Sounds Wild and Broken, page 30
The nonprofit organization Global Witness recorded 212 murdered defenders of the land in 2019, violence disproportionately directed at indigenous peoples, an underestimate because many deaths happen out of the media’s gaze. Conflicts over tropical forest lands in Colombia, the Philippines, and Brazil topped the list. Amazon Watch reported an “unprecedented wave of violence and intimidation” in 2019: more than two dozen murders, seven indigenous leaders assassinated, and multiple instances of violence directed at the person and property of people defending forest land from mining, logging, and clearing for agriculture. “If we don’t stand before the world and say, ‘This is happening,’ we will be exterminated,” said Ermes Pete, an indigenous leader from Colombia, during a protest against rising violence and the murders in 2020 of more than 200 civic leaders.
Not only are the voices of indigenous peoples in tropical forests often not being heard, they are, in many places, being actively suppressed. Deafness to these people and the knowledge that they have of the forest is not merely a by-product of expanding industrial activity and land colonization: silencing is strategy. To listen would acknowledge the presence and the rights of indigenous people, and open the door to ways of being that are a threat to short-term extractive economies, the theft of land, and the transfer of control to outsiders.
To speak and to listen, then, are acts of resistance that can inform action. Listening can restore life-giving flows of knowledge among peoples and between people and the community of life. But not all forms of listening are equally open to the voices of the oppressed. Our modes of listening must remedy injustices and not reinforce them.
As science expands its ability to remove the ears of local people from assessment of forests—first in the tradition of foreign field naturalists flying in to “sample” biodiversity and now through electronic ears hooked to “artificial intelligence”—we often bypass the senses and intelligence of people who not only have been listening to and understanding the forests’ many rhythms and cadences for centuries but whose cultures were born and now belong within the ecology of the forest. The soils and biodiversity of these forests are, in part, a product of thousands of years of care by indigenous peoples. Because many listening technologies now circumvent the need for the human senses, they carry with them the danger that such lived human experience in the forest will become irrelevant within the processes of science and policy making.
Technologies and the methods of science do not necessarily lead to injustice, but they distance us from subjective, embodied knowledge, sliding without friction into the oppressors’ dehumanizing tool kits. It does not have to be so. The indigenous communities in Kalimantan appealing for help from the United Nations decried the recent removal of “environmental and social impact assessments as prerequisites for business permits.” These changes to the law will allow timber and oil palm corporations to further displace indigenous communities from their lands and despoil the forest. “Environmental and social impact assessments” need, in many cases, the methods and insights of science. Eddie Game’s plan to get sound recorders to local communities in Papua New Guinea, for example, now funded through a partnership with the United States Agency for International Development, aims not to usurp control but to give local people access to information they can use as they see fit to manage their land.
Listening technologies are most likely to yield positive results when they restore imbalances of power. At present, control in forests is mostly in the hands of resource-extraction corporations, governments, and, in some places, large aid agencies and conservation groups. If the many voices of the forest—human and beyond human—could penetrate these organizations, all might benefit, especially if listening is not just relegated to superficial consultation with local communities as plans from elsewhere are implemented. But a surer path to right the relationship between people and the forest is to change the power dynamic at its root by restoring indigenous peoples’ control over their lands and futures.
We are a long way from such justice. A 2015 study by the Rights and Resources Initiative found that in half of the sixty-four countries they studied, indigenous communities had no legal path to obtain title to their lands. In Indonesia, less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the land is community owned or controlled, although the Indonesian Constitutional Court ruled in favor of communities’ customary forest tenure rights, so there is some hope of an increase. In the United States, indigenous communities own or control 2 percent of the land area. In Australia, 20 percent. In Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, about one-third. In Papua New Guinea, 97 percent. These figures illustrate wide differences among countries, but they also gloss over many nuances and imperfections in indigenous communities’ tenure of land, including violations by governments and corporations seeking minerals and timber. In general, though, these percentages are increasing as dozens of countries decentralize control of forests. Activism by local communities, pressure from foreign donors and agencies, and limited administrative capacity of central governments have driven these changes.
