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"The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality." Hannah Arendt

ON PLANES AND BUSES, in classrooms, stores, libraries, I began to ask people if they thought it was possible to communicate with nonhumans. They said yes, and yes, and they said My friends think I'm crazy but. . . and they said, It changed my life, let me tell you about it. . . . The daughter of a rancher said her parents gave stillborn calves to coyotes in exchange for the coyotes leaving the rest of their herd alone. A man who worked on the Alaska pipeline said he'd always carried a rifle in the backcountry, and had killed many bears, until one day a native friend said, "Mike, you don't need to shoot them. Apologize to them for being in their home, and walk away." The next time he saw a bear he raised his rifle, then caught himself and lowered it. He said, "I'm sorry," and raised his hand in greeting. Now, I don't know if this account was a cousin of the old fish story, but he said that the bear stopped, squinted, raised one paw in response, then left. Regardless, he never shot another bear. A third-generation pig farmer said that when he picks up piglets to cuddle, they relax silently into his arms; when he picks them up to castrate them, they scream—first to last— even before he reaches for them. Story after story, they pile up, dozens upon dozens of conversations, with or without words, conversations with pets, bears, coyotes, rivers, trees, owls, hawks, eagles, mice.

A friend said, "That's all very nice, but do you have any scientific verification?"

I have plenty of empirical data, but that just means I'm relying on direct experience, not abstract theory. Strictly speaking, scientific verification is impossible, because science is by definition the study of objects, and a conversation is an interaction between two or more subjects. In science, you repeat an experiment in a controlled environment, and you eliminate variable after variable until any moderately careful person can make the same thing appear. But conversations only happen once. So try this: "How are you?"

I'm fine.

Now say it again: "How are you?"

I'm tired.

"How are you?"

"None of your business.

Now again: "How are you?"

The book is green.

Do you get it? Because I'm a willful subject, my answer could be anything.

While it's reasonable to expect repeatability from a machine— I'm writing this while flying in another airplane, and I hope that when the pilot manipulates the plane's controls, the rudder and flaps respond predictably —no sensible person would demand strict repeatability in everyday life. I would at least hope not, for the sake of that person's companions. Similarly, it is scientifically impossible to rigorously verify the subjective existence of anyone other than the experimenter him- or herself: one of the beauties of the Cartesian notion that subjective existence is held only by an elect few is that it's impossible to disprove; just ask my high school friend Jon, who was unable to prove that he existed even when he socked me one.

So, scientific verification of interspecies communication is out, although results of experiments can of course be factored in, weighted the same as other anecdotal evidence, experiments being merely one form of anecdote, with specific underlying and formative assumptions. If you put me in a cage in a lab, stick needles in me or cut off my body parts one-by-one, then "sacrifice" me when you're through, the conversations we have in the meantime will perforce be different than if we meet in other circumstances.

I also know that the nature of physical reality is not determined by popular vote. Many people sharing the same delusion does not make the delusion true, whether we're talking about interspecies communication, modern science, Christianity, or capitalism. Think about how many people voted for Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or Augusto Pinochet, for that matter. Look how many people—including some presumably intelligent ones— spend their lives producing nuclear weapons. Look how many people think money is wealth, and how many believe that land can be bought and sold. It doesn't matter if it isn't true. Remember, this is a game of make-believe. Its a pretty good game, very well constructed; in fact it's so good we've forgotten that it is just a game.

All this goes to say that while the stories I've heard about interspecies communication are interesting and believable, science will never give them a stamp of approval. This says a lot more about the presumptions and limitations of science than it does about reality.

Nonetheless, I can and must, like a filter-feeding barnacle, continue to absorb or reject whatever material flows my way. And I can use this material to attempt to deconstruct, or at least review, the belief structures that have been handed down to me by my culture.

When a magazine offered me the opportunity to interview Jim Nollman, I immediately agreed. Nollman has spent the better part of his adult life playing music with whales and dolphins, and studying the different ways they interact with each other and with us. He has written three books that play with the subject of interspecies communication, and has founded a nonprofit organization dedicated to it.

