that may happen. We have been in the midst of it for the last century. Because of our Biblical and Hollywood imagery of catastrophe, we suppose all such disasters to be a kind of Armageddon, with walls collapsing and people screaming. It's not like that at all. It's much worse, a creeping thing that we identify as something else–inflation, poverty, recession, levels of mental ill-health, suicide, crop failure, political upheaval, famine, social discontent–anything except its true nature, the disintegration of natural systems. It has nothing to do with the media question, "Will mankind survive?" Because a species as tough as ours is not yet ready to join the cavalcade into eventual extinction. Of course I have hope. Why not, it's cheap and available. It is also the last resort. It allows one to be seen as chipping away defiantly at "the problem" rather than taking one's misanthropy off into the rubble to await some final bell.

...(Frederick Turner) All of us, though, do have some kind of special knowledge of what it once meant to be so connected. This knowledge is in our archaic brain stem and can never be expunged. It can be covered over, and is covered over, with layers and layers of cultural applique, and maybe with the development of the cerebral cortex, but it can never be erased. Wherever we come in contact with the natural world, it is awakened.

...(Jerry Mander) People are now faster than the natural world, literally. That's not just an intellectual separation. It's a real separation. A concrete separation. A physical separation. It's a separation of the body and the nervous system from their former relationship to the natural world into a dimension that moves faster and is tenser and therefore more prone to react speedily and violently to circumstances. This new dimension is not conducive to pleasure, or calm, or contemplation, or understanding, or depth.