This sound is as wet, wild, and weird as a voice can get. It was picked up by a hydrophone anchored to the bottom of Glacier Bay. Five miles of cable snakes past bath-tub sized halibut, colorful starfish, fluorescent sea pens, clacking crabs, snapping shrimp, and clam siphons the size of your wrist and eventually plugs into a set of speakers continually spilling sound into the little corner office of my friend and neighbor Chris Gabriele who, as a scientist for the Park Service, has devoted her life to trying to fathom what motivates humpback whales to do all the bizarre things they do. That’s a lot of cable out there, I say. For a whale, explains Chris, it’s all about sound—the acoustic habitat is like a tree to a robin, a rock to a barnacle.

Chris calls me up sometimes, says “Listen to this,” and holds her phone to those speakers while I press mine to my head as it fills with whooping hoots, bellowing groans, clicks the size of a federal building, and any manner of indescribable noises emanating from some school-bus sized winged-whale lurking in the cold depths. Sometimes Chris just leaves her phone by the speakers and goes back to her research paper due on Friday, and I let the dishwater get cold and just sit on the couch listening and grinning.

Later, while Chris is pulling the first spring weeds from her garden, I wander over and ask how they make all that racket. Do they use their lips? Nope, says Chris, a vocalizing whale makes no bubbles. They have a huge, expandable larynx. Far we as know, they’re passing air back and forth between mouth, larynx, and lungs—making all those sounds along the way. The laryngeal sac probably serves as a resonating chamber, making those deep bass notes.

“How big is that sac?” I ask. “Could you get a cat in there? A border collie?”

“When the sac’s inflated a sheep could wander around in there,” says Chris.

“Shorn or unshorn?” I ask.

“Wool and all,” says Chris.

So, here you have it: a sound first generated underwater by air trumpeting through airways a farm animal could get lost in, then getting picked up by the hydrophone with the five-mile cable, then Chris setting down her coffee cup to reach over and hit the record button—and now someone in Pittsburgh can listen in. Makes you wonder what that whale might say if he knew we’re all listening.

Enjoy.

(P.S. Don’t listen through those little speakers built into your laptop. Plug into better speakers or untangle a set of ear buds. It’s worth the effort. The sound is that wet, wild, and weird.)

Hank Lentfer is the author of Faith of Cranes. He lives on a creek bank in Gustavus, Alaska.

How much more life is evident in our cities? And how much has our thinking about urban nature evolved in recent years?

Join us for a free live discussion featuring urban ecologists from all over North America, including Beatrix Beisner, co-editor of the new urban ecology guidebook Nature All Around Us, Liam Heneghan of DePaul University/Chicago Wilderness Science Team, and Kevin Anderson, proprietor of the blog Marginal Nature. The event will take place on May 16, at 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific.

The event is free to join, will be moderated by Orion staff, and is open to all readers and friends. Register here.

Orion hosts live web events every month. Sign up to be alerted by e-mail when a new one is announced.

Birds, whales, and now insects—you’ve written about and made music with all of them. What is it like moving between these different musical languages? Is it at all like moving between different kinds of human music, say, jazz and throat singing and heavy metal?

You’re right, each one is a genre into itself. Each kind of creature changes the way I think about music, and what music means to me. With insects, each one is a single simple organism that makes complex music only when part of a huge emergent order of which it need not comprehend much beyond its own simple sound. But together, they make a rich complex music of many species. As a human, it is a challenge to join in.

Bug Music makes the case that humans’ sense of rhythm and dance may have arisen out of our coevolution with the sounds of insects. Do you think the wide variation in human music across cultures has something to do with the variation in the vastly different soundscapes in which different cultures developed?

Yes. Just listen to the way the Bayaka pygmies’ songs fit into their rainforest soundscape in the Congo. This is a human song that knows its place in the layers of birds, frogs, and crickets.  Can we in the West ever do as well? (Click here to listen to an audio sample from the Congo, depicted in the sonogram below.)