Where land title and control have been returned to indigenous communities, rates of deforestation often decline. In the Peruvian Amazon, for example, eleven million hectares of land have been titled to more than one thousand indigenous communities since the 1970s. Rates of forest clearing on these lands, as assessed from satellites in the 2000s, dropped by three-quarters. During the boom of forest clearing in the 1990s in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, deforestation rates in indigenous territories that overlapped protected areas were low. But indigenous territories that lacked these formal protections had much higher rates of forest loss, partly because local communities could not prevent incursion by mining and logging and partly because some communities chose to clear land for agriculture. A 2021 United Nations report found that Latin American forests controlled by indigenous communities were better protected than others, but that there was a pressing need to compensate these communities for the benefits such as carbon storage and biodiversity that their forests provide. In Nepal, when local communities control forest management, both poverty and deforestation decrease, especially in larger forests that have been under community control for some time. Honoring the needs and rights of local communities is an end in its own right and a necessary precondition to the work of habitat protection and restoration.
The “unlogged” areas in Burivalova and colleagues’ acoustic monitoring study were located in a thirty-eight-thousand-hectare forest managed by the Wehea, a Dayak culture indigenous to the area. Ledjie Taq, chief of the Wehea, recounted in a 2017 interview with journalist Yovanda how, in the 1970s and 1980s, illegal logging, then palm oil plantations impoverished much of the forest and drove people from their land, giving them no choice but to become laborers for industry. But, he said, “The Dayak people cannot be far from the forest. The forest is a storehouse of life. . . . We gathered strength and put up a statue of our ancestors. We announced that Wehea is a customary forest [forest belonging to indigenous peoples]. We made rules for everyone, especially the local people.” These rules govern hunting, tree cutting, clearing of land for agriculture, and access by outsiders.
In 2004, with the help of researchers at Mulawarman University, The Nature Conservancy, and the regional government, the forest became the largest, and one of the few, indigenous-community-controlled forests in Indonesia. In their publications, Burivalova and her colleagues called the Wehea forest “unlogged” and the areas where commercial timber harvest had occurred “never logged.” Another categorization might name the sites “land controlled by indigenous communities” and “land controlled by central government and corporations” (the Indonesian government grants logging concessions).
Around the forest protected by the Wehea, palm oil farms, timber plantations, and mines continue their expansion at the expense of forests, feeding the global economy. Fire also takes its toll, driven by climate change and the more than four and a half thousand kilometers of drainage canals dug into the wet soil of Borneo’s peat forests. In 2015, one of the worst years, twenty-two thousand square kilometers of forest burned in Kalimantan. Forty million people in Southeast Asia swam for weeks in a pall of smoke as thick as murky water. In cities hundreds of kilometers away, every breath brought into the body the vaporous, toxic ghosts of the burned forest and all its inhabitants. Chemical analyses of carbon in the smoke showed that the burned forest peat had lain buried in the soil for a thousand years or more. Urbanization is about to be added to the dire effects of land clearing for commodities and fire. In the next decade, more than a million people will leave sinking Jakarta and move to Indonesia’s soon-to-be-built new capital city in East Kalimantan, about two hundred kilometers from the Wehea forest.
The magnificent diversity of a rain forest’s sounds is not only the product of millions of years of past biological evolution. It is a sonic manifestation of the work of traditional custodians of the land, people whose own often endangered languages are part of this diversity of sound. Where these people’s human rights are honored, life and sound often flourish. The future vitality of these richest soundscapes on the planet depends, in large part, on whether we restore the rights and agency of forest peoples. This is not a reincarnation of the “noble savage” idea from the Romantic movement in Western Europe, where indigenous people and cultures were presumed to be primitively uncorrupted by the hand of civilization, childlike in their harmony with “nature.” Rather, might those of us in colonial cultures recognize that many forms of civilization have developed across the world, all of them entitled to freedom from murder, land theft, and disenfranchisement?
