The book focuses the many varied relations that exist between orcas and human beings in the Pacific Northwest. The result is a short but comprehensive essay that devotes chapters to the training of orcas in the Vancouver Aquarium, the identification work of scientists like Ken Balcomb on San Juan Island Washington, the preservation science of Paul Spong, whalewatching, and the Haida tradition of woodcarvers who revere the orca as totem.

One of the themes that occurs over and over again, contrasts the sacred aboriginal view with the profane scientific and commercial views.

Doug Hand wrote me during his writing process, asking to observe an IC orca project with the intent of devoting a chapter to our work. I was wary of his mainstream male East Coast science writer's point of view. Just a few months earlier, another writer had described the work of IC as if we were a pseudo-scientific sideshow like the geeks we see on David Letterman's show who get dogs to bark Row row, row your boat. With that in mind, I thought it would be helpful to our cause–as well as to his writing–if first he got other points of view concerning our field projects. I advised him to start the process of comprehending IC by interviewing a few friends living in New York City who had attended our orca sessions and who were transformed by the experience. He never answered. Somehow, the book seems incomplete by our absence.

...As I watched the orca, it was impossible to keep myself from imagining the pure pleasure of leaping into the air and soaring with them. I imagined that they were conscious of how they looked, like dancers, sensing if they had fully left the water or had their tail dragging...I believed they felt as I did as a child when I threw myself off the high dive, out of touch with the familiar, supported by nothing.

...I spotted the killer whale totem to my right front and paddled hard toward it, running the kayak up on the beach. It was a mortuary pole. At one time there had been a box atop the pole, with human remains. The killer whale was the only recognizable figure. Its flukes were folded down. A bulbous protrusion emerged from its blowhole, which looked to me like a frog.

A wonderful study of birds and humans that develops into a profound criticism of our culture's prejudice that animals are not conscious beings. Drawing on years of research, Barber offers intriguing evidence that birds clearly and consistently show they possess intelligence comparable to human beings. He concludes that they just use it differently and then speculates that intelligence is probably universal throughout the animal kingdom. He recommends that it's time we reconsidered our exalted place on the evolutionary ladder.

...All official ornithology texts share a very serious deficiency. They discuss the behavior of birds in general...but they do not recognize that birds are individuals and they never focus on the behavior of one particular individual bird. This book remedies this deficiency by looking at birds not only at the class and species levels but also at the level of particular individuals.

...The avian communication system, which utilizes calls, songs, and body language, is just as instinctively guided as the communication system of humans. Birds are also set to detect the particular sounds of their species and to pass through a "subsong" period that has important commonalties with the human infants "babbling" period. Normal birds, but not deaf ones, also match their vocalizations to the innate patterns of their species' song; in some species the matching is immediate.

...Pairs of terns took turns in relays lifting a disabled flockmate, each holding onto one of its wings and carrying it to safety. A male European robin fed and kept alive a rival male after crippling him in a fight. A male jay guided a human over a considerable distance to an abandoned newborn of a different species that had fallen from its nest.

The opening frames warn us that this film is in serious trouble as a narrative about natural processes. All the animals of the African Savannah have joined together on the plain to sing an uplifting animal rights, deep ecological anthem about the "circle of life". Nice sentiment, beautiful song, nice image to instill in children. But when the animals finish their chorale, they all bow down like serfs demonstrating obeisance to the prevailing aristocratic order.

This isn't evolution and animal behavior, It's zebras bowing down to human kids in lion suits. It's corporate America peddling a new line of organic candy bars.

To my jaded mind that bow is mostly a marketing department's way of continually winking at its spellbound audience of children. This film looks like zebras and lions but it's really The Sword in the Stone and Beauty and the Beast in drag–the latest stop on the cartoon costume ball, this time offering little girls and boys the chance to dress up as king and queen of the Serengeti.

Noting the fact that the voice of the boy-king's father in The Lion King is the same voice (James Earl Jones) as Darth Vader–who is, of course, the boy-king's father in Star Wars–my seven year old commented that the latter story is a diluted form of the former. Not bad for a seven year old. I must add however that she's seen the film five times.

