The Ethics of Listening to Whales

Transcript

Emmanuel Vaughan-LeeWe are going to talk about whale language today and this really fascinating project that, César, you’ve been working on. But before we talk about that specifically, I want to begin by speaking more broadly about animal communication and language, and how this is really something we’re only just beginning to understand through a scientific lens—how these languages are just so vastly different from our own. And I want to start with you, James, because in your work you talk about a need to broaden our definition of intelligence—which, of course, language is a huge part of—and that intelligence can look different from our own human ways of perceiving the world; that the relationships that we have with the more-than-human beings are often mediated by our own intelligence. But in trying to listen in this new way to the language of whales, it seems we are turning towards a space of recognizing that there are possibilities of relationality beyond this.

James BridleYeah. Thanks for having me. It’s really lovely to talk about this. Some of my earliest studies very naively were in linguistics. And I remember particularly how they were studies in alienation, to some extent. Because my first linguistics professor was this old guy who’d studied some very, very distant—I think now even lost—languages in fieldwork all over the world. And he used to start every lecture by speaking one of these languages to us. And there’d be like fifty usually hungover students in the room, so half paying attention, and he would break out into some extraordinary-sounding thing that quite possibly, occasionally, he might be one of only two or three speakers left in the world of. And it was always this sort of startling moment to realize that this sound had some kind of meaning, but it was also completely inaccessible to us there at that moment.

EVLRight.

JBI always come back to that as this realization that a communication is happening and that one doesn’t necessarily have access to it. And so, yeah, as you said, in my work I think I’ve thought a lot about intelligence and how it gets enacted in the world and come to this sort of realization, at least for myself, that intelligence is something that we do, that we practice in the world, and that emerges out of relations. And so within that, language is such a powerful relationship-building tool, I think, that allows us to recognize another intelligence in the world, because we’re communicating with it. And also, conversely, of course, it means that we don’t attribute intelligence to so much of the world, because it doesn’t seem to speak our language.

And I’m always really, really aware of that distinction: that we deprioritize and degrade the intelligences of others, including often other humans. I know this as someone who lives in a foreign country and speaks the language badly. You know, when someone doesn’t speak our language well, we basically think they’re stupid. And when they don’t speak at all, historically—and particularly with regard to non-humans—we’ve always regarded that as a sign of lower intelligence. So this constant obsession we have to find other languages and to enter into them I find endlessly fascinating and I think will throw out all kinds of interesting questions.

EVLRebecca, you spent many years researching the lives of whales, and you wrote about this in your book Fathoms. And you explore both how we experience whales—which is revealed in our stories and in how we treat the living world—and also how whales experience us and our presence on the Earth; how our actions in technology may shape whale culture or relationships. And an understanding of whale language could really deepen both an understanding of these creatures and our sense of intimacy with them. But I want to ask you, does this also risk flattening the richness of their lives and intelligence, because they may be so entirely other to us?

Rebecca GiggsThat’s a ten-ton question, Emmanuel. Yeah, I mean, to take us back a couple of decades to the moment when the whale protection debates were really at their height— You know, I’m a child of the 1980s. I remember seeing the bumper stickers that said, “Save the whales” on the back of all the Australian utility vehicles. And in the seventies and eighties, the use of whale song as an activist tool was very much geared around the idea that the sounds whales made were song-like, language-like. They pointed to the existence of a certain kind of consciousness within the animal, potentially a certain kind of culture. So killing whales didn’t just mean exterminating animals or extincting animals; it meant a threat to animal cultures and other forms of consciousness.

There were activists in that moment that took that too far. We imagine—not to say that whale song isn’t incredibly complicated and potentially encodes historically contingent information, you know, intergenerational information; there’s a lot that I’m sure we’ll get on to when we talk about the sounds whales make. But when you had people like Heathcote Williams say things like, whales are capable of communicating “a sense of the unknown” to one another in a philosophical way, or one of the co-founders of Greenpeace talked about whales being “a nation of armless Buddhas.” You can understand why people romanticized whale communications to that degree, like what their motivation was there. But at that point, our understanding of whale communication was simply that it was complex and song-like, whereas now, of course, we know much more.

As to whether there’s still some environmental, political potential in the mystifying realm of whale com—like leaving whales untranslated—yeah, I’d be interested to hear from our other speakers on that subject as well. I think that we are always compelled by a sort of phenomena that remains somehow outside of touch for us and points to the serenity of nature independent from the human realm. Certainly that’s one of the grounds on which whales were protected originally.

EVLCésar, this gets us thinking about the ethical frame this act of listening and decoding sits within. And your work with MOTH is really about creating a formal legal framework that reflects an ethic of care and kinship with the more-than-human world. So if whale language becomes translatable using AI, how should we approach when to translate and what to do with those translations?