In a world where colonial and industrial cultures are manifestly failing to protect forests, oceans, and air—the foundation of life on Earth—it seems especially provident to allow cultures with better track records to, at the very least, have control over the lands they and their ancestors have lived on for centuries. These are not “pristine” lands. No human culture lives without effect on other species. As humans spread around the world, our arrival coincides with the decline or extinction of the tastiest and easiest to hunt animals. But some cultures have found more effective and fruitful ways to guide and contain human appetites and thus be responsible members of life’s community. In an era of ecological collapse, these are the voices that should lead and advise us. Instead, many are crying out for their lives as colonialism and resource extraction continue to plunder, kill, and displace. In 2019, nearly four million hectares of primary tropical forest were lost from our planet. We’ve lost about the same amount every year for the last two decades. These forests are home to hundreds of indigenous cultures. Tropical forests also house most of the world’s terrestrial species and huge stores of carbon. The loss of these forests is accelerating the climate crisis. The present system of governance and trade is failing in its most basic tasks: to protect the rights and homes of people, and to ensure that we bequeath undiminished the diverse marvels and life-giving properties of the living Earth.
“Culture and nature are the main wealth owned by the Wehea Dayak people,” says Ledjie Taq. “If we don’t look after them and pass them on to our children and grandchildren from an early age, then we won’t be able to pass on anything.”
The dignity and value of human cultures. The riches of nature. Look after them and pass them on. To do so, we need to listen to our animal cousins through bird surveys and recordings of the combined voices of the forest animals. But alongside these studies rooted in Western science, we also need to hear our human sisters and brothers. They have news for us about their forest homes. To listen is to honor those who are speaking. We cannot do so while also denying them agency and removing their source of life, the forest. To listen in tropical forests is to hear the need for justice.
A great silencing is underway in tropical forests. As they are lost or degraded, so too are the diverse voices within them, both human and nonhuman. In these imperiled forests, it is not only the sounds of insects, birds, amphibians, and nonhuman mammals that are in sharp decline but also the acoustic richness of our own species. Because linguistic diversity is especially high in tropical forests, deforestation is a leading cause of endangerment of human languages. The fate of sound in tropical forests, then, reveals the impoverishment and homogenization of human and nonhuman life.
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Headphones off. Outside my window, a European starling lets tumble a stream of whistles and clicks, mixed with ki-ki-ki, an imitation of the kestrel that patrols these suburban streets. One of the five lawn service companies that tend to the turf of neighboring houses is leaf blowing grass clippings from a concrete sidewalk. A garbage truck with a bin-grabbing pincer like a stag beetle’s mandibles wheezes and clatters on its rounds. Mostly, though, the house interior is quiet, an unchanging soundscape of fridge compressors and laptop fans.
These are sounds that unify the suburbs. In a world in tumult, our senses here are soothed by familiarity and predictability. It is a universal human desire to make homes that buffer us from the sensory extremes and vagaries of the outside. From Paleolithic caves to modern apartment buildings, human dwellings cocoon us and keep us safe from the threats and discomforts of cold, wind, noise, or attack from others. Industrial power has now made this buffering so complete that it imposes a disconnection that undermines the powerful relationship between sensory experience and human ethics.
Many of us now live in almost complete sensory isolation from the people, other species, and land that sustain us. Buildings cut us off with their walls, but more severe are the fractures imposed by supply chains for material goods, pipelines and wires for energy, and land-use plans that exclude native habitat from much of the suburbs and cities. Click-and-deliver internet shopping now removes us from contact even with traders and shopkeepers. The cardboard box delivered to my door is the apotheosis of colonial trade: goods shorn of any trace of living relationship to people or land.
Users, like me, of paper pulp from pine plantations or timber from Bornean forests almost never know where our goods came from. I look around at the objects in my house. With the exception of some garden vegetables, the provenance of everything I own bears no relation to my body and senses. This ignorance and isolation not only are the products of globalized trade, but are the source of the sensory alienation needed to sustain a destructive economy. With our senses cut off from the information and relationships that root and orient ethics, we are adrift. Ecological despoliation and human injustice can thus continue unconstrained by lived relationship. It was these sensory connections that mediated human environmental ethics until the colonial and industrial era.