In this book, you seem to ask your readers to listen not just to science but to our own human experience, what our senses tell us, how we react to things. Why is this kind of subjective observation important?

Science is only one human way of knowing the sounds of nature. Science wants to be rigorous, it needs to measure and count. The musician needs to feel, to catch the groove, to dare to join in, with other human players or more-than-human players.

Ultimately, your work on music and nature seems to be about connection—with other species, with each other, with the whole living planet. How or why does the simple act of listening bring about that kind of connection?

Learn about what you listen to and it suddenly comes alive. Seventeen-year cicadas just sound like a huge mass of noise until you realize that you are hearing three separate species, each making three different sounds. It’s a nine-part motet, an ancient, evolved composition! It’s not hard to hear the parts when they are pointed out to you. For more on this, see magicicada.org and bugmusicbook.com.

2013 is poised to be a big year for cicadas in the Northeast, with the emergence of the seventeen-year Brood II. What plans do you have for jamming with them?

There are a whole series of concerts planned, and if the cicadas are singing, we will bring some to the show to join us. First up is May 22nd at the Judson Church in Manhattan, then June 1st at the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx, part of the World Science Festival.

In June, I’ll be in upstate New York: June 4th and 5th at Mohonk Preserve near New Paltz, June 7th at the Cary Institute in Millbrook, New York, June 8th at the School of Jellyfish in Beacon, and June 15th at the Cicada Festival in Kingston, down by the Rondout. And there may be more. Check my events page, and I’ll see you there.

As editors, the stories we work on inevitably affect us in some way, although some more than others. While working on the photo essay “Tortuga Rising” (May/June 2013), I became fascinated with the plight of sea turtles, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols’s work to save them, and simply charmed by these amazing and gentle creatures.

While editing the feature, I had the opportunity to visit the Mote Aquarium while on holiday in Sarasota, Florida. With help from Dr. Nichols, I was able to take a private tour of Mote’s turtle hospital (who knew!), speak with Mote’s dedicated team of turtle rehabbers, and meet Binx, Chelsea, and Grinch—all patients at the hospital—and then explore the aquarium itself.

Below are photos from the sea turtle exhibit. These turtle specialists have taught the turtles to perform tricks! Although seemingly “untrainable,” many sea turtles can actually be taught to recognize shapes and colors and swim towards them for treats.




They also have distinct personalities. Take Shelley and Montego: one sister was a sweetheart, and the other a bit of a prima donna and grump.

And of course, no trip to Mote is complete without a visit with Hugh and Buffett, who exist mainly on sixty pounds of romaine lettuce a day.

Check out “Tortuga Rising,” Orion‘s May/June 2013 feature on sea turtles, and you’ll likely be smitten with these ancient mariners, too.

Andrew D. Blechman is managing editor of Orion.

The Wildbranch Writing Workshop is the country’s foremost writing workshop for people interested in honing their ability to write honestly and powerfully about the natural world. This year, join Orion editor-in-chief H. Emerson Blake and writers Alison Deming and Robert Michael Pyle for a week of writing and conversation in the rolling hills of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Over the years, Wildbranch has served as a forum for conversation and community, but it’s also been a home to students and faculty who’ve gone on to produce beautiful writing about the natural world.

This spring, in fact, two books from former Wildbranch students have hit shelves: Kevin M. Bailey’s Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock and Julia Corbett’s Seven Summers, the story of a naturalist-turned-professor who flees city life to pursue a lifelong dream of building a cabin in the Wyoming woods.

Also of interest to prospective Wildbranch students will be Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing, a collection of poetry and essays by more than fifty contributors associated with the Wildbranch Writing Workshops.

The application deadline for this year’s Workshop is May 10—apply today! Learn more and download the application form here.

See you in Vermont!

