Wolf Listening: Acoustemological Politics and Poetics of Isle Royale National Park

Abstract

Listening to wolf howls as both material object and socially constructed metaphorinfinitely interpretable, ideologically malleable, and ultimately based on particular values, biases, and cultural ideas-highlights the contested relationship between nature and culture. The author conducted field research on Isle Royale National Park from 2011-15, from which he offers a narrative wherein citizen-scientists listening for the howl literally "lend their ears" to a wolf biologist who has led the longest continuous wildlife study in the world. This listening community and its web of meaning-an interwoven tangle of national park politics and policies, wilderness ideology, environmental ethics, and global climate change-will be introduced in this dissertation as a rethinking of environmental aesthetics, as art in the anthropocene. This dissertation discusses acoustic epistemologies (acoustemologies) and sonic environments in the political world of Isle Royale National Park as a form of music in everyday life. The theoretical framework of this dissertation, therefore, extends acoustic ecology-which is often intended to provide the scientific justification behind the preservation of nature-to include environmental history, and cultural theory-which problematizes definitions of 'nature' and 'natural'-to ultimately describe a nuanced form of participatory, situational environmental music that plays out in the everyday lives of those listening on this remote, roadless island in Lake Superior-a location where the nature/culture dialectic (as opposed to a dualism) is critically engaged.

Goblet Cell Mucin of Rat Small Intestine. Chemical and Physical Characterization

“…It is therefore thought to resemble, as closely as possible, a physiologically intact or 'native' mucin. In major compositional features it is somewhat similar to mucins of various sources isolated with the aid of proteolysis, organic solvents, or reducing agents, including mucoproteins of bovine cervical epithelium (43), submaxillary glands (6, 7, 12, 331, stomach (9,10,44), colon (45), small intestine (46), and ovarian cyst (44). In general, however, glycoproteins isolated by these methods are smaller in size and exhibit greater heterogeneity, from which it is suspected that 'native' macromolecules were partidly degraded during purification.…”

Selling Nature to Save It: Approaching self-critical environmental sonic art

“…My own ethnography (DeLuca 2016a, 2016b) starts by listening to wolf howls as both material objects and socially constructed metaphors to highlight the contested relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Relying on field research conducted on Isle Royale National Park from 2011 to 2015, I offer a narrative wherein citizen-scientists who listen for the wolf howl literally ‘lend their ears’ to a wolf biologist who has led the longest continuous predator–prey study in the world.…”

“…This ethnography proposes that Isle Royal acoustic epistemologies – or as sound studies scholar and artist Steven Feld has coined, acoustemologies: ‘a knowing-with and knowing through the audible’ (Feld 2015: 13) – are a politicised, socioesthetic, citizen-science in sound. This context is a nuanced form of participatory, situational environmental sonic art that plays out in the everyday lives of those listening on a remote, roadless island in Lake Superior to critically engage with nature/culture as a dialectic rather than dualism (Kisliuk 1998: 12; Davis and Turpin 2015; Morton 2007; Doherty 2009; Norman 2011: 3; DeLuca 2016a, 2016b). Paying attention to these communities, which surround ecological acoustic spaces, allows for the identification of an environmental sonic art that emerges from human experience, moving beyond interactivity to intersubjectivity.…”

“…For Isle Royale acoustemologies, human communication with the non-human is not achieved by means of dualistic Cartesian thinking but rather through an appreciation of human’s place within nature. This type of interspecies communication is about identifying the differences and similarities between humans and non-humans – leading to a critical, politicised awareness of environmental issues that is not external to the human agent (DeLuca 2016a, 2016b).…”

“…This form of environmental sonic art extends R. Murray Schafer’s ideas about authorial control, showing