Book ReviewsPage Four |
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The idea of people publicly acknowledging personal and even totemic relations with animals is bound to become more prominent in the culture as species continue to go extinct and habitat vanishes at increasing rates. That is easy to understand when the animals are dolphins, pandas and elephants. But who would have ever expected anyone to promote interspecies relations with insects? That is precisely what Joanna Lauck does in her wonderfully written book, which firmly and exhaustively confronts our culture’s unwarranted and largely ignorant fear of insects. As Thomas Berry notes so casually in the introduction, the time has come for humans and animals to turn toward each other. …affinity for a particular creature is always a gift, linked inexplicably to our essential nature. Perhaps the species that mirrors some aspect of our wilderness identity waits, with insect diligence, at the entrance of our conscious awareness. Maybe we have only to become aware of our projections and seed our imaginations with new ideas and stories to create a pathway that permits their entry and helps us return to our native place. …While standing in the aisle amidst an assortment of plastic crickets and ladybugs created to add interest to floral arrangements, a woman with a toddler in hand walked by me and pointed to the plastic insects. "Oh Jeffrey, look, bugs! Ick!" "Ick", echoed the child, the lesson learned without protest. …although most ants will fight any strange ant, even one of the same species that lives in a nest a few hundred yards away, the Argentina ant recognizes as family all others of its species. …What is often humbled in a painful encounter with another creature, especially a small creature like a scorpion, is the self-important, inflated parts of ourselves. |
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| Contributors to this anthology include many friends of the interspecies extended family including chimp observer Jane Goodall, horse empath Linda Tellington-Jones, antelope healer Christine Jurzykowski, and Interspecies curmudgeon Jim Nollman. The editors deliberately chose stories and essays that present diverse views of animal awareness and communication. Encounters with the natural world run the gamut from turtles and prairie dogs, to hornets and giraffes. …He was six years old. From birth, he had never really enjoyed good health. It was not as if anything was specifically wrong, yet nothing was quite right either. Swollen joints, less active than the rest, thinner too. We found him fully horizontal one afternoon. "Quick, prop his head up," someone said. A giraffe must have its head elevated or else the buildup of unused pressure causes and aneurysm of the brain. We spend the next forty-eight hours with this gentle giant on our laps. (Christine Jurzykowski) …The whales did not seem ferocious to my unpracticed eye. Even in those days, I didn’t believe much of what I read in the newspapers or science texts. Nor did I ever call this being a "killer whale." They were orcas to me, and that conscious choice of nomenclature helped immensely in establishing a friendly protocol between us. Ironically, I felt that if there was any risk to swimming with orcas, it ewas that whales would perceive me to be a generic man––the same old story of me getting interpreted as a mean-spirited creature possessed of a long history of harming their kind. (Jim Nollman) …Two boys were holding the chickens upside down, swinging them in circles, their legs tied. I purchased them, put them in the back of my van, drove frantically in search of a place without humans where I could leave––a riverbank with thick brush. It was nearly dark. But there was no place that was not inhabited. Every creek had herders nearby who would capture the chickens and stew them. (Michael Tobias) |
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This rare book was donated by John Lilly to IC at a recent conference in Tokyo. It comprises the annotated text of separate speeches delivered by these two men at a time when people were just starting to perceive dolphins as intelligent animals. As a forty year old example of the mostly modern literary phenomenon of human/animal history, this slim blue volume exists as a precursor to the themes of the books reviewed above. … …It is of interest to note that, in connection with the vegetable feeding habits of the Kamerun dolphin, Lycophron, in his Alexandra, makes his dolphins feed on trees, and Ovid, in the Metamorphoses describes a flood in which the dolphins take possession of the woods. (Montagu) …In 1945, the wife of a well-known trial attorney residing in Florida was saved from drowning by a dolphin. This woman had stepped into the sea with a strong undertow and was immediately dragged under. Just before losing consciousness, she remembers hoping that someone would push her to shore. "With that, someone gave me a tremendous shove, and I landed on the beach, face down, too exhausted to turn over…when I did, no one was near, but in the water a porpoise was leaping around." (Montagu) …A human shouts some words over the water of the tank in which the dolphin is residing. A single word may be used or many words––it makes no difference. Eventually, the animal in the tank will raise his blowhole out of the water and make some sort of humanoid emission or whistle or clicks in a delphinese fashion. If the human immediately replies with some word or words, the animal may immediately respond, the human answers, and a vocal transaction is underway. (Lilly) …A new science one might call anthropo-zoology or zoo-anthropology. This science is a deep study of human beings, of animals, of their mutual relations, present and potential. In this discipline, researchers encourage close relations with the animal, and study the developing relation between human and so-called "beast". |