In so many ways this film is disorienting: a nonstop exhibition of exquisitely detailed animated graphics of animals and nature fused to a boring formulaic story populated by all the interchangeable characters from all the other of Walt Disney's recent films. Ingenuous but heroic children with endearing funny sidekicks with Brooklyn accents. A sadistic villain with a baritone English accent accompanied by stupid and funny villain's sidekicks with more Brooklyn accents.

Here's my own quirky suggestion for watching this film one time. After the first song is over, turn off the soundtrack. Put Ladysmith Black Mombazo on the stereo. Enjoy the graphics.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I've grown bored of reading the six or eight book-length rehashes of environmental philosophy that pass across my desk each year. Nonetheless, I hunger for fresh insight about a subject that affects our future like no other. This book is the best I've seen in over a year. It's written in an academic style, and at times it can be slow-going. But its thesis is absolutely riveting. Goldsmith uses methodical logic to clarify how and why, ever since the industrial revolution, the best minds of science, economics, and politics have been picking apart the planet like wings off a fly.

Goldsmith's heroes are the native cultures worldwide, that recognize implicitly how economic activity, technology, community, and education can all serve Gaia.

...the need to recycle materials was built into the cultural pattern of all traditional peoples. It was not seen as a scientific requirement but as a moral one.

...According to the rules established by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT), the crops a country produces must be exported as long as a market demand exists. Only when malnutrition and hunger prevail can an exception be made, and U.S. delegates insist that even in such dire circumstances food must continue to be exported. If they have their way, it will then be GATT-illegal for a country to feed its starving people, rather than export it to the already overfed. It is only by doing so that it can maximize its expenditure on the manufactured goods of the industrial countries that control GATT.

This illustrates a principle: production governed by 'market forces' is not designed to satisfy biological, social, or ecological needs. Kenneth Lux points out that economists must deny the very existence of such needs if modern economic theory is to make any sense at all. The market is seen as catering only for our 'wants' which, when backed up by solid cash are reflected in 'effective demand'; a country is seen as being 'self-sufficient' once 'effective demand' is satisfied.

...In Bangladesh frogs were being caught in vast numbers and exported to satisfy the very considerable market for frogs legs in France. The result was a population explosion for all the insects on which the frogs fed, leading to a massive increase in the use of pesticides required for controlling them. Eventually, it is said the cost in pesticides became greater than the income derived from selling frogs.

...Once human life came to be treated as a commodity, work ceased to be embedded in social relation–and the 'whole man' was replaced by the worker, a new category altogether. Whereas vernacular man–the whole man–is a member of his family and community, the worker lives in a largely atomized society and can be mobilized to fulfill any function–however socially and ecologically disruptive or morally repulsive it might be–so long as it provides the wage on which he becomes increasingly dependent for the satisfaction of his most basic biological and social needs.

Exploring was the subject of a recent Interspecies newsletter and has always been an important component of our field expeditions. In this book, Stegner recounts the successes and frustrations of nineteenth century geologist John Wesley Powell, whose trips down the Colorado River were among the classic explorations of the American West. It was a hundred and twenty years ago that Powell tried to warn his contemporaries of the dangers of economic exploitation of the West and he spent a good deal of his life overcoming Washington politics in getting that message across. This book goes far beyond biography, and into the very soul of our American creed of exploration.

... Other western explorations had met Indians, buffalo, and antelope and elk, grizzlies; had passed alertly through a wilderness that teemed with life. Their own had passed through a wasteland naked even of game, sometimes even of vegetation, and its trademark was the ancient and terrible stillness which was all they heard now.

...Out of the studies of Powell and his collaborators came records: reports, photographs, sketches, geological sections, and the maps that were as essential to geology, Powell said, as a house was to housekeeping.

...Primitive cosmologies, Powell said, persisted in more advanced stages of society in the same way that vestigial organs persisted in the body. Evolution worked upon institutions as it worked upon the physical organism, but it worked slowly.

Although we generally think that human culture's association with whaling began two centuries ago, in fact people have been hunting the whale incessantly for at least ten thousand years.

