The ocarina “vessel flute”, variously made from clay or animal horn, is found around the globe and from earliest human cultures. Second only to humans in global habitat distribution, orca whales have long connected with the imagination and arts of their thumbed Homo sapiens kin. This ocarina styled as a sinuous orca caught my eye decades ago, and the congruent movement of animal and art has sounded across my life ever since. Similarly, back when Michael Mountain was founding editor of Best Friends Magazine, his words first moved me, as my thinking about our culture’s failed understanding of fellow animals evolved. My analysis and activism both sharpened, and as I turned to creative writing, my art too sought ways to bring us closer to connecting and wholeness. Michael Mountain later co-founded the Whale Sanctuary Project, a model in Nova Scotia for similar projects aimed at providing better lives for captive whales and dolphins that have been exploited for human entertainment.

One justification for keeping these incredible animals in excruciatingly small concrete enclosures without natural family groups is “education”. The Whale Sanctuary Project seeks to change that false narrative and instead educate people about the true complexity of cetacean ecology and social organization. Public opinion is shifting away from the old domination paradigm, and scientists provide the research to show how that thinking is not only incorrect, but self-defeating.  In Becoming Wild, Carl Safina’s exploration of culture in three different beyond-human communities provides a heart-opening opportunity for people still wary about charges of “anthropocentrism” in their work. Richard Powers’ novel Playground takes up the call in the voice of a character modeled on trailbreaking under-ocean explorer Sylvia Earle (also an advisor to The Whale Sanctuary Project): “She had spent too many decades of close observation to be cowed any longer by the prohibition against anthropomorphism. What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on earth was like us in any way.”

Exploiting our planetary relatives merely for money leaves us bereft of so much knowledge and beauty and joy. Yet even this reckoning puts human benefit above intrinsic values of existence and ecological relations. Despite so much pain in the news of the day, many experiments in reconnecting—like Safina’s nonfiction, Powers’ fiction, Mountain’s sanctuary—demonstrate ways people can benefit others, ways we can reciprocate (despite our doubts and guilts and frustrations) for the lives we continue to live. I’ve often shared Rajiv Mohabir’s list essay from Orion magazine How Not To Write About Whales as a cautionary note to avoid some of our culture’s colonialist tendencies. For example, rather than cutesy names, he encourages writers to “learn how to say the word for whale in the Indigenous languages of their native waters.” Activists too can invest in this reconnection, as The Whale Sanctuary Project does by engaging with Mi’kmaw elders. In a letter of support issued by the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, they speak to their stewardship values and traditional understanding in these words: “These marine animals… are spiritual beings with a purpose and must be respected.” By amplifying this awareness, the Sanctuary sings our human spirits back to life as well.