César Rodríguez-GaravitoExactly. So our work with Project CETI and our own work at MOTH is trying to look at both the opportunities and the risks for the protection of whales and cetaceans and other animals stemming from the emerging scientific findings on the complexity, and potentially the content, of cetacean communication. So just to be clear, I’m not going to go into the science, because I’m not a scientist, although I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the CETI scientists doing fieldwork in Dominica and the Caribbean. I’ve learned a huge deal from them. But, of course, I’m not in a position to comment on this science now.

My role and MOTH’s role is to figure out the opportunities, as I said, for the protection of whales, precisely along the lines of what Rebecca just said. So are there new possibilities for legal and ethical frameworks and actions that use, that leverage, the new findings on the complexity of whale language or whale communication? Speaking of which, as you can tell, you can see my hesitation here in the use of the terms “communication” versus “language” precisely for the same reason that James flagged. “Language” is a very charged term in the scientific community. I’m perfectly fine with using it. I’m trained as a lawyer and as a social scientist. So for me, with any form of meaningful communication, wherever there are messages being transmitted among living beings, I’m happy with the use of “language.”

Now there’s been a decades-long debate in linguistics about whether—just like with intelligence, as James said—whether language is something unique about humans. And although I’m not a linguist, I did co-author a paper with one of CETI’s linguists, the head linguist Gašper Beguš, who’s been in an internal debate in linguistics, advancing the view that human supremacism in linguistics should be revised and that we should be open to calling these clicks and codas that sperm whales use, or the songs that Rebecca alluded to, as languages. I do think that the existing science— There’s a lot of futuristic debate about this. And as some of you may know, and some of the listeners may know, Project CETI—the C-E-T-I acronym kind of is a play of words on the S-E-T-I acronym, which was all about, the collective was all about, extraterrestrial life: the search for extraterritorial life. So those two worlds come together in very generative ways that we can discuss later.

And I’ll just end by saying for now that there are immense risks associated with this science that we’re also working on. As you said, Emmanuel, we’re about to publish also a set of ethical and legal guardrails for the protection of whales vis-a-vis, or with regards to, the serious risks for manipulation, commodification, and invasion of privacy of cetaceans and other animals that stem from this sort of science.

EVLIf we truly listen to whales, we might be shocked by what we hear, by what memories they carry, what they might even say about us. How do we prepare to hear something that may not comfort us, but confront us? Or are we ready to be receptive to what whales might actually have to say? James, I’ll come to you for this.

JBI don’t know if I can even imagine that possibility. I love this idea, though, of what you say, of what they might say to us, what memories they might cover. My partner actually did a bunch of work with whales, and many years ago she—I was there, I didn’t go on the boat herself. We went to New Bedford, which, some people may be aware of, was the kind of main center of the US whaling trade. They still have a whaling museum. It’s the main town that features in Moby Dick. We were actually there for the big annual Moby Dick reading they do. But my partner went out—she was this invited artist—on a reconstructed whaling ship, a former whaling ship that had been rebuilt, and went on this little voyage just along the sort of coast there between Boston and New Bedford and a couple of other towns, I think. And at some point she realized that there were whales out there and some of those whales would’ve been old enough to remember when that whaling ship was actually out there whaling, right? Which no living humans did. The ship had last sailed, like before—as a whaling ship—before anyone living was around, anyone living now was around.

RGOne wonders whether that’s a form of dark tourism for the humans or for the whales. You know, like does the whale approach the whale boat with a sense of threat?

JBI mean, there were many problems with this whole trip, I think, that had not been particularly considered by the people who operated it. But yeah, I think this had not been thought through well: like, are the whales really going to welcome the reappearance of a whaling ship in their waters?

Whatever they have to say on whether they choose to speak to us and whether we are capable of understanding, I have no doubt that they carry a body of knowledge and understanding of the world, a perception of the world, of parts of it that we don’t understand, have never understood. Perhaps those things are communicable in some sense. Perhaps there is something to learn from them. There is undoubtedly something to learn from them if we are capable of learning from them. I don’t think— And I would love to hear from César and from Rebecca about what we could create in our culture that would make it more amenable to receive messages like this. I’m sure there’s a lot of historical work with SETI, with the “s,” kind of looking at what happens when messages from the outside—to some extent outside of our current consciousness and that kind of breach that model of the world in some way—arrive. Because that’s deeply radical. That’s something quite strange. Though, I say that, and then I look at the entire history of human exploration and say, we’ve been doing this over and over and over again. And actually, this is the colonial impulse—

RGThis is the colonial impulse to contact pre-contact civilizations, right?