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| It’s a great idea. As Watership Downs was a highly literary novel describing the behavior, society, and mythology of a warren of rabbits, so this book tells a similar tale about an elephant family struggling to survive in modern Africa. The books animal protagonists seem caught in a descending spiral dominated by overpopulating humans whittling away at their habitat, and poachers greedy for ivory. In the midst of this daily struggle, Gowdy weaves an ingenious story of a lame baby elephant learning to become an adult in a matriarchal society where only females change their names at puberty as a rite of passage, while males keep their birth names because physically they only grow larger with age, not different.. The book tells of many other creatures as well, including hyena, cobra, and antelope. Reading a book like this always makes me wonder if the author is anthropomorphizing or simply telling it like it is. Highly recommended. …a time of mating and of spectacular confrontations between big bulls. So much is bound to happen, in fact, that cows arriving at a gathering customarily greet each other by declaring their chief intention(next to eating of course): "I come to seduce." "I come to gossip." I come to enlighten." … The stench of vehicle. Within seconds everybody has gone still, everybody has caught the sound or smell. Trunks pivot toward She-Scares and She-Demands, either of whom will signal the next move. There is a good chance that the vehicle isn’t headed directly here––vehicles don’t drink at the watering places and none have been seen at Blood swamp in twenty-five years. …There is nothing green here and nothing in flower and nothing not withered. Almost every tree is black with vultures, the earth a pandemonium of bones poking through drifts of red dust or, where the ground has been burned, through black ash. The skeletons belong to the grazers., but it is those zebras and wildebeests and gazelles still standing who seem more dead, less lucky, than their fallen relations. The living haven’t any young among them, and even the carnivores seem to find this hard to believe. The jackals trotting among the Thomson’s gazelles hold their muzzles up and scour over their shoulders, as if searching for something more sprightly and delectable than the wretches whose trembling legs they look through. |
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| . Given the quality of the literature being produced these days in the cause of planet Earth, one might im agine critics a hundred years in the future defining the cusp years of the new millenium as the golden age of nature writing. Freeman House's new book, Totem Salmon, insists that a new and poignant voice be added to the growing list of biologists and naturalists who work as eloquently with metaphors as they perform tirelessly to protect species and habitat. We enter this book by getting thrust bodily into a muddy stream alongside House, learn to feel the rain and the cold edging through the dense fog. Ever so conscientiously, we are taught to comprehend the lives of the salmon as yet another victim of the human madness that seems set to destroy every creature that deigns to remain wild and free. Totem Salmon is written with a Grateful Dead flow of imagery, and unfolds like an epic poem set to the rythmical ambience of a stream tumbling over rocks. One image remains especially strong. House describes the extinguished salmon of a devastated habitat as "the ghost of a sensation that seems to come where a lost limb once was." These ghosts, whether fish or tiger, whale or herb, live on in an ecosystem as a palpable presence in our memory. Fortunately for all of us, there are people like Freeman House capable of describing the difficult process of rehabilitation with such passion and clarity that his enthusiasm finally becomes contagious, bound to make many more people jump into the muddy creekbed to work alongside him. |
