This off-the-wall and hugely entertaining novel just won a major book award which it roundly deserves. I now hear it’s going to be made into a major film. Let’s hope they do it right. It’s the story of two women. The first is a Japanese American film maker hired by the U.S. meat lobby to direct a weekly show for Japanese TV, about Americans who love to cook and eat meat—a different family, a different locale, a different recipe each week. The second is an anorexic woman living in Tokyo whose ambitious and cruel husband dreamed up this bizarre TV show. How the two women meet and end up affecting each another, is a tale worth telling.
The description of animals, as commodities and, well, as meat, meat, meat is both shocking and utterly surreal when one realizes that this is the way it actually works in the food industry.

...There’s a fairy tale about the first Japanese wanna-be astronaut, a drunken monkey, who saw the moon in a deep and quiet pool and bragged to his friend the badger that he could fly all the way there and bring back the moon in a bucket. He drowned in the attempt.

...And another thing you East Coast environmentalists are always griping about is organic waste pollution. Well, you should be real happy, ‘cause this pretty much takes care of the problem, don’t it. Feed the animals shit, and it gets rid of the waste at the same time. That’s two birds with one stone."

...Anyone who travels around the sprawling heartland of this country must at some point wonder why American are so uniformly obese.

If any book I own would be worth a fortune in five hundred years, this first edition, signed by the author, is the one. I am certain this book has a US publisher.

This is an epic poem; a penetrating critique of the whale's inscrutable vitality, and a parable of the whale nation's tragic demise at the hands of human beings. Were the photographs of this book presented with no words, it would still be among the most powerful of whale books. With Williams poem, the book achieves a depth equal to Moby Dick and Mind in the Waters.

...A siren's song,
Leading sailors to believe,
As the sounds infiltrated through the wooden hull,
That their vessels were haunted
by spirits of the deep.
Webs of elegant cetacean music stretch around the globe;
Lyrical litanies on the bio-radio
That draw on an oral tradition of submarine songs
From a living memory bank, founded fifty million years ago.

...Fifty million year old sagas of continuous whale mind:
Accounts of the forces of nature;
The minutiae of a shared consciousness;
Whale dreams; The accumulated knowledge of the past;
Rumours of ancestors, the Archaeoceti,
With life-spans of two and three hundred years.

I am a whale researcher, and this book has always been my main reference for locating information about any and every species of whale. No other book can touch it for scope, for its clear illustrations, for its literate condensation of thousands of scientific and anecdotal references. Yet it is also the kind of book that a whale aficionado might curl up with on the couch and read like a novel.

...In September 1957 a live beaked whale came close to shore at Oiso Beach, near Tokyo, where some boys were playing ball. The boys waded into the water and killed the whale with their baseball bats. When Nishiwaki and Kamiya (1958) examined the specimen, they realized that its measurements and proportions did not agree with those of any known species of Mesoplodon, and therefore "ventured to settle a new species for this specimen and nominated it as Mesoplodon ginkgodens. This species name is chosen from the fact that the lateral view of the teeth of the present specimen resembles closely the shape of the leaf of the ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba Linneaus)."

...The beluga is probably the noisiest of all cetaceans. Early whalers actually called them "sea canaries." Scammon, who could hear them only from the surface, claimed they made a noise like the "faint lowing of an ox," and others referred to the various sounds of the beluga as bird calls, mooing, deep sighing and gnashing of teeth, grunting of pigs, badly played musical glasses, and the noise produced by vigorously shaking a large tin tray (Fish and Mowbray 1962). According to Tomilin (1957), the Russians "in the north" have a proverbial expression for one who is making too much noise: "screaming like a Beluga."

This may be the least well-known of all the various incarnations of the Whole Earth Catalog. The subtitle explains it best: communication tools for the information age. Look to this book to learn how to make a newsletter or to learn about theories of language, from visual knowledge to digital thinking, from Body communication, to networking societies. Like every other Whole Earth Catalog, this one is the product of a community of reviewers. It offers incisive critiques, and an imaginative sky-is-the-limit overview of a subject prone to techno-pigeonholing.

...Interspecies Communication Inc. was founded to promote relations between humans and animals the way civic groups promote relations between sister cities with meetings between representatives, full of warm smiles and good intentions. IC's newsletter reports on these meetings, which have recently involved U.S., Soviet, and cetacean musicians in one case, and psychics and orcas in another.

You can't call this pseudoscience though; IC doesn't claim that this is any science at all. The idea, rather, is to interact with other species in whatever way–scientific, artistic, shamanistic–seems most appropriate to the situation. This is certainly a broader definition of "communication" than most researchers would accept. But the approach does give the animals a greater opportunity to shape the exchange to their liking than a purely scientific approach would allow.