When I first listened to Borneo’s forests in the suburban room, I felt I was wrenched from one world to another. But these are the same world, deeply linked. The unruffled peace of the suburb is the corollary of the storms underway in forests and other habitats. From ruined ecologies and human societies, we extract the resources to build and sustain the calm. Manufactured quiet and predictability provide the conditions needed for continued despoliation, over the horizon, beyond the senses.
Oceans
I drop the needle onto a vinyl album. Industrial diamond meets sound ensnared in polyvinyl chloride. The claw of the record player’s stylus follows the spiral furrow. The jewel follows the wavy plastic groove, every microscopic side-to-side motion conveyed to magnets and wire coils in the stylus’s head. Burned coal and methane, arriving on wires strung across the sky, electrify my amplifier.
The powers of factories, oil wells, and mines converge. A humpback whale’s song awakens, leaping out of the sea into air, breaching out of the 1950s into an experience of the moment.
Two long introductory cries, a pause, then a string of rumbles and throbbing pulses. The first cry is more than three seconds long, an interlacing of dozens of frequencies, each one swelling and receding at a different pace. The higher registers sweep down, a moan. The lower tones hold steady, droning, then twirl up, accenting the end. Echoes from undersea canyon walls or from the sea’s surface add reverberance. The second cry is a little shorter, simpler. Its stack of frequencies flow in concert, a downward inflection that leads into a steady wail, then an up-down bump, weeEEow, before fading into echoes. A growl undergirds these sounds, builds in vigor, then resolves into a string of percussive jabs, a trill made of low, fleshy twangs that snake through variations of pitch and tempo.
The Cold War captured this whale’s song. The work of zoologists and musicians then propelled it into public imagination, awakening human ethical concern for our sea cousins. Later, the song returned to the oceans in the form of whaling bans. The album is a triumph of interspecies listening.
But the vinyl disk spinning on my turntable is also a record of how far the soundscapes of the oceans have been degraded in our lifetimes. The oceans of the 1950s were orders of magnitude quieter than they are now. If there is an acoustic hell, it is in today’s oceans. We have turned the homes of the most acoustically sophisticated and sensitive animals into a bedlam, an inescapable tumult of human sound.
The humpback that kicks off the first track of the album was recorded by Francis Watlington, a descendant of whalers who had emigrated from the United Kingdom to Bermuda in the 1600s. Watlington worked in Bermuda for the United States Navy in the 1950s and 1960s, inventing, installing, and monitoring hydrophones that eavesdropped on the Atlantic Ocean. Several patents for underwater listening devices bear his name. Archival photographs show him in cramped rooms surrounded by wires and monitors, at home in the habitat of an inventive electronic engineer.
Watlington and his colleagues ran a cable from their onshore lab to a hydrophone three kilometers offshore and down seven hundred meters to the seafloor. At this depth, they hit the “deep sound channel,” the lens formed by pressure and temperature gradients that transmits sounds thousands of kilometers through the ocean. The electronic ear sought the thrum of engines and the squeal of sonar signals from enemy ships or submarines. Alongside this military intelligence, the hydrophone caught the sounds of humpback whales as they moved in springtime from the Caribbean to northern feeding grounds. From shore, Watlington could see the whales blowing and breaching over his hydrophone. The signals arriving in his laboratory revealed their sounds. Few human ears had listened at such depths before, let alone recorded the sound. Intrigued by what he heard, Watlington kept the magnetic tape in whose tiny flecks of iron oxide were contained the mark of the whales’ songs, a collection that spanned the years 1953 to 1964. In 1968, he shared the by-then declassified tapes with Katharine and Roger Payne, zoologists who were visiting Bermuda to make their own recordings of humpback whales.