For example, this past January, in order to meet a commitment to write every day, I began rising before dawn and wrote until sunrise. This meant I had an hour or so before daylight and the stirring of my family signaled the end of the day’s early work. The assignment required that I develop a new routine. First rule: no houselights. I stoked the woodstove and boiled water in the dim light provided by my bicycle headlamp. Then, for reasons mostly romantic, I wrote in the small globe of light afforded by one candle, looking through the French doors out to the snowed-over yard.

Five a.m., but not really dark, the yard bright with snow and illuminated by what I came to think of as dual moons. The real one and a small, domesticated one in the form of a solar-powered paper lantern hung on an ornate iron crook in the dormant Budleja bed. The actual moon waned toward mid-month, then waxed to full by its end. It featured large in my writing. Every poem in some way moonie, moon-soaked. (Did I notice a small, brightening of mood in the lines on the page as the moon returned, fattened, taking up more space within the white pines as it drifted from east to west? I did.)

The moon set, the sun rose. My writing session was over. At least the sitting-at-table-watching-the-darkness-fail part was over. But the poem, or whatever it was the writing fragment was to be called, was not complete. The burgeoning thing needs air and a bigger view. Which often coincides handily with the dog, who needs his walk, and with my restlessness.

Where I write depends as much on the world outside my doorstep as what dwells inside. These days that includes a trail along the Mill River, in early spring the forest floor a carpet of trout lily, speckled leaves and yellow heads nodding, a few secret patches of Dutchmen’s breeches and purple trillium. Includes the grounds of the old State Hospital, the once so-called Asylum turned ghost town turned suburban development. Or, includes hipster coffee shop with found art and loud music by bands I’ve never heard of.

What I know is there’s a relationship between the inside and outside of writing. The place I sit—kitchen table or crumbling steps of Victorian-era building or booth carved with names—and the place I walk. Inside: candle burning to a stub, tea going cold in the cup. Outside: ruins, spring ephemera, a riverbank testament to rise and fall, flux.

Maya Smith Janson’s poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Murmur & Crush, was published in 2012. Her poem “When I Don’t Know What Kind of Bird I Am” appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Orion.

Just as a piece of cultural and acoustic diversity is buried when the last native speaker of a language dies, there is a great loss when the original source of language and music becomes buried beneath the whine of wheels and drone of jets. I’ve often fantasized about some guy on the Lewis and Clark expedition carrying a parabolic dish and digital recorder alongside his musket and powder bag. Each morning, at daybreak, while his companions kindled the morning fire, he’d walk from camp and capture the voices of a continent unfettered by industrial sounds. He’d record the whisper of tall grasses, the thunder of 10,000 bison hoofs, the rush of a sky filled with passenger pigeons. He’d hear the scream of mountain lions beyond the edge of camp, the gurgle of the Columbia River unimpeded by dams, the sound of waves crashing on a new shore.

When I find myself getting bummed by all we have lost, it helps to remember that our culture is also responsible for the largest conglomeration of protected lands on the planet. The good old U.S. of A., exporter of Big Macs and Coke, is running the world’s grandest experiment in communal land ownership. Nowhere is that more evident than outside my door here in Alaska where the chirps, grunts, drips, growls and songs of the natural world still dominant. With enough hardtack and endurance, I could step off my porch and spend years exploring over 23 million contiguous wild babbling acres of public land.

While we can’t reach back two centuries and send a recorder along with Lewis and Clark, we can get a microphone in front of a calving glacier, beneath a singing thrush, alongside a bellowing humpback. And, for the next two years, that is what I, and good friend Richard Nelson, plan to do. (Check out Richard’s radio work here.) With financial support from the National Park Service and Friends of Glacier Bay, Richard and I, armed with omni-directional microphones, a bag of batteries, and can of bear spray will prowl and poke through the Glacier Bay’s 3.3 million acres, recording the grooviest and grandest sounds we can find.