EVLYou mentioned earlier, Rebecca, the role that whales played in the environmental movement in the seventies, and they became a symbol. And then there was a lot projected onto that symbol, as you alluded to. The whale is this magnificent, majestic creature that evokes awe and largesse of nature, and also one that was saved from the brink of extinction. This is a symbol of success for the environmental movement, if you will. And you wrote in Fathoms that “whales were how the western environmental movements first learned to tell a story as big as the world,” but now the whale has also become the contaminated whale, carrying plastic and toxins, all the consumerist waste, in its belly: a symbol of our collapsing ecosystems. Can you speak a little to this and how listening to their voice in this particular moment can reshape how we perceive whales, or potentially even give back an agency to whales that can free them from the narrowness of our imaginations? Which, you know, is something that also was alluded to by what James shared.

RGYes. I think that a better understanding of the umvelt of the whale—both in its expressive communications, but also its sensory reality—helps expand our understanding of what environmental suffering and damage is. So, of course, now the voices of whales are not disappearing because whales are threatened and hunted and driven to the edge of extinction; rather, they’re disappearing because they’re getting blurred out by noise, anthropogenic noise, in the oceans. And I think that there’s an increasing awareness of that. I think that that’s coming through certainly in popular culture.

I was reflecting earlier today that, since the pandemic, there have actually been several novels in which the Dr. Dolittle contention of communicating with animals has been explored with a sort of malevolent edge. So I think about a book like The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay, an Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning book from 2021, in which a virus, a zoonosis, is introduced that allows people to communicate with animals. But when they go to the whales and they hope to have this moment of ecstatic communication, and potentially something reparative takes place, some expression of repair or grief—what happens? The whales say, “Get in the water. Get in the water, because we want to kill you.” Like that’s the— Or the other example is Ray Nayler’s terrific book, The Mountain in the Sea, about an encounter with octopuses. And, human beings trying to communicate with octopuses, what do the octopuses do? They bring up the skulls of dead sailors and they create a giant kind of array of dead bones in front of the humans as a sort of threat.

So, you know, I do think that in creative literature we’re seeing an expression of the potential for animals not just to absorb the traumas that we’ve inflicted upon them, but potentially to have some kind of vengeance upon us. Now, of course, that’s, you know, that’s highly speculative. But it does, I think, speak to our sense of culpability and to the lack of a protocol for dealing with that culpability within the lives of everyday people.

EVLCésar, as you already shared, you’ve partnered with Project CETI and are working with them to help shape an ethical and legal imagination and framework for how we should engage with whale language and all that comes from this project. I wonder if you could just speak more about Project CETI and set up what it’s doing and how you’re collaborating with them.

CRGSure. Again, I want to be very careful about describing the science, because no matter how many times I’ve heard David Gruber and Shane Gero describe it all, it’s complicated. That’s the short version of the story. So this is a highly interdisciplinary collective. I’ve been to some of their annual meetings, I’ve done some fieldwork with them in Dominica. And oftentimes I’m tempted to revert to my role at— My PhD’s in sociology, so I want to do sociology of science, just looking at them, and engage across the boundaries between marine biology, technology, complex science, and so on. So it is a highly bold and generative project.

As I understand it, what they’re trying to do is, first, very gently record the language of the communications of whales, building on a data set that Shane Gero, the well-known Canadian marine biologist, has built out over the years. All of this science is based on the very patient non-AI-assisted science done by marine biologists. This is the first thing.

So long before there was AI, long before there was Chat-GPT and the like, Western scientists were trying to listen intently to whales—not to mention, of course, Indigenous peoples, who have been in communication and in relationship with cetaceans for the longest time. So this is not new in that way. What’s new is, of course, the technological capabilities that come with large language models. And I’m of course looking at James here, because he’s a technologist, and I learned quite a bit from him in his book, a wonderful book, Ways of Being. And what they’re doing, Project CETI, is establishing a kind of triangulation between the utterances, the language, the communications, that sperm whales in particular— They focus on sperm whales and sperm whales in the Caribbean in Dominica. And they’ve published peer reviewed science that shows already—and this is no longer speculation, this is not futurism, this is existing Western science—that shows that the language of sperm whales is highly complex, that it contains the equivalent of vowels, diphthongs, and tones, like in Mandarin. So all those building blocks are there. This is not five years into the future, but this is our current understanding of their communication. The way they do that is by triangulating behavior, they also record the whale’s behavior, and trying to understand the structure of their codas and their clicks.

One thing that I find particularly fascinating about their science is that some of it is done without the help of AI. Going back to what James said about the person who used to teach based on his knowledge of other languages that people would not recognize in class, Gašper Beguš, the head linguist at CETI, he’s an expert in “dead languages.” And he’s developed kind of an ear for whale-ish, and he’s begun to understand some patterns, basically just by speeding up and slowing down the vocalizations. And there’s a lot that can be understood that way. Going forward, and this is where most of the excitement and the fascination with this sort of research comes in— By the way, I’ve done many, many projects in the Amazon, in other parts of the world that involve the intersection of social justice and environmental justice, and I’d never seen this sort of fascination, even longing, for reconnecting with the more-than-human world too. So this is why Rebecca’s book was also helpful for me to understand kind of the origins and the history of the fascination with the whale language.

