TUTUNUI-WANANGA

U.S. WAR-GAME OPS "BOLD ALLIGATOR" = DEAD DOLPHINS

2012-02-09T22:21:00.000-08:00

I only learned an hour ago of this massive and highly unusual dolphin stranding on Cape Cod, Massachusetts It would be no coincidence that the biggest amphibious/marine 'war game' exercise in a decade, called Bold Alligator, is currently taking place all over the eastern seaboard of the USA, rattling some sabres for the coming Operation PERSuasion: The 'Nuking of Iran to Fulfil Biblical Prophecy' Scenario and Other Religiously-inspired Atrocities. All these forces and battle technologies have been amassing in this area for the past month, which is exactly the time span these unusual strandings have been going on. At least two aircraft carriers, the USS ENTERPRISE and the USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH are in this exact area now and have been for a while.

These and many of the other ships would of necessity be operating ALL their forms of radar, sonar, including mid- and low-frequency active systems, not to mention ALL of their 'HAARP'/RF weapons systems, plus all the regular old nuclear and 'conventional' explosive, chemical and biological warfare gear.

Now that I've learned more about the Navy as being the 'mac daddy' of all things nuclear, I think it safe to say that the U.S. Navy may own and operate more nuclear reactors than every other country and branch of the military put together, perhaps even thousands of them. Where do you reckon they dispose of all that high-level waste? They would never just drop it on the bottom of the ocean, would they?

Try if you can to imagine what the marine acoustic and chemical environment must be like for hundreds if not thousands of kilometers in every direction from this immense concentration of all-things-deadly. Imagine how many thousands or tens of thousands of cetaceans might have been 'taken', harassed and/or murdered by this ludicrous spectacle of military necrophilia..."to carry out our national security mission."

Relating to my last post, "U.S. Navy: 'Environmental Stewards' or Agents of Ecocide", archived here:

http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.co.nz/2012/02/us-navy-environmental-stewards-or.html

Note that in the Guardian article below the 'official' liason with the NOAA (U.S. government organization who receives massive funding from the U.S. Navy) tells us MANY totally incredulous reasons why the dolphins stranded...from "swimming too close to shore" to being "confused by changes in water temperature" to "the liability of their strong social bonding." What utterly ridiculous and totally bogus CRAP coming from the brown-encrusted lips of Teri Rowles, obviously a Naval 'pr' operative like the majority of other people in the 'marine biology' business these days.

Dolphins are extremely advanced beings superbly adapted to life in the (pre-industrial civilization) ocean LIGHT-YEARS beyond any 'intelligence' exhibited by homo sapiens. Her embedded message of "social cohesion could sometimes be deadly" sounds to me like a psy-ops meme designed to keep people from cooperating with each other, what do you reckon?

http://strandednomore.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/the-similarities-between-two-common-dolphins-mass-stranding-events-cornwall-uk-2008-and-cape-cod-usa-2012/

The Navy Connection

1. In Cornwall event the Navy connection was well established, but not proven 100 %

2. In Cape Cod event nobody connects the Navy to the event even though it is known that Naval exercises COMPTUEX have been and possibly still ongoing somewhere in Atlantic Ocean.

As the unusual mass stranding of common dolphins at Cape Cod continues, it is perhaps pertinent to revisit another, quite similar mass stranding of common dolphins in Cornwall, UK in 2008.

The UK event was as unusual as the Cape Cod one because it involved scores of dolphins stranded in a short period of time compared to average stranding numbers during other months of the same year. 26 dolphins died in that event, while during other months the numbers of stranded dolphins ranged from 1 to 4. Luckily the Cornwall event was very thoroughly investigated.

As far as numbers go, here is a part of report `In total, approximately 40 common dolphins stranded or attempted to strand alive at various locations: Porth Creek (24 dead, one stranded/euthanized, approximately seven refloated), Gillan Creek (five to seven refloated), Place (one refloated) and Trelissick (one stranded/euthanized). Over the course of the day, over 70 animals are believed to have been guided out to sea by rescuers. One additional dead dolphin was reported on 11th June, although the species was unconfirmed and the body was not recovered.`

Dolphins were also seen milling close to shore prior to the onset of the mass stranding event.

In Cornwall event it was very quickly established that the Royal Navy was doing a whole bunch of activities in the area, including Medium Range sonar, submarine activities, aircraft activities, explosions, etc.

The report on Cornwall event concluded that “The link to the naval exercise, while not proven, seemed the most plausible explanation for the adverse behaviour of the dolphins and is the most likely trigger for the mass stranding event.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/03/stranded-dolphins-cape-cod

" 'It's not unheard of for dolphins to swim too close to shore', said Teri Rowles, who heads the marine mammals division of NOAA, the government agency that monitors oceans. 'The Cape Cod area is a hot spot for mass strandings,' she said. But Rowles suggested the animals could have become confused by changes in water temperature or tides that led them into Cape Cod Bay, or by the irregular features of the coastline. There is also the possibility the dolphins could have been victims of their own natural sociability, simply following one another to their doom. 'These are very intelligent animals with very large brains, but there is something about the way they bond to one another,' Moore said. Those strong bonds serve the dolphins well in the wild. When they get into trouble, the dolphins stick together. But Moore added that social cohesion could sometimes be deadly. 'That bond becomes a liability when they get into shallow water, and that may be why they mass strand.' "

Or maybe it was a few LFA-SONAR blasts from the USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH air-craft carrier?

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/world/europe/marines-assault-us-beaches-amphibious-drill-794

"With beach landings, 25 naval ships and an air assault, the United States and eight other countries are staging a major amphibious exercise on the US East Coast this week, fighting a fictional enemy that bears more than a passing resemblance to Iran... Bold Alligator is 'the largest amphibious exercise conducted by the fleet in the last 10 years,' said Admiral John Harvey, head of US Fleet Forces Command...About 20,000 US forces, plus hundreds of British, Dutch and French troops as well as liaison officers from Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Australia are taking part in the exercise along the Atlantic coast off Virginia and North Carolina.

http://www.stratfor.com/image/us-naval-update-map-feb-2-2012

AN EXCELLENT VIDEO: PENTAGON IS PLANET'S BIGGEST POLLUTER

http://thecontrail.com/video/pentagon-the-planet-s-biggest-polluter-flv

"U.S. NAVY: 'ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDS' OR AGENTS OF ECOCIDE?"

2012-02-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

"By integrating environmental stewardship and modern science, the Navy is committed to using sonar responsibly and furthering the world's understanding of the ocean and its inhabitants as we carry out our national security mission.” U.S. Navy propagandists

"...In many regions, the Navy plans to increase the number of its exercises or expand the areas in which they may occur...In all, the Navy anticipates more than 2.3 million takes (significant disruptions in marine mammal foraging, breeding, and other essential behaviors [or deaths]) per year, or 11.7 million takes over the course of a five-year permit..." Senator Barbara Boxer

The purpose of this posting is to identify and draw attention to a blatant example of what I call ‘military-industrial green-washing’, which is the utilization of the full spectrum of ‘perception management’, ‘public relations’ and ‘engineering of consent’ techniques to convince an unwitting and uncritical public that all-things-military, all-things-industrial, all-things-bureaucratic, all-things-nuclear, and all-things-deadly are actually life-sustaining, absolutely safe, clean, green, harmful to no one or no thing, and are in fact there for the benefit of you and the environment.

What we are witnessing in the arenas of what was formerly ‘public discourse’ but is now closer to ‘willingly consumed media dictatorship’ is a not-so-subtle blend of Orwellian double-speak, unbounded euphemism, unlimited funding, and Hitlerian ‘big lie’ all rolled into a seemingly savoury load for you to swallow. From the think-tanks of infotoxin where “truth is our weapon” psy-ops advertologists crank it out, messages like “100% Clean and Green New Zealand” to “Environmental Mining helps Australia” to “Strontium-90 is a Nutrient”, “Water is not a cure for dehydration”, and our all-time favourite, "safe levels of radiation", please welcome the latest contribution from the U.S. Navy on their new 'green' role as 'environmental stewards.' (see video link below)

The Navy funds and/or directly controls almost ALL marine biology researchers and institutions in the western world. They would have us believe that the reason they spend tens of billions of $ annually on ‘research’ is so that they can do a better job of protecting the environment. The truth is a little different; for example, the Navy alone owns and operates more nuclear reactors than America and western Europe put together. Put simply, they specialize in weapons systems; mass-media is the biggest weapons system ever created.

Another de facto ‘weapons system’ indirectly targeting any life-form in the sea is towed-array seismic exploration technologies using compressed air guns whose sound pressure levels can, like LFA-sonar, exceed 250 dB. This is a trillion times louder than a Rolling Stones concert from the front row. Hundreds of ‘geophysical exploration’ vessels can be in operation at any given time, all with ‘kill zones the size of Texas.’ Not that many would be needed for a "kill zone the size of the Earth."

Remember, too, that the Navy was bringing LFA-sonar on-line at the same time that they were deploying HAARP, in the mid-1990's. These are classified as 'non-lethal weapons.'

IMPORTANT: Note that this video was uploaded by Navy personnel on the 24th of January 2012. Only two weeks earlier, on the 6th of January, the Federal Registry published the ‘permit request’ from NOAA on behalf of the Navy to “take” unspecified numbers of marine mammal species from 70 species of cetaceans and 24 species of pinnipeds. A similar permit application from a year or two ago actually requested a ‘take’ limit of 11.5 million animals. The current permit application has different wording, thanks to NDAA, that is more vague and actually allows for unlimited 'takes.'

In the same way that critics of Zionist ideologies may incorrectly yet conveniently be labeled as ‘anti-Semitic’, and in the same way that critics of ‘global warming’ and the ‘demonization of carbon’ agendas may incorrectly yet conveniently be labeled as ‘supporters of the mining industry’, don’t for a minute think that just because I’ve done enough homework to know that whaling and dolphin slaughter are not the biggest threats to cetaceans, that I am defending what the Japanese are doing. I didn't write any poems celebrating the destruction of Fukushima like Capt. Paul Watson did, but do you…

STILL THINK THE JAPANESE ARE THE WHALES’ BIGGEST ENEMY???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXcAglCyrF0&feature=youtu.be

Navy Sonar and Environmental Stewardship

“Marine mammals rely on underwater sound to survive. Similarly, the U.S. Navy depends on sonar for defending our ships at sea. To continue its mission and protect marine mammals, the Navy has studied the potential effects of its sonar activities and developed protective measures to minimize potential impacts to marine mammals. In addition, the Navy is a major funder of marine mammal research. Scientists like Dr. Darlene Ketten at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conduct groundbreaking research to better understand how marine mammals hear and how they may be affected by manmade sound. By integrating environmental stewardship and modern science, the Navy is committed to using sonar responsibly and furthering the world's understanding of the ocean and its inhabitants as we carry out our national security mission.”

http://baltimorechronicle.com/sonar_may02.html

A Texas-Sized Kill Zone: Navy's Submarine-Detecting Sonar Has Harmful Side Effects for Marine Life

"The U.S. Navy has developed an extremely powerful Low Frequency Active (LFA) sonar to detect "quiet" submarines, and it has applied for a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to deploy it. However, based on newly available scientific information, this low frequency sonar produces a high intensity sound that, at 150 to 160 decibels, can kill whales, other marine mammals and marine fish by rupturing the delicate membranes surrounding the lungs, swim bladder, or other enclosed air spaces.

The second lethal effect of LFA sonar involves the activation of supersaturated gas in marine animals' blood and in their cells to form small bubbles which can block the flow of blood in the brain (causing stroke) and can rupture the cell walls. This effect will be greatest in deep-diving animals (such as bluefin tuna, swordfish, bigeye tuna and deep-diving whales) that will have the highest levels of supersaturated gasses in their blood and cells.

The source level of this sonar is 240 decibels (equivalent to the intensity of a Saturn rocket). But, because low frequency underwater sound can travel hundreds of miles with little loss of power, it will actually create a "kill zone" several hundred miles in diameter. NATO naval exercises using low frequency sonar conducted off Greece in 1996 killed whales that were more than 100 km away. In the final EIS for its sonar system, the Navy admits that an intensity of 160 decibels (a lethal level) will be felt several hundred miles away from the source. This will create a "Kill Zone" the size of Texas.

The Navy says it wants to deploy this sonar in 80% of the world's oceans (omitting only the Arctic and Antarctic)"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g08SgyTBNCw

DEADLY SOUNDS IN THE SILENT WORLD

http://greenfleet.dodlive.mil/environment/marine-mammals-ocean-resources/marine-mammal-research/

U.S. NAVY: ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT & CLIMATE CHANGE: marine mammal research

https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2002/07/23/02-18592/record-of-decision-for-surveillance-towed-array-sensor-system-low-frequency-active-surtass-lfa-sonar

"The Navy is facing existing and emerging threats from foreign naval forces. For example, several non-allied nations are fielding new, quiet submarines. New anti-ship, submarine-launched cruise missiles are also being introduced. When quiet submarines and anti-ship cruise missiles are combined, they pose a formidable threat to our sailors and Marines, who are called upon to project power from the sea and maintain open sea lanes.Show citation box In order to successfully locate and defend against these threats, our sailors must train realistically with both active and passive sonar. In executing anti-submarine (ASW) missions, sonar is the key to survival for our ships and sailors.

The employment of SURTASS LFA will enable the Navy to meet the clearly defined, real-world national security need for improved ASW capability by allowing Navy Fleet units to reliably detect quieter and harder-to-find foreign submarines underwater at long range, thus providing adequate time to react to and defend against the threat, while remaining a safe distance beyond a submarine's effective weapons range.

The U.S. and its military forces must have the ability to project power decisively throughout the world. A key to the ability of the U.S. and its military forces to project power is the protection of U.S. and allied forward deployed Naval units against the threat of opposing force submarines. Of the approximately 500 non-U.S. submarines in the world, 224 are operated by non-allied nations."

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-01-06/pdf/2011-33600.pdf

"On August 17, 2011, NMFS received an application from the U.S. Navy requesting authorization for the take of individuals of 94 species of marine mammals (70 cetaceans and 24 pinnipeds), by harassment, incidental to upcoming routine training and testing of the SURTASS LFA sonar system, as well as the use of the system on a maximum of four U.S. Naval ships during military operations in certain areas of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea from August 16, 2012 through August 15, 2017. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2004 (NDAA; Pub. L. 108–136) amended the MMPA by removing the 'small numbers' and ‘specified geographical region' provisions and amended the definition of 'harassment' as it applies to a 'military readiness activity.'"

http://www.agriculturedefensecoalition.org/oceans

"...In many regions, the Navy plans to increase the number of its exercises or expand the areas in which they may occur, and virtually every coastal state will be affected. Some exercises may occur in the nation's most biologically sensitive marine habitats, including National Marine Sanctuaries and breeding habitat for the endangered North Atlantic right whale. In all, the Navy anticipates more than 2.3 million takes (significant disruptions in marine mammal foraging, breeding, and other essential behaviors) per year, or 11.7 million takes over the course of a five-year permit..."