In an effort to share these sounds with as many people as possible, we’ll come in from the wilds every two weeks, take a shower, eat some ice cream, and send along our best tracks to be posted on this blog. (Listen to Richard’s “Night Sounds” track below for a taste of things to come.) Through these posts we hope to remind ourselves and others that, along with the mess our grandchildren will inherit, we also have the opportunity to pass along vast stretches of country where bears still chase salmon beneath the shrill cry of eagles. And, more importantly, we hope the sounds emerging through your speakers will put a welcome pause in your day and smile on your face as you remember that, somewhere, the full orchestra of natural sounds grumbles and whispers and sings the same tune that tumbled back through the ears of our earliest ancestors.

Hank Lentfer is the author of Faith of Cranes. He lives on a creek bank in Gustavus, Alaska.

“Cartography” is a story told in second-person; the narrator speaks to a protagonist who, it seems, is also the reader. Who is the narrator, as you imagine him or her?

This is such a hard question for me. It’s been my experience in recent years that as something of an artist (and not, by contrast, as a scholar), there are certain narratological questions that I just need to ignore—philosophical questions about fiction and fictionality that I just have to bypass in order to get on with the work and remain true to the feeling or impulse that it began with. Often these questions manifest just as you’re sensing: Who is the narrator? Why is he/she telling us this, and from where/when? I just don’t know.

The city in this story is a kind of ethereal place, its borders out of sight and its distances vast. What is your experience of cities, and how do they work on your imagination?

I’ve lived in some serious cities (Cleveland, Phoenix, Los Angeles) and in some pretty remote places: (Telluride, CO; Cataldo, ID; in a boat at sea). But here’s a funny thing: both Telluride and Cataldo are Superfund Sites. In the boat, I was collecting, counting and documenting plastic in the Sargasso Sea (and saw, for example, hundreds of miles from the coast, an entire and intact bright orange Tide detergent bottle float past). Practically speaking, ecologically speaking, and in terms of our responsibilities and quality of life, urban places like Los Angeles don’t really have borders. Not metaphorically or figuratively but quite literally, then, we live in one big city.

I was feeling some of this when I wrote “Cartography,” but not in an altogether gloomy way—also and perhaps more so in an empowering way. Humans (myself included, I can tell you…) are both good enough and horrible enough to do anything. Well then, what do we choose to do? I don’t mean in the future, or in terms of a career or a goal, but like right now—in this very minute.

Where did this story begin for you? With an image and a voice, or with an idea you wanted to explore?

An idea: I’ve been slowly unraveling a long essay about creativity, and in the process of researching, found a spiritual text that refers to “creativity as birthright.” The idea started working at me. “Creativity” seems to be one of those dozen or so tremendously misused and overused words these days—so much so that seeing it makes my eyes glaze over and practically dismiss whatever it is I’m seeing. And of course, that’s not right, to dismiss the whole concept because it’s become something of a cheap corporate/marketing buzzword.

This idea of creativity as birthright seems somehow intuitively right to me, and instructive, as well—though I’m still not sure about what it means. In any case, it’s got me thinking about truly creative rather than destructive or simply imitative capacities, and that we really can’t subtract our thoughts, speech, or actions from the fabric of the world—either what it is or what it is becoming.

Stories have a way of creating atmospheres through which the reader must travel. Does fiction work this way for you? When you set out to write a story, what kind of experience do you have in mind for the reader?

As a reader, the fiction that originates little shifts in my perspective and that stays with me usually does so emotionally or viscerally more than intellectually. This is no different really than how phenomena of everyday life change and affect me: my brain is usually the last to know. The life-changing messages, even very little or subtle ones, hit me first in the stomach, or across the face—i.e., in the body.

Since it’s still National Poetry Month I’ll just add that poetry is especially wonderful in this way: often the “better” the poem, the more it affects me without my intellectual understanding playing a role. I love Sarah Vap and Ariana Reines’s poetry, particularly, for this reason, and recommend it. I don’t know if I write fiction in this way, myself, but I aspire to.