The book is intense; the ideas about mind, religion, and evolution are as unconventional as one might ever ponder. The essential thesis is that the ingestion of certain psychoactive substances, especially psilocybin, create a direct, unmediated link between nature, God, and the creative impulse of the human mind. McKenna suggests, for instance, that the human acquisition of language occurred very quickly. Members of an advanced primate species inhabiting the east African Savanna, and already prone to signaling amongst themselves, one day ate too many mushrooms. Words and grammar were the result. But this book is neither a rave nor an apology for drug-taking. It offers instead, a highly articulated philosophical overview of the human species told by one of the most creative and original thinkers of our time.

...Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crisis; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century.

...What I call the Archaic Revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature. The Archaic Revival spells the eventual breakup of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization, something that cannot be changed overnight by a sudden shift in collective awareness. Rather it will follow naturally upon the gradual recognition of the idea and ideal of a vegetation goddess––the Earth herself as the much ballyhooed Gaia.

Everywhere around the world, species that once flourished are now seldom seen. This book takes a look at the problem by focusing on the implicit connection linking species to the place they live. It shows us what an ecosystem needs to have in size and makeup if the animals who dwell there are to flourish. The author makes it clear that the favored species-centered approach to the issue of biodiversity has utterly failed us. His analysis is focused around the grizzly bears of the Northern Rockies. He concludes they may be extinct within a few more years unless our very manner of acknowledging their existence (what we usually refer to as 'dealing with them') alters very soon. This book offers a most accessible and yet sobering explanation of the important work of conservation biology. Consider it required reading.

...Boundaries drawn in the past are no longer suitable today. Misplaced borders may be ecological, legal, or managerial, but they all result from the dominant Western worldview that draws a hard line between people and nature. Anthropocentricity (literally, "man-centered") places people above grizzlies, greater ecosystems, and the rest of the natural world, and reduces non-humans to the status of resources. Such "resourcism" has a simple credo: The world gains value only as humans transform it into goods and services to meet their demands. We employ economics to measure such transformations and call the results progress. Three assumptions bolster resourcism: Human demands need only be met in the short term, Earth's abundance is inexhaustible,, and technological savvy will continue to push back the limits to growth.

This is the most thoughtful natural history to appear in print since Ghost Bears, which was reviewed in this newsletter a few years ago. I encourage everyone who has ever wondered about wolves, to buy a copy of what amounts to a real-life interspecies thriller. Hopefully it will soon be out in paperback.

Hampton tells his true story about the wolves of North America as a history of interaction between our two species, most of it violent, a lot of it enacted as a personal struggle between individual animals fighting to survive and the rough bounty hunters set out to extinguish them in the same way they extinguished the Indians. The wolves who do survive this holocaust are astonishing for the methodical and very cerebral manner they outwit the bounty hunters.

Much of the book focuses on the recent campaign to bring wolves back to Yellowstone. The various characters representing government bureaucracies and ranch groups who fight every attempt at reintroduction are far less appealing, courageous, compassionate, and even reasonable than the wolves they would keep out. By the end of the book, I wonder how many other readers besides myself will prefer to ban the self-serving ranchers from this range and give it all back to the wolves who will certainly do a better job of stewarding.

...The Cheyenne tell a tale when a large village was attacked by Colorado militia at Sand Creek in November 1864, and over one hundred women and children were slaughtered. Two women and their children managed to escape but soon became lost. Cold and starving, they took refuge in a shallow cave under a bluff. In the middle of the night, the women said a large wolf came into the cave and lay down beside them. At first they were afraid, but in the morning the wolf continued traveling with them, stopping to rest whenever they did. One of the women finally addressed the wolf: "O wolf, try to do something for us. We and our children are nearly starved." The wolf led them to a freshly killed buffalo. Over the next few weeks, the wolf never left their side, always finding food for them when they were hungry. Finally he led them to a Cheyenne camp on the Republican river, and after delivering his charges and receiving food in return, the wolf vanished. pg 41

...The first estimate of the continent's pre-columbian wolf population was made in 1925 by Ernest Thompson Seton who set the number at two million. pg 22

...the fact that both wolves and Paleo-Indians spread more or less concurrently throughout North America, while at the same time pursuing the same prey in the same manner, raises the intriguing notion that imitation may have played a role. Scientists who dispute this possibility insist that no direct proof of such a relationship exists. Nevertheless, surviving oral histories and creation myths of several Native American peoples–Caddo, Ojibwa, Sioux, Tonkawa, and Cheyenne–attribute the wolf with having taught their ancestors how to hunt. pg 24

...By 1918, it was undeniable that wolves were far less numerous than stock owners had claimed. Federal hunters and trappers simply were not finding that many animals, only about 500 or 600 a year, a number that fell to fewer than 100 by the mid-1920's. Bounties, coupled with decades of oppression had nearly eliminated the animals and the federal effort would prove only a denouement to what stock owners themselves had nearly accomplished. pg 136

John Lilly is one of the great mythical figures of our time, a metaphor for mind-expansion as much as a person. As in life, this autobiography shows him to be a master of speculation, emerging not so much as a scientist, but as a modern mystic who equates his dreams and his personal revelation as bonafide fact. This, his life story, reads like the quest of a modern warrior-monk who set out to slay the dragon of earthbound intellect as a prelude to attaining the chalice of unbound wisdom. Does he find his chalice? Actually, the answer remains a matter of interpretation, and by the end it doesn't seem very important. Like every other allegory, this story is about the quest, not the goal. It makes a terrific read.