Please note that NOAA is receiving funding from the Navy and has been issuing permits for the U.S. Navy to proceed with these warfare programs with limited mitigation measures in place. It should also be noted that most studies being conducted at this time are allegedly funded by the Navy with their participation. The ability of NOAA working as a funded partner with the Navy leads one to believed that their test results will be biased in favor of the Navy.

http://www.whales.org.au/news/tyack.html

U.S. Navy's Low Frequency Active Sonar Research Exposed

"...a Canadian Broadcast Company report titled "New military sonar harms whales: scientist" found at:

http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/view?/news/2001/01/02/sonar010102

This article cites Dr. Tyack as stating that the LFAS is no more harmful to the whales than the noise from whale watching boats. While there may be differences of opinion on the potential damage LFA can do to whales, there are few in the scientific community who could compare the power of LFA with the noise from a whale watch boat.

In the past, Dr. Tyack attempted to walk the line of keeping his scientific integrity while interpreting his results in a manner designed to avoid alienating his potential naval funding. Dr. Tyack appears to have gone over completely to the Navy's position. The objectivity of his research is thereby further compromised.

With the obvious interest of citizens and organizations internationally and members of the U.S. Congress in the LFAS program, the actions of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the National Marine Fisheries are a disservice to the public and the public interest." Lanny Sinkin

"What's the difference between the Pacific Ocean and the Dead Sea?"

"The Pacific's a lot bigger."

JEFF PHILLIPS
SOUTH ISLAND
NEW ZEALAND
6 FEBRUARY 2012
SPACESHIP EARTH

"PAUL WATSON & LOUIS PSIHOYOS: 'SAVE THE WHALES' PROFITEERS and REALITY DENIERS" Jeff Phillips

2012-01-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

NOTICE THE ADY GIL IS UNDER FULL POWER TAKING HER DIRECTLY INTO THE PATH OF THE JAPANESE BOAT...BETHUNE ADMITTED SINKING HIS OWN BOAT UNDER ORDERS FROM WATSON. HOW DO ACTIONS LIKE THESE IN ANY WAY HELP TO 'SAVE THE WHALES'?

Popular culture dominated by 'reality tv' and 'social media' would have us believe that people like Capt. Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Louis Psihoyos of the Ocean Preservation Society are the world-leaders in 'saving the whales/dolphins.'

The reality is that these people and organizations are VASTLY CAPITALIZING on the uninformed public's love of cetaceans, not to mention the whales and dolphins themselves, while functioning primarily as 'media content providers' for television (Animal Planet's 'Whale Wars') and cinema (The Cove), AND at the same time TOTALLY OMITTING any mention whatsoever of REAL GLOBAL THREATS TO ALL MARINE LIFE coming from LFA-sonar, seismic/geo-physical exploration (some of whose technologies are identical to LFA-sonar); radio-logical contamination of the global ocean from the on-going Fukushima disaster (which as of July had released on the order of 1.5 exa-becquerels of ionizing radiation into the biosphere); and finally, the GREATEST SINGLE THREAT to marine life, the U.S. Navy, whose warfare, experiments, wastes, operations, and technologies (including HAARP) outweigh the damage from all other sources combined. The U.S. Navy, who was granted a 'permit' to 'take' 11.5 million marine mammals over a five year period, like the rest of the military-industrial complex, is quite literally a state-sponsored 'geo-terrorist' organizaton funded by YOU.

How can ANYONE even pretending to 'save the whales' remain in TOTAL SILENCE concerning these grave issues affecting human health as well?

"Omission is the greatest form of lying"
George Orwell

NOTE FROM JEFF: This posting is one of several sections of a more comprehensive and inter-related 'geo-terrorism' up-date. To read the entire up-date go to the following url:

http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.com/2012/01/nu-flir-2012-1-increasing-frequency-of_23.html

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
Sergei Bondarchuk/Leo Tolstoy (often attributed to Edmond Burke)

A CURIOUS ASYMMETRY: Resolving Our Astronomical Contradictions
GLOBAL NUCLEAR SCENARIO: "Lie of the Epoch" = Safe Levels of Radiation
'CYBER-SECURITY'/WAR ON THE INTERNET: Hack Yourself Awake!
NEW ZEALAND/CHRISTCHURCH QUAKES: Clandestine Technetronic Warfare
OCEANS and WHALES: U.S. Navy vs. Mother Earth/"Save the Whales" profiteers
IN CONCLUSION: "Act Now to Create a World You Love"

WHALES AND OCEANS

OBSERVATIONS ON NELSON NZ WHALE STRANDINGS

http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/dozens-whales-stranded-in-golden-bay-4698249

http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/pilot-whales-strand-in-nelson-4677450

ROSE AND EVERYONE...Jeff here again. All this stuff with the whales and dolphins is REALLY SICK. The cetaceans are the highest beings on this planet and "man, the wise" regards them as "beautiful animals" which, when it comes down to it, are pleasant to watch but ultimately are expendable when 'resources to fill human needs' come into play. We view each other this way, why not the whales? BUT humans fail to grasp that when we endanger the cetaceans, we are wreaking MASSIVE KARMIC DAMAGE on ourselves...to me, even more than when we endanger each other.

I'm going to be posting a lot more in-depth information on all this soon, as well as a new 'beyond film' we are working on, on who the cetaceans are as fellow beings...but for now, it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for us to realize that the 'save the whales' enterprises sound good on paper or on tv...BUT when it comes down to the reality of the situation, these people and organizations are functioning more as a DISTRACTION from the real issues rather than actually helping in a significant way.

To wit: Capt. Paul Watson/Sea Shepherd and Louis Psihoyos/Ocean Preservation Society, producer of The Cove: both target and demonize "clearly evil Japanese" who are conducting "scientific = culinary whaling" or "dolphin slaughter"...which IS of course barbaric.

BUT the reality is that, as 'evil' as these practices are, even if unimpeded by 'save the whale' organizations, only a few thousand cetaceans are harmed. This is of course not acceptable BUT the reality is that these same people/organizations TOTALLY FAIL TO EVER MENTION EVER the astronomically greater threats to ALL CETACEANS from military-industrial activities like off-shore seismic exploration and the U.S. Navy's LFA-sonar...both of which are forms of acoustic warfare, especially given the increased energy of sound transfer in marine environments; nor do any of them EVER MENTION the threats from network of 'technetronic' weapons systems using R(adio) F(requency E(lectro) M(agnetic)R(adiation) transmitted from numerous sites on land, sea and space; NOR do these "save the whale" people mention the unprecedented radio-logical contamination of the global marine environment, specifically from the ASTRONOMICAL QUANTITIES OF RADIO-NUCLIDES FROM FUKUSHIMA that are poisoning the oceans around the world.

The U.S. Navy and American-based corporations and banks in general who run the military apparatus...like Anadarko...and who are behind the 'technetronic warfare' scenario...HAARP and chem-trails...constitute threats to cetaceans the world over, threats that are literally MILLIONS OF TIMES greater than anything that Japanese whalers and fishermen are doing.

http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.com/2012/01/our-militaryasset-or-albatross-philip.html

"OUR MILITARY...ASSET OR ALBATROSS?" Philip Berrigan

"The terrible number of those killed, maimed or diseased, an irreversibly damaged ecology, the obscene cost of nuclearism and interventionary war, all require harsh conclusions. Whatever their motivation, the bosses, warriors and arms hucksters are killing us, while simultaneously, they kill the environment. The attack on humans and the natural world is indistinguishable. They coincide in an attack on life itself. For the Earth is our matrix, our womb, our mother."

Yet Watson and Psihoyos NEVER MENTION any of this. Why? Because, wittingly or unwittingly, they are part of it themselves. They may not be 'conspirators' but they may have internalized unquestioned beliefs which allow them to support the 'wars' on 'global warming' and 'terror', and "all things American" as gospel, like nuclear power. They both say as much.

Plus, Watson is an officer in the Coast Guard, just like Admiral Thad Allen who was in Christchurch for the Feb. quake, and SS claims to be operating under the UN World Charter for Nature "which allows private organisations to interfere in government-like ways in the interest of the environment"; Watson even goes so far as to condone a "radical reduction in the human population" and actually rejoiced when the Fukushima quake-tsunami wiped out entire coastal communities and released vast clouds of radiation. Watson has publicly proclaimed his disdain for 'truth' and even ordered one of Sea Shepherd's boats to be sunk on purpose...the Ady Gil...because it would be "great publicity." Ady Gil skipper Pete Bethune testified that this was in fact the case in New Zealand maritime court. Watson rationalizes such behaviour clearly and in his own words, which I will document at length in my up-coming Geo-Terrorism update.

http://www.3news.co.nz/Bethune-quits-Sea-Shepherd-over-lies/tabid/1160/articleID/180068/Default.aspx

"Bethune now says he was directed by Sea Shepherd admiral Paul Watson to deliberately sink the Ady Gil after it was hit by the Japanese ship. 'It was done for PR purposes and after the sinking I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone about it and I wasn't even allowed to visit Ady Gil,' he says."

'Whale Whores at War, but Who Cares about the Whales?" Jeff Phillips

http://synthaissance.blogspot.com/2010/10/whale-whores-at-warbut-real-heroes-care.html

"'Bad Actors': Sea Shepherd, Animal Planet, 'Sea-lebrities' & Endocrine Disruptors" Jeff Phillips

http://synthaissance.blogspot.com/2010/01/bad-actors-sea-shepherd-animal-planet.html

Psihoyos was a photographer for National Geographic for many years, an extremely right-wing glossy NWO publication (close ties to Council on Foreign Relations) supporting the 'war on terror.' NG also runs those ludicrous "100% CLEAN AND GREEN NZ" spreads. Psihoyos, whose 'cv' may as wall say "Marketing nature for the New World Order," worked with special effects people from Lucasfilms Industrial Light and Magic in order to render his original documentary version of The Cove more highly marketable.

Watson and SS's overall modi operandi since Whale Wars started on Animal Planet smacks very much of CIA-influenced 'public relations' staged-reality crap (Watson himself accused Greenpeace of being taken over by the CIA), just as does The Cove with all the staged 'reality' tricks and "evil Japanese" who seem to be so cooperative on-camera. Think about it. Discovery Communications hosts Animal Planet; they also host The Military Channel.

Have Watson and Psihoyos stopped the Japanese from doing these 'evil deeds'? NO. Have they both capitalized immensely from their 'save the whales/dolphins' activities? YES. And as long as they are all making money from it, these 'evil deeds' are not likely to stop. Money more than whales is the common ground of the 'evil Japanese' and the 'good guy' Yankee pseudo-environmental capitalists.

"The nature of the mass media today is such that the truth is irrelevant. What is true and what is right to the general public is what is defined as true and right by the mass media. Ronald Reagan understood that the facts are not relevant. The media reported what he said as fact. Follow-up investigation was 'old news. A headline comment on Monday’s newspaper far outweighs the revelation of inaccuracy revealed in a small box inside the paper on Tuesday or Wednesday."

Earthforce! An Earth Warrior’s Guide to Strategy, Paul Watson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watson

"To walk the streets of NY at night recently, and see that majestic building lit up for our campaign filled me with joy. The first night we all celebrated outside at a rooftop bar on Fifth Avenue, wrapped in red blankets and the red glow of heat lamps, ESB beaming one the most powerful lights in the world into the sky above us."

Paul Watson saying that 'truth is irrelevant' and Louis Psihoyos reflecting on a visit to the Empire State building in NYC where they wined with the building's owner who had decided to LIGHT UP THE ENTIRE BUILDING using WHO KNOWS HOW MUCH ELECTRICITY FROM FOSSIL FUELS OR NUCLEAR sources: and you STILL believe that 'saving the whales/dolphins' is REALLY these guys' highest priority?

http://mail.tinymill.com/t/ViewEmailArchive/r/91EC9D53A6BE2921/C67FD2F38AC4859C/

From 'The Cove' web-site: 'Carbon-trading' for Whales

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/whale-market/

WE HAVE TO STOP SUPPORTING THESE WHALE-PROFITEERS AND WAKE UP TO THE REAL ISSUES HERE...many of which are the same major issues affecting us.

The whales are closer to being "real people" than most of us can still claim to be...and they've been around for 30 million years, long enough to witness repeated episodes of "man, the wise" under-going self-inflicted re-enactment of cosmic catastrophe.

Will homo sapiens finally succeed in taking itself out of the equation of life on Earth?

"SONGS OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE" DR. ROGER PAYNE (1991 cd liner notes)

2011-06-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

NOTE FROM JEFF: These are the liner notes from the digitally re-mastered 1991 release of "Songs of the Humpback Whale." Dr. Payne's urgent plea for a vast human awakening before it's too late is even more urgent today, 20 years later, as the 'sci-fi' technologies of HAARP and 'technetronic' warfare are increasingly deployed. Not only are the whales under immense attack from astronomical levels of chemical toxicity, they are beseiged by electronic and magnetic disruptions affecting humans and all life. A vast amount of the damage is being conducted by the U.S. military, in particular the Navy, whose "war games", exercises, experiments, wastes, and weapons systems (of which HAARP is only one) make them the NUMBER ONE de facto enemy of all cetaceans. Ironically, Payne tells us that these original humpback song recordings, were done by Frank Watlington, using "an extraordinary array of deep-water microphones, part of a Cold War experiment of the U.S. Navy, costing tens of millions of dollars and now claimed by the sea..."

For more information on Dr. Payne's organization Ocean Alliance, their report on a five-year study of global ocean toxicity, and the their current mission, a return to the Gulf of Mexico to study the effects of the BP diaster there, go to

http://www.oceanalliance.org/

[download the executive summary of ocean toxicity survey]

And for leading-edge information on 'technetronic' warfare and the war against the cetaceans by the U.S. Navy, visit

http://www.agriculturedefensecoalition.org/?q=us-navy

“There are over 5 billion of us humans on this planet. We have a choice, either to be the greatest heroes in the history of life on Earth – remembered for longer (probably forever) than any other generation before for having made the effort and raised ourselves in time to heal the world around us, or we can be the greatest villains in the history of life on Earth – remembered for longer than any other generation before (and probably forever) for having sat on our hands and done nothing while the consequences of both our action and our inaction destroyed the natural world. This recording is offered in hopes that when you hear the whales you will take up the cause of life on Earth.”

