Karen Bakker

Karen Bakker must be a wonderful teacher. She is a scientist who labours in the arcane fields of environmental governance and digital transformation.

She is knowledgeable in biology and animal behaviour. She listens to aboriginal elders and the voices of the sea, and advances in experimental techniques of acoustics and artificial intelligence.

I can’t imagine a better guide to the burgeoning fields of bio-accoustics and eco-accoustics.

In this slim work she invites us into the questions of what other species say to each other and what are we missing out on.

But technology has a marvelous way of opening new vistas to us. In this case acoustical engineering helps us map whales in the seas, follow a honeybee to its next home, or listen to the inaudible — to the human ear — crackling of a stalk of corn.

I am particularly sensitive to sound so when she tells us that noise pollution is cutting us off from nature and hastening the demise of species I hear her loud and clear.

Why is this so important?

Because we are silently killing our fellow creatures at an alarming rate; because we are desecrating the wilderness; because there’s no way back; because some of us love this planet.

NB: If you enjoy this book you will also enjoy Ed Yong’s An Immense World and Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard, another terrific Canadian scientist.… (lisätietoja)

Karen Bakker's "The Sounds of Life" brilliantly illuminates the yawning world of plant and animal communication, hinting at societies that indigenous cultures have known for millennia, but which the "scientific" world has only recently been "discovering."

Before I get into the particulars of the book, I'd like to highlight a failure in discourse regarding "communication" with non-human beings (none of which is to place any blame on Bakker). I'll begin by looking at some examples of human communication.

You're on a battlefront. The enemy has just fired an artillery round, killing three of your compatriots down the line. How do you interpret their communication?

You've just received an ambiguous text message on your phone; the words could be interpreted in a few different ways. Is your correspondent grumpy with you, excited to see you? You're not really sure.

At this moment, it is likely worth calling out the distinctions that Iain McGilchrist establishes in his book, "The Matter With Things." To oversimplify this 1,500-page work, the left hemisphere of our brain tends to have an instrumentalist outlook on the world, when the right hemisphere has a gestalt approach. For the left hemisphere: think language. For the right: think art. With language you can be precise, but the better your precision, the more divorced your meaning is from the reality it seeks to describe. With art you can be expressive and dynamic, but this dynamism leads to the possibility that different people will interpret your work in different ways.

What is the issue with communication? To create a dichotomy, let us contrast it with relationship. Language fosters communication. Interaction fosters relationship. This is not a black-and-white divide; there are shades of gray in-between, such as with poetry. But you might say the majority of communications we take in don't necessarily build our relationships, and many of our most meaningful relationships—say, snuggling with a loved one, might have very little "explicit information exchange."

Now let's look at some possible interspecies interactions.

You're sitting in front of hemlock tree in springtime. The tips of the hemlock bows are covered in the fluorescent emerald of new needle growth. You're interbreathing, inhaling the green tones of that hemlock, while the hemlock is tasting the humidity and carbon dioxide of your outbreaths. You feel a sense of belonging.

You're cross country skiing out in the woods. Thirty feet ahead, you see a white shape cross the trail. Before you can identify that other, they are gone. But a minute later, it happens again. The third time you notice the small white figure of a mink, popping their head up above a drift, their small black eyes watching you. This goes on for awhile—the interplay of the syncopation of their criss-crossing the trail in front of you in contrast to your steady gate. You feel a playful energy.

Let's come now to some of the topics that Bakker covers in her book. She looks at projects that "translate" the dance of bees into location data for a nectar source. She mentions the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), "applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales." Yes—these are new frontiers of interspecies communication. But does this kind of communication foster relationship? I would argue: no. You're better off sitting quietly in front of the beehive, or swimming with the whales, if you're looking for relationship.

We can begin to develop a "reality" stack. On the bottom (in reality) we have relationship. It is complex, dynamic, and ultimately ineffable. On top, we have communication: language, semiotics, etc. These frameworks are concise, bounded, and ultimately contrived and only tenuously linked to reality.

To take an example—think about the last Zoom call you were on, and contrast it with the somatics of the last in-person meeting you had. On the Zoom call, maybe you head a heady discussion, full of concepts and facts, but did you come away with any more trust for your interlocutor than at the start of the call? And then, with your in-person meeting; recall your awareness of their breathing, the temperature of their body as you gave them a handshake or a hug. You notice the hint of an accent you hadn't picked up in your phone conversations. You pick up on the pungency or sweetness of their body odor. You're aware of subtle textures on their face that don't come through on a video feed. And if you close your eyes, you still have a sense of their presence, there in front of you. Maybe this conversation was "less productive;" maybe you let intuition have a stronger reign over the direction of discourse, finding yourself in a story about your grandmother. But I'd posit that you've come away with more relationship than in the former example.

If you want a hypothesis to carry with you to help explain these dynamics, I'd suggest the integral model of relationship in contrast with the graduated model of communication. With relationship, when two beings come in contact, if any aspect of either of them drops out, you lose the whole, and a certain kind of relationship is no longer possible. This is an intuitive and subconscious process, so you won't be able to dissect the situation and pinpoint what went wrong. When you're hearing someone over a video call, you still have some visual and some auditory stimulus, but your interlocutor has become a buzzing, whirring computer, rather than a living breathing being. From the integral perspective, this is fundamentally different. But with communication, the situation isn't so stark. You can start tapering down on bandwidth—dropping out visual, adding some static, maybe moving to text, then to Morse code—even then, communication is still possible. But relationship? I'm not so sure.

Regardless, Bakkers book does call us deeper into relationship with the more-than-human world. She's done an excellent job synthesizing those whom have come before in the field of bioacoustics (such as Bernie Krause), and has also presenced indigenous perspectives on interspecies communication (such as those of Robin Wall-Kimmerer). By the time you're done reading, you'll have a longing to go sit in your favorite natural place, listening to the rush or hum of the living world.

I can recommend this book to anyone working in the field of biodiversity and interspecies communication.… (lisätietoja)