I must admit I wasn't sure that Nollman would be able to contribute much to my overall sense of mental well-being (remember, we're still talking about talking with animals). The first major public performance of his work was a Thanksgiving Day radio broadcast of the folk song "Froggy Went A Courtin'," recorded live at a factory farm, with thousands of turkeys gobbling simultaneously at each refrain. The Washington Post called him "a harmless crank." Nollman claims the turning point of his life came while performing a duet with a turkey in southern Mexico. I was beginning to feel better already. Perhaps instead of gaining understanding I would find the two of us sharing the same asylum. I was looking forward to my interviews with Napoleon Bonaparte, Jesus Christ, and Marie Antoinette.

Since Nollman lives on an island in Puget Sound, I flew to Seattle to work with my friend George first. When George was driving me to the ferry, we talked about interspecies communication, and he told me about a woman who has extended conversations with wild ravens in their own tongue.

"I've seen it for myself," he said. "It's really unnerving to be talking to her in English, and all of a sudden have her step aside and caw to a raven. It was weird. The bird cocked its head, sat there, then cawed back at her. She changed her inflection. Then the bird, then her."

"What'd they talk about?" "I don't know. I never asked."

We also talked about intraspecies communication. He said, "These days I can't talk to environmentalists anymore than I can talk to industrialists. They're both playing the same game. Industrialists lie by diminishing the severity of the situation, pretending against all evidence that there isn't a problem. 'We can keep cutting down the forests,' they insist, 'I don't see any damage.' Meanwhile, environmentalists also diminish the severity by pretending the problem can be solved. 'If we just revoke Boise Cascade's charter, or Plum Creeks, we can save the old growth. If we can just reform the Forest Service, if we can just take back Weyerhaeuser's illegally gained

lands, the old growth can be saved.' Well, the old growth is gone. We've killed it coast to coast. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous."

I nodded, and we drove in silence. The silence lengthened. I didn't know what George was thinking about. I often don't. I looked outside, to the grass off the interstate's shoulder, then back to George. I told him that while I had once seen a newspaper report that humans are causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet, it had been relegated to two-column-inches on page twenty-four of the B-section.

"We should be happy the paper mentioned biodiversity at all," George chimed. "I mean, a newspaper is a corporation, and it's foolish to expect corporations to do what's best. No one expects it from Union Carbide or Westinghouse. Isn't it a bit naive to expect the corporation known as The New York Times to be different? ‘All the News That's Fit to Print’? The function of a corporation is to make money, whether it manufactures bulk industrial chemicals (most of them toxic), or bulk industrial opinions (most of them just as toxic). And ethics just don't fit."

He had a point. Newspapers lying to serve their own interests go back as far as newspapers themselves. The turn-of-the-century historian Henry Adams put it as clearly as possible: "The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved."

Newspapers manifest the culture as a whole. Just as it is true that any father who would crush a child's will would not be able to speak of it honestly, so, too, a culture that is snuffing out life on the planet would necessarily lie and dissemble to protect itself from the truth. Environmentalists lie, industrialists lie, newspapers lie. Parents lie, children lie. We all lie, and we are all afraid. Afraid to not know what is going on, and even more afraid of finding out. The opposite is true as well. Honest discourse is the first and most important step in stopping destruction.

George and I had lunch, and he dropped me off at the ferry before continuing northward to give a talk in Bellingham. "It's for a Christian television show," he said, "and that's a hopeful sign. Ten years ago you had to put on an owl suit to get mainstream media to pay attention. Now, all I had to do was write a book, and I'm having rational discourse with Christians."

The ferry ride to Friday Harbor was chilly, and a cold headwind brought the blood to my cheeks. As we weaved between islands, I stood to watch the waves roll beneath the ferry, went inside to warm up for a while, then returned to stand behind the railing above the ship's square bow.

Jim was waiting for me near the dock, and he drove me in his old yellow pickup to the home he shares with his wife and their two daughters. He showed me his garden, a beautiful patchwork of herbs, fruit trees, berries, and vegetables, set off from the pathways that weaved through them—like the Sound through the islands—by small boulders he'd moved for borders. He took me to a one-room cabin across the garden from his house.

We talked about his garden, how every day he walks the paths for an hour or so, stands in front of the bushes and talks to them. He observed that whenever his family leaves, the plants look listless on their return, even if they've been well taken care of.

"The plants know when we're here," he said, "or when we're not here. How do you verify something like that? It's pointless to even try."