Dr. Roger Payne, 1991

Dr. Roger Payne, who produced this recording while associated with the New York Zoological Society, has spent the last 35 years doing research in biological acoustics. His studies began while an undergraduate at Harvard University with work on the directional sensitivity of the ears of bats. He received his doctorate in biology from Cornell University for work demonstrating that owl can locate the position of their prey in complete darkness (well enough to strike it), simply by hearing it move. He has done equally important work on hearing in moths, discovering their ability to judge the direction of bat sonar and this evade capture. The common thread in all his work has been acoustics.

Dr. Payne has led over 100 expeditions to all oceans, studying every species of large whale in the wild. He pioneered many of the benign research techniques now used throughout the world to study free-swimming whales. He directs two long-term studies: one on the songs of the humpback whales; the other following the lives of over 1,000 individually recognizable southern right whales in Argentina (the longest continuous study of a population of known individual whales, based on natural markings, in existence). He has received numerous honours and awards, including a 5-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called “Genius Award”), and has been knighted in the Netherlands for his work on the conservation of whales. When asked how he began studying whales, he replied:

“At the time I was a neurophysiologist at Tufts University and had never even seen a whale. I was in my laboratory one March night during a sleet storm when I heard through the local radio news that a dead whale had washed ashore on the beach. I drove out there. The sleet had turned to rain when I reached the place. Many people had come to see the whale earlier, but by the time I arrived there were only a few, and when I reached the tidal wrack where the whale lay, the beach was deserted.

It was a small whale, a porpoise of about 8 feet long, with lovely subtle curves glistening in the cold rain. It had been mutilated. Someone had hacked off its flukes for a souvenir. Two others had carved their initials deeply into its side and someone had stuck a cigar butt in its blowhole. I removed the cigar and stood there for a long time with feelings I cannot describe. Everybody has some such experience that affects them for life, probably several. That night was one of mine.

At some point my flashlight went out, but as the tide came in I could periodically see the graceful outline of the whale silhouetted against the white foam cast up by the waves. Although it was at that time more typical than not of what happens to whales when they encounter humans, that experience was the last straw, and I decided to use the first possible opportunity to learn enough about whales, so that I might have some effect on their fate.

I was extraordinarily lucky; the very first thing I happened to select for study about whales was the elaborate sound sequences produced by humpback whales during their breeding season. Working with Scott McVay, a pioneer in whale conservation, we discovered that the whales were actually repeating their elaborate, rhythmic sequences of sounds after several minutes. Any time an animal repeats itself in a rhythmic way, it can properly be said to be singing., whether it is a human, a bird, a frog or a cricket. Thus, the humpback whales' sequences were, properly, 'songs.'

They are different from the songs of other animals in several important ways: they are longer; they are repeated without any break between songs; whales change them all the time they sing them (so that at the end of about 5 years there is nothing left of the songs recorded 5 years earlier); and some songs may include rhyming endings on some of their phrases. These latter two fascinating discoveries were made by Katherine Payne (her work on rhyming being a joint study with Linda Guinee).

The fact that whales sing, along with the beauty of their songs, gave us a chance to change the way people perceived whales. Human musicians like Judy Collins and Paul Winter began to include the sounds of whales in their performances and compositions. Killing and eating a whale now became killing and eating a 'musician', and the “Save-the-Whales” movement was born, founded on a new perception: the whale as artist. Conservationists from all over the world began to get involved, and what they accomplished is one of the great success stories of the conservation movement."

At the start of the “Save-the-Whales” movement the whalers had already reduced to commercial extinction every species of large whale except the Minke whale. When this recording first came out in 1970, 33,000 whales were being killed each year. By 1990 the whalers were killing just 1% of that number. We had stopped 99% of the industry. In the process, other scientists like Sydney Holt, Justin Cooke, and William De La Mare had demonstrated before the International Whaling Commission (the international body which regulates whaling) the importance of applying an entirely new set of principles to the protection of whales. In doing so, they ensured that whaling would never be the same.

But the whales are far from safe – whaling may start again, and as they have survived into an age of high technology, whales now face threats which make harpoons seem minor.

Each year about 100,000 porpoises (which are also cetaceans, i.e., whales) have been drowning by accident in huge purse seine nets which are set for tuna. And each year it now appears that more whales and dolphins than are killed by purse seine nets and direct whaling combined are killed in drift nets – nets as long as 50 – 80 kilometers (30-50 miles) which hang from buoys at the surface of the water. Each day, 50,000 or more kilometers (30,000 or more miles) of drift nets are set in deep ocean, killing not only marketable and unmarketable fish, but whales, dolphins, porpoises, sea lions, seals, sea otters, sea turtles, and sea birds. Especially alarming are the so-called “ghost nets”- pieces of drift nets that break off and wander the seas, entangling everything in their path.

But even the wanton destruction of drift nets and ghost nets is minor compared to the destruction wreaked by tens of thousands of toxic substances which industrialized societies vent into the oceans. Of these, PCB's (compounds closely related to DDT) are known to constitute a major threat to marine life, owing to the fact that they are very soluble in fats, but almost insoluble in water, and there fore concentrate in living animal and plant tissues which contain fats and oils. PCB's have recently been found in porpoises in concentrations so high that some of the porpoise's tissues could, in theory, qualify them as swimming toxic dump sites, thus making them eligible for clean up as Super Fund sites. Some scientists believe that if only a small percentage of the PCB's now in use reach the seas they could bring extinction to all carnivourous marine mammals, including, of course, the whales and dolphins, and render inedible most species of commercially valuable fish.

To quote Roger Payne:

"It is critical that people recognize the danger to life on Earth itself, posed by the slow accumulation of toxic substances in the seas, and that we make the sacrifices in time and money necessary to prevent the further entrance into the seas of the most destructive of the toxic substances. If we do not, then this recording could become, in just a few years, the last cry from the last of the great whales, and humanity will be sentenced to live in the unimaginably boring of our creation...forever.

Forever is older than the universe itself. Losing a species, or an entire ocean of species, forever, is a more inexorable loss than any we can ever comprehend. It is one thing to lose your friend. It is another to lose all your friends, along with everything that ever gave you sanity, and the whale species of which they were a part, thereby losing your future as well.

We must stop deceiving ourselves and face squarely the fact that the things with which we are concerned, and on which most of the time and resources of our governments are spent, are trivial alongside problems like the destruction of the seas. Having faced this fact we must act. We must radically change the way we spend our time and energy – stop wasting our potential on the inconsequential things – and dedicate our lives instead to persuading our governments, by whatever means, that they must address the important problems facing humans, and spend, if necessary, all their time and our money on measures that will prevent the destruction of the rest of life on Earth.

The consequences of a failure are, by definition, infinitely worse than any costs of trying to succeed. Life has no time left for governments that cannot comprehend this urgent reality. It is not just governments, but we who must act now – the final hours of our species have arrived. If you and I continue to do nothing, we must face the harsh truth that we really have no intention of acting, will never act, and things really are hopeless. The only person who can deny this is you, yourself, by acting...NOW.”

"CODA - THE DOLPHIN UTOPIA" Robin Brown

2011-06-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

“You question why we have produced no works of art but do not question the further paradox that we have brains large enough to appreciate art. Could it be that there is enough beauty here, that the kaleidoscope is varied beyond comparison, that the hues of the sea, of the live scales of fish, of the rocks, sands and sea plants are their own canvas and that you may perhaps be limiting yourself by crediting the status of “artist” only to those who can interpret beauty and emotion to others...You will find us when you have the mental technology to recognize our existence...In the meantime, learn what you can of us, as we are interested to learn of you.”

“Coda – the Dolphin Utopia”

Chapter Ten, The Lure of the Dolphin, Robin Brown (1979)

Here, within this small scrap of cosmic detritus, we mammals of the sea both large and small have been graced with the major endowment. Consider...

The surface of this planet measures 197 million square miles and of that 139 million square miles is covered with water. But wait – that is only one concept of our dimension, a limited anthropomorphic concept. To move with us you must learn to think in terms of space, not distance.

For example. The average depths of our nine-tenths of the planetary area is 12, 566 feet; in fact, were the bumpy sections of the land surface of earth – those parts you call mountains – smoothed flat so that the planet became a perfect sphere, the entire surface would be covered with water to a depth of 8,000 feet. Yes, there is that much water!

And we are not confined, as you were before this visit, to the thin film of living space that is the dry land. How high have you built, or how deep have you burrowed on the land? A few thousand feet at most! And to use these paltry intrusions into the sky or the land – to live there – you depend on machinery. You are like birds who may climb trees but cannot fly.

Our world – our living room, counting all our head room, and side room, room before and room behind, the surfaces above and the depths below – is 331 million cubic miles!

Beyond your comprehension, not at all! For lack of an example you place too much value on the imperatives bred in you by the need to fight for a corner of your restrictive surface land. Think instead of the dimensions of outer space – you have dipped an inquisitive paw into your ceiling as we have lifted an inquisitive beak in ours. Is it not the case that confronted with the awesome emptiness of space your territorial imperatives change? There is no enmity among your space men. Well, they, alone of your kind, have tasted the size of our natural habitat.

To understand what we are and why we are it is necessary to understand that we have not only been graced with most of the space but that that “most” is beyond exploration. There is no discovering an end to it, for there is no meaningful end to it. There is no need to guard one part of it, for one part is the same as another part. Example. We have been here some thirty million years and we have a facility for what you call memory which allows us to “remember” the elements of that time. Memory is habit ingrained in the mental structure of all beings, and you have noted with some wonder that one of our kind whom you term the pilot whale is given to grounding itself on the land for no known reasons. Only recently have your scientists noted that such groundings take place where once there was no land – where continents have moved and closed old sea passages.

Such theories have been labeled nonsense – how could any beast remember a passage closed for twenty million years? The answer, or at least one answer, is that memory is memory, that it is not shed like skin, and we have no knowledge that that passage had been closed. How could we have? When you have 331 million cubic miles to journey in, everything is new. Or more simply, if we were to take one year to explore 30 cubic miles of our world – no man could properly map that size of cubic area in so short a time – we would need ten million years to do the whole. The world moves a great distance in a time span of that magnitude. Which means there is no end to our journeys of exploration, for all would have changed by the time any were even partially completed.

And this affects us. The very essence of what we are, although we are aware that you have no great respect for the essence of what we are. We are not serious. We build nothing. Outside of ourselves we create nothing. Our brains expand for no good reason. We have no competitive spirit, or not spirit of the kind that you admire and instill in your young for the advancement of your species.

If you were to be presented with our world to live in, all that you area as a species now would die. You would become like us. You would not be joined as tribes, grouped as countries, separated by color, class or creed. All these imperatives stem from the smallness of your world.

Let us consider the possibility that one day one of your spacecraft discovers another world, as pleasant and temperate as this. The only difference is that it is bigger, shall we say a million times as large as Earth. If you were to take each of your present nations and place them in separate parts of this giant world, and to each of the units of these nations offer total freedom of expansion, what would happen?

Think before you answer, and consider the size we have mentioned. Between Africa and the United States the distance would be 6 billion miles; twice that between the U.S. And Asia, and these continents would have land areas equally enlarged. We think if you were to ever discover such a world it would be a honeypot trap for your species. It would puff out the frantic energies and claustrophobia that presently impel you. We have never been so impelled; that is the essence of the difference between us.

Before taking this tour you were briefed on the some of the aspects of us now established by your scientists. None of these findings has done a great deal to improve out status – we are still not serious, have built nothing and outside of ourselves have created nothing. And yet it is accepted that our brains have expanded to a larger size than yours. How can you resolve the paradox? Working only on the evidence in your possession, and we would stress that it is limited, it is surely possible to see something of our world through our eyes.

Let us begin with our body shape. Our bodies are our buildings and our art.

We have no criticism of our world. It is boundless, eternal, multifaceted, changing. But our original bodies were poor vehicles in which to move through this world. Now they are their own perfection. You will notice you feel no weight, none upon the body and none upon the mind. On the land you are constantly trapped and held and moved by a force you cannot see.

Although you are no longer aware that you are in water – what is water? - you can feel the perfection of movement from a perfect hydrodynamic shape. But what is shape? It is not a conscious structure but a device for movement, a device now so well made, so well adjusted to its purpose as to have no conscious effect. These bodies are sculptures expressing freedom, nothing else.

Movement – how may we describe movement to walkers? To birds perhaps, but even that comparison is primitive. There is no flapping of wings here. Movement is no more than a minute adjusting of lung breath, the gentle inclination of a fluke or the merest flicker of a tail muscle. We hang in our sky, are suspended in our world, not embattled by it.

And remember there are two worlds, worlds of different tactile sensation, a world to float in and another to breathe in. To understand you must imagine that your metabolism is that of the most bizarre alien – a vacuum breather. Think of yourself free of gravity, free to soar through your own sky, brushing mountains, swooping through canyons, playing tag with the clouds and hide-and-seek in the tops of trees – then gliding up and up when the time comes to sip a little of the vacuum outside the atmosphere. We are sorry this is such a fantasy for you. It is the reality for us.

When there is a need for excited movement, then of course we can find speed! There are games to be played, the feel of the sea as it breaks up and over our storming tails, the skimming away of the streamlining molecules leaving drag and friction to dance their slow steps on our ghost skins. A roll in the sky, a spin in the air, a ride upon one of the bow waves of your boats, or a quick dash for food – all are games. There is a sophistication in play and the food hunt that perhaps you may never understand until you understand freedom.

But when we review the restrictions your world has lain upon you and the restrictions you lay upon yourself it is hard to see how you will ever come to understand this world of ours.

And if you cannot understand this world, which is the alpha and omega of our existence, the amalgam of our brains and our bodies, how will you understand us? The movements you see are, in us, sublimely easy. Our evolution, of the brain and of the shape, is a natural function of perfection.

There are, we must stress again, no practical limits to this freedom. Certain of our species have made a choice as to where they prefer to swim, but for all there is eternal change, unending room. We may go up or down, as and when we choose. Down as far as the desire takes us, the body closing in on itself, protecting itself from pressure; changing air into blood energy, then up, up (fast or slow as it suits), the body opening again. There are no threats from any of these other creatures in the sea. It is as if they have been put here in our service. Even the great shark, who is forced to swim in his narrow plane of pressure, can be moved on with a good prod from our hard beaks.

Everything else exists either to sustain or to delight us. You question why we have produced no works of art but do not question the further paradox that we have brains large enough to appreciate art. Could it be that there is enough beauty here, that the kaleidoscope is varied beyond comparison, that the hues of the sea, of the live scales of fish, of the rocks, sands and sea plants are their own canvas and that you may perhaps be limiting yourself by crediting the status of “artist” only to those who can interpret beauty and emotion to others? Would it not be true that if all your kind could make such interpretations there would be no need for artists? That you would all be artists?

An excuse? No, not in our case. But perhaps it would be if all we had to see with, as is almost true of your kind, were eyes.

Consider our eyes, our many different “eyes”, and then consider us against any measure you would like to choose – as builders, say, or as artists, or as musicians.

For all of these are aspects of things you see and hear. Now consider what we can see and hear.

With our eyes we can see more than you – with our optical eyes, that is. We may see from beneath the sea; the beaten pewter of the surface, the black holes of the thermoclines, the shifting rays of an inquisitive sun, the dancing tricks of refraction, the gently shifting deserts of sea bed, coral fantasies (busy builders these!) ranging across the architectural spectrum, carapaced thing, angel fish and devil fish, jellies and living rocks, undersea mountains painted with rainbow encrustations.

Yet with a blink, and a small adjustment of our optical eye muscles, we can see all that you can see. We may peer through the spume of storms, view sunsets and moonlight, dawns, and cyclones; the towers you build along the edge of the world, the heaving buckets you float across our ceiling, the dark, clumsy blobs, windowless (and we have assumed mindless in terms of their enjoyment of the sea), that you have lowered below the ceiling and that you call submarines. And we have seen you, and wondered. Oh how have we wondered! We wonder how you live, where you live, but most of all why you live. Do you ever really play?

But we must stress that these optical eyes, in spite of all they (in our terms ) can see, are not rated particularly highly by us. There is even one of our kind that bothers with not at all.

No, our true eyes are what you would call our ears, with some special connections and receiving equipment that as yet you do not possess. We may see a mirror view of converted sound, a view with depth, that sees inside and outside, around and about, measures and counts – with these eyes we may take a total count of all there is to be known within the ever-expanding balloon of the sonar mirror.

For example, friend dolphin swimming there – even if the were to remain silent, which, as you can hear, he is not – need tell me nothing. I know he is 100 feet away, swimming at 3 feet per second – see now he has just changed course, and is following the butterfish.

I cannot read his mind as such, but I can calculate his thoughts simply by looking. You question that? His stomach is full and his lungs expanding and contracting under no great strain – so he has no need of the butterfish for food. In any event I can judge the speed of the butterfish and have “seen” that the rock it is now approaching has a large hole inside it; too small for friend dolphin. Now see, he spurts, it is a game. A boring game, I admit, for he can make the same calculations as can I. He can see the hole, judge the speed of the butterfish – it is just a moment's exercise.

Please believe that this example is trivial. To read all physical knowledge in a single sonar glance and to refresh that knowledge constantly with echo pulses, to know of the insides of things as well as the images presented by the outside, to be able to do all this by processes of millionths of seconds, is to have a comprehension beyond any example we can present for your kind. We are beyond conception in your sense, and I do not mean that in a derogatory way. All these processes, all this reading, all this seeing, are not taking place consciously. It is not like one of your radar operators sitting in front of a machine gathering special knowledge of a particular set of events for a specific purpose. We incorporate this special sense of seeing into our special state of normality.

And this is true of our sound communications as well.

In the sense that you have need of sounds, we have no need at all. Patronizing? No, objective. Consider friend dolphin again. I know everything he knows – his chances of success, his physical imperatives. I can assess his chances of success. All this from a few clicks. What need of sounds that transmit information – what you call the spoken word – in that case? The only “voice” communication I need to make is one of appreciation – or scorn, or humour – all emotive sounds, all emotions that can be expressed other than by sound. Even your kind have developed gestures of the hands, expressions of the mouth, frowns, smiles, or at best a whistle of appreciation or a groan of contempt. To express an emotional reaction you need no sound, and we need them even less.

If that were the only purpose of communication we would be completely silent animals. We are in fact very noisy. You must ask yourself why. No, you lack our ability to see enough in other ways to appreciate why you communicate as you do, by complex language. I will tell you why we communicate noisily. The primary purpose of communication is contact, an extension of the gregarious instinct we both share. You confuse it with other things because you are obliged, with your limitations, to use communication for other, more basic, tasks. You pass essential information by sound and presume that it is the only way of passing essential information. You exchange images by sound and assume it is the only way of exchanging images.

But strip yourself for a moment of these needs. Conceive of a race of humankind that knows all there is to know of its physical universe, that has books enough to answer all the questions, computers so complex as to do all the equations and pictures upon its walls capable of every form of interpretation. Would humankind then cease to converse? It would not. We are gregarious animals.

Here this gregarious need is serviced by sound images so complex as to require that you amalgamate all your media to understand them. I will click ninety times in a second, and each click will be a ball of information that is comprehensive, subtle, definitive, humorous; tinged with warning; warmed by emotional overtones; even a little aggression; and in the light of my sexual nature, of which you are aware, rich with innuendo.

Don't look puzzled, I am merely describing a concept of language which many of your experts have described. Bernard Shaw spent much of his life attacking the limitations of your English language and proposing alternatives. Do you seriously propose humankind as a species that should be admired for its communicating ability when in this day and age there are possibly a thousand different languages and dialects? Or more to the point, in a world which admires its ability to communicate, and sees it as the factor which separates humankind from all other species, including ourselves, there is not one human being who can communicate with all other human beings.

You have had great difficulties communicating with us. This has always been somewhat surprising in that, so far as we know, there has never been an instance where we have been anything other than interested in or desirous of communication.

In recent years we have become aware of the limitations of your vocal structure. Here, as you know, we use twice the sound spectrum that your limited auditory system can receive. I think we must both accept that until you have built equipment to compensate for these inadequacies, vocal communication will be very difficult. We could of course learn some of your limited sounds, and we will do our best. But the imperative, surely, must be on your side. We have lived by a code which allows an adaptation to new requirements, not a change of structures to them. Given time, a few million years, and a continuing human interest, no doubt we will adapt ourselves to speak within your sound ranges. If you want it any sooner, and I would again remind you that the limitations are on your side, you will have to supply yourself with another tool. It would be better surely if you changed yourself in the fullness of time to use our range, but we sense, as it would appear to be the nature of your species, that you will seek something more immediate even though it will not be as comprehensive.

As for the brain, well, we know nothing of the brain. It is an extension of all else. The brains we have are the brains we need. The brains you have are the brains you need.

We know something of your evolution on the land. Down the ages we have met your kind at different moments of its development. Again, this is not a criticism. There were no tigers in the sea. We were not so badly buffeted by Permian winds nor driven so close to extinction by the ice ages. No dinosaurs walked the bed of the sea. The sea has been our womb since we first chose it for what if offered. It was kinder then and it has been kinder since. So we understand the drives that have shaped your kind.

But you must understand that we are shaped by our world too. There is no danger here, so there is no fear. There is no hunger, so there is no justification for killing other than for the essential food requirement. There are no territorial limitations, so there are no territorial imperatives. There is no need for work, so motive comes from play. That we are gentle, forgiving, undemanding, inquisitive is not that we are special, it is simply the shape of our surroundings.

You say we have large brains. I say we have normal brains. No, that is not to say that you have small brains. For your kind you have normal brains.

Why do we bother with you? We bother because evolution has no end. You are obsessed with “difference”, determined that there should be a gulf. There is no longer any need. You have stopped building moats around your castles. You have even reached the point where you have a secret longing for communication with another species. Are your space probes looking for rock samples or life samples? Is this obsession with UFO's anything more than a rejection of cosmic loneliness? As I have said before, we are gregarious, and as you know well, we share a common evolutionary heritage. We are the same at heart, you of the land and we of the sea.

You will find your life on other planets when you have the technology to get there – the laws of logic and the size of the galaxy make that inevitable. The same goes for us. You will find us when you have the mental technology to recognize our existence, and if this visit, be it ethereal, is any guide, we are getting very close.

In the meantime, learn what you can of us, as we are interested to learn of you.

WISE LABORATORY for ENVIRONMENTAL and GENETIC TOXICOLOGY

2011-05-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

"Arsenic is much more cytotoxic to human cells than bowheads. The results indicate that bowhead cells may have cellular processes that protect them from the effects of arsenic exposure."

http://usm.maine.edu/toxicology/research/comptox.php

OCEAN AND HUMAN HEALTH STUDIES

Comparative Toxicology of Humans and Marine Animals

Photo courtesy of Iain Kerr

Many years ago miners used to take canaries with them into the mines to detect if dangerous levels of poisonous gas were present. The birds were more sensitive to the toxic effects of the gas and so miners knew if the bird died that poisonous gas was present and they needed to leave the mines. We are investigating the possibility that marine species are the "canaries in the ocean" for environmental pollutants. In other words, we are trying to determine how marine animals and humans respond to ocean pollutants because if marine mammals are the same or more sensitive to these chemicals in humans then we will know that for those chemicals marine animals are indeed our canaries in the ocean and may be warning us of the danger we face from ocean pollution.

On the other hand, marine animals may be more resistant to the effects of marine pollutants. This finding would suggest that they may possess some unique cellular or molecular features that protect the cells. If this proves to be the case, we can try to determine how this protection occurs to see if we can use it to protect human health.

Already we are finding substantial differences in the response of marine mammal and human cells to environmental toxicants. For example, we find that bowhead whales are much more resistant to the cytotoxic effects of arsenic than human cells are (See Figure below). This suggests that bowheads have some cellular process that protects them from the toxic effects of arsenic. Future research will help determine what this process might be.

This figure shows the cytotoxicity of arsenic in bowhead whale (red line) and human (orange) lung cell lines. Arsenic is much more cytotoxic to human cells than bowheads. The results indicate that bowhead cells may have cellular processes that protect them from the effects of arsenic exposure.

IN HONOUR OF OCEAN ALLIANCE

2011-02-10T18:05:00.000-08:00

NOTE: Here are excerpts from the “executive summary” of the report from Ocean Alliance on the results of their unprecedented five-year survey of global ocean toxicity, publicly released in June of 2010 just before the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

FULL REPORT: http://www.oceanalliance.org/?page_id=221

NOTE FROM JEFF: I’ve had the pleasure and honour of being in contact with Iain Kerr, CEO of Ocean Alliance during the past year. With my long-standing interest in the health of the ocean and her life forms, especially the whales, and with my disgust for “save the whales” organizations like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, who demonstrate that they are far more interested in projecting their “made for tv” charades to make money than in confronting REAL issues of danger to ALL whales, I recognized Ocean Alliance to be one of the miniscule number of organizations doing real science that matters. Ironically, shortly after founder Dr. Roger Payne presented the sobering findings of their five-year survey of global ocean toxicity to the U.S. Senate, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico happened. The largest and most environmentally damaging “oil spill” in history followed right on the heels of revelations that the entire global ocean was already vastly more polluted than anyone could have deemed possible. While Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd, and every other major non-profit “environmental” group cowered unbelievably in a silent vacuum of zero response to the BP scenario, so as not to offend “anyone” who may have contributed vast sums of money…yes, it’s documented that BP practically “owns” several major “environmental” groups, Ocean Alliance rallied like the warriors they truly are and with great effort and at great, even personal, expense, mounted a “toxicity reconnaissance” mission down to the Gulf to study the immediate and long-term impacts of not only the massive amounts of petroleum that were released, but more significantly the astronomical amounts of the neurotoxic and carcinogenic dispersant Corexit that BP deployed. As I write now OA and their scientific affiliates are hard at work studying their samples and hopefully soon will be able to share with us their findings. IF you are someone who’s been contributing or thinking of contributing money to organizations like Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd, I recommend that you stop funding these imposters and support the “original” whale-savers and researchers, Ocean Alliance. Liesbet and I sent a whole set of rocks for the crew of the Odyssey in honour of their historic work, and Iain Kerr recognized me as their “southern hemisphere correspondent.”

In my on-going effort to get the real and total picture of what’s happening, I’ve given OA some “constructive criticism” which I hope didn’t offend anyone, for example, suggesting that, since they are already looking for POP’s, toxic metals, and nano-particles, why not complete the spectrum of toxicity by looking for radioactive substances. I also suggested that, like Rosalind Peterson of www.agriculturaldefensecoalition.org, they identify the military, specifically, the U.S. Navy, as prime suspects not only for their toxic chemical contributions, including the “new kid on the block” chromium, but also for their extensive global deployment of LFAS, “low-frequency active sonar” which can explode the inner ears of cetaceans within a “kill zone” the size of Texas; and the Air Force has been spraying a lot of toxic chemicals for “geo-engineering” purposes, too, which, like almost all pesticides used on the planet, end up in the ocean. As it stands now, the military, a monstrous planetary juggernaut, is categorically exempt from any environmental regulations whatsoever. They are the proverbial “elephant in the living room” that almost everyone pretends not to see. But the dung is piling up. By the time our nostrils are clogged, we won’t be able to speak out! I also only half-jokingly asked Ocean Alliance if they had paid the whales any royalties for use of their “songs”, and if they were whales, would they in fact want to be “sampled” or even “watched.” Without ever mentioning it, I was wondering if they were at least considering the possibility of becoming vegetarians, if for no other reason than the bio-accumulation of toxins in the flesh of sea animals (and yes, contrary to an on-going belief still held by some, fish is in fact meat. It’s certainly not a vegetable, what else could it be?) Finally, Iain paid me what is by far the highest compliment anyone has ever offered. In closing our most recent phone conversation, he said “Stay sane.” The implication is that in his eyes I WAS sane. And also by implication, humanity as a whole might not be. In the interest of the preservation of “sanity” and our love of the Earth and her oceans, I present to you now a summary of the recent Ocean Alliance voyage.

NOTE: Soon I will be posting a comprehensive synthesis the current global cetacean scenario.

“The major problem with the recommended use of pesticides is that so little actually reaches the target pests. The estimate is that less than 0.01% of the pesticides that is applied reaches the target pests. This, of course, means that 99.9% of the pesticide that is applied pollutes the environment. The result is that numerous birds, fish, and other species are killed or affected by the applied pesticides…Worldwide…26 million people [are] poisoned and about 220,000 deaths each year. In addition, pesticides cause cancer and the estimate is that there are more than 10,000 cases of cancer which are the result of pesticide exposure. Pesticides also disrupt the endocrine, immune, and neurological responses in humans and other animals. It is interesting to note that these disruptions tend to make male animals become female in structure. In addition, the production of sperm is greatly reduced or is zero.” David Pimentel, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Cornell University (2000)

www.oceanalliance.org (founded by Dr. Roger Payne, 1971)

“The contamination of the world’s oceans is a rapidly expanding global problem. According to 1998 reports from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.N. Environment Programme, between 1930 and 2000, the global production of human-made chemicals increased exponentially from 1 million to 440 million short tons per year. Because the oceans are downhill from everything on earth, they are the final destination for every contaminant that can be moved by water or wind.”