Your novel, Lamb, was published in 2011. What are you working on these days?

I’m finishing a strange novel and a story collection, and, perhaps of interest to Orion readers in particular, have begun a collaborative, somewhat nonfictional work on climate change ethics/ethics for the Anthropocene with one of my dearest friends on the planet, the eminent environmental ethicist Dale Jamieson. We’re excited about the project.

Follow Bonnie on Twitter at @bonnienadzam. Her story in the March/April 2013 issue of Orion is available in print and digital editions; go ahead, subscribe!

In case you’re still not convinced, here are ten more reasons to give a graduate (or anyone) a gift subscription to Orion:

1. It’s plastic-free, advertising-free, made from recycled paper, and will last a long time.
2. The recipient also gets a free, organic cotton t-shirt.
3. They’ll say, “How beautiful! I love it.”
4. The articles, essay, poetry, and fiction make for great summer reading.
5. They’ll think of you every time it arrives in the mailbox.
6. They can share the magazine with friends.
7. You’re showing you know they care about a better future for the planet.
8. It will inspire recipients to write, photograph, draw, and explore.
9. Each issue will spark their curiosity and inspire them to keep learning about our world.
10. Orion is unique—just like them.

Give a gift that will inspire. Give a gift subscription to Orion.

Earlier this month, Orion friend and columnist Sandra Steingraber was sent to an upstate New York prison for blocking a facility used to store hydrofracked natural gas. Sandra has continued to write from jail; her most recent, and final, letter from Chemung County Jail is below. She was released today, shortly after midnight.

My book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, was released in paperback this week. But, being in jail, I was unable to grant interviews or otherwise to participate in its promotion. That’s not a situation that book publicists appreciate, although mine is being very good about it. But, being in here, I feel that I am walking my words.

The fundamental message of Raising Elijah is that the environmental crisis is a crisis of family life, as it robs parents of our ability to carry out our two most basic duties: to protect our children from harm and to provide for their future. When inherently toxic chemicals—including developmental toxicants linked to asthma, birth defects and learning disabilities—are legally allowed to freely circulate in our children’s environment, we can’t protect them. When heat trapping greenhouse gases create extreme weather events that slash the world’s grain harvests (this is happening) and acidify the oceans in ways that threaten the entire marine food chain, starting with plankton (and this is happening too), then we can’t plan for our kids’ futures—no matter how much we sock away in their college funds or Tiger Mom them into athletic or musical mastery.

This crisis requires our urgent attention. And by attention, I mean sustained political action, not intermittent, private worrying. Hence, unless the kids can get there and back, under their own steam, then piano lessons, karate, Little League, play practice, SAT prep, and Scout meetings are cancelled until further notice. Ditto for yoga, date night, and book club (with apologies to my long-suffering publicist).

Look, one in every four mammal species is headed for extinction. The world’s available drinking water is becoming less and less available. Insect pollinators, which provide us one-sixth to one-third of the food we eat, are in trouble. The price index for thirty-three different basic commodities is rising, and financial analysts are predicting shortages of the kind that lead to social unrest. Meanwhile, the world’s leading and most powerful industry is preparing to blow up the nation’s bedrock and frack out the last wisps and drops of gas and oil—releasing inherently toxic chemicals into our communities to do so.

In short, we don’t have time for out-of-town sporting events. Consider this commentary in the preeminent science journal, Nature:

I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago. The seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public. . .  Recognition of the facts is delayed by the frankly brilliant propaganda and obfuscation delivered by energy interests that virtually own the US Congress . . . This is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be brave. (Nature, 491, Nov. 15, 2012)

The author, Jeremy Grantham, was speaking to the world’s scientists, but his message is equally applicable to mothers and fathers. Consider that the World Health Organization has identified climate change as the number one threat to public health for people born today. Otherwise known as our kids.