And, looking into the future, the idea or the aspiration, both for CETI and other collectives doing similar science, is that there will come a point where the content of those vocalizations will be understood. That’s yet to be determined. No one has some other— More Silicon Valley–based collectives like to say, no one has broken the interspecies language barrier. But everyone has their own prognosis about how fast that’s going to happen. But that’s the basics of what CETI and others are trying to do.

EVLYou’ve obviously spoken about AI’s role. And traditional non-AI-based research is there as well. But your involvement with this project is around creating ethical guardrails of how we create and eventually go on to use these translations, which AI is involved in. How is the use of AI taken into account? What are the possible ethical implications of using this technology?

CRGYes, thanks for that question. It’s crucial to understand the role of AI in both speeding up the opportunities that arise from this science and also bringing up a whole host of complications and potential risks. On the opportunities side, which is the paper that literally yesterday we released, we’re looking at two types of opportunities. One has to do with the enforcement of existing legislation. Oftentimes, for those of us who have also a legal practice in addition to an academic practice, when you go to court and ask a judge or a court to recognize an animal as a subject of rights, a chimp, or a whale, a whole ecosystem (like in Ecuador), oftentimes the objection—it may come from the government or from a corporation or from the court itself—is that human beings have unique traits and features that uniquely qualify them as rights holders. And the goalpost keeps moving. It used to be sentience; back in the 1970s it was, well, animals don’t really feel, they don’t really suffer. Then when, of course, signs show that everyone from primates to octopuses do feel pain, then the bar got raised to the level of intelligence. And then, as James has shown in his book—and many other people have documented—well, animals are problem-solving beings that are quite, quite capable of understanding the world and acting upon that world. And then the ultimate threshold is language. So we’re really kind of at the last frontier here, like I said. If the objectors to animal rights are willing to accept that animals do feel pain and they do solve problems and are intelligent beings, maybe the last kind of frontier for the resistance is, they will say, well, but surely they can’t speak.

And what’s interesting about this science, of course, is the question of what if?—which is the question that we ask in the paper—what if we were able to understand at least some of their language and their messages? And we say, very practically— Because, of course, I’m interested in the theoretical questions and in the academic questions, but I’m also action-oriented. So I want to know what we can do with the emerging science, for example—going back to Rebecca’s point—to protect whales from the incessant noise of ship traffic. How do we substantiate the argument that that level of noise that masks their voices is equivalent to torture or cruel treatment, which is a definition that we’ve used in human rights law to qualify or to classify, understand, and label behaviors that directly harm the basic sensory world and umvelt of human beings.

And finally, going forward, the question is, well, what if we understood the content of those vocalizations. The argument that we make in that paper is that, that would help us substantiate or reinforce findings that we already have on the features of whale life, such as socialization and cultural interactions. There’s already pretty solid science showing that whale pods behave in culturally specific ways: they eat certain food, they also use certain clicks, they have dialects. And that together with understanding the content of their vocalizations would, I would say, help us make a strong case for the protection of their social lives as opposed to only their individual lives.

EVLJames, what are your thoughts on how our treatment of the more-than-human might change if they can be shown to have language by AI technology and what it can offer?

JBI was struck by a couple of things listening to César speak there. Particularly this … he spoke of the researcher—I’m sorry, I forget their name—who has an ear for whale-ish. I love that thought: that someone who’s spent more time than others is obviously going to have this deeper sense of the language. And I want to tie that also to this notion of trying to get away from a kind of language-centric approach to communication in general, or communication in specific and relationships in general. As humans, we prioritize language so highly above other forms of communication, because it holds so much meaning for us. But, you know, we talk to animals all the time, all of us, just not in language. There’s so many other forms of communication that we have. Whales are quite distant to us, but we talk to, you know, pets and things all the time. Not in language, but through other forms of bodily communication. So language isn’t the first thing.

But, of course, if you build that relationship so strongly through language, it’s going to have an effect. I was thinking, you know, this idea of having an ear for it—I was thinking of someone like Barbara Smuts, who did all the baboon research that I write about in my book—not in language, but simply in being with a species for so long that she felt herself taking on these qualities of kinship and common behavior. It felt so easy in time to kind of merge with the desires and intentions and being of another creature, really, really intensely. And I can only imagine how overwhelming that might be with language. And I’d love to hear more about this ear for whale-ish or if that happens to other language researchers. Because, of course, there’s many other animals that, also, we know more about their language than whales, whether it’s prairie dogs or various types of bird calls or that sort of thing. There’s a huge range of this language going on. I wonder if there’s people who have this greater ear for it.