“The environmental crisis we face provides this generation with the most singular opportunity for greatness ever offered to any generation in any civilization, ancient or modern. If we hesitate we will write our names in infamy. If we seize it, we can take our place among the stars.” – Roger Payne, PhD

Circumnavigating the Globe: Executive Summary

The First Expedition: March 2000 – August 2005

A Pioneering Global Research Voyage to Collect Baseline Data on Contaminants in the World’s Oceans

Ocean Alliance, Inc., a 501(c)3 organization, was founded in 1971 by biologist Roger Payne. Led by Dr. Payne and CEO Iain Kerr, Ocean Alliance collects a broad spectrum of data on whales and ocean life relating particularly to toxicology, bioacoustics, behavior, and genetics. Working from that data, we give information about ocean pollution and the health of marine mammals and other ocean life to policy makers, politicians, nongovernmental organizations, educators, and students. Our data is the basis of many conservation success stories.

Our major scientific partner is the Wise Laboratory of Environmental and Genetic Toxicology, at the University of Southern Maine, which conducts state-of-the-art research aimed at understanding how environmental contaminants affect the health of humans and marine animals. The Wise Laboratory’s mission is accomplished through the pursuit of a number of key objectives, including innovative and multidisciplinary research in toxicology and molecular epidemiology to increase understanding of disease in humans and marine organisms, particularly in relation to cancer, asthma, and reproductive/developmental effects.

Ocean Alliance Research Programs

Tracking Sperm Whales – Sentinels of Ocean Health

We learned to track sperm whales day and night by listening for the vocalizations they make. We towed an array of underwater microphones (called hydrophones) behind the Odyssey at all times. The sounds the hydrophones pick up are then broadcast inside the pilot house and displayed visually through a computer program invented by Douglas Gillespie of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The program, called Rainbow Click, assigns a different color to the clicks of each different sperm whale, determines a bearing to them, and displays those clicks without ocean noise, enabling us to find and follow the individual whale. The crew of the Odyssey has become so skilled at doing this that if we hear just one “click train,” we can almost always find the group, and having done so, we can stay with it for days as long as at least one of the whales in the group keeps clicking.

Right Whale Program

Ocean Alliance runs the longest continuous study of any baleen whale species in which specific individual whales are tracked and identified over time. The subject of this study is one of the most endangered of the great whales, the southern right whale (Eubaleana australis). Ocean Alliance right whale researchers, led initially by Roger Payne and now by Victoria Rowntree, have studied one of the world’s largest populations of right whales (approximately 2,000 individuals) on their
calving grounds in Argentine waters since 1970.

Humpback Whale Songs

Ocean Alliance is best known for Roger Payne’s 1968 discovery (with Scott McVay) that the intricate and impressive vocalizations produced by humpback whales (Megaptera novaengliae), particularly on their winter assembly grounds, are produced in repeated, rhythmic patterns and are therefore, by definition, songs. Roger Payne and other researchers at Ocean Alliance have gathered recordings from humpback whale populations throughout the world, a collection that now contains more than 1,500 recordings from 14 geographic regions. It may be the largest collection of humpback recordings anywhere and is now being curated by Cornell University’s Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds. The Ocean Alliance library also contains recordings from right whales, sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus), and several other species, which, together with the humpback recordings, total more than 6,000 hours of sounds.

The Reasons for a Global Survey of Ocean Pollution

The contamination of the world’s oceans is a rapidly expanding global problem. According to 1998 reports from theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.N. Environment Programme, between 1930 and 2000, the global production of human-made chemicals increased exponentially from 1 million to 440 million short tons per year. Because the oceans are downhill from everything on earth, they are the final destination for every contaminant that can be moved by water or wind.

Poisonous chemicals contaminate ocean food chains throughout the world. Pesticides poison our food and leach into waterways; many industrial emissions poison the air and damage our lungs, kill wildlife, and impair the ability of our children to learn. We are facing a slow graying of the human future caused by the inexorable accumulation of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Because they are metabolized so slowly POPs increase in concentration as they move up food pyramids.

In the 1980s more than 900 dolphins died off the East Coast of the United States from immune system disorders, some of which may have been caused by pollutants in their habitat. In the seemingly crystal-clear water off the Bahamas, Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) show signs of pox, skin lesions, tumors, and birth defects. Beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence river are so full of chemical pollutants that when they die and their bodies wash ashore, they have to be treated as toxic waste. Yet the lack of any baseline data on the concentrations of these substances has made it all but impossible to persuade governments to take the steps necessary to reduce the manufacture, use, and improper disposal of POPs in the environment.

The Voyage of the Odyssey program was established to fill this gap and collect the first-ever global dataset on the distribution, concentrations, and effects of toxic pollutants in the world’s oceans. Ocean Alliance has accomplished this by collecting 955 sperm whale tissue samples worldwide. In doing so, we have used sperm whales as our bioassay – as a global indicator of contaminant loading in a top predator. We chose to study sperm whales because they, like us, are top predators – and therefore can be expected to offer an instructive reflection of the problems from contaminants that we also face. We have collected samples from every ocean (including polar oceans because that is where adult males feed), advanced the field of marine mammal toxicology, and created an unrivaled sample set of information and other resources for future collaborative research. The Voyage has made it possible to draw direct comparisons between contaminant concentrations in all oceans, and has provided the first worldwide assessment using the same protocols of the risks facing humans and wildlife from pollutants in the sea.

The original goals of our toxicology program were as follows:

1. To establish an archive of skin and blubber biopsy samples from sperm whales from all oceans
2. To measure the contaminant burdens present in our samples, especially for EDCs (endocrine-disrupting chemicals) and other persistent organohalogens.
3. To establish a baseline against which future studies can be compared, in order to monitor changing ocean pollutant levels in the world’s oceans
4. To generate data on critical biomarkers of contaminant exposure, specifically cytochrome P450 1A1 (an enzyme produced by animals as a result of exposure to chemical contaminants)
5. To compare and contrast our data with existing databases on contaminants and their effects on vertebrates around the globe

Organohalogens (organic molecules with attached halogen atoms such as chlorine or bromine) are part of a greater group of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants (POPs). We chose organohalogens as our initial focus because most are synthetic chemicals that are pervasive, and have potential toxic effects such as immunosuppression, disruption of neurological functions, reproductive abnormalities, and cancer. Also, POPs accumulate in fatty tissues (e.g., blubber), which makes measuring them in skin/blubber biopsies feasible and practical. Furthermore, as they play no known positive physiological role in animals, the presence of most organohalogens in animal cells indicates that the animal has been exposed to industrial chemicals. The principal organohalogens that we targeted for study are recognized toxicants and include DDT, DDE, dioxin, and several PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). Although the toxicity of these substances was well established by others prior to our Voyage, the extent to which they had reached into the marine environment was unknown. It was to document their concentrations near-shore as well as in remote ocean regions that Ocean Alliance launched the Voyage of the Odyssey.

A New Toxic Threat Emerges

About the time that the Voyage was drawing to a close, we began to recognize a new and impending threat from an even more ubiquitous suite of organohalogens, the polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs. These compounds are used as flame retardants and are now found worldwide in many consumer products. Structurally, they are very similar to PCBs except that the halogen atom is a bromine instead of a chlorine. Near the end of the Voyage, studies by others began to emerge showing that concentrations of PBDEs were dramatically increasing in human mothers’ breast milk, particularly in U.S. mothers. There were also disturbing reports that these substances may be neurotoxic to a developing brain. Because we had waited until the end of the Voyage to settle on what compounds to analyze, Ocean Alliance was able to shift its principal focus on organohalogens to these key and newly recognized toxic PBDEs, the distribution of which are virtually unknown. Regulation is now coming into place for the more familiar toxicants such as PCBs while PBDEs are mostly unregulated.

As the Voyage neared its end, Ocean Alliance’s partner Dr. John Wise of the Wise Laboratory of Environmental and Genetic Toxicology at the University of Southern Maine, was fully engaged in the analysis of our samples. Dr. Wise and his team are pioneers in marine toxicology. Their studies include an emphasis on the toxic effects of chemicals in cells grown in culture. This means that not only are we able to establish baseline concentrations of pollutants in the sea, but we now can measure directly the toxic effects of the pollutant concentrations we observed on sperm whale cells grown in culture. This will provide a toxicity context to our measured baseline of pollutants. The latter step will occur later, but for now, under Dr. Wise’s leadership, we are continuing to analyze the pollutant concentrations in the samples we brought back from the Voyage.

Data Report I: Organohalogen Analysis I (PCBs, DDT, and HCB)

What Are These Chemicals?

Halogens are nonmetal elements consisting of fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and astatine. An organohalogen is a chemical that has a halogen as part of a molecule the remainder of which is carbon based. In environmental toxicology, perhaps the most infamous organohalogens are the organochlorines. These carbon-based chemicals have at least one covalently bound chlorine atom. Their principal uses are as solvents, pesticides, and electrical insulators. In our study, we focused on three groups of them: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were used primarily as electrical insulators, DDT and hexachlorobenzene (HCB). The latter two are pesticides.

What Samples Did We Use?

The PCB, DDT, and HCB analysis was done by Dr. Cristina Fossi at the University of Sienna in Italy. The Fossi study included 50 individual whales that we selected on the basis of their CYP1A1 levels (discussed later). They came from five Pacific Ocean regions (10 individual samples per region).

Data Report II: CYP1A1 Analysis

Because of the potential high cost of organic contaminant analysis and our desire to rapidly achieve a global dataset reflecting pollutant levels in the whales, we chose to measure the levels of CYP1A1 in whale biopsies. The chief scientist of the Voyage at the time, Celine Godard-Codding, also had a specific research interest in this biomarker. See full report for results.

Data Report III: Organohalogen Analysis II (PBDEs)

These Chemicals and their Health Effects

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are organohalogens that are structurally like PCBs, except that instead of chlorines, they have bromines. PBDEs are predominantly used as flame retardants in many products including clothes, furniture, electronics, cars, plastic packaging, and building materials. The health effects of these compounds are just being established. The most common concern focuses on their potential for affecting the developing nervous system and possibly for disrupting the endocrine system.

Data Report IV: Toxic Metals

What Are Toxic Metals and Why Should We Care about Them?

Toxic metals are metals that poison the body and have no known biological role. As a group they can poison all of the organ systems of the body, though individually the scope of their toxicity is, in most cases, more limited. Some of their organic forms (such as methylmercury or tetraethyl lead) are even more toxic than they are as elements, but others (such as arsenobetaine) are less toxic. Because toxic metals are elements, they cannot be destroyed, although they can bioaccumulate, and some biomagnify. One aspect of toxic metals is that they can mimic essential metals and interfere with the uptake or function of that essential metal. For example, cadmium, lead, and other toxic metals can interfere with the uptake of iron and cause iron deficiency.

Chromium is one toxic metal that can be either toxic or essential. In its hexavalent form, it is clearly a toxic metal. In its trivalent form, it is classified as an essential metal; however, more recent data are challenging that classification and finding that although it may have activity as a drug, it may not be essential. Chromium is currently unique among essential metals in that it is the only one for which there is no recognized disease state that results from its deficiency. The absence of such a state further supports the argument that although it has pharmacological activity it may not have essential activity. We have included it here with the toxic metals because with the levels we find – whether in its trivalent or hexavalent form– there is reason for concern.

Although we measured all toxic metals, the full report presents the baselines and some brief context with respect to the uses and health effects of chromium, mercury, aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead, gold, silver, and titanium. We also provide the context of other published studies of sperm whales, other whales, and other marine mammals. We are still in the process of reviewing existing literature studies, but we have summarized what we have found so far. We have yet to find data for some pollutants, suggesting that ours may be the first. Of course, there may be publications that we have not yet uncovered, and new data are being reported all the time. Thus, contextualizing our data is an ongoing process, and we will be expanding it to include the remainder of the toxic metals we measured (barium, strontium, and tin) as well as the essential metals such as copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, nickel, zinc, and selenium. This summary focuses on chromium, mercury and selenium. Our study was one of the very few to measure levels in free-ranging, apparently healthy whales, and thus of necessity we measured skin levels. The other studies considered dead animals and usually focused on the liver and other internal organs. They rarely considered skin, and therefore some of the differences in levels that we found may be due to the difference in organs studied. We discuss the overall implications of these data later in this summary (also see page 152 of the full report). Our context is presented later as we discuss each ocean and sea separately. A finer breakdown of locations beyond major oceans and seas can be found in the individual metals sections.

Implications of the Data: What Does All of This Mean?

Working up the data, contextualizing it, and writing it up as scientific papers is still underway. Nevertheless, some important discoveries that can be expected to alter fundamentally the way the world thinks about marine pollution are already apparent. The first Voyage of the Odyssey provides clear evidence that pollutants have reached the deep oceans of the entire world; the extent of the accumulation of contaminants in apex predators makes it an indisputable fact that humans are polluting the oceans. Aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, and titanium are all metals that are found in high concentrations and/or appear to be increasing in ocean life. The Voyage has already achieved a number of important goals and breakthroughs as follows:

1) Established a baseline of ocean contaminants

As evidenced by the many contaminant baseline concentrations presented in Part 3 of this report, we achieved our fundamental goal many times over. We can now talk and think about many pollutants in a global context, something not possible before the Voyage. This context is critically important because it allows us to see in objective terms that even animals living in the most remote ocean regions are heavily contaminated and that pollution is now a global problem. Voyage of the Odyssey results encourage us to begin thinking more about global movements of pollutants by such natural forces as wind and ocean currents. Scientists have long questioned whether pollutants were moving across the globe at rates and concentrations that would constitute any kind of significant threat to ocean life or, by extension, to human life. But the baseline concentrations provided in this report now show that this is indeed the case. The presence of high levels of pollutants in remote locations near areas of land without major industry such as Kiribati and the Galapagos demonstrate that contaminants are everywhere whether they are carried there by wind, water, or animals. We now have proof that humanity is polluting all oceans. In the future, the baselines provided by the first Voyage of the Odyssey will tell us whether things are getting better or worse and in applicable cases whether remediation efforts are working.

2. Conducted the first and only large study of marine contaminants in free-ranging animals

The Voyage of the Odyssey transforms the way we will think about contaminant studies. The study encompassed hundreds of apparently healthy animals of a single species that is found across the globe. It is the first of its kind. Even if we consider studies of dead animals, it is the largest single marine contaminant study. Previous studies have relied on small numbers of animals, usually a handful, from just one species. Moreover, these animals were usually found stranded and dead, though in a few cases, such as subsistence-hunted bowhead whales, the specimen animals were presumed healthy when they were killed.

In previous whale studies the animals came to the researchers: the researchers did not go to the animals. The Voyage of the Odyssey proves that a large dataset from multiple regions can be developed and, more important, provides critical insights into a complex problem. Scientists can now use these data to provide context and guidance for their own smaller or more local studies
and may now seek with greater confidence of possible success, new ways to perform larger and more ambitious studies.