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| A very special college textbook that treats trees, forests, and the animals living in them, as collective entities possessed of ethology, behavior, and history. Starting at the retreat of the ice sheets, the author describes the slow migration and melding of forests and species, turning northward as the climate warmed. The book includes a demographic investigation of the forests as they appeared to the first European explorers. The changes wrought in the mere 400 years since, are as shockingly dramatic as everything that went before. I highly recommend this book, as a most readable history of the changing forests of North America. ...Forests represent a loose collection of species that grow together for a time as they pass each other on the way to somewhere else. Each species arrives and departs independently from other species. Plants move very slowly; animals move more quickly; but they all continue to move either to escape an inhospitable environment or take advantage of a new one. If they can not move, they adapt. If they can not adapt, they become extinct. Thus forests redefine themselves as plants and animals continue their relentless shuffling. ...The American chestnut had a commanding presence in the ancient forests. It gained the title of “redwood of the East” because of its great size, dark brown fissured bark, and resistance to decay. The largest specimens stood as much as 130 feet tall with trunks up to 10 feet thick, and most mature trees were 100 feet tall and 4-5 feet thick. |
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| During a recent trip to Europe, I spent time with ethnomusicologist, Dario Martinelli, an authority in the growing discipline of animal aesthetics. He recommended this essay written by the well known French composer. Dario regards it as the best intellectual overview of interspecies communication. Myth and music are represented here as the best tools we have to express a deep longing to connect to nature. Mache’s explication of several ancient myths——especially the dolphins who save humans from drowning——draws the intriguing conclusion that the historical evolution of musical thought is co-dependent on the human understanding of natural phenomena. It seems another way of saying that the environmental crisis is a crisis in human perception. Likewise, to grant myth a genuine power to guide our lives and our actions, teaches us that nature and culture need not oppose one another. The book is sometimes clumsy in its language, which makes me wish for a better translation. ...In the majority of mythic forms, music is of the essence. Divine or heroic representations are only a presentation of the forces acting within us. The great theater of myth has only the human mind as its real setting. What the stories of Arion and Dionysus try to tell us is that in order to escape the perverse temptations of the desire for power, especially that which is conferred by socially-recognized talent, one must dare to risk the great leap into primordial consciousness. ...The imitation of animal sounds by primitive groups of hunters is likely to give us the most direct image of the common source of myth and music. |
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| I sometimes see Peter at crafts fairs, selling his artful book the way other people sell pottery. He’s always been an inspiration to me, not only for collecting stories about people and whales, but for editing, designing, publishing, and marketing the book series on his own. Whale Tales read like a series of folk tales from some oral tradition overheard at a campfire. This volume two illuminates humans and whales doing their best to simply greet one another well, a testament sadly lacking from most mainstream nature writing. The book makes a great gift. …It is night. The sky has cleared, the wind is westerly again. The moon, in her first quarter, seems to hang behind the mizzen, making the sea glisten in the wake. The reef is cleared, my porpoises are gone, the way is free until the Horn. Free on the right, free on the left, free everywhere. ——Bernard Moitessier …When the killer whales were entering the inlet, I went into the water. I was sitting there and began making sounds, splashing and blowing bubbles with my face in the water. Two females came in close, logging at the surface two meters away. After that encounter, the whales came to find me in the same place several times. I got deeper in the water and they swam closer, almost touching me. When I played my harmonica for them, they rolled over each other to get closer to me. ——Roberto Bubas …Perhaps whales are only celebrities, Elvis Presleys of the animal realm. In other words maybe we give them more power than they deserve. Or maybe they actually have the power we feel from them. Look only to yourself for the answer. Go find a whale and decide if the power is real. And realize that the once distinct lines between scientists, environmentalists and mystics now seem to be softening. ——Jim Nollman |
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| As someone who visited Neah Bay to meet with Makah tribal leaders, I am sad to say that this literate book serves up a rather sloppy account of the Makah whale hunt. During his two year stay in Neah Bay, the personable Sullivan makes friends with several locals, and goes into great detail about the crew training in their canoe, followed by anti-whaling protestors and the Media arriving in force. Unfortunately, he was never privy to the decision-making process of tribal leaders who never emerge from the edges of his vision. Worse still, he portrays many of the protestors as shrill racists, and, never even mentions for instance, Cynthia Matzke who spent several months working alone trying to convince the wavering tribal majority that they didn’t need to kill a whale to