As expected, dolphins play a key role in Lilly's journey, at once messengers, patients, specimen, teachers and slaves. Reading this story one gets a strong sense of the bizarre clinical beginnings that eventually prompted the charged mystique that currently surrounds the dolphin relationship with human beings. Lilly is both sire and patriarch of that paradigm.

...The whaling industry has assured the demise of the older, larger whales who contain the cetacean wisdom of the past and who taught it to the younger cetacea. the obvious conclusion is that the old sperm whales are gone and that with them a good deal of sperm whale knowledge and wisdom has been extinguished. One can assume not only that the older whales educate the younger ones, but there is also interspecies communication in the sea among cetacea. Man has missed the opportunity to share in this ancient culture; the ancient cultures in the new world were eliminated in a similar fashion during the Spanish conquest of Mexico and South America. pg. 204

...I can not convey to you all of the evidence for my feeling that if we are ever to communicate with a non-human species of this planet, the dolphin is probably our best present gamble. In a sense, it is a joke when I fantasy it may best to hurry and finish our work on their brains before one of them learns to speak our language, else he will demand equal rights with men for their brains and lives under our ethical and legal codes. pg 134.

...The "dangers" of brain-voyaging have been hysterically discussed, but not well understood. The perils are not physical.

This a set of seven CDs produced by whale bioacoustician, Christopher Clark at Cornell. You may know him as one of the scientists involved in the US Navy's horrific LFAS program to test low frequency sonar by turning up the volume until it starts killing whales. The recordings on these CDs essentially came about because The Soviet Union lost the cold war. Subsequently, in 1992, the US Navy launched a program to restructure their submarine acoustic surveillance network for ocean-wide environmental monitoring of whales in the North Atlantic. The idea of expensive spy gear being used to record whales was great public relations, and the program got a lots of attention.

Unfortunately, these recordings are disappointing. It is perhaps too easy to be impressed by the stats revealing bigger, farther, more powerful: for instance that the sensitivity of hardware was capable of recording blues whales vocalizing a thousand miles from the hydrophones. But at that distance, the distortion is extreme, the deep ocean static is indistinguishable from what sounds like annoying amplifier hiss, and the muffled sounds of hundreds, perhaps thousands of ships passing in the night makes one want to cry for these endangered whales who have certainly lost the ability to hear a mate across the great ocean distances these scientists are able to hear them.

Listening to the actual sounds of blue whales, fins, minkes, and assorted other species mostly reminds me of listening to scratchy old blues songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded in the 1920s. The analogy is fitting. In both cases, incredibly powerful music. Lousy recording.

And despite the hype of this noteworthy collaboration, underwater field recording remains the art form of a few devotees willing to invest about three thousand dollars in a hydrophone, and a DAT machine and then maneuver within a couple of hundred yards of cetacean activity and remain there, anchored, sometimes for weeks on end, until the whales vocalize in an animated fashion.

Good recordings happen when these devotees have to turn down their volume, not crank it up. Great recordings happen when a listener can hear the whales but no internal combustion engines wheezing in the background. That's an increasingly rare event these days.

...During the very first hours that the Undersea Surveillance System was used to detect blue whales, more of their sounds were recorded than had ever been described in the entire scientific literature.

...Until the Whales '93 effort very little was known about the kinds of sounds produced by minke whales...Results from recording minkes on the IUSS have been dramatic and indicate that minkes are acoustically prolific in the deep waters of the southwestern North Atlantic from fall through late spring. Minkes produce distinctive types of sounds that consist of a regular, almost drumbeat pattern of monotonic pulses.

...Listening to the voices of fin whales on this CD will be very different from anything you have ever experienced before. In the deep ocean, where low sounds dominate the acoustic soundscape, the entire texture of sounds gives you the feeling of being wrapped in an enormously soft, slowly undulating quilt.

The responsibility of creating a sustainable future rests on everyone who live today. It's about choices, some of them intimate, some very public, others abstract and intellectual. They include how many children we decide to have, whether we choose to live in a place where we have to drive to work, whether we prioritize the planet or people when it comes to moral issues like abortion, whether we are willing to trash the dangerous American ideal of doing what we want on OUR land.

Durning's book is the best one yet on the subject. He is a master of using cogent statistics as a tool to make a point. More importantly, he only pulls out his bottomless store of numbers to elucidate what he insists are personal choices, using anecdotes from his own family to show how common choices affect the future. Focusing on building a sustainable society in the Pacific Northwest, this book's message applies as well to people anywhere else, as well as to the future of whales in the deep blue sea.

...The only surefire way of forestalling migration would be to reduce quality of life–or worsen perceptions of it. Indeed, if quality of life fuels migration, then the more successfully the Northwest reconciles community, economy, and ecology, the more attractive it will be to potential migrants. Success at home, in other words, can not be sustained without matching success elsewhere.