And then, you raised the question of AI. Well, you know, what is the quality of AI that gives it this ear for it? Like, I understand how it functions as a tool, but the example that I always come back to is this research that was done in Germany and Italy around studying animal responses to earthquakes. So in that case, there was a communication. Scientists used sensors on various animals to detect their movement, essentially their physical responses to oncoming earthquakes. And they were able to communicate the fact that they had some sense that earthquakes were coming, but only through the medium of AI that was capable of reading these patterns in particular ways. In that case, they even adapted AI, or machine-learning, I should say, software that was intended for like financial markets—for like one very particular type of human behavior—was changed in this other way to kind of intercede between us and other species to make this form of communication possible, which I think in itself is a very beautiful thing.

And I’ve just— It makes me also think of this idea of, you know, certain technological tools as things that really are capable of expanding our perceptions in certain ways. It really is like, it’s an extension of our own senses to be able to hear not just the sound of, in this case, whale song, but aspects of its meaning potentially that were not available to us. So, an expansion of meaning is also an expansion of sense-making in that way.

EVLWell, with this meaning—whether it’s directly through language, which is then understood, at least in part, potentially, through what might come out of Project CETI—there are lots of implications legally. And, one that I was thinking about was, if that’s introduced into legal frameworks, is it counted as testimony? You know, what the whales potentially share—is that legal testimony in court? Could it go down that route? What would it mean for legal systems to make room for evidence that is not a human voice?

RGIt has been submitted as testimony in, like it’s been used in congressional debates around the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So Christine Stevens, one of the activists, brought in whale song and submitted it as a supporting evidence during the course of those debates. A stunt, but—

CRGYes. And certainly that would be one of the uses of the knowledge on the content of those messages. And also there are a number of collectives around the world, including Indigenous collectives, that are interested in bringing the voices of whales, cetaceans, and other animals to bear on, say, legislative processes, and citizen assemblies, on parliamentary debates on everything from mining regulations to the regulation of marine life. And I work quite closely with the Sarayaku Indigenous people of Ecuador, and they want what’s probably the most important legal precedent, the International Court ruling on free, prior, and informed consultation and consent, which is a right that Indigenous peoples enjoy as per international human rights law. They’ve always insisted—I remember them saying this the first time that I went to the Amazon, into their territory—that animals should also be consulted. That the consultation should not apply only to them as human beings, but that there were all kinds of life that should be consulted. And, of course, that sounded a bit outlandish to all of us coming from a human rights angle. But now if we are able to understand the language of at least some species, that will certainly make a difference, I would hope, in legal proceedings, where you need to convince legislators and judges and policymakers with the kind of hard evidence of what is being said by other beings, other than humans.

EVLGenerating a sense of empathy and tenderness towards the more-than-human world are, I feel, big parts of all of your work. And each of you, in different ways, look at how we see commonalities with other species and what this can mean, what this can change. And part of this is a hope that it will be a flourishing of care and reverence that will move us towards pathways of a real ecological transformation, whether that be creating legal frameworks or otherwise. And Rebecca, I’m curious about your thoughts on how an ethic of reciprocity should be present in our attempts to translate the language of other species.

RGI think a lot about not just caring for other species, but caring with other species for our shared environmental sphere. In terms of there being an ethic of reciprocity in the translation of whale communications, I wonder what would happen if—let’s say Project CETI, or the other big one at the moment, of course, is DolphinGemma, the Google project—if that communication is translated and what comes through is Go away, what happens then? Okay, so at what point, like where is the threshold at which, if these technologies are intended to be in their world on their terms, what volition does the animal have to leave that?

And you raised earlier, César, the matter of a right to privacy. I think this is really interesting when it comes to whales specifically, because we have imagined them not just as targets for our moral attention, but as animals that deserve a certain sense of justice from us. And in some cases we have, in fact, even looked to their social modalities as aspirational for our culture. So you hear people talk about, for example, matrilineal killer whale lineages, forms of play, even forms of pleasure. For example, you know, female killer whales continue to have sex after ceasing to be reproductive, after menopause effectively. And there’s some interesting, I think, ways in which that gets talked against, because we speak from within a social system that’s been defined by patriarchy. So if we have this model of justice that we want to bring to bear upon our relationships with cetaceans specifically, we have to respect that right to privacy. We have to respect their right to move away from us as well. And I’m interested to hear more about, César, when you were talking about defining guidelines, not just the use of that material after it’s collected, but in that moment of collection, what is the ethical dynamic there?

CRGYeah, that’s a crucial question and one that we have been grappling with for a few years now, and that I know some marine biologists, certainly those in Project CETI, also struggle with, because sometimes they know these individuals very well. So Shane Gero, the head marine biologist in the whale project in Dominica, he can recognize individuals just by kind of a little stain on the whale’s back, from a distance. I’ve been there. And so, the level of knowledge and closeness is quite remarkable. And the question arises, what would happen if CETI or other collectives manage to understand the vocalizations of those whales? So one way that we’ve been trying to deal with this as MOTH, as the ethicists/lawyers in the collaboration, is by putting in place an ethical and legal framework that we offer for endorsement to all scientific collectives undertaking this sort of research.