re-vitalize their traditions. The result is a book that leaves gaping holes in a complex political and environmental incident. For instance, when representatives of several nation’s whaling industries convene in Neah Bay, ostensibly to welcome the Makah into their brotherhood of whaling, we get to drive in the car with Japanese whaling executives, but Sullivan never tells us why this group was invited to Neah Bay in the first place, and what they plan to offer the tribe. He offers the lame excuse that none of his Makah friends seem to know either, without recognizing that their obfuscation becomes his own. When protestors later accuse the Makah of accepting a bribe from the Japanese to cultivate whaling on the American west coast, Sullivan never makes the connection. Such lapses in reportage occur so often that anyone who cares about animals is left dissatisfied by a book displaying much style and not enough truth-telling. Let’s hope someone else eventually offers a better accounting of a controversial event. |
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| The book offers a thorough overview of what is truly the last frontier on Earth——the depths of the sea. It is written by a New York Times reporter who, essentially, lets us accompany him on his own journey of discovery to such places as the Azores where a sunken armada awaits salvage, to the Titanic, to undersea vents spewing a treasure of precious metals as well as organisms capable of withstanding superheated water. Along the way, we learn about the horrific deep sea dumping of radioactive waste by the Soviet Navy, the US Government’s low frequency “ATOC” tests conceived to shed light on global warming but vigorously protested by the whale lobby, and strange and wondrous microbes that inhabit the rocks far beneath the earth’s surface and which are emerging as a cornerstone of biotech research. I couldn’t put this book down although, I was often annoyed by this author who criticizes the obvious pattern of technology fostering greed, but then gloats over the same new technology whenever he gets to see it in action. Like any mainstream science writer, he seems unwilling to elucidate the true price (or even the meaning) of endless information accrued for its own sake. Then again, I admit to a thin skin whenever data gathered in the cause of nothing but science is presented as if it were knowledge. …It was improbably long and thin, with a fiery red dorsal fin that ran the length of its body and exploded into a feathery crest atop its head. Today the creature goes by the rather pedestrian name of oarfish. The eerie, serpentine beast can grow to lengths of 55 feet and weigh more than 600 pounds. It is believed to live at depths of up to 100 fathoms (600 feet). …The Navy undersea microphones that were to record the temperature signals were located up and down the west coast, off Alaska, around Hawaii, and in Guam…They would rumble with low frequency noises for twenty minutes, repeating that signal up to six times a day. In theory, the monitoring of the undersea rumble would open the concluding chapter of the global warming debate, settling it once and for all. That was the plan. But ATOC and its scientists ran into the whale lobby, a political force to reckon with in the late 20th century, especially in nature-loving California. |
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| Tracking is a skill usually associated with traditional hunters. Thankfully, modern tracker Paul Rezendes regards hunting as a cruel and unnecessary anachronism. Working in the admittedly humble wilderness of New Jersey, Rezendes’ clientele consists entirely of non-hunters who come to him seeking techniques to acquire direct relations with wild animals and the natural world. This, his new book, subtitled Adventures in Nature and Animal Teachings, Rezendes joins a select group of nature writers who emphasize first-hand experience over researched information. In Rezendes world, animals exude a practical intelligence which is comprehended by walking in their tracks and learning to think like they do. In this game, the predators are always on the offensive, while the prey learn the method as a survival teaching. Rezendes book describes tracking as a dance and a drama. While reading it, I thought of ballet dancers onstage at Lincoln Center just 70 miles away from the bobcats and rabbits enacting their own graceful dance in the winter snow of the Pine Barrens. …With great cunning , the cat had picked a place where a downed tree blocked the hare’s run. The tree trunk was close to the ground, but with enough room for a hare to squeeze underneath. Well-worn tracks told us that this is just what the hare had been doing. The cat had hidden itself behind a stump just past the fallen tree, so it wouldn’t be seen by a snowshoe hare coming down the run until the hare ducked under a tree, came out the other side, and was face-to-face with the cat. …Tracks told of tremendous leaps and zig-zag scurries. The hare streaked one way, then another, trying to throw the cat off. The bobcat chased the snowshoe hare for about a hundred yards, then gave up. …In order to embrace the web of life yourself, try tracking an animal. You don’t have to go to some exotic place. You don’t have to track a bobcat, a mountain lion, or a wolf. You can track in your own backyard, in little pockets of woodland, in suburbia, or even in a city park. It doesn’t matter what kind of animal you track. |