...By mid-adolescence, average American young people have spent more time watching television than they have spent with their teachers, friends, or parents. The message they get about sex is "do it, but don't plan it, prepare for it, or talk about it." When teens watch TV, according to the Institute of Medicine, they are exposed to 25 references to sexual acts for each reference to contraception or abstinence. The latter tend to be derogatory; the former, positive.

My shelves have been overflowing lately with books that definitely deserve some recognition and promotion. I offer up this version of literary Spring cleaning with the conclusion that book reviews add an important new dimension to the newsletter. I'll try to offer them more regularly in the future.

This one gets the interspecies highest rating award, not only for its poignant descriptions of an Arctic people and environment, but also for its childlike drawings, its deep descriptions of the human/dog relationship, and also because it possesses one of the most evocative titles since Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost.

Malaurie, a Frenchman, journeyed to Northwest Greenland in 1951, and then spent parts of the next twenty years living, observing, and participating with several Thule Eskimo groups, that were still largely untouched by the heavy hand of Western civilization.

There's a lot in this book about firstly, the outer limits of human role-playing, secondly, the evolution of human society within a deadly environment, and thirdly, the undercurrents of both violence and nature know-how that such a lifestyle engenders. Perhaps tragically, each of these three themes offers much to our own culture as we all slide towards the next millenium. Here's two excerpts:

...The eskimo and his dogs form a very real "couple," and their relationship is as close as a marriage. The team is like someone you marry and who marries you. It functions as a single person: the leader is the head, and the dogs are literally, the torso and limbs. Without his dogs the Eskimo is not himself. He is a widower who has lost his strength, his capacity for action, his joy in life.

...Another rule was that of hospitality toward captured animals. The bear and the seal were not "really" killed when they were harpooned. To the hunters' way of thinking the animals let themselves seem to be killed so that they could visit their human brothers and sisters and help them. Therefore, in the igloo, everything possible was done to both show them respect and amuse them. Songs were sung to them softly and certain words like knife were carefully avoided. A seal needed fresh water; so fresh water was kept nearby in a bowl. The severed head of a bear had to be turned inland so that the animal would not have too much trouble returning home. Sometimes, certain bear carcasses were even provided with hunting gear just in case they might be capable of assuming human shape.

If you're one of those people who senses that much of the new marketing of environmentally sound products somehow misses the fundamental point about curtailing human excess, then this book is going to open your eyes further. For example, it's the first book I've ever seen that explains recycling as a necessary half measure that unfortunately provides no realistic longterm solution to environmental degradation. It also takes on Earthday as mostly a global parade that did far more to draw attention to itself than change policies. If you disagree with either of these assessments, then the authors want to ask you why it is that the environment has deteriorated so much more drastically since the first Earthday; since the birth of so many fervent environmental organizations, since the adoption of so much new educational curricula, and since the ostensible raising of so much environmental consciousness and angst? The authors conclude that the solutions they, themselves, seek are never going to be initiated by governments, corporations, institutions, or mass movements. Environmental transformation is, instead, a grassroots process.

Buy this book despite its very ugly cover. But beware, its out to change your life. Here's some excerpts:

...A truly green economy would require that all products be audited for their effect. Such an audit would...include the amount of energy used to produce and transport the item, the pollution generated in its manufacture, the role of the commodity in the economic and social health of the country of origin, the investment plans of the company in question and all its subsidiaries, and the final disposal of the product. The questions raised by this approach are endless. Does the use of rainforest nuts justify the energy expended transporting them here? Should we buy recycled paper from a company known to pollute rivers?

...In a review of the sales of phosphate-free detergents, one report noted that its share in the Swiss market was 100 percent. The reason is simple. The Swiss government has banned detergents that contain phosphates.

...farmers like to make fun of the Amish for their hair-splitting ways with technology: allowing tractor engines for stationary tools but not tractors in the fields. But in addition to keeping the Amish way of life intact, such compromises bring tremendous economy to their farming while lightening the workload. A motor-powered harvester, pulled by horses may seem ridiculous to a modern agribusinessman, but it saves thousands of dollars over buying tractors for this work. The reasons tractors aren't allowed in the fields is that they would tempt the Amish to expand acreage, going into steep debt to do so, and in the process drive other Amish off the land which is exactly why and how American agriculture got into the trouble engulfing it today.

The environmental crisis did not start with the Industrial Revolution. Instead, it has been developing over a much longer time frame; slowly gaining momentum for at least the past 600 years. And like the Japanese film, Rashoman, which reconstructs a single murder from several different points of view, each of these three books also takes one particular point of view for retelling the history of species murder in North America. That history offers a prelude for the crisis we face today

Sea of Slaughter is the grimmest of the three, mostly because Farley Mowat writes with unabated fury as he chronicles the historical passing of the animals who once populated this continent. This book expresses a passionate sense of mourning; and after the first five chapters you may get very depressed as you realize that the story of the demise of the penguin-like Great Auk reads just about the same as the history of the demise of the polar bear from New England, or of the wolf who once flourished just about everywhere. The animals are gone, probably forever. Finis. It's done. This book is their elegy.