And just briefly, I’ll just go down the list of the four principles. It is short and crisp. The principles or the framework is called the PEPP framework. And “P” stands for prepare. There’s a lot that needs to be done even before going into the water. To your question, Rebecca, there’s a lot that needs to be put in place. For example, research ethics protocols to make sure that at the very least the research complies with existing guardrails that are, you know, usually implemented at the level of academic research.

Then there’s the question of how to engage—the “E” stands for engage. How do you engage not only with those animals, in this case sperm whales, but also with the human communities that have longstanding relationships with those whales? Because this is, when I speak and write about more-than-human rights, I very much mean a kind of a holistic understanding of human and more-than-human rights. So that also brings in elements and learnings from human rights law dealing with Indigenous communities and local communities.

Then as we approach the moment of the actual research, the key principle there, the one that I feel most strongly about and that we build out at length in the guardrails, is the precautionary principle. That is kind of a core standard in environmental law, which basically means that in moments of doubt, in moments of uncertainty, in situations of uncertainty, scientists should refrain from conducting research: if there is scientific uncertainty about the potential negative impacts of, say, the collection of data, the recording of sounds through hydrophones and drones and gliders under the sea.

And then finally the protect principle. None of this is in place yet. Given that AI is such a widely unregulated field, it’s not like we can repurpose existing standards and apply them to this particular niche of research. So we have to kind of make do with a patchwork of ideas from other legal fields. But the protect principle—and this is the boldest claim—asserts that whenever there is a clash of interest, a clash of rights, say, between the right of human beings to collect data and study marine life and the well-being of the whales, in this case, those situations should be solved in the best interest of the animals. And we’re taking that principle from human rights law. The Rights of the Child international framework applies something along those lines, saying that the interest and the well-being of the vulnerable side of those relationships between mainstream human groups, adults versus children, or in this case humans versus animals, that those vulnerable groups should be given a priority. That means then that if the best approach to protect those lives and clans and pods, individual lives and social groups, is to refrain from conducting research at some point, the guardrails suggest that that should be the course of action.

EVLWorking with whale language could reconnect us with a basic skill we’ve lost: listening to and understanding that we share the Earth with others. And James, you said that real kinship doesn’t require translation; it requires care.

JBYeah, I mean, I’m really enjoying this conversation, but I do, I’m sort of sitting here slightly increasingly uncomfortable with this idea that a) language is magic. That if we only understood, somehow everything would radically change. Because there’s nothing we would learn from an initial conversation with whales. Even if I could just sit at a bar with one right now, that would not tell us 99% anything new about how we should be behaving differently towards the life that surrounds us on this planet. Like, we know all the bad things we’re doing, we know the extent to which we’re damaging things. We don’t need the whales to tell us that.

So this idea that—and it feels very tightly tied to the way in which human legal systems expand in certain ways in these situations of conflict, in ways that rarely shift the actual actions of society. They may expand certain protections to more groups—there may be something. But the basic presumptions, the presumptions of in-groups—colonialists versus Indigenous peoples, just as I was talking about; the operation, the patriarchy, as Rebecca obviously was pointing out—I don’t feel that the gradual inclusion of more groups within that tent— When you dissolve certain borders, you harden the borders that are further out, is my feeling about this way that we are talking about sort of bringing creatures, other peoples, into the framework of rights, because it’s not actually premised in any way on, as you say, a fundamental basis of care for the world. We do not need to understand one another in these ways in order to behave in the way that we should rightly and justly.

Now that’s not to denigrate any of these projects at all. I think they’re fantastically important projects, but I guess I lost faith some time ago in the idea that just showing and telling does this. And you know, you said in your question—I don’t think this is quite what you meant—but about this question of needing to know language: I personally have found— I spent a lot of time thinking, I need to figure out how to talk directly to the animals; talking about this, kind of, parliaments of non-humans and bringing them together into conversation. And I found that mostly I don’t: mostly what I need to do is sit beneath a tree for a while and think, and the world will open itself up and communicate, and in very fundamental, meaningful ways.

Language is not the thing that ultimately makes that possible, because so many other forms of understanding are possible. And also, not understanding, just practice, just doing the thing, being the thing, being in the world in a way that connects us—which is why I love the story of whale-ish, right? Because I think there’s researchers who understand these things; they get it because of the time and care. And I think maybe the success of the whale recordings undercuts this point to some point. Because I want to say, like, only if you really spend time doing it, then it will really be transformative. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the fact that ultimately we haven’t really saved the whales, like in the big scheme of things, means that the whale recording is just, you know, a nice hippy, seventies thing that sort of stops the whaling but didn’t really shift perceptions in the way that we wanted. And the only thing that really does it is actual personal practice and care, not these kind of “charismatic megafauna” communication styles.

EVLRebecca, what are your thoughts?