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| I discovered this long-forgotten gem in a used bookstore in Genoa Nevada just before heading out on a backpack into the Sierra Nevada. The book was written in the first century BC by a Roman poet. Lucretius was enamored of the Epicurean philosophy that believed in the evidence presented by one’s senses, to the exclusion of all abstraction, metaphysics, and religion. The book is unique because, despite his seemingly cold approach, Lucretius remains full of wonder concerning the small and large miracles of life as well as the pleasures he constantly uncovers through his perceptions. Some have described this book as one of the first scientific texts. I don’t think so. It certainly contains elements of objective observation, but the ongoing descriptions of nature are much too wildly rapturous to fit snugly into the category of scientific materialism. He seems more like a Bronze Age John Muir or Thoreau. Lucretius would have been a member of IC. ...The truth, as I maintain, is this: there are certain bodies whose impacts, movements, order, position, and shapes produce fire. When their order is changed, they change their nature. In themselves they do not resemble fire or anything else that can bombard our senses with particles or impinge on our organs of touch. ...There never were, nor ever can be, Centaurs—creatures with a double nature combining organs of different origin in a single body. This can be inferred by the dullest wit. A horse reaches its vigorous prime in three years, a child far from it. ...It was the sun and the moon, the watchmen of the world, encircling with their light that vast rotating vault, who taught humans that the seasons of the year revolve and that there is a constant pattern to things. |
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| As one who has played music with many different species of animals over the past several years and promoted the experience for almost as long, I have developed a rather curmudgeonly theory about how and when, I believe, natural sounds produced by the likes of wind and whales suddenly jump out of the background to insist we refer to them as music. Simply put, if it seems to possess the sense and order of music, then it is music. If it doesn't, it isn't. One caveat. Those people most capable of hearing music within nature also tend to perceive nature more like Gaia, and less like the bottomless resource that leads to the environmental crisis. I might conclude that your grandchildren's future is at stake depending on how well you listen. It is with this understanding that I have been reading and listening to a brilliant book anthology/CD combination entitled The Book of Music and Nature, a new collection of essays attempting to make "sense" out of the relativist connection between music and nature. I conclude that most of the writers gathered here do indeed hear the upbeat melody of a trilling robin on a warm summer morning as a wonderful song, but are just as enamored with the academic game of language and culture that invents intellectual hurdles to keep them from leaping too quickly from heart to head and back again. Sitting in my living room, listening to the robin in the garden through an open window while reading the essays, I clap wildly for the singing bird and yet also feel myself acquiring genuine insight about the subject of music in nature reading the arguments of aesthetes, ethnomusicologists, and biologists who insist I withhold my applause until they define the terms more accurately. The chapters run the gamut, including narrative excerpts from the poet Rilke and the novelist David James Duncan, erudite essays by composers like David Toop, ideas from aesthetic philosophers, anthropologists, and firsthand accounts by soundscape artist Daniel Quinn sitting on a ice flow recording walrus and field recordist Bernie Krauss out in some jungle searching for that fast-disappearing habitat still free of airplane sounds. Every aesthetic concept is up for grabs in this collection, especially the definitions of nature and music. John Cage has written elsewhere that art (including music) is "whatever you can get away", which leads him and several of his modernist disciples to argue here that nurturing the grating sounds of the inner city or a six lane highway at rush hour are music if we simply wish them to be. Perhaps good advice for people who have to endure the urban cacophony, although Cage's laissez-faire aesthetic seems to provide a subtle yet screwy encouragement to the likes of Exxon to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve. Composer Pauline Oliveras begs for far greater discretion, outlining a series of exercises to guide students through a program of aural meditation. "You are part of the environment," she writes, "Explore the limits of audibility." In the most probing essay in the book, Tim Hodgkinson interviews Pierre Schaeffer about the cultural implications of musique concrete, which is defined as music composed of raw sounds: thunderstorms, steam-engines, waterfalls. This has led, of course, to the genre of Paul Winter, Alan Hohvaness, Pink Floyd, and everyone else who has ever used a recording studio to overdub a wolf, a whale, or a ringing telephone into a song. Shaeffer's analysis of the gut violence of rock and roll is especially troubling. The accompanying CD does an admirable job of fleshing out the text. Although a bit of it sounds discombobulating outside its written context, some excerpts are simply wonderful, including a Nepali sarangi meditation of great virtuosity entitled The Butterflies of Jumla. David Lumsdaine's paradigm-shattering recording of the Australian butcherbird displays in all its glory a bird song as musically sophisticated and healing as Miles Davis solos in Bitches Brew. My own personal favorite is the musical excerpt of Tuvan throat singer Anatoli Kuular, who composes songs only to be sung in the habitat where the music originates. As Kuular's recordist Ted Levin explains, the goal is "to present as vividly as possible the wonderfully permeable border between sounds of the non-human world, human imitation of that world, and musical constructions involving those imitations. |
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| There have been a few English translations of the great Finnish Epic poem over the years, but I consider this one the most readable. The myth tells of an ancient Finnish shaman named Vainamoinen, describing his exploits with witches, demons, and all manner of animals and heavenly bodies. The history of the Kalevala’s publication is almost as interesting as the poem itself. The tale was originally sung by keepers of an oral tradition, who would chant the verses for hours or even days at a time without rest. In the 1830’s Lonnrot traveled the Karelian backwaters where the tradition was most vital, and wrote down an entire library of these chants, collectively known as the Kalevala. He then spent several years studying the threads that connected the stories, finally transcribing it into a single volume. Actually, the Kalevala we know today, is more rightly understood as “Kalevala’s Greatest Hits. On a recent foray to Northern Europe, I was shown the richly-decorated rooms in Helsinki, where Lonnrot’s original notebooks are kept. It felt like a holy space, the epicenter of Finnish nationalism and spirituality. Some speculate that a few stories reflect events depicted in the ancient Karelian petroglyphs. There is a reference to a place along the northern coast between high hills where whales were said to be found. Some scholars interpret this as a verbal map leading to a petroglyph site that focuses on images of whale shamanism. The Kalevala is never going to be an easy book to comprehend, which is why I recommend it as a better candidate for backpacking even than Lucretius. ...whitefish have eaten his eyes, a pike has split his shoulders, so let the man go in the sea, perhaps he’ll become a cod, or do well as a whale. |
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| The failure of science in the twentieth century is a failure in our collective perception of “object”— with the result that we see and describe the world as disconnected things without consciousness or mentorship. This soulless view of the world must be held at least obliquely responsible for the environmental problems of our day. The failure of art in the twentieth century is a failure in our collective perception of “subject”. Until the autocracy of Modernism took the art world by storm, artists had always served culture as teachers of perception, showing us how to know mystery, and live in right relationship to the world. So-called modern art changed all that so that today, art is actually marginalized by the artists themselves, who insist their work must not mean anything and that they can not (and do not) bear responsibility for inspiring the greater community. What we have lost by allowing art to promote the noncommittal, is the subject of Suzi Gablik’s extraordinary book. She adds a deep ethical and social context to the cute myth of the lonely avant-garde artist as she confronts an art milieu that exists without purpose or moral authority. Know this. Her criticism of the art scene underscores the prime reason this organization was founded in 1978. Read Gablik’s book and you will understand better why IC has devoted the past 22 years sponsoring those few artists who eschew the urban art scene to create works meant to transform our culture’s fundamental perceptions of nature and animals. …Those who defend modernism claim that art need not serve any purpose but should create its own reality. (The composer Arnold Schonberg went so far as to declare that nothing done for a purpose could be art.) Abstract art brought into being not only a new aesthetic style, but also a change of understanding regarding the very raison d’etre of art itself. For the committed Modernist, the self-sufficiency of art is its salvation. Aesthetic experience is an end in itself, worth having for its own account. The only way for art to preserve its truth is by maintaining its distance from the social world—by staying pure. …As we move into postmodernism, we seem to be witnessing the rise of a new psychological type of artist: the bureaucratic or organizational personality who lives in a condition of submission to a cultural and economic power system because of the rewards of money and prestige which are offered in return for such submission. In America, this process is now far advanced as a new power elite of managers continues to grow and consolidate, encompassing all aspects of life. Thomas Whiteside has written eloquently in The New Yorker about the corporate takeover of the publishing industry; the same tendencies now threaten all levels of the art world, where a commercial morality can only have the same effect on art as it had on book publishing: the promotion of mediocre work through aggressive forms of mass marketing and advertising. |