This is an extraordinary book that somehow manages to connect Edward Goldsmith's theme of economies-out-of-synch with nature and Wallace Stegner's theme of the drives that cause men to explore the unknown. After all, whaling has always been about spending months and sometimes years out of sight of land. Sanderson writes with the heart of a poet and the mind of a historian. And with much compassion for the unwieldy fate of both the whales and the oceans.

...To follow the whale is to follow the whole course of one of the most important and significant aspects of our own history. It is virtually the story of the conquest of the planet.

...A stranded whale would thus provide a heaven-sent bounty to a Stone Age man. The oil would provide light and probably heat. Houses and perhaps boats were built with the ribs and long bones of the jaw and skull. The meat could be eaten fresh, or in cold weather, stored for the winter...The skins covering the liver were made into drum heads; the guts were shredded and used as twine for sewing skins; the baleen was carved or softened in hot water into a great number of useful things. Sinews from the tail flukes were used then as they are today to bind stone and bone tools to shafts. In fact, whales must have been taken apart completely and every bit of them used by prehistoric man.

...The true oceans are great areas of apparently permanent depression that have never been dry land. Their rocky bottoms are said to be covered with the second layer of the Earth's surface known as the Sima, (silicon and magnesium predominating). All the rest of the water constitutes seas which are quite different.

In a world with far too many magazines, and far too few of them worth the trees needed to publish them, this one is a jewel. And you don't have to be a member to get it. Extraordinary photographs, real and timely environmental news, great features, and a generous measure of compassionate first-person nature writing makes for a winning mix. Among the magazine's more endearing traits is its nourishment of members' talent, showcased through its annual nature writing and photography contests. The magazine never tries to gloss over the issue-driven angst that continually divides the minds and hearts of its membership.

Sierra's last page is devoted to a unique feature that poses a genuinely provocative environmental question to its well-educated, activist readership. In the issue in front of me the question is: Should access to abortion be part of a nation's family-planning strategy? Next month's question is: Do you shop, cook, and eat in keeping with your environmental values. If not, why not?

Why not, indeed.

Imagine what a more interesting place the TV tube would be if the likes of Frontline and the PBS news hour made the same use of interviewing intelligent real people instead of the perennially male, urban, think-tank oriented, talking heads we've all come to expect as experts.

...Yes, and abortion should be covered under any new health care plan. We don't need a million and half more births yearly to mothers who don't want more children.

...Yes, we do need to curb population growth, but abortion is not the answer. Abortion is merely a destructive way of shunning our duty to responsibly (and compassionately) manage our families and environment.

...Abortion results in only a slight dip in population growth. Ending immigration and establishing a "you want 'em, you pay for 'em" policy on childbearing could trim our population to a sustainable level.

Speaking of the TV tube, this show, now in endless re-runs, may tackle the question of living in nature and communicating with other species better than anything else on television.

One recent episode focused on a yelloweye-looking race who seem to half-speak English. The prepositions and verbs are the same as ours, but the nouns are all proper names while lingual concepts are founded on metaphors taken from unknown historical events. Captain Picard is kidnapped, coerced on pain of death to learn how to communicate to this species. By the end of the hour, the viewing audience has learned an intriguing step-by-step lesson in how to communicate with another species.

The show also buoys my outlook about the Earth my children's grandchildren are bound to inherit. The 24th century crew onboard the starship are continually reminding other alien races that the human race nearly destroyed itself way back in the 20th century by fouling its own nest. Humanity saved itself only by learning how to respect nature, respect other races and cultures, control its own population, and elevate women to the status of equals. The immediate result was the virtual elimination of violence.

Don't be fooled into watching the original Star Trek. It's far less entertaining in the execution of its surrealistic themes. By contrast, The Next Generation. is downright visionary in the farflung metaphors it offers to help us get a creative handle on the real problems we face now, today.