America as Seen by its First Explorers tells the same story, this time focusing upon the fantastic abundance witnessed by the white "discoverers" of this continent. If Mowat's book is morbid, then this one is tantalizing in its scope because it reads too much like a surrealistic description of Eden. Who can quite believe, to quote just one of many such examples, that Champlain sailed along the coast of Maine in 1604 and "not a day or a night passed we did not see less than 1000 dolphins." In fact, the richness of that distant tapestry now seems so beyond our current context, that the book leaves us feeling both enriched by what was, as well as saddened by what's left. Here is an environment gone forever. It's done. This book is its elegy.

Beyond Geography, Frederick Turner's version of the story retells the spiritual history of the European conquest of North America. Turner asserts that the destruction of this untamed continent was, in fact, a holy war. Ultimately, the conquerors never found satisfaction on these wild and verdant shores, because the traditions from which they sprang were founded upon the concept of Earth-as-devil. European religious culture had long been corrupt because it was based upon the medieval terror of the Crusades, and the Renaissance intolerance of the Inquisition. Beyond Geography chronicles the way that moral bankruptcy got translated into a new holocaust for a new continent. For example, Columbus' very first log entry upon meeting the Arawaks on October 12, 1492 reads:

They should be good servants and very intelligent, for I have observed that they soon repeat anything that is said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for they appeared to me to have no religion.

By comparison, the spirituality of the native cultures, (including the disguised no-religion of the long-extinct Arawaks), was based upon a respect for the land, for community, and for a sense of place. Turner's book is riveting, especially when he reaches the monumental conclusion that the merging of European intellectual prowess with Native American spiritual ecology was and is the single greatest lost opportunity in the history of the world. Now, as we contemplate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing, the legacy of his horrific conquest leaves us little to celebrate with honor.

And all together, these three books written by three different authors, each working under three different publishers, offer the very best background anywhere for comprehending how and why the environmental crisis ever developed. Actually, somebody should figure out a way to get the three of these books reissued as an inexpensive boxed set. Most of all, let's make sure that they get smuggled into every high school history class in North America.

If only more authors realized that a brevity of form often informs the most profound ideas. The best of this brief-and-profound literary genre are the ones we usually discover in a little rack placed next to the toilet. Carrier and Bekoff's book is a cute and miniature tour de force. It takes examples of plant and animal behaviors from hundreds of different species and condenses each down to a one-liner. The result is a very satisfying anthropomorphic nightmare, and certainly one of the more instructive animal books I've read this year.

...Whether you win, lose, or marry can depend on how well you blow bubbles. (humpback whale)

...The more babies you have, the more enemies you'll encounter (bird)

...Double your weight before winter (ground squirrel)

...Losing your mind? Grow another. (earthworm)

...If you're really hungry, eat yourself. (sea anemone)

This space started out as a review of Real Goods, a commendable mail order company that focuses on alternative energy products. Then I got the Affluenza brochure in the mail, and I couldn't resist swapping out a plug to buy helpful products for another plug to buy no products at all. One of the producers suggests the first week of July as "independence from stuff week". Sounds healthy, like what Buddhist monks already do or what 1/4 of the planet does during Muslim holy week. More time spent in the garden. If everyone reading this newsletter does it, how much do we cumulatively change the world? A little bit at a time, thank you very much.

..."Affluenza" is the name coined for the epidemic of rampant consumerism and materialism ailing Americans. Its symptoms include record levels of personal debt and bankruptcy, fractured families, chronic stress, and overwork.

...Evy McDonald, a hospital administrator who discovers she has a terminal disease, asks a poignant question, "Who do I want to be when I die?" How would you answer this question? Are you that person now?

No bunnies, dolphins, dogs, robins or horses in this book, which celebrates varmints, bugs, creepy-crawlies, and all the non-celebrity species that deserve our respect and attention. Jim Nollman's piece entitled The Lesson from the 1996 summer Interspecies Newsletter, about a caterpillar attacked by ants is one of the few essays in this anthology of mostly poetry.

...Because they are ordinary
Because they are everywhere
Because they have to scrabble each day for food
Because they are not flashy
Because they are intent on their business
because they are adapted to their lives.

–Why I watch sparrows, Greg Kosmicki

I've seen you sunning your eggsac
a diamond studded pillow
turning it on warm sand
dreaming of your brood
wondering when they'll get on your back
but you give it hollow abandon
at a predator's approach.

–Burrowing Wolf Spider, Matt Welter

...Before there was John Lilly and Koko the gorilla and double blind experiments and workshops on how to swim with dolphins, there was Aesop, Raven, and Coyote. What was primarily communicated between species was a matter of myth, metaphor, parable, drama. Before there was Martin Luther, Jesus, or Moses, it was the job of our spiritual leaders to sweat over the proper interpretation of the great issues of living, loving and dying as acted out by creatures like ants and caterpillars.