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| Darwin believed that the process of evolution consists of an ongoing series of mutational accidents. In effect, the best mutation survives another day. This book takes a contrary stand, theorizing that life itself controls the evolutionary process. Quantum evolution proposes a theory that both complements and expands upon the much vaunted Gaia Hypothesis. But whereas Gaia relies on chaos theory and biochemistry to demonstrate its salient process, McFadden’s profound book suggests that evolution may not be random at all, because quantum mechanics gives to living organisms the ability to initiate mutations. This property of living organisms to direct their own adaptations indirectly gives new meaning to the idea of consciousness, implying that every organism possesses free will. …[Traditional myth] records a belief that life contained a divine or magical principle, absent from the inanimate world. To create life, this vital principle needed to be added, often from a living source, such as blood. …When all other animals flee north, the Emperor penguins head south to the freezing continental interior where they congregate in nesting sites on the central Antarctic plateau. The female lays her single egg and heads north herself to the ocean, leaving the male penguin to perform perhaps nature’s most exemplary display of paternal duty. He gathers the egg in a pouch and huddled together with as many as twenty-five thousand other penguins, he braves the coldest place on earth. …The universe is anthropic in the sense that its properties must be compatible with the emergence of life and indeed intelligence. There may be (or have been) billions of alternative universes, with different values for their fundamental constants, but they are probably all sterile. The one fact that we know for certain about our universe is that all properties are compatible with our own existence. …Quantum measurement may be the key ingredient missing in conventional theories to account for the origin of life. The ability of self-replicators to amplify their own quantum state to the classical realm, and thereby measure that state, was crucial to life’s emergence. Once the first self-replicating cells were generated, the rest, as they say, is history. |
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| With Interspecies Inc so involved in interpreting ancient art depicting shamans interacting with animals, we have been naturally drawn to this excellent book about the ritual basis of Northern European culture, primarily from Germany. Metzner is a well-grounded scholar, but his sentiments clearly lie with the traditions of the ancient people themselves. In describing their ceremonies and even their mindset, he casts aside the usual academic method of presenting “primitive people” as separate and less enlightened than his own modern self, but as a distant extension of his own psyche. This refreshing perspective highlights a multi-cultural book that will interest anyone who regards the Earth as sentient, and that it is not only possible to resonate with other species, but our responsibility as well. …Two ravens sit on Odin’s shoulders. Every day he sends them out to fly throughout the different worlds and bring him knowledge and information about events in far-off places. As a result, one of Odin’s many names was “Ravengod” and raven’s are referred to as “Odin’s birds”. In shamanic lore, ravens and other birds are generally associated with finding lost or hidden knowledge. Because they are carrion eaters and frequented battlefields, ravens and crows were also associated with the dead and dying, which fits with Odin’s role as necromancer and guide for the dead. …The Valkyries are complex mythic figures, combining in themselves several different aspects also known from other traditions. In their role as strategic counselors to the warrior-hero, they resemble the later Greek Athena, daughter of Zeus, who acts as the cool strategist and advisor to Odysseus. In their role as death demons and spirit lovers they also resemble the Indo-Tibetan dakinis who were, on the one hand, the terrifying attendants of the monstrous Kali; and on the other hand, the “sky-dancing” spirit guides and initiators for Tantric Buddhist yogis. …There were also the Ulfhednar, the “wolfskins”, identified with the wolf to obtain his hunting prowess——and who inspired the enduring legends of werewolves. These…wolf coat warriors were said to be in a kind of ecstatic trance, a holy rage, when they rode into battle, howling eerily, disdaining shields, and inspiring terror in their enemies. |