This is easily the most intense novel I've ever read about the clash that too-often occurs when modern Europeans first come into contact with a traditional culture. Set at the turn of the 20th century, and told by a young Inuit man, the story begins when three whalers lose their way in a storm and are rescued by a community of Inuit living along the east coast of Baffin island. The whalers are adopted into the community, but soon cause lasting tension when they demand to retain their individualism while drawing upon all the benefits offered up by their hosts; and without ever fully comprehending the exigencies of that exotic culture. Despite the obvious masculine tenor of my description, it is the Inuit women and the feminine point of view that actually fills out the complexity of this very realistic account. The White Dawn was also made into a film starring Timothy bottoms. The film was powerful although it pales in comparison to the novel.

...Next day we watched the tides and waited patiently. But the fish in numbers did not come to us again. Something must have offended them. Perhaps the fish did not like to have their flesh burned black [as the foreigners preferred them cooked]; perhaps some child or one of the foreigners had thrown a stone toward the river and angered them. When the huge tides did come, the river went mad, and we were drenched in a deluge of rain. The wind rose and blew violently out of the south. Most of the fish lines fell in the night and the dogs devoured the catch. Too much of the high tidewater was forced into the narrow river, and it overran its banks, flooding over the top of the stone weir, which disappeared entirely beneath the surface of the rushing water. No fish were held during that vital time. They all passed over our trap and up the river to hide from us in the depths of the lake. There they would remain, locked beneath the oncoming winter's ice. Nine freezing moons would pass before summer would drive the fish to sea again.

It was a terrible thing to lose the fish, to go into winter with our caches empty. The strangers did not fully understand our misfortune, but they would suffer for it later. If winter hunting goes badly, people often die during the broken ice of early spring when hunting is impossible. We knew whole camps that had starved to death. It was just as well that our three visitors did not know this, for we believed that there was no way to change the bad things that were coming to them or to the rest of us.

When dissection was introduced into the school curriculum in the 1870's, it was thought to be a good learning tool in the study of anatomy, physiology, and the theory of evolution. Today, new teaching methods have been developed which can replace dissection. But dissection today is a big business. Over three million frogs a year are killed in high school biology classes; in the process, natural habitats are decimated and entire ecologies are threatened. Countless cats, mice, rabbits, and pigs are also sacrificed for dissection experiments. This book, published by lawyers and written for high school students, tells what to do if you're fifteen years old and your teacher says she's going to flunk you unless you start shaping up and stick a pin in some poor frog's brain but you still refuse to do it.

...Even more destructive is the desensitizing effect of mutilating and dismembering animals in the name of science and in the cause of "education". Somehow the study of "life science" meant to instill wonderment and respect for life has become a science of death. Dissection teaches the lesson that animal life is expendable and unimportant.

Arne Naess, founder of the deep ecology movement, is said to have seriously considered calling his new philosophy, An Ecology of Lifestyle. In fact, the only real way any of us can hope to turn around the current dilemma, is for each of us to adopt a lifestyle that brings us closer to the Earth while taking us further away from her very limited resources. Organic gardening as a serious pursuit offers one of the very best paths towards a more ecological lifestyle, and the idea of learning to garden throughout every month of the entire year offers much food for thought, as well as for table. Given the drastic variations of winter climate that occurs around this fair land of ours, this particular book tends to focus its discussion around the clement winter climate of the Pacific Northwest. But its major tenets apply anywhere that people want to extend their growing season. I also find it revealing that almost none of the crops she recommends have ever been put through the grinder of modern hybridism. The majority of cultivars I plant, myself, developed over thousands of years by peasant farmers in China, Japan, and central Europe.

...If you think about this a bit, you will see that growing winter crops means that you turn from a summer gardener into a year round gardener. I suppose I really should have written a book about year round gardening, but if I had done that, I would have had to devote space to tomatoes and cucumbers when it is the cool season crops that need to be discussed. Also, you might have missed the point: the point is that in this climate you don't have to be without vegetables in the fall, winter and early spring if you use the right varieties, observe the right sowing dates, understand the principles of cool season production, and experiment for yourself.