3. Showed that hundreds of healthy sperm whales, from even the remotest ocean regions, have been exposed to pollutants, thus demonstrating that marine pollution is both a global and a local problem

With the dataset from the Voyage we now have the statistical power to show marine baselines with unprecedented authority. Critics of previous studies by others have pointed out that the number of animals considered was so low that the studies probably did not reflect the whole population of that species, and disputed that any definite conclusion could be drawn regarding a large pollution problem. In addition, they argued that because the studied animals were sick, the levels were quite probably elevated as a result of the underlying disease that caused the animals to strand and die in the first place. Finally, they argued that if there were any validity to the levels found, they probably reflected an unusually high and localized exposure to some rare pollution event such as an oil spill or a sunken ship.

The Voyage of the Odyssey overcomes all of these criticisms. Hundreds of animals were considered, not just a handful. Because all of the animals were alive and exhibiting normal healthy behaviors, disease is not likely to be a factor, nor is it likely to be responsible for the elevated levels found. Eighteen broad regions from around the globe were studied so this is not merely a local phenomenon. Moreover, the vast majority of sperm whales are not found in coastal waters so this is not just a near shore problem. Finally, because this work was done on a single species, critics cannot argue that the observed differences come from studying several different species. Because of the dataset we have provided, it is no longer possible to argue that marine pollution is not a major global health concern.

4. Compiled the first extensive pollutant data for the Indian Ocean

Very few studies have considered contaminants in the Indian Ocean. This data gap seems remarkable given the size of the Indian Ocean and the numbers of peoples who depend on seafood from it. The Voyage of the Odyssey has now provided substantial insights into pollution levels in the Indian Ocean, which will help officials and scientists in that area better understand the challenges they face in protecting and conserving this important area.

5. Identified aluminum and chromium as global pollutants

The high aluminum and chromium levels we discovered are surprising and provocative. Aluminum and chromium have only rarely been considered in marine studies as they were not thought to be major concerns. Now, with data showing chromium levels previously seen only in workers, with long occupational exposure, the discussion changes and we have to consider aluminum and chromium as important global health concerns.

6. Brought attention to and started a significant discussion on the importance of air pollution in the marine environment

One discussion we have already started concerns the possibility that whales are exposed to chromium via inhalation. This argument stems from the fact that chromium is poorly absorbed by eating food or via direct absorption through the skin. Thus, it would be logical that in order to have the high levels we observed, whales have to have been inhaling substantial quantities. In starting this discussion, we have learned that few have considered the impact of air pollution on marine mammals, the focus having almost entirely been on diet and water exposure. The Voyage data will fundamentally change the way scientists perceive the marine environment, by forcing them to consider air quality as an important health concern to marine life.

7. Created the first sperm whale cell lines

The creation of the world’s first sperm whale cell lines will allow us to investigate the toxic effects of metal and chemical pollutants we found in the biopsy samples we obtained. We will also be able to compare the effects of pollutants on sperm whale cell cultures to their effects on human cell cultures, thereby gaining important insights into both whale and human health. Finally, using these cell lines, we can create a number of important cellular and molecular tools that can be used to gain a better understanding of sperm whale biology.

8. Established baselines for nanoparticle-related metals

Nanotechnology is an unstoppable wave of the future that has raised concerns globally about its strong potential to cause serious environmental problems. Because of the Voyage of the Odyssey, we are now armed with key baseline data showing levels of three of the major nanomaterials (silver, gold, and titanium) before they came into widespread usage. As that usage grows, our results will help assess the effects of the widespread use of nanoparticles on the marine environment, and can be expected to be of key value in helping to minimize negative effects.

9. Established baselines for organochlorines

Although the levels of organochlorines in the oceans are low, the Pacific baseline for these chemicals tells us that they appear to be decreasing. This observation is important because it tells us whether remediation methods such as banning a chemical can work – an important consideration when considering how to control other pollutants with very high levels, such as chromium.

10. Are establishing a baseline for polybrominated flame retardants

PBDEs are a ubiquitous contaminant of emerging concern. Once we complete the work of establishing the baseline for them, we will have provided a key insight into the extent of their reach into the oceans and how urgent a problem they constitute there. There are of course many more important but less consequential achievements from the Voyage that we will not attempt to discuss further here. Examples are the data showing that chromium can damage whale DNA and the determination that CYP1A1 is not a sufficient biomarker for assessing contaminant exposure levels in sperm whales. As we continue to analyze our samples, we are confident that many more discoveries will come to light.

U.S. NAVY/COMMERCIAL WHALERS vs. THE WHALES

2010-08-13T00:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.agriculturedefensecoalition.org/?q=oceans

U.S. NAVY & AIR FORCE WARFARE TESTING EXPERIMENTS & PROGRAMS

COMMERCIAL WHALING & OTHER ISSUES FACING OUR OCEANS

Our oceans are under assault from a wide variety of sources. The worst of these are the U.S. Navy Experimental Warfare Testing Programs which were initiated in 2008, and will continue in the Atlantic, Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico over the next five years. In the U.S. Navy Sitemap Section of this website you will find the U.S. Navy Environmental Impact Statements, a Navy map of all their five year warfare testing areas, notification about those that have already been implemented in Southern California, the Mariana Islands, and Hawaii in the Pacific, and those in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Many of these 5-Year warfare testing program will be started in the near future unless the public says "NO"! (The U.S. Air Force is also using the Gulf of Mexico for bomb blast testing.) The one that is proposed for Northern California, Oregon, Washington & Idaho is being opposed by many groups at this time and this 5-year warfare testing program could start at any time here in Northern California.

Letter from several Senators including Senators Barbara Boxer and Feinstein to NOAA-June 17, 2009:

"...In many regions, the Navy plans to increase the number of its exercises or expand the areas in which they may occur, and virtually every coastal state will be affected. Some exercises may occur in the nation's most biologically sensitive marine habitats, including National Marine Sanctuaries and breeding habitat for the endangered North Atlantic right
whale. In all, the Navy anticipates more than 2.3 million takes (significant disruptions in marine mammal foraging, breeding, and other essential behaviors) per year, or 11.7 million takes over the course of a five-year permit..."

Please note that NOAA is receiving funding from the Navy and has been issuing permits for the U.S. Navy to proceed with these warfare programs with limited mitigation measures in place. It should also be noted that most studies being conducted at this time are allegedly funded by the Navy with their participation. The ability of NOAA working as a funded partner with the Navy leads one to believed that their test results will be biased in favor of the Navy.

Our oceans and ocean life are already in trouble and now the U.S. Navy and Air Force warfare testing will create a crisis destroying not only sea life, habitat, fish, mammals, birds, and more for years into the future. When you also add the ocean geoengineering schemes to this mix (like ongoing and unregulated iron ocean fertilization, commercial whaling and other programs), we will lose this vital resouce and its inhabitants. (See the Geoengineering Section of this website.)

OCEAN ALLIANCE MARINE TOXICITY REPORT

2010-08-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

www.oceanalliance.org/

SEE ALSO the Facebook group "A Race To Save Our Oceans" for up to the minute postings from the crew of the Odyssey...

Ocean Alliance Releases Voyage of the Odyssey Report

6/24/2010

The Voyage of the Odyssey Report is the scientific end-product of Ocean Alliance’s 5-year, round the world research expedition during which scientists and crew collected biopsy samples and other data from almost 1,000 sperm whales globally.

Conducted aboard Ocean Alliance’s research vessel Odyssey, a 93-foot ketch motor-sailor, the expedition collected research data from sperm whales while providing formal and informal education and conservation programs in the 118 ports in 22 countries that the Odyssey and crew visited.

Departing from San Diego and traveling 87,000 nautical miles before its return to Boston, the Voyage of the Odyssey was a remarkably successful expedition to collect the first-ever baseline data set on toxic contaminants throughout the world’s oceans by studying the sperm whale, a cosmopolitan whale species that sits atop the oceanic food chain.

To access the Executive Summary, click below:

http://www.oceanalliance.org/documents/OAVoyageoftheOdyssey-ExecutiveSummary.pdf

WISE MARINE TOXICOLOGY GULF MISSION

2010-08-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

http://rachels-carson-of-today.blogspot.com/2010/08/wise-marine-toxicology-labgulf-mission.html

Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded resulting in an uncontrolled release of oil into the ocean. Estimates now indicate that 1.5 million to 4.2 million gallons continue to flood into the Gulf on a daily basis totaling between 85.5 million and 239 million gallons with no end in sight. Superimposed on the threat of the oil, is the already more than one million gallons of toxic chemical dispersants that British Petroleum (BP) dumped into the Gulf to try and breakup the oil. These chemicals are being used in unprecedented amounts and in untested ways.

One major concern is the impact of this crisis on wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico. Marine mammals are a particular concern because they serve as sentinels for human health and because they are key species for both the ocean ecosystem and coastal economies. Marine mammals are at risk in this crisis. For example, there is a resident population of about 1,600 sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico. This population is endangered, as all sperm whales are, but this population is considered to be at particular risk because the size of the group is so small. Losing even a few whales will have dramatic population effects because individual whales take a long time to reach sexual maturity and then only produce a few calves over their lifetimes. The Gulf Oil spill is a specific threat to these sperm whales, because they occupy deeper waters and thus are much closer to the greatest amount of oil. Moreover, studies show that prior to the explosion, many sperm whales spent a lot of time near the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. In fact, a dead sperm whale has recently been discovered near the oil spill though the cause of death has not yet been reported.

"TOXINS FOUND IN WHALES BODE ILL FOR HUMANS"

2010-08-02T19:37:00.001-07:00

http://www.physorg.com/news196611627.html

Report: Toxins found in whales bode ill for humans

June 24, 2010 By ARTHUR MAX , Associated Press Writer

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This undated file photo provided by by Michael Moore of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts shows a sperm whale. Levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium together are the highest ever found in marine mammals, scientists who spent five years shooting nearly 1,000 sperm whales with tissue-sampling darts say, warning that the health of both ocean life and the people who consume seafood could be at risk. (AP Photo/PA, Michael Moore, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

(AP) -- Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.

"These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean," said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance, the research and conservation group that produced the report.

The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish - the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid - typically have levels of about 1 part per million.

The whales studied averaged 2.4 parts of mercury per million, but the report's authors said their internal organs probably had much higher levels than the skin samples contained.

"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.

Payne said sperm whales, which occupy the top of the food chain, absorb the contaminants and pass them on to the next generation when a female nurses her calf. "What she's actually doing is dumping her lifetime accumulation of that fat-soluble stuff into her baby," he said, and each generation passes on more to the next.

Ultimately, he said, the contaminants could jeopardize seafood, a primary source of animal protein for 1 billion people.

"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what's going on," he said.

Payne called his group's $5 million project the most comprehensive report ever done on ocean pollutants.

U.S. Whaling Commissioner Monica Medina informed the 88 member nations of the whaling commission of the report and urged the commission to conduct further research.

"NOTES ON MY CONNECTION WITH ARTHUR C. CLARKE" JEFF PHILLIPS

2009-09-12T03:55:00.000-07:00

NOTE FROM JEFF: In this article I explain my connection with Arthur C. Clarke and how it all stemmed from the dolphins. In this piece I describe my "Cetacean/Arecibo Project", which involved doing live musical dialogues with whales from boats and beaming it into space in real time using a radio-telescope. Bob Arnold, then head PR person for the NASA's SETI Institute, made the initial connection...read more.

http://synthaissance.blogspot.com/2008/06/notes-on-my-connection-with-arthur-c.html

"People sometimes ask me how I “knew” Arthur C. Clarke when they see his name listed on my card as owning one of my hand-painted rocks. Here’s the story…

It all goes back to the dolphins. Around the time I quit college in 1978 and enrolled in a much larger “uni”…the “uni-verse”…I began to receive what has been a life-long “calling” to reach out to, communicate with, protect, and understand our friends the dolphins and whales.

This “calling” originally came to me through the work and writings of Dr. John C. Lilly, a brilliant and controversial “renaissance mind” of science whose background in neurobiology led him to the dolphins. I moved to California in 1980 to get involved with his dolphin communication work; my main angle was in the use of music as a form of communication.

What interested me most in Lilly’s thinking was that the cetaceans are a true “extra-terrestrial” intelligence (literally, “away from land”) who not only live on the same planet we do, but have done so for millions of years longer than us, in the ocean, without hands or external technology, with brains that are more highly evolved than ours. Lilly said basically that there was no way we could possibly hope to communicate with or understand true ‘alien’ beings from another planet or galaxy if we couldn’t even communicate with or understand highly intelligent beings from the same planet as ourselves..."

SEE LINK FOR THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

"WHO ARE THE CETACEANS?" JEFF PHILLIPS

2009-09-12T03:49:00.000-07:00

NOTE FROM JEFF: This article was originally written upon the request of Jim Nollman for his Interspecies newsletter. After reading it, they accused me of being "anti-human", refused to print it, and to this day have banned me from receiving their newsletter.

The cetaceans are more than just large-brained mammals who live in the ocean, breathe air and give birth to their young; they are more than highly intelligent animals with complex social systems and sophisticated uses of sound like echo-location and communication. They are even more than the people of the sea, which is how the ancient Lemurians referred to them, humans being the people of the land.

A few years ago I was talking with musician Ralph Towner about doing live musical dialogues with whales from boats and beaming it into space via radio-telescope. He thought the project was interesting, but his immediate comment was that we should really leave those people alone.

To me, the cetaceans as a whole possess not only the full spectrum of attributes which humans have traditionally reserved exclusively for ourselves, including self-awareness, but beyond these they show through the example of how they live an intelligence more highly-evolved than that of man, the wise.

The cetaceans, for example, are far more perfectly adapted to their environment than we are ours; and they live in the sea, which not only covers 70% of the Earths surface and enables relative freedom from gravity as well as self-locomotion in three dimensions, but is also a much more stable environment than land and provides protection during periods of cosmic energy bombardment.

We dont really know all that much about their inner experience mainly because we havent bridged the physical communication barrier, but I think that it is likely that they are capable of all endeavours that indigenous humans participate in, for example, advanced knowledge of astronomy and cycles of time, knowledge of the sun and planets, mapping the ocean and sky, knowledge of plants and foods, oral histories shared from memory, spiritual psychologies, a sense of the sacred in their lives, and music.

They are gifted with internal technologies much the same as we have been; yet I believe they have developed theirs much more fully than we have, as we have been distracted by a full spectrum of external hardware and extra-somatic artifacts which seem ultimately to be our down-fall.

Our most highly advanced external technologies are used in the service of killing; not only do cetaceans not kill members of their own species, they show a profound deference for man, the wise even in the face of repeated abuse on our part. Dolphins have been known to go to great lengths to assist humans in distress; and Capt. Paul Watsons (a founder of Greenpeace and currently Sea Shepherd) life was changed from momentary eye-contact with a breaching cachelot who was about to crush his dingy and then rolled to spare him.

Greek naturalist Pliny the Elder said he believed that dolphins were capable of something that even humanity had not attained: friendship for no advantage.