––Jim Nollman

Cetacean enthusiasts sometimes forget to take a step back from their admiration to keep sight of the forest for the trees. Inadvertently achieving that goal, Drew Kampion, longtime friend and colleague of IC, has produced a coffeetable book of rare scope and beauty, focused on powerful photos of ocean waves shot around the world. There are waves here to give pause to even the boldest of surfers, waves to break over the hearts and minds of poets, oceanographers, photographers, children, painters, and philosophers of every stripe. There are big waves, little waves, long waves, perfect waves, aberrant waves, deadly waves, waves seen from high above, shot from underneath, from near, from far, tubular waves looking down the barrel directly at the red sun of dusk. This is a book to give to someone you love, then sit down and pore over the images together.

...the energy released in a breaking wave is tremendous. All that stored wind power–transported silently for so many miles–at last bursts out of its liquid confines with a thunderous roar of liberation.

...Although humans are the most common surfers today, the act of riding waves is an ancient custom for porpoises, seals, sharks, killer whales, and fish and birds of all kinds. Seals and porpoises are terrific surfers; their instinctive familiarity with the liquid medium allows them to be the most subtle and eloquent wave riders of all.

With the advent of desktop publishing software ten years ago, some writers began to explore the one-person "magazine" as a viable publishing option. Heinberg's four page newsletter is not only one of the most profound expressions of this new form, but also one of the least expensive I've come across. Why publish oneself? In Heinberg's case, his growing number of loyal readers means he's doing quite well without a bloated infrastructure. His style seems too trenchant for mainstream newspapers, his savvy linkage is too bold for mainstream magazines, and his subject matter is usually too quirky to ever let him thrive as mainstream pundit. Yet he has an exceptional eye and ear for describing his own search to discover the sacred within the underbelly of modern culture.

One recent issue focused on the connection between gardening and spirit, and another one on the mandatory pain to the earth caused by modern economics. All quotes below are from a conversation between Heinberg and distinguished psychic researcher, Russel Targ, gleaned from the issue in front of me.

..The book [Miracles of the Mind] describes the CIA remote viewing program. For many years this information was highly classified; I was unable to talk about or publish my own research.

...We know from a wide range of recent medical research that when people feel connected to the world around them they tend to be healthier, whereas feelings of isolation and alienation often coincide with illness. The community of spirit is our sense of connection to a wider world. It can refer to family and friends–all the people with whom you have some emotional connection–and also to a wider community that includes consciousnesses that are not necessarily human or physically incarnate. Ultimately it includes the whole universe.

...I'd say the evidence for psychic ability is overwhelming. I agree with the critics that we don't know how it works. But the lack of an explanation does not at all affect the reality of the phenomenon. The data now, for half a century of psychic research in dozens of laboratories is really conclusive. Physicists are beginning to make models of how this works, but there isn't yet a complete description that everyone agrees with.

I met Howard Hall 20 years ago in Japan. He was working as the underwater cameraman for a film about the dolphin kill at Iki Island which included a segment about IC's role of directing dolphins away from the fishing boats. One night Howard and I talked about the risk of diving with sharks, for which he was gaining a reputation, and the risk of swimming with orcas, which I had done the previous summer. Howard believed it was completely safe to swim with almost all the shark species. He could not believe that I would ever choose to get into the water with orcas. Different drummers.

The publisher of this book, Beyond Words, is making a well-deserved reputation for producing some of the best designed books of our time and Secrets of the Ocean Realm continues that tradition. It is one of the most beautiful books of underwater photos I have ever seen. The images are sublime, not only for capturing the luminescence of the underwater subject matter, but for the unusual photographic detail of cuttlefish and kelp, sea horses and sperm whales. Staring at a massive school of squid, the prickly mouth of a mako shark, or the gnarly snout of a gray whale has never looked so surreal.

The text is another matter. It is garbled and repetitious, tenses switch without notice. The writers often lose their train of thought. They don't seem to know or care about the basic rules of grammar. A good editor, or better yet, a ghost writer, would have made this book a classic. As it is, poor writing tarnishes the superb photos.

...It became suddenly dark. A great shadow had passed over my head. I looked up into the sunset light lancing through the surface far above. Silhouetted against the golden light flew hundreds of bat rays. The swirling school looked much like a great flock of huge birds circling before beginning an evening migration.

...I got close to the squid feeding on the tuna. It was nearly six feet long and looked to weigh about a hundred pounds. I reached out and touched the animal. I was surprised by its texture. It was not a soft, snail-like creature. It's flesh was hard and muscular. It flashed from white to angry red as I touched it. Then a tentacle lashed out gripping my arm. I felt a stinging on the back of my hand and instinctively recoiled. I looked at the back of my hand and saw small drops of blood beading up. The squid's tentacles were covered with powerful sucker disks, each of which was armed with needle-sharp hooks.