...I have come to treasure leeks, so hardy, so tasty, so attractive

Native American animal myths always seem to present the most cosmic ideas in the most entertaining and captivating way possible. There must be something to it. This collection, from a publisher who seems to specialize in works that enhance the connection between earth and spirit, is one of those books that wants you to open it anywhere and simply start reading. It also permits you to stop reading anywhere and still come away having your mood enhanced.

...The child took the bag and flung it
up into the air and the
bag sailed out
the smoke
hole
and that is how stars
came into the world.

–Tlingit

 

...Old Coyote, dawn stealer
in the first days of life,
howling at the center
of all things dark
with his mocking heart--
laughing, laughing
at the sun--
a memory too hot
to hold
on even
his tricky tongue.

–Navajo!

Most of us with a spiritual interest in animals, possess some inkling of the deep and ancient worldview of the Australian Aborigines–that which they themselves refer to as dreamtime. Whether our own knowledge came to us through such writing as Mutant Messages (a made-up account posing as non-fiction), or the profound novel, Songlines, we should never forget to also check in with genuine source material. This book links the spiritual beliefs, the mythology, the history and art of the inhabitants of Arnhem Land in northern Australia. The author fills an important gap between anthropology texts meant to interest the scholar, and popular books which often fail to give a real understanding of the people behind the Dreamtime. I don't know if this book is still in print. If not, get it at a library.

...The wise old men who lead the clans recognize that both time and patience are required to make the transition to an industrialized society. As Silas Maralngurra of the Gunwinggu said to me:

'We don't want Balanda (white people) to go too quick. We do not know yet how to dig the holes to plant bananas. We have to learn how to fix our automobiles. What will happen if the mail comes and nobody knows what to do with it?'

... Marriage was more than a convention for holding families together; it also was the basis for social organization, for uniting groups for hunting, ceremonies and war. It provided some guarantee that young men would be available to help protect and feed the old people. Children in the proper kin relationship were betrothed to each other from the earliest years. The boy's uncle and the girl's mother and maternal uncle assumed the responsibility of arranging marriage.

The inside front cover of this very elegant nature journal states well the publisher's credo: To help us deepen our personal connection with the natural world as a source of enrichment and inner renewal.

Orion is simply the best forum for excellent nature writing in the English speaking world. Nothing else even comes close. The fact that a magazine that pays its contributors so little money is able to accrue and keep such a well-honed literary character says much about its stature among writers.

Each issue has a theme. Recent themes have included: Animals of the Heart, The Living Soil, Doing Ecology, Land Use and Human Values, Nature in Literature. The magazine is rarely academic-sounding. Almost everything inside is readable, and much of it is downright provocative. Orion is the place to look to encounter a worldview where our own perceptions about the earth may soon mean as much or more to our survival than economics, technology, or politics. The blend of writing, photography, layout, and illustrations makes this a worthwhile read for anyone interested in exploring ideas about our common future.

...In the earliest human account of this landscape (Belize), the limestone sponge is said to be the flat back of a crocodile resting in lily pads. The people telling the story are made of maize dough after attempts to fashion them in mud, wood, and flesh each failed. Itzamna the lizard god, links heaven to earth; a young man with almond eyes is the perennial god of maize,; frogs and and tortoises sing to help the chacs bring rain; the unfaithful moon, Ix Chel, weaves and heals. The people love chocolate, and its beans are money.

One of the best books yet written that delves into the whole issue of Gaia and its implications. The authors make the ironic case that most societies throughout history were well aware of Gaia; and it is, rather, our own society that is unique for not recognizing it. For that reason, the authors choose to describe the current scientific explanation of Gaia as a recovery from cultural amnesia.

Most of the first half of the text is a history of human relations to the earth which includes an in-depth discussion of the great religions and their teachings about the planet, the life force, and nature. This is also the source of my own understanding of Wakonda, numen, and feng shui. There is an especially illuminating account of some of the less well known works of Sir Isaac Newton, who considered himself primarily an alchemist.

The second half of the book focuses more on the subjects for which these authors are known including ley lines, biomagnetism, (including the northern lights), and finally, the earth and certain of its parts as functional organisms.