The cetaceans have been on the same planet as us, with neurobiological systems more highly evolved than ours, for tens of millions of years. Man, the wise only came to be about a million years ago. That they live in tune with the Earth is an understatement.

I think we are living on their planet. Man, the wise is wreaking catastrophe upon catastrophe not only on the cetaceans, but on the Earth as a whole. We are destroying in years what Mother Nature has taken billions of years to create and bring to fruition.

That we do not recognize the cetaceans as fellow beings is a testament to our blindness, our unwillingness to open our hearts and minds to who they really are.

I do not think that humanity is innately dysfunctional; but in our present condition of amplified koyaanisqatsi, we as a whole are no longer people but have become the HSMV, or homo sapiens macro virus.

I think that the word people should be reserved for those who act like real peopleand in the homo sapiens population, these are few and far between!

The cetaceans are the REAL PEOPLE of planet Earth!!!

John Lilly believed that if we couldnt even learn to communicate with fellow intelligences possessing similar neurobiology and living on the same planet, there was no way we could hope to communicate with beings from other worlds.

If the remnant of real people in the human population got together and made a huge effort to reach out to the cetaceans and attempted a quantum leap in our abilities truly to understand and communicate, we might actually become more than we have ever been, not only real people but for the first time, the actual crew of Spaceship Earth!

JEFF PHILLIPS
HOBART TASMANIA
2006

2009-08-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

JEFF PHILLIPS RADIO INTERVIEW re: LFAS, internal technology

2009-08-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

Andrew Haig interviewed me on his radio show "Future Static" on PBS-Melbourne in June of 2001. We talked about "who has the best brains on this planet", the danger posed by the U.S. Navy's LFA-sonar to the global cetacean community, and the importance of music and an understanding of our own immense "ultimate technology."

PART ONE OF THE INTERVIEW:

http://www.mediafire.com/?n1n2tdmjjtt

SOUND COLLAGE (mix of Mickey Hart, Fiorella Terenzi, and humpback whales):

http://www.mediafire.com/?p1l1yyluilz

PART TWO OF THE INTERVIEW:

http://www.mediafire.com/?m0jdqtimx2m

2009-08-20T05:48:00.000-07:00

"Friendship for No Advantage"

2009-08-20T05:22:00.000-07:00

"To the Dolphin alone, beyond all others, Nature has given what the greatest philosophers seek, friendship for no advantage; yet it is the friend to all men and has often given them great aid."...Plutarch

"Man and Dolphin" Jeff Phillips

2009-08-20T05:10:00.001-07:00

MAN AND DOLPHIN

Jeff Phillips July 1980

[NOTE: This article was published in the December 1980 issue of Magical Blend magazine in San Francisco, the “whale and dolphin” issue. I was a hyper-enthusiast of the work; if I were to write this article today, quite a few changes would be made. But here is the article as originally written…]

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was written upon the request of John and Toni Lilly for the Human/Dolphin Foundation. The content of this article is based on personal interaction with John and Toni Lilly; the writings of John Lilly; other writings; my own ideas and experience. It is a report, a synthesis, and a message.

Humans and cetaceans have co-habited Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, yet have remained separated by the chasm of having totally different ecological niches, totally different experiences of reality. Today we stand on the threshold of a dream, for the possibility of direct communication with a non-human intelligence, that of the cetaceans, is quickly becoming a probability. Once this chasm is spanned, a new era will have begun for life on Earth. The significance of this step, now being taken, once realized, will far exceed that of Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the lunar surface. When we can communicate directly with a non-human mind, a mind that predates man by millions of years, our entire structure of reality may be shattered. We will learn things never before conceived by the human mind; we will see ourselves and our planet as never before; we will no longer be alone. The new human/cetacean mind will be a synergetic entity far surpassing its predecessors in its ability to structure/create reality and to solve problems of survival and existence. The vision of poet/musician Jon Anderson will become a reality: “As one with the knowledge and magic of the source, attuned to the majesty of music we marched as one with the Earth…”

Interest in non-human intelligence has traditionally been the domain of the astronomer and the science-fiction author. For years they speculated on the existence of intelligent life forms on other planets in our solar system; with the expanded Hubble universe of the 20^th century, the speculation reached out to remote star-systems and galaxies. Radio astronomers have been “listening” for signals from “extraterrestrial civilizations” and beaming out encoded messages into space for two decades. Few considered that “extraterrestrial”, which means literally, “away from land”, could mean “in the sea”, here and now, on this planet.

Contemporary interest in cetaceans (who are the completely water-borne marine mammals) stems largely from the ideas and experimentation of Dr. John C. Lilly, who was apparently the first human since Aristotle to consider that cetaceans may be highly evolved and intelligent beings. And the current possibility/probability of direct communication with the exists through the processes and activities of dedicated minds and state-of-the-art technology, guided by the vision and genius of Dr. Lilly, and woven into a non-profit organization called The Human/Dolphin Foundation.

Dr. Lilly’s background is important to understanding the present cetacean communication work. He is a diversely and talented general scientist¹ who worked in the area of brain/mind research before becoming interested in communicating with cetaceans. He has made many contributions to biological and medical science, including a theory of positive and negative rewarding systems in the brain, and some of the earliest work done with implanted electrodes. In the mid-1950’s he quit cat and monkey brains and founded the Communications Research Institute in the Virgin Islands, which conducted neurobiological and communications research with bottle-nosed dolphins. These animals were of interest because their brains were more similar to the human brain than any other known brains. As part of his earlier work he had also developed the isolation tank, a tool which enabled him to float relatively free from gravity, cut off from all input from the external environment, free to study and experience the mind’s own processes. He pursued the dolphin work and the tank work concurrently for 10 years. Then in 1964 he began a two-year series of experiments on himself with LSD in the isolation tank. As his own mind and the universe were manifested to him, his attitude towards the dolphin research was greatly transformed. In the mid-1960’s, after 12 years of research that constituted almost all of what was being done with dolphins, he closed the lab, realizing that he, and man as a whole, was not yet ready to attempt communication with an alien mind, because we knew so little of our own minds. He also realized that the dolphins were highly evolved organisms not to be held prisoner with electrodes in their brains (a concentration camp?), and that the chief limitation in the communications work lay in the human end of the system. In his own words, “…we carried to them our own projections and our own expectations. The more I got to know dolphins, the more alien they became. As you get rid of your own projections and your feeling that you understand dolphins, and give them a chance to express themselves, they become stranger and stranger. You suddenly realize that there is an entity on the other side of that barrier of communication that’s comparable to you – one that’s trying just as hard to communicate.” ² Lilly’s work with LSD in the isolation tank spawned three books which are beginning to be recognized as landmarks in the exploration of the human psyche.³ With this work he has taken giant steps towards mapping domains of inner experience that for thousands of years were known only to spiritual masters of esoteric Eastern disciplines. In the introspective tradition of William James, and with an internal application of the scientific method, Lilly has demonstrated that science is a western way of enlightenment. In 1976, with newly integrated neurocircuitry, much experience of non-ordinary reality, new insights into the communicative process, new computer technology, and a good deal of respect for the unknown, Lilly founded the Human/Dolphin Foundation to sponsor research dedicated to establishing direct communication with dolphins and to educating humans about this new reality. After his voyages into the far-out realms of the psyche, he had a lot of questions for the dolphins, who have been around for thirty million years, as opposed to man’s one hundred thousand.

Who are the cetaceans, and why the interest in them? For the sake of consistency we should be talking about primates and cetaceans, two orders of the class mammalia. Mammals are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals that suckle their young. Primates are basically land-dwelling, upright, and four-limbed, with hands. They are the monkeys, apes and humans. Cetaceans are sea-dwelling mammals with highly streamlined bodies and are capable of rapid, extended self-locomotion. Cetaceans have flukes, or flippers, but no hands, and they breathe voluntarily, as opposed to the automatic breathing of most other mammals. They are the porpoises, dolphins and whales.⁴

The specific cetacean we are interested in for communication purposes is tursiops truncatus, the Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin⁵, because his brain is most similar to ours, the humans, or homo sapiens. Evolutionary theory states that dolphins were once land-dwellers who returned to the sea. Were this the case it could be possible that humans and dolphins evolved from a common ancestor. Alternately, it is conceivable that dolphins evolved from the icthyosaurus, a prehistoric sea-dwelling reptile. All we can say for sure is that we can’t be sure!

We operate on the basic assumption that intelligence, consciousness, and experience are functions of the central nervous system (CNS) of the organism. The CNS is also the control system of the organism, regulating behavior, bodily processes, and processing of sensory information. The CNS also gives rise to that nebulous entity known as “mind”, which everyone experiences but no one can define! A vast literature exists concerning the relationship between brain and mind (known as the “mind/brain problem” in philosophy and psychology). The best model to date seems to be that of the brain as a biological computer ⁶, in which the brain and nervous system is viewed as the hardware (circuitry) and the mind is viewed as the software (the processes within the circuitry). The nervous system and sensory organs function as antennae of sorts, continuously exchanging information with the organism’s environment. The software consists of genetic programs, which are inherited and “wired-in”, and of acquired programs, or memory, which is formed through the living and growing experiences of the organism. The non-isolated, healthy nervous system is in continuous feedback with itself (through memory) and with its environment (through sensory channels).⁷ As we grow, experience, and learn, the quantity and quality of our programs increases. Metaprograms, or programs that control other sets of programs, emerge – learning to learn, for example. All higher mental functions are incredibly complex metaprograms. The self, one’s identity, “I”, the experiencer is the metaprogrammer, the chooser, the decider. A large number of metaprograms are concerned with the process of modelling or simulation, of what which we are not. We do not generally experience reality directly; we experience our nervous system’s simulation of reality. The five sensory channels that provide the information for the construction of most of our perceptions of reality are in reality narrow filters, processing selected regions of the total spectrum of energy/information that is “reality.” ⁸At this instant, you, the reader are simulating this printed page! Your visual system is processing light reflected from the page! Everything we experience in ordinary states is a simulation. What everyone simulates and agrees on is the everyday world of consensus reality. But it is really different for everyone. The essence of science, philosophy, and religion is to discover that which is real, or true, or common to everyone’s experience of reality. This mutuality of experience, or agreement on reality, is the essence of communication.

So…we humans simulate each other and dolphins; the dolphins simulate each other and us humans. As we share more and more, and learn to communicate, our mutual simulations will get better and better. We will grow to know each other.

Since experience and communication are functions of the nervous system, let us compare the brains of homo sapiens and tursiops truncatus. The central structures of all mammalian brains are identical; as we progress from the most primitive mammals, the brain size increases in the region of the cortex. The cortex consists of the outermost layers of the brain. Beginning with the chimpanzee, silent areas of the cortex appear. They are termed silent because in electrode mapping studies stimulation in these areas produce no behavioral change – these brain regions are not directly connected to the body. Humans have very large cortices, or silent areas. These areas appear to be the seat of our higher, or characteristic human qualities, for example, morals, ethics, long-term problem solving, reasoning, abstraction, language, religion, altruism. All of our uniquely human qualities appear to be a function of cortical circuitry.

In the order of cetaceans, there are brains comparable to chimp brains. Then there is the brain of tursiops, which is comparable to human brains. Then there are the whale brains, that reach 10,000 grams, six times the size of the human brain. Most of the area of these brains is silent, cortical tissue.⁹

The average human brain is 1400 grams. The average tursiops brain is 1800 grams. This 40% of additional brain is in the silent, cortical regions.

Let us now consider the inner experience of the dolphin, and the problem of evaluating their level of intelligence.

In the case of humans, we can’t know what each other’s experience of anything is like. We can assume that our experiences are similar, because our nervous systems are similar, and because we can communicate to a degree, meaning we agree on what we communicate about, which is experience. In the case of humans considering dolphin experience, however, we must be more speculative, because we know that our respective experiences of reality are very different, and because we do not yet communicate directly.

Let us first consider the notion of intelligence. There is no objective measure of intelligence. About all we can do is to look at the organism’s flexibility in its adaptation to its environment and to changes in its environment. Dolphins are supremely adapted to life in the sea, down to streamlining and lubrication of their bodies. Humans are well adapted to life on land, but much of it comes about through manipulation of the environment, often in thoughtless, short-sighted, and disharmonious ways. Dolphins do not manipulate their environment, nor do they have material possessions to separate them from living. They seem to be more in tune with their environment than humans are. They have survived for 30 million years.

Now, the shark, too, has been around in its present form for millions of years. It appears to be highly successful in adaptation to the sea as well. Are the shark and the dolphin equally intelligent? Here we approach a difficult issue. Perhaps they are both equal in terms of biological intelligence – they have both solved their long-term problems of survival. But obviously they are very different sorts of creatures, as we can judge from our relations with them. We know that a shark would as soon eat us or part of us as look at or taste us. The shark has been described as the perfect eating machine; he will even eat part of himself when given the chance. It is probable that the sum total of a shark’s experience is a simple program for getting food – he has little or no choice in any of his actions.

Now look at tursiops. Not only is there no record of any dolphin ever attacking or injuring a human, there are many records of dolphins going to great lengths to help humans in distress in the sea, even saving drowning humans by pushing them to shore. They appear to have a sort of ethical code that governs their behavior with humans: they are to be kind and tolerant of us at all costs. It appears that the parent dolphins teach this to their offspring. This sounds a lot like something a great teacher of 2000 years ago taught! The dolphins appear to be very loving and playful among themselves and with humans. They seem to love interacting with humans. The life of the dolphin seems to be very simple, free, and beautiful.

What is their inner experience like? Of course we can only speculate. Let us look at experience quantitatively and qualitatively. The experience of the shark is probably very low in both respects, judging from their observed behavior and from the size of their microchip brain. The experience of the dolphin, however, is probably quanitatively similar to ours as humans because our central nervous systems are similar. The richness and variety of their experience probably compares to, perhaps exceeds, ours, with their 40% larger cortex. Qualitatively, however, their experience is bound to be extremely alien to us. They don’t have hands or possessions; we are hand and object-oriented. They move in three dimensions in a medium of density almost equal to their bodies, and are relatively free from gravity; we move only in two dimensions in a medium of density much less than that of our bodies, and are constantly fighting gravity.