...I came across a large male dolphin as he swam slowly over the sand., his nose almost touching the bottom as he used echolocation to detect fish hiding beneath the surface. Suddenly the dolphin stopped, his body becoming vertical as he scanned a small patch of sand. Then he began digging...opening and closing his mouth to pump water and sand from the ever-deepening hole. I was so excited I almost swallowed my mouthpiece! Soon his entire head was beneath the surface. He had dug at least eighteen inches into the bottom...he rose clutching a small razorfish in his teeth.

The author, Victor Perera recently visited the IC office as he prepared to write his next book about the ritual life of whales as well as the people who study them. This older book, his best known, delves deeply into the lives of the last traditional Mayan tribe living in the jungles of southern Mexico. The writing focuses on the healing work and knowledge of the tribe's shaman, Chan K'un, who has since died. For anyone who has been moved by the fiction portrayed as fact in the Don Juan books of Castaneda, take a look at this book for an in depth study of the real thing.

...The gods were displeased and loosed a deluge on the men of wood. Eagles, jaguars, tapirs were sent to gouge out their eyes and mangle their bones. Black rain fell day and night. In the end, even their domestic animals and their pots and pans rebelled against the soulless men of wood. "You have eaten us, and now we shall eat you," said the birds and the dogs. Even the faithful hunting dogs who had been ill treated leaped on the wooden men and tore out their faces. When the men of wood had been destroyed, the few survivors became the forest monkeys.

...A Lacandon farmer becomes so enraged at the animals that keep raiding his cornfield, he finally lights incense to Akinchob, the god of maize and protector of farmers, and asks to be changed into a jaguar, so he can chase the animals off. When Akinchob accedes to his request, the farmer/jaguar sees the animals as his kin, and instead of chasing them, he takes pity on them. "You poor people," he says. "You must all be hungry. Come in, come in, I have plenty to eat in my cornfield."

This is one of the true classics of modern non-fiction; telling the story of Hans Taaibosch, a Busman born and raised in the stone age culture of Southern Africa who somehow, finds his way to New York City where he makes his living in a circus. Of this book, The Christian science monitor wrote, "Mr. van der Post has come closer than ever to the heart. If you read no other book this month, this year, this decade, read this one."

..."Tamed?" she exclaimed with a look of utter incomprehension and incredulity. "Tamed? What an extraordinary expression to use about human beings! You tame wild animals. You don't tame people–or do you do that too in that horrible Africa of yours?"

...There was one great fact of the history of human imagination to be taken into consideration...Everywhere at all times, in all cultures and races of which we have record, when the greatest meaning, the highest value of life, men called their gods or god, needed renewal and increase through life on earth, it began the process through a dream.

...The people who painted the walls of the caves at Lascaux, and engraved the rocks of the Iberian peninsula, and the Bushmen of southern Africa, shared a common ancestor, who might well have been the little man of folklore and fairy tale who once invested the Mediterranean littoral as well as the whole of Africa.

Traveling in Alaska recently, I spent some time moored alongside Roger Payne on The Odyssey, his research sailboat stocked with a seemingly bottomless array of techno-toys used for monitoring the undersea environment and sticking nasty projectiles into the hides of whales. Despite the nature of some of his toys, Payne is a thoughtful man who does a masterful job of straddling the often contrary worlds of cetacean science and environmental activism. His new book possesses a nice balance of stories about the mysterious ways of whales and the sometimes misplaced values of the men who use them. Anyone with a penchant to learn more about whale behavior should start right here.

...When a humpback whale lunges forward with its mouth pried hugely open, collecting everything both above and below the surface, the normal strategy of a little fish to dart sideways or jump through the surface doesn't work at all. It may not look very selective or elegant, but in a case involving the need for carloads of food, subtlety is hardly relevant. Just by being so enormous, a whale defeats these avoidance mechanisms of its prey.

...The ultimate expression of our madness is that we revere as wise those who put economic consideration above all else and sneer at those who see the madness of such a system of values. Meanwhile, we spend all the capital of our children's inheritance to maintain ourselves in the myth that what we are doing is viable. I would offer that this is the most deeply flawed, most expensive belief ever adopted in the history of our species.

...To understand how big a large blue whale is, think of it making the simple motion of going from its horizontal position to a vertical position...Our 106 foot whale would have to be, of course, in at least 106 feet of water. And when she did so she would have experienced a difference in pressure from the tip of her head to the tip of her tail of over three atmospheres.

I don't usually respond very well to folksy books. It's too painful to read them closely, and eventually expose the author as someone possessing a quaint 19th century attitude about nature as a repository of curios. This one barely made my opinionated cut after I read Elliot describing how to cook a skunk as an experiment in trying something new.

Reading deeper, this book seems folksy mostly as a result of its publisher's misguided marketing scheme rather than its author's intent. It is actually about becoming an astute observer in the woods and with animals most anywhere in North America. The author's drawings are finely etched, and liberally sprinkled throughout. Better than anything else, they demonstrate that Mr. Elliot knows how to sit still for a long time watching and interacting with the microcosm spread out before him.