In general, it is the attitude of the authors which makes this book so interesting. They tend to take things at face value, and avoid making judgments even if the described phenomena don't always fit our standard views of reality.

...Water also seems responsive to sound. In Bavaria, for example, there is the old tradition of Tonsingen or tone singing. Towards evening each day in the growing season the farmers sing ascending notes as they stir a little clay into a bucket of water in an anticlockwise motion and descending notes as they swish the mixture around in a clockwise direction. The buckets are then left overnight in the dark and the contents sprinkled over the crops early next day.

...Whales and dolphins are now believed to use 'magnetic stripes' on the ocean floor as navigational aids on their long submarine journeys. The cetacean seem to use areas of high magnetism as geomagnetic 'landmarks', and the long troughs of low geomagnetism, the stripes, as routeways. These mammals have both fine and coarse magnetic materials embedded in their bodies, but researchers feel that their refined magnetic sensitivity may be due to large magnetic particles in the inner ear.

...There can be little doubt that of all the methods of producing altered states, dreaming is the most practical and effective. Two types of sites are likely to be most appropriate for this method: magnetic stones at stone circles–or rock outcrops at non-engineered places of power–and ancient sacred wells.

Joan Halifax is a spiritual leader of many talents: part Buddhist nun, part aboriginal bridge builder, part shamanic scholar—an all-pro player in the fields of the Lord.

This is her story, overflowing with powerful and enlightened characters, sometimes nearly too full of wonderfully exotic events, too full of sentences that start out: I remember a story that so-and-so once told me... Could any of this be true? In fact, this editor knows her well enough to vouch that it is. Her unique account of two IC orca trips adds a few intriguing twists to what has become a much retold story.

...The [Tibetan Lama] sang mantras to them, and Linda Tellington-Jones and I sang "whale" to them, and they were singing right back, no amplification needed. This was live! Then a giant orca slowly rose out of the depths between three of our kayaks, her great body shimmering with phosphorescence in the moonless night. I was struck with more than a little respect as she slid almost soundlessly back into the water less than fifteen feet from us. The night's finale was a mother whale and baby whistling and growling within touching distance.

...Meeting creatures in the wild is a powerful experience. It awakens that bittersweet nostalgia for a time when all creatures spoke together and were held in the common embrace of creatureliness. It also stirs up the stuff of trust when encountering a being who is quite capable of eating you for dinner and doesn't. I have had close contact and even communication with snakes, lizards, jays, and hawks, dolphins, and coyotes, but whales can not help but awaken in us the sense of being part of the great natural sangha, the community of all creation. Indeed these old beings are our companions in awakening.

Fred Donaldson is another longtime friend of IC. We first heard about his work years ago when he was using his mastery of Aikido as a means to communicate with wolves. His writing about the human/wolf exchange remains one of the most powerful expressions of interspecies communication, and it can be found described in much greater detail in his new book.

Playing By Heart provokes us to reconsider the meaning of play in our lives. The connection between playing and belonging seems especially profound for these times of deep alienation; our own culture's overbearing manner of linking play to competition actually destroys the unifying lessons found in play. This book should be mandatory reading for all soldiers, psychologists, professional athletes, educators...and explorers.

...A child's grasp of my finger, a dolphin's touch, the trust felt in the nuzzle of a coyote are all such invitations to play. One autumn day I rested on a sun-warmed carpet of sycamore leaves in an enclosure at Wolf Haven. I was enjoying the large yellow leaves as they drifted to the ground, trying to guess which one would let go next. My reverie was soon shattered by Little Guy, a young coyote, pouncing on my chest and nibbling my beard. Suddenly, like the sweeping strokes of master swordsmen, we rotated together entwined in a tight spiral of motion.

...When playing with children, wolves, or dolphins, I often have the sensation of being surrounded even when I have only one playmate. They seem to be sinuous Mobius strips, weaving a three dimensional ying-yang symbol in which there is no up or down, no back or front, no left or right. In these circles movement and stillness are blended. The essence of one is born in the extreme of the other. I seem like a stick figure compared to them. I am relearning with their help that the energy of the universe moves in curves, circles and spirals.