RGI was just thinking, this may be a little bit off topic, but in terms of that question of moving animals towards more human, legible, expressive potential, that is domestication in its farthest reach, right? That is the process of actually drawing out from an animal a beinghood, a sense of communicative ability, that enables us to have a social contract with it. And those are the animals, the domestic animals, the animals we have in our household lives, our interior lives, that, you know— We now have so much concern over whether or not we’ve enfeebled them through a process of making them into more human-like beings.

I absolutely agree with what James is saying about, we don’t need language to understand the damage we’re doing. We already understand, for example, that noise pollution stresses whales. We can tell that from doing hormone surveys, looking at their bloodwork, looking at their excretions, and that’s well-established science.

There might be something to be said for there being a subspecies unit of protection that is a social entity or a cultural entity—so rather than, you know, when we think about red lists and things like that, when we’re quantifying the process of defaunation and extinction, that being able to see social units of animals and cultural units of animals as forms of animal heritage that deserve localized protection and are currently invisible when you’re just dealing with large data sets that talk about, potentially, animal numbers and population numbers—I can see the merit for it on that level. But again, I don’t think you need language to obtain that. You can already point to, for example, different practices, feeding practices, between clades of sperm whales or pods of orca.

So yeah, I mean, I think on the one hand when we talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence, there have been some real bonuses: passive acoustic monitoring, which has allowed us to pick out the signal of whale noise from background noise to, in real time, direct ships around where pods of whales are singing. That’s been really helpful. Yeah, it’s a real frontier moment. I feel so conflicted about this science. I’m excited by it, and I sort of, like anyone else, I long to be in some other animal’s contemplation, but—

CRGYeah. Just to add to that: I’m torn about this question, because on the one hand, I couldn’t agree more that we pretty much know what we’re doing to the whales and other animals, and we wouldn’t need additional linguistic evidence to substantiate those claims—that we need to stop, say, increasing incessantly ship traffic to bring those containers from across the world to carry those orders that we made online. And, at the same time, the terminology of rights is a double-edged sword. One thing that I’m keen to do in talking— I’ve engaged quite a bit with the rights of nature movement, which is having a moment around the world: one ecosystem after another, one river after another, one species after another, is being considered for recognition as a subject of rights. You know, more than five hundred initiatives on rights of nature have been pursued around the world according to the eco-justice monitor.

So as much as I am a big supporter of that movement, I have participated myself in some cases and in some campaigns, I’m aware of the limits of the rights language. And I would like to add some other terms to that legal grammar of animacy, to put it in the terms of Robin Wall Kimmerer. We need more than rights, and this is why the terminology that I use, “more-than-human rights,” is also meant to convey the idea that we need more than rights. And to use your term, Emmanuel, ”reciprocity”—and I would add “responsibility”—should be equally important terms in that lexicon. What I like about those terms and the sensibilities and the emotions and also the moral dispositions that they convey, is that they don’t necessarily require the acknowledgment or the recognition of special features, special capabilities, that some animals—but not others—enjoy.

So to James’s point about expanding the boundaries of moral consideration, but then hardening them at the outer edges—that is something that happens, for instance, in the world of animal rights. When I engage with animal rights scholars and practitioners, some of them are very resistant to expand the sphere of moral consideration to other kingdoms of life: plants, fungi and so on. And this is a real risk with this type of research that we were discussing, because if sperm whales are seen as uniquely endowed with this form of communication, then the potential conclusion from that may be that maybe other animals don’t deserve that level of legal protection because they’re not as linguistically capable. Which is why a fundamental belief / moral assertion of reciprocity, respect, and care would take us further. The question is, what—in terms of a theory of social change—what could do the trick? Would the awe and the wonder that Rebecca has documented that the songs of the humpback whale kind of evoked—is that enough of a social and political fuel to get us to care more? Or would sitting under a tree, as James suggests—which I’m all for—would that get us faster and more efficiently to that place of empathy, care, and hope, and action?

RGI think care can also be really gothic as well. Like we’re talking about care as though it’s this easy sort of spiritually replenishing experience. As many of us involved in either elder care or childcare through the course of the pandemic learned, the boundary between caregiving acts that seem heroic and caregiving acts that seem really kind of confronting and tiring and hard and rigorous and, you know, physically and emotionally fatiguing. Like, staying open to this is not just about awe and wonder, it’s also about the troublesome work of care.

EVLWe’ve been talking throughout this conversation about listening to whales and not so much about potentially speaking to whales, which might be an outcome as a result of AI decoding the clicks of sperm whales; that the next step would be, there would be ways to respond, which raises a lot of questions—just as many as the questions that have been raised around the ethics of listening, and all that goes with that. And, you know, I think there’s this question of how and why we are going to insert ourselves into the lives of whales—using what might be the outcome of this technology, a language that we can potentially speak to whales in—and how this may affect or disrupt their lives. You know, just basically, we’ve pointed to, maybe they just don’t want to listen. But it’s also a disruption, potentially, not just a wonderful bridge of communication across the species divide.