He continued, "I know this about my garden in the same way I know my hat is made out of cloth. To be able to surrender to the knowledge that the garden and I are connected nurtures my soul. I wish more people could

know this connection more often, and I believe people did know it before we became so dependent on machines and jobs and time."

Away from the Sound, the afternoon grew warm, and in the sunny cabin, with its wide windows and the line between sun and shadow sliding slowly across the floor, it became warmer still. Jim said, "People laugh up their sleeves at anything that defies the industrial explanation of our lives, anything that is spiritual. But these experiences are grace. Interacting with nonhumans doesn't have anything to do with gathering information; it has to do with being blessed. And wanting to be blessed. It has to do with that intersection of communication and communion."

I nodded in agreement, and then changed the subject. "Do you ever wonder if you're projecting?"

"There was a time, when I was thirty-five or forty. I was working intensely with orcas, alongside scientists, and I worried about that all the time. But I don't really care anymore. I'm content to set up situations where 'those things,' whatever they are, are likely to happen. The meetings themselves are so remarkable—whether they involve 'interspecies communication' or not—they justify themselves."

The tape recorder hummed and ticked on the table between us. Jim continued, "I couldn't do what I do if I had to count on results, because too often I don't have any, in terms of what our culture or magazines or editors would believe. In the late 80s I was doing a film every summer, and we'd have these incredible interactions with whales, but the filmmakers never got them. It's like they never happened. Finally I had to walk away."

I looked at him, puzzled, and he continued, "I had to find a new reason for my work, for my art, or I would have had to stop doing communication with nonhumans. Then I realized that art doesn't really need to have a reason to exist. It's like what John Cage said, 'Art is whatever you can get away with.'"

I liked so much of what he’d said earlier, but I found myself on a slippery slope of damp squib. I tried to pin him down. I had to know if he thought these experiences were as real as the hat on his head.

"Being an artist, everything is just metaphors." He paused. "It's safe. If I came out and said these things as pure energy, Id get in trouble. That doesn't happen if you talk about them as metaphors."

"But are they true?"

"It doesn't matter. It just matters if they're interesting. If you're going to last, you can't take any of it very seriously, yourself, the universe, anything."

"Why not?"

"You won't have a voice. I wouldn't be able to publish. I wouldn't be able to speak. This summer I get to work with some world-famous marine biologists; we'll be doing stuff with humpback whales. Ten years ago these guys wouldn't have touched me with a ten-foot pole, and now they'll work with me straight on. And you know why? Because I've never made any sweeping statements. I've never said that whales are intelligent. I've never taken a stance."

I guess, I thought, I’ll have Marie Antoinette all to myself: this guy isn't going anywhere I want to go.

"Everything we're talking about here," he continued, "is very threatening, to the culture, and to people's basic ideas about how the universe works. The trick is to talk about it without shutting people down. How do you breach their defenses? What is your schtick to be able to get them to listen, and to make it so you can continue? I'm trying to change the culture, trying to change the way people perceive their place in the world, but I'm also trying to make a living. How do you do that? It would be very easy for

me to get lumped into a box, as somebody who just plays music with whales. And I don't want to get lumped there."

I understood where he was coming from, but the same phrase kept popping into my head: We're screwed.

I stepped away from the conversational fire, and asked, knowing well the answer, why the notion of communicating with coyotes, whales, plants, is threatening to the culture.

"If the Earth is dead, it feels no pain. If the Earth weren't considered dead, we couldn't build the Empire State Building, because we couldn't bring ourselves to hurt the planet so much just to make a big building. The entire culture is based on the belief that the earth is inanimate."

I stepped even further away, and, because the seminal experience of his life had come in a barnyard in Mexico with a turkey, asked what has caused him to continue to listen to the natural world, at least metaphorically.

"We need to distinguish between listening and hearing. I believe I listen better than many people, but I still don't hear very well. I have a lot of friends around the world who are able to actually hear the natural world. Still, whether or not we hear, listening is important. Until we start to listen —and, I hope eventually hear—the natural world for ourselves, nonhumans will be regarded as objects. Just the act of trying to listen can change a lot of our perceptions about nature, and that can change the way we live."

We talked through the afternoon, and eventually I turned off the recorder. After dinner, and after going with him and his wife to a reading in town, I returned to spend the night in the cabin. There, I fell asleep listening to the rustling of the stalks in his garden. About three, a cock began to crow. I shut the window and covered my head with a pillow to