Now, do you have time to participate in a civil rights–style uprising? Protecting our kids, making sure they have a future: it seems to be a basic part of our job description.

I AM HERE in the Chemung County Jail on a charge of trespassing as a result of blockading a compressor station site belonging to the nation’s largest gas transportation and storage company. Inergy’s plan is to compress, liquify, and store fracked gases from out of state in depleted salt caverns under Seneca Lake, the largest and deepest of New York State’s eleven Finger Lakes. This practice has led to catastrophic results in other states—including explosions and collapses. Even now, Inergy itself is chronically out of compliance with the maximum legal limits for its chemical discharges into this lake, which is the source of drinking water for 100,000 people.

This compressor station, which is less than twenty miles upwind from my house, is just one piece of fracking infrastructure among millions. I chose to take a stand here both because Inergy’s plans represent a direct risk to my children’s air quality and safety, and because my son was born nearby. The west shore of Seneca Lake is his birthplace, and the sound of green frogs twanging in the night was the theme song for my labor and delivery.

So, yes, my course of political action has taken me away from my own children in an attempt to redress this problem on their behalf, and during the first five days, when I was kept in twenty-four-hour lock-up, I had no access to them. But I am convinced the tears of my children now will be less than their tears later—along with the tears of my grandchildren—if we mothers do nothing and allow the oil, coal, and gas companies to hurdle us all off the climate cliff.

I’m also aware that human rights movements throughout history—from abolition to suffrage to civil rights—included many people who were parents of young children. They were surely just as busy as you and me. They, like I, probably also kept a list labeled, “Things to do before going to jail.” Their list, like mine, probably included: making meal plans, paying bills, cleaning the bathroom, and finding a costume for the school play.

To fight against Hitler, anti-fascist partisans sent their children away to safe places in case they were betrayed. They were busy parents, too. They loved their children just as much as we do. The difference is: Now there is no safe place for our children. We can’t hide them from the ravages of climate change.

And here are two observations from the inside: the jails are already full of mothers. Every single woman on my cell block has kids. One of them is trying, from behind bars, to find her son a kidney because he desperately needs one. That’s hard to do from a pay phone, but she’s doing it. And yet, what do you suppose Marlene (not her real name) spoke about with me as we walked around and around the walled-off, barbed-wire rec area at 6:35 a.m. this morning? The same thing that mothers throughout New York State are talking about this morning—how our kids are handling the state testing. Last week was ELA. This week is math.

The mothers in jail are fierce and proud. When the male guards insult them, they insult back. Their voices echo down the corridor, penetrate the iron doors and walls, carry messages through the heating vents and, when they can, out the windows. When another inmate, nicknamed Stingray, cussed out a guard for demanding she remove a towel from her face while sleeping, she received six days in “the box.” So she told me while we were all lined up against the wall to head out for rec. An hour later, when the guard ordered us to line up and come in, she did not walk meekly to the door. Instead she ran the other direction and then, in a stunning gymnastic display, turned a whirling series of cartwheels, round-offs, and flips, landing—Olympic-champion style—at the guard’s feet. Stingray has two kids and is six months pregnant with the third.

Imagine what we mothers could do if we brought that spirit of loud, uncompromising, creative defiance to the necessary project of dismantling the fossil fuel industry and emancipating renewable energy, which is its hostage? Imagine hundreds and hundreds of mothers peacefully blockading the infrastructure projects of the fossil fuel industry, day after day. Imagine us, all unafraid, filling jails across the land. Imagine the press conferences we would give upon our release. Imagine us living up to our children’s belief in us as superheroes.

As Stingray shouted down the vent to another inmate yesterday, “You know I’m loud. My words are my magic.”

Sandra Steingraber’s column in the May/June 2013 issue of Orion, “The Discontent of Our Winter,” discusses motherhood and climate change. Next year, her daughter will learn to drive on upstate New York roads that will or won’t be filled with fracking trucks. Photo by John Armstrong.