..."Beavers are a lot like people," he said. "They live in dome-shaped lodges, like we do. They cut trees, dam streams, and change the landscape. They are community builders."

...Origin myths often describe events that may seem like casualties or mishaps, but they end up changing the world.

...A bee in a robbing mode moves in an agitated way, and releases a pheromone that makes her "look suspicious" to the guard bees, who rush to fend her off. If several robbers attack in a mob, some of them distract and occupy the guards while the others break through into the hive. There they find unguarded cells of stored honey and steal all they can carry. If the hive is weak, robbers from strong hives will sometimes strip the weaker hive of all its stores and leave it to starve and die.

I met Doug Peacock last summer, he and I and two other buddies traveling by inflatable boat up into the remote fiord country east of Vancouver Island. I hadn't yet read his book, although his notoriety as a outdoorsman had certainly preceded him. Over that glorious week, I came to appreciate Doug as one of the very few "animal men" I have had the pleasure to spend time with; his intense totem relationship with grizzly bears serving as a mirror to my own long term rapport with the orcas. I finally read his book last Fall. It is a testament to a certain cleansing bond with nature that most of our culture has either forgotten or unconsciously decided to eradicate. Grizzly Years is a sublime account of that bond by one of the last people experienced enough to describe it.

...the way we handled the bison, Indian, wolf and grizzly was the way we wrote our history, the convergent, blood-flecked roads that carried us here. Despite a bit of latter-day remorse about the way we treated the Indian, there are not many apologies.

...The rest of the morning I watched the large brown grizzly go about his business. He dug on the hillside and grazed on bits of grass or sedge, sometimes exploring anthills and sniffing dried pearly everlasting flowers. He pounced on a clod of turf as though capturing an escaping ground squirrel. Other times he looked reflective, and I felt I could spend all my days watching bears. If I had a handful of lives, this would be a perfectly good way to live at least one of them. Bears had become more than bears, and I glimpsed a transcendence. A faint but brash jingling interrupted my meditations. The obnoxious clanking of metal bells drifted down from the trail above ¡ hikers wearing "bear bells" as the Park Service recommended. Bear bells are an obscenity. Every disturbance of animals takes vital energy away from them and, in exceptionally lean years, human harassment of wildlife can make the difference between life and death.

Cave of the Clan Bears was terrific, but then got diluted and diminished by its own success; its characters soon transmuted into caricatures attracting "adventure". It left many of the book's original admirers feeling the same bathos we felt for Castaneda's books ten years earlier.

Raspail's book, the story of an extinct tribe of primitive Indians who inhabited the far tip of South America, somehow reminds me that Jean Auel abused an obligation that all authors should feel for their characters, but too often do not. The Kaweskar, the protagonists of his novel, were a real people. They never advanced beyond the dawn of time, but physically survived deep into the twentieth century. This novel is a fictional account of the last survivor, Lafko, who remembers the story of his people while crouched upon a strip of beach in Tierra del Fuego.

...They were not aware of it, but they had already been walking for hundreds of years. They were the farthest-flung spray of a storm that had blown up ages earlier in Asia, washing wave after wave of tribes ¡ across the land bridge into empty America. Sometimes the migrations marked time for five or ten generations. But when a stranger appeared again, with his odor, his strength, his cruelty, his contempt for these forlorn, backward, weak, ugly little people, they pushed on south again and their memory set off with them.

...Charles Darwin was a man without indulgence, without kindness, highly intelligent, sarcastic, full of his own superiority. Three days ago he had focused his small inquiring eyes on the first naked savages they had encountered. He noted: "I had not measured the enormity of the difference separating the savage from civilized man, a difference surely greater than that separating wild and domesticated beasts. Beholding these men and women, it is hard to believe they are human creatures inhabiting the same world as ourselves. Captain Cook once compared their language to a noise a man makes clearing his throat, although, most assuredly, no European ever emitted such harsh sounds while clearing his throat."

This must be one of the best books ever written about animals stuck in zoos. It is the masterwork of a very compassionate man, a psychologist by background, who served as director of the Zurich Zoo fifty years ago. Hediger seemed well aware that his psychological assessment of captive animal behavior sounded surrealistic given the context. There is a treasure trove of material here about the mind and emotions of wild animals as well, and the comparison makes for mandatory reading for students of animal behavior.

...The armadillo species most exposed to danger is Tolypeutes, the one with the most complete armour, since rolling up into a ball is no use against man, its worst enemy, and therefore it makes capture easier. This highly armored one faces extinction. The lightly protected one, Dasypus, a burrowing animal, prefers ground that has been broken up, and is therefore flourishing wherever ground is being cultivated.

...Adult elephants, as a rule, do not go to sleep before midnight, and then for only about three hours. Animals that are very old, unwell, or upset, do not lie down to sleep at all, but stand up all night; while healthy animals lie down at full length, with their trunks coiled up like ship's rope.