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| It was good luck that helped me locate this important monograph, being hawked by the author on the sidewalk during the Seattle Bumbershoot festival. Dear author Leen, you are far too humble. Please offer your readers either an email or an address to help this reviewer promote your work to a larger public. The stapled book confronts two issues close to the heart of this organization, ancient whale petroglyphs and Northwest coast Indian whaling. While I have made much about Russian petroglyphs that display shamans playing with whales, ancient whale images are also found carved into rock at several locations along the Washington and British Columbia coastline. Some of the best sites are found near the Makah homeland at Neah Bay, within an easy day’s drive from Seattle or Vancouver. …This paper is intended to document data recorded since 1978, synthesize previously published material, and analyze the rock art of western Washington as it relates to the rest of the Northwest coast. Due to the largely unsolved problem of dating, coupled with relative lack of ethnographic data regarding the function of Coast Salish rock art in a cultural context, stylistic development and cultural significance can only be discussed in general terms. …Located on a vertical cliff of coarse light granite facing Haro Strait at Limekiln on San Juan Island, this is the only known pictographic (painted) site in western Washington. Initial attempts to record this site involved rappelling down the face of a cliff to make field sketches…the site has four designs: one of a complete human figure with rays extending out of his head, another apparently representing a four-masted sailing vessel with furled sail, and third design that may represent a bow or stern view of the same sailing vessel. Another figure’s pigment has faded beyond recognition of a pattern. |
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| Ric O’Barry has made a career protesting the Oceanarium trade and, consequently, “monkey-wrenching” dolphin captures. He began as the onsite trainer for several of the Flippers which appeared in the popular TV series, and became radicalized watching his wards either die from abuse or be shipped off to Oceanariums as they matured. Let’s honor him as the world’s foremost abolitionist for non-human species. This book presents his work in a new way, as a counselor, learning to de-program and rehabilitate dolphins emotionally scarred after years of captivity.
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| Readers of our newsletter know Marc Bekoff for the piece he writes for us about animal ethics and culture. Find this book, it is breathtaking. The photos alone are worth the cost, displaying animals caring for young, bickering, nuzzling, crying. But it’s the text that makes it transcend almost any animal book I’ve received in the past few years. Bekoff, crafty philosopher that he is, has commissioned forty or fifty field biologists to write a short personal essay of witnessed animal emotions that doesn’t quite fit their own professional vocabulary. The stories are wonderful, often startling. But it is the inevitable reliance on anecdotal imagery and anthropomorphic metaphor that finally lifts this book into the realm of the fantastic. As if Bekoff wasn’t content with the remarkable stories, he has asked Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps one of our culture’s chief purveyers of the biological hard line to compose a learned but ultimately ironic introduction, that in light of the stories, finally morphs under its own erudition into the statement of official denial that motivated this book in the first place. Buy this book next Christmas for anyone who revels in poignant animal photographs. Read it yourself to learn about the debate raging in professional biology regarding animal culture and emotions. …Contrary to popular belief and stereotype, people who study animals in a scientific way do not generally treat them as unconscious mechanical automata and do not restrict their interest to objective and measurable properties. (Stephen Jay Gould) ...We behavioral researchers should probably call this event a mere example of an “alternative mating strategy” and perhaps speculate that it deviated from the norm only, because there were few males in the immediate area…I prefer to think that the two became powerfully attracted to each other and had at least a feeling of afterglow as they swam off. Buth and Aphro were the “right” right whales for each other. (Bernd Wursig) ...Some years ago I watched Darrell, a young male chimpanzee deal with a strange and frightening trauma: one of his baby teeth was loose. He doubtless felt the looseness, along with some minor pain, and after wiggling the offending tooth around a bit, he set about finding some tool to help him dig it out. The best he could come up with was a small plastic toy alligator which he gave to his lifelong companion Kermit. Darrell, mouth agape, sat quietly in front of Kermit, who obligingly applied alligator to tooth, quickly extracting it. |
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