The experience of the dolphin may be much more peaceful and meditative than that of the average human. The sea is a much more stable environment than land/air; temperature changes are less rapid and less extreme. There are powerful undersea currents, but no raging storms. There is less bombardment by radiation from space, which may strongly influence the evolution of surface-dwelling species in a random fashion. As stated earlier, it is believed that they have been around in their present form for 30 million years. We are tempted to ask, “What have they been doing for so long?” This is a typical human projection, who do anything, why not just be? Pure existence. Just live! This is something most of us have forgotten how to do. It is conceivable, however, that the inner life of the dolphin as a species could have evolved in a manner analogous to that of a human yogi, whose attention is focussed on the inner rather than the outer domains. They could be much more spiritual than humans; since they never harm or kill each other, they probably are.¹⁰

The silent areas of the brain are also known as the associational areas. The rich interconnections of these nervous tissues allow multitudes of simultaneous processes to go on. It is in the cortex that the untapped potential of the brain lies. Out of this vast array of neurocircuitry can emerge many different variations on a single theme, many different solutions to the same problem, many different ways to use time that isn’t spent surviving. The cortical neurocircuitry is the basis of creative intelligence, as opposed to the purely biological intelligence of the shark we mentioned earlier. Humans and dolphins both seem to possess creative intelligence. As Lilly says, “They have lots of time for considering the possibilities as opposed to the probabilities, and they have lots of time for tripping out and doing various things that we don’t have time to do because we’re so busy.” ¹¹

Allow me to share with you my first encounter with dolphins. Coming into this first meeting I already had a complex model of a dolphin; I was, however, very open to the direct experience. This poem excerpt expresses the essential state:

I saw them floating, bobbing,

Swimming, peacefully.

They saw me, not all simultaneously.

I went to them; they came to me.

I looked. I could not believe my eyes.

The beautiful beings I beheld radiated love.

I reached out. I touched.

The skin, incredibly soft and smooth;

The eyes, vividly expressive and alive.

The being. The dolphin. The love.

Can it be only projection? I think not…

I was totally blown away. Dolphins are really wild! And when you feel those razor sharp teeth close ever-so-gently on your hand in what seems to be a gesture of affection, you can’t help but wonder, who is behind those magical eyes?

It appears, then, that the bottle-nosed dolphin is a highly-evolved organism of high, but alien, intelligence. They are playful and spirited. They seem to have a positive, friendly attitude towards man, and enjoy interaction with him. A good prospect for direct communication.

Now that we’ve decided who to communicate with, how do we go about it? Before taking the first step, we must leave all excess baggage behind. We must know as fully as possible our own biases and preconceptions. One’s beliefs, if not sufficiently open-ended, can function as effective filtering mechanisms or pattern-imposers, coloring one’s actual experiences; one’s beliefs determine one’s interpretation of experience/reality. We must know our beliefs, and if not sufficiently broad, expand them to allow for unknown experience. In general, beliefs are limits to be transcended.

As Lilly says, “…as long as the conscious and unconscious basic belief exists that the human brain and mind are superior to all others, there isn’t going to be very much acceptance of the idea that there can be communication between species.” ¹² What is communication? Lilly defines it as “the creation of information in one mind by means of signals from another mind. The second mind acknowledges the reception of the signals and the formation of the information by feeding back other signals to the first mind, which then creates new information. Biological organisms in general and the human and cetacean in particular use various outputs and inputs in the service of such creation of information. In order to communicate there must be an agreed-upon simulation of the information and rules for construction of the information from the signals. Language, as we know it, results from an agreement among many individuals about the meaning of the signals. Any two individuals must agree upon the kinds of signals they are going to use, the rules for their manipulation, and their interpretation.” ¹³

There are many different types of communication. Making love is probably the most direct and most intense form of communication, intra- or inter-species. (Yes, it has been done!) We humans use a variety of bodily positions and gestures to say various things, generally on an unconscious level.

The case of music is very special and very interesting. Let’s consider instrumental, or non-verbal, music. Music is sound, vibrations in air, just like speech and noise. But what makes it “music?” It is sound which is ordered in specific ways. Music has definite patterns of rhythmic (temporal) variation and repetition, and definite patterns of harmonic (frequency relationship) variation and repetition. We are speaking of western music. Eastern music is basically rhythmic and not harmonic, i.e., utilizing chords. Western music is rhythmic and harmonic. Basically, music is combinations of sounds that sound good to us. It is the frequency relationships that determine whether or not we call it music: western music utilizes any types of rhythms, but a more limited number of frequency relationships, or chords. What we call chords are sounds whose frequencies relate to each other in ratios of the reciprocals of small whole numbers.

What does music communicate? Many things, basically feelings and emotions, which we all experience intensely but which we know little about. They are very important to us; in fact, they seem to be the essence of life. But why? The concept of resonance is very important. Resonance is a measure of how well two or more systems vibrate together. Two lovers are resonating well…their bodily rhythms are highly attuned to each other. Musicians playing together are causing their instruments to resonate harmoniously, producing music; if they are playing jazz, then their own bodily rhythms and feelings are being expressed by and through the music, reaching you, the listener, thereby effecting communication. Jazz is very emotional music; Bach is a superb blend of intellect and emotion.

Feeling and emotion seem to be connected to resonance.¹⁴ We believe that the same music affects different people in similar ways, if they are in a similar state, and are open to it. How can this be of use in communicating with dolphins? We know already that dolphins are highly and positively responsive to music, but that’s about all. An interesting area for experimentation. We need more research into how our nervous systems perceive and structure sound patterning; music could be a powerful future tool.

Human language is symbolic communication in the sonic sphere (there is also non-symbolic communication in the tone of the voice and in the inflection of the words, but the words, or symbols, convey the more precise meanings). Symbolic means that the communicators can deal with representations, or symbols, of things, events, relationships – abstractions of the actual reality –which can transcend temporal and spatial limitations. We can talk about the future or the past, or about a place far away. We can refer to something outside of immediate mutual experience. Symbolic communication is opposed to the direct communication of love-making or hearing music, for example.

To repeat, human language is a sonic code, or symbolic system. Users agree upon the kinds of signals (the specific language and dialect), the rules for their manipulation (grammar, syntactics), and their interpretation (semantics). Meaning exists not in the signals exchanged but in the minds of the communicators (their simulation of the signals). Meaning depends upon agreement, upon mutuality of experience, and is a difficult issue at best. (A prime philosophical question: can there be meaning in a relative universe?) The essence of meaning seems to be connected to the relationship between a system and a larger system of which it is a part (e.g., “who are we?”- the relationship between the human system and the larger cosmic system). This is the essence of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis of linguistic relativity. It may be safest to assume that we are nobody!

Comparing the sensory systems of humans and dolphins, humans are basically visual creatures and dolphins are basically sonic creatures. We both communicate with members of our own species with sound: humans process more environmental information in the visual sphere, dolphins process more in the sonic sphere. Dolphins have about the same area of acoustic cortex as humans have of visual cortex. It is theorized that dolphins construct an acoustic “image” just as we construct visual images. Their image would depend on properties of sounc, just as ours depends on properties of light. For example, if a dolphin encountered a human in water he would see inside the human’s body because the ultrasound the dolphins use penetrates flesh very easily.

Dolphin sonic communication has been analysed in detail, but is so different from anything we call language that a direct decoding is next to impossible. We can describe their sounds – they are various types of clicks, whistles, moans, and groans in the basic frequency range of 3,000 – 80,000 cycles per second. Human hearing extends to a limit of around 20,000 cycles per second, so most of their sounds we can’t hear. Besides, they communicate in water. If their sonic communication is found to resemble a language, it may not necessarily be a symbolic language. Theoretically, a language would be a system of communicating specific feeling/emotional states, much as music is, whose meaning would be implicit in the signals. But a symbolic system of communication would have survival value in that “…the degree of adaptation will correspond to the complexity and levels of abstraction which can be transmitted from one animal to another. The fantastically great gain in adaptive abilities of those who possess such capability is most easily demonstrated by another species, homo sapiens…”¹⁵

A limitation to direct sonic communication is the difference in the physical parameters of our respective sonic communications. Humans speak in air, dolphins communicate in water. Humans have one sonic transmitter, the voice box or larynx. Dolphins have four sonic transmitters. One is used for echo-location, or sonar. We both encode our sonic signals using temporal (rhythmic) and frequency (pitch) variations. We do this in one channel; dolphins can do this in one to three channels, simultaneously varying rhythm and/or frequency in any combinations of the three channels. On the surface, their sonic communication resembles four-channel stereo music more than it does our language! Their frequency range is broader and higher than ours; it extends basically from 3,000 hertz to 80,000 hertz. The human range is 20 to 20,000.

In comparing the human and dolphin minds it is important to note that we use various recording devices – the written and printed word, the tape recorder. This gives us a great advantage over time and space: we have access to the accumulated experience of many previous generations, we can read the ideas of people we could never interact with. The dolphins, on the other hand, have no recording devices. Durk Pearson, a biologist at MIT, suggested that we give the dolphins tape recorders, implying that they would record what was of greatest importance to them. Lilly theorizes that dolphins and other cetaceans may have vocal histories that are passed from generation to generation. This is an exciting idea. Imagine hearing and understanding cetacean Vedas!

So far we have discussed the basic ideas behind why we are interested in dolphins, and have indulged in some interesting speculation. Let’s now look at the actual approach to the problem of direct communication with dolphins.

The basic idea is to create a new symbolic code utilizing strings of sonic elements as symbols. The sonic elements are single-frequency tones of short duration. Rather than teaching them English or our trying to learn “dolphinese”, this approach allow us to meet each other half-way. Moreover, Lilly has demonstrated that dolphins possess a sophisticated ability to match strings of sonic bursts in number, duration, and in duration of inter-burst silence.¹⁶ They go to inordinate lengths to mimic our voices in air, but they can manipulate and generate underwater sonic bursts much more easily.

With modern computer technology we can transform their frequency range into ours and vice versa in real time (which effectively means simultaneously); we can also write flexible programs that will further test tursiops’ sonic capabilities and which can acquaint tursiops with the beginnings of a sonic code; the code development will then proceed interactively.

This is exactly the idea behind JANUS, Dr. Lilly’s brain-child for communicating with tursiops. JANUS stands for Joint Analog-Numerical Understanding System. Janus, coincidentally, is the Roman god of openings, and has two faces, one in each direction. Lilly’s JANUS has a dolphin “face” consisting of sonic and video inputs and outputs underwater, and sonic and video inputs and outputs, as well as a keyboard, as the human “face.” The minicomputer, a PDP 11/04 controls the operations which interface the two species. Initially the code will consist of symbols for “hello”, “goodbye”, later expanding to include “yes”, “no”, “same as”, “different from”, “greater than” and “lesser than.” Early questions are, “can dolphins perform logical operations and differentiations? Can they perform numerical functions? Can they recognize and use linguistic symbols to convey constant meaning?”

That is essentially the plan for the early experiments with tursiops. Hardware, facilities and staff are available. Michael and Patricia Demetrios of Marineworld/Africa USA have donated the use of two tanks and adjoining space. The computers and peripheral equipment is housed in a van nearby. Several months of reprogramming experiments have already been done; the work was terminated when the dolphins were sold by their owners. Funds for the purchase of two new tursiops were obtained, and John and Toni Lilly supervised their “capture” ¹⁷ in Gulfport, Mississippi. The two new tursiops, Joseph and Rosali, await the completion of a connecting channel between the two tanks here. Work will resume when they arrive.

The Human/Dolphin Foundation is a non-profit organization and is funded by contributions, membership fees, and sale of books and posters. The work is realized through the voluntary efforts of a dedicated staff of 8-10 young people who give generously of their time and energy. John and Toni Lilly spearhead the group and John Kert, a physicist, directs the research.

The first steps in the evolving relationship between man and dolphin are now being taken. These are important steps for us young humans: they are really our first real steps as a young species. The emerging world view in the west is one of the realization of the inter-dependence and inter-connectedness of all things. The eastern mystics realized this unity thousands of years ago. As east meets with west, unifying the planetary cultures, so will man conjoin with the dolphin, unifying the spirit of life on Earth. What things have they known for millions of years? Let us become as one, and co-create a future of life, love and joy!

FOOTNOTES

1) General Scientist means that “I do not any longer recognize the walls that have been arbitrarily been set up between the sciences. In my opinion, the sciences are a continuum of knowledge, broken only by the holes of the unknown. The continuum of the sciences stretches from the basic particles of the universe to the hidden thoughts of you and me and to the incredibly distant island universes. As a generalist, I integrate knowledge from any and all sources.” John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, p.15

2) Interview with Jules Siegel, Penthouse Magazine, 1973

3) The Human Biocomputer: Programming and Metaprogramming, 1967; The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space, 1972; The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Isolation Tank Technique, 1977

4) Dolphins are 7-12 feet long, with a beak and a human-sized brain; Porpoises are 5-6 feet long with no beak and a chimpanzee-sized brain; dolphin fish are not mammals, and have acorn-sized brains.

5) This species is most familiar to humans; they are commonly seen in oceanaria shows. Flipper was a tursiops.

6) See S. Ashby, Design for a Brain; J. Lilly, The Human Biocomputer; J.Z. Young, Programs of the Brain

7) Transcendental personal experience indicates that channels of information flow exist that are outside the domain of normal sensory channels. The significance of the isolation tank is that the nervous system is cut off from environmental information, experiencing only it stored programs and/or information flow from these unknown channels.

8) It is interesting to note the Bergson/Huxley theory of normal consciousness as being a filtered product of the nervous system contents; the brain allows only biologically useful (i.e., survival oriented) information into consciousness, filtering out flow from the non-ordinary realm. Also note the Pribram/Bohm theory, which states that the brain is a frequency analyser which mathematically interprets a realm of reality that transcends space and time, called holomovement, to generate ordinary reality. The non-filtering brain (e.g., one that is activated with LSD) probably tunes directly into these various dimensions of frequency domain.

9) The extremely large brains of whales may give them minds so alien to ours that communication may never be possible; we can at least strive for mutual acceptance.

10) Note that dolphin trainers report a high incidence of telepathic communication with their dolphins!

11) Siegel interview, op. cit.

12) Siegel interview, op. cit.

13) Lilly, Communication Between Man and Dolphin, 1978

14) See Sentics, Manfred Clynes

15) Lilly, research proposal submitted to National Science Foundation, January 1979

16) Lilly, “Reprogramming the Sonic Output of the Dolphin: Sonic Burst Count Matching”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 43, June 1968

17) A minor evil: they will be in the best of human hands and will be released after one year at the place where they were captured…

A metaprogram for the evolution of life:

Believe in communication between man and dolphin.

See this communication as a step towards

1) heightened planetary and cosmic synergy and ecology

2) realization of the essential unity of all life

3) an understanding of the human condition by the process of reflection

4) survival and evolution of water-based life here

5) having more and better playmates; someone to talk to

6) a better simulation of God

7) a representation of the accelerating growth of Earth consciousness

8) a game of the Tao/life force; Gaia touching her fingertips

9) Yet another manifestation of the Dance of light/energy/information/consciousness

10) A profound learning and sharing adventure

11) A fun thing to do

12) An expression of love

SPAN CHASMS OF PROGRAMMED DISTANCE AND SEPARATENESS:

COMMUNICATE

Jeff Phillips

Esalen/Big Sur California