RGWe also know that humpback songs—sorry, just to jump in at that moment for one moment. We know that humpback songs evolve year to year, season to season, that there are particular fragments and sort of like a pop song: there are little bits of lingo that get picked up and transmuted across the globe through their migrations. So one imagines that by the time the processing has taken place, and you’re speaking back to the whales—I know it’s different with sperm whales, but nonetheless—you know, that’s going to sound like Shakespearean English to the whales at that moment. There’s going to be a decay, isn’t there? There’s going to be a way in which that synthetic voice is coming from the past, not just from another world.

EVLJames, what are your thoughts here?

JBI just, I come back again to the thought of, you know— Rebecca enumerated the ways in which we can know that whales are troubled by loud noises underwater through hormone measurements and behavior and so on and so forth. And I was just thinking, yeah, you can know it by swimming as well. If you’ve ever swam near a loud boat, that experience is terrifying. It’s incredibly loud, basically. It’s amplified by the water. You have this experience, I guess, but to answer— I mean that’s the only way I can imagine approaching an answer to this question of what would this kind of conversation be like.

Is really trying— Like what would the terms of the conversation be? And the terms of the conversation could only be founded upon what we share, right? I’m not entirely clear on what that means, except it is the embodied somatic equivalent of what César is trying to do in law, which is to find these commonalities that do extend experience in meaningful ways. It’s always about we’re listening to, or we’re speaking to, how are we the same, how are we different? It’s this binary. I think the promise perhaps of being able to speak [to whales] is that you find the bits that simply are in common, something that actually we fundamentally understand about the world together. And it’s that opening up into something greater, rather than into two sides of a conversation: that is the ultimate ecological realization that I think we’re all pushing away. So what would whale communication do? How would it find this other? The answer is, we don’t find another, we don’t find another; we find this greater shared world, in which we’ll participate. That’s the ecological realization—however we get there. If this is how we get there, then fantastic. But it will be from this realization of a single, greater shared world rather than a difference between us.

RGI’m casting back to your initial comment, James, about your partner being on that New Bedford replica whaling boat and potentially encountering whales that bear some living memory of the experience of previously being pursued by those vessels. And yes, I think the shared reality—like, we have shared biophysical aspects with mammals, we’re warm-blooded, we raise our young, we play—there are shared things we share with wild kind. But one imagines that the other thing we share is the history of whaling, and that there’s a way in which the message broadcast from that boat really should just be: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. And if we’re to say anything to whale-kind now, it should be that.

CRGYeah. Which is something that many scientists said in response to a question that was posed by a journalist at The Atlantic on a piece about what you would say—basically, the question is, what would you say if we were able to speak to whales? And many of them said, I would just say, I’m sorry. Some others said, well, what is it like to be a whale? Which sounded to me like a highly kind of aspirational and bold and ambitious question. I have to confess that I’m very queasy about speaking back to whales. That I feel much more comfortable with the idea and the enterprise of listening than with the idea of speaking back, which is something that—because I have worked with Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous peoples who have never been “contacted,” who are in voluntary isolation. And all kinds of disastrous consequences have followed from efforts to contact them and to speak to them. So that inevitably kind of brings in traumatic memories from past lives in Indigenous rights work.

But this also has a scientific connotation, which is something that CETI has been beautifully dealing with. One comment that scientists working on bioacoustics and specifically animal communication tend to get from reviewers is that they want to see playback. They want to see playback studies, because, of course, the one way to demonstrate that a scientist is understanding what an animal is saying is to play back some sounds and see if they are understood, understandable, to that animal, so two-way communication can be established. Otherwise, of course, the question is whether any conclusion that the scientist is extracting from just listening to the sounds can be replicable and can be substantiated by the evidence. CETI very interestingly is in the process of doing—and they published theoretical work in computer science journals—suggesting that there may be ways to understand what whales are saying without playing back sounds to them; that just by listening intently, by working on the recurrent patterns of the whale vocalizations, that it will be possible to understand, or it may be possible to understand, the content of those messages. The jury’s still out on all of this. But if that was indeed a scientific possibility, I would feel much more comfortable as a lawyer, as an ethicist, with an approach that doesn’t entail speaking back, because, of course, the risks of harms to the whales are even greater that way.

EVLWell, it’s been a pleasure to be in conversation with you all about this today. It’s a pretty deep and far-reaching topic, and we covered a lot. And I felt that’s a good stopping place: returning to the potential of first learning how to listen and not considering anything beyond that as a starting point—seems like a good one potentially. So, again, thank you all for joining from Greece and from New York and from London. James, César, Rebecca, so wonderful to have you on the show.

CRGThank you.

RGA privilege. Thank you.

JBThank you. Thank you so much, Emmanuel.