Conservation through tech
The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants
by Karen Bakker
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022
$33 (USD) / 9780691206288
Reviewed by Carol Matthews
*
Around the world, people are exposed to an array of sounds that are irritating and sometimes terrifying: beeps and buzzes, bombs and gunshots. In The Sounds of Life, Karen Bakker introduces us to more pleasant sounds from other worlds in which animals and plants communicate in ways that humans are unable to hear unless they listen very, very carefully or have the aid of digital technology.
Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, the book explores the ways in which bioacoustics allows scientists to record conversations between whales, turtles, honeybees, bats, and other non-human species, revealing a world of sound that humans, until recently, have not heard. In her first chapter, Bakker writes about the whaling explorations of 19th century journalist Herbert L Aldrich as he travelled with Captain Edmund Kelley, who told him about the “singing” whales. Kelley spoke about hearing the whale songs and urged others to listen to the sounds. Although he was mocked at first, other ships soon started to follow him in order to haul in thousands of pounds of baleen.
Soon scientists were recording whale songs and learned that songs evolved from one year to the next, eventually discovering that “a song originating in one part of the Pacific can gradually spread to other humpback populations across the entire ocean basin.” As scientists began to study the whales in collaboration with the Inupiat people, they changed their approach. “Rather than using sound to hunt the whales down,” Bakker says, “scientists began using sound to try to understand them.”
In the chapter called “The Singing Ocean,” Bakker tells of scientists learning from the Inupiat people whose villages depended upon the whales for food, heat and light, and the building of kayak frames, sleds, drums, clothing, and tools. Whales have been a focal point for the Inupiat, and Bakker refers to “cetaciousness,” a term describing “a whale consciousness imbued in every aspect of Inupiat society.” Consequently, these people are aware not only of the sounds whales make but also of the sounds that whales may hear from humans.
Scientists became involved in ground-breaking studies of other species that had previously thought to be mute and began to learn that “the world around us not so silent after all; perhaps they just needed to learn how to listen.” In “Quiet Thunder,” Bakker reviews research conducted in the midst of elephant genocide. Katy Payne travelled to Africa to record the low-frequency sounds of savannah elephants and confirmed that elephants use infrasound “to communicate over long distances, coordinate their movements and search for mates.” A generation later, Lucy King and her mentor Iain Douglas-Hamilton founded Save the Elephants to advocate for a global ban on the ivory trade.
Although the ban was implemented, a farmer-elephant problem grew and King took on the challenging task of elephant deterrence. Stone walls and thornbush fences did not keep out elephants, so King turned her efforts to deterring the elephants from raiding the farmers’ crops by building live “honey bee fences.” Elephants are afraid of bees and King observed that they emitted distinctive rumble vocalizations that served to warn others of the threat of bees. From this, King made the discovery that elephants have a specific “word” for honeybees. Language has many forms!
In “Voice of the Turtle,” Bakker studies the vocalizations of turtles, long considered to be voiceless, their sounds being among the most subtle in the world of animals, with long pauses between one and the next. She offers an evocative image of how these quiet creatures contribute to the music of the world.
If whales are the opera singers of planet Earth, and birds are the orchestra, then turtles are more like a quiet marimba or a tiny thumb piano: low-frequency, quiet sounds of relatively short duration that only an attentive ear, and a body held in stillness, might pick up.
In a chapter entitled “Reef Lullabies,” Bakker writes poignantly about the disappearance of corals as a result of ocean warming and acidification that threatens the livelihoods of so many people. She reviews research in which scientists place digital recorders in coral reefs so as to capture the sounds of the underwater world. Again, she uses a musical metaphor, describing a middle of the night concert in which choruses of “grunting cod and crunching parrotfish” create an underwater orchestra amidst fish choruses and whale sounds. She describes coral reefs as being one of the most studied underwater soundscapes: “The sheer, joyous abundance of the marine cacophony contains a trove of information that can be decoded from the layers of sound.”
Aboriginal communities have shared their ancestors’ stories of the birth of the Great Barrier Reef, stories told in Indigenous songlines. These songlines contain “environmental history from deep time . . . formed by the ancestors and embodied in the Dreaming.” Palyku legal scholar Ambelin Pwaymullina’s description of this cosmology as the “ongoing creation of all that is . . . the ever-moving web of relationships that . . . recognizes the familial relationships with all forms of life.”
Aboriginal communities have shared their ancestors’ stories of the birth of the Great Barrier Reef, stories told in Indigenous songlines. These songlines contain “environmental history from deep time . . . formed by the ancestors and embodied in the Dreaming.” Palyku legal scholar Ambelin Pwaymullina’s description of this cosmology as the “ongoing creation of all that is . . . the ever-moving web of relationships that . . . recognizes the familial relationships with all forms of life.”
In presenting important new research on bioacoustics, The Sounds of Life offers lyrical descriptions of worlds whose sounds have previously been unheard and unknown. The new studies of bioacoustics help scientists to interpret the “waggle dance of the honeybee” and the “banter of bats” and the songlines of coral reefs that may help us to begin to “crack the code” of interspecies communication. These accounts are fascinating, deeply moving and fun to read.
Karen Bakker was a visionary scientist and scholar as well as something of a poet in the way she presents her research. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford where she earned her PhD, she taught for 21 years in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, going on to pursue research about how AI and digital environmentalism could create an appreciation of biodiversity. Sadly, Dr. Bakker died of cancer last year at the age of 51. Her last book, Gaia’s Web, which considers new possibilities for ecological justice by empowering nonhumans to participate in environmental regulation, was published by MIT Press this year.
Although she writes about what we may learn about non-human creatures with the aid of digital acoustics, she notes possible misuses of the technology. Throughout the book she acknowledges Indigenous data sovereignty and the requirement that researchers collaborate accordingly when harvesting data on Indigenous territories.
In his contribution to the book Global Chorus, Canadian poet Don McKay speaks about a necessary change in our thinking as global membership shifts from “the notion of the Master Species at the summit of a hierarchical order to that of a member of a system that works as a vast web of interdependencies.”
It is this shift towards a web of interdependence that Bakker discusses in her final chapter, “Listening to the Web of Life.” As she says so succinctly, “If we open our ears, a world of wonders awaits.”
The Sounds of Life is a remarkable book: informative, uplifting, and inspiring.
Dr. Bakker’s death at such a young age is a tragedy but, in her work and in her writing, she has left a lasting legacy.
*
Carol Matthews has worked as a social worker, as Executive Director of Nanaimo Family Life, and as instructor and Dean of Human Services and Community Education at Malaspina University-College, now Vancouver Island University (VIU). She has published a collection of short stories (Incidental Music, from Oolichan Books) and four works of non-fiction. Her short stories and reviews have appeared in literary journals such as Room, The New Quarterly, Grain, Prism, Malahat Review, and Event. [Editor’s Note: Carol Matthews has reviewed books by Grant Buday, Kasia Van Schaik, and Kristjana Gunnars for The British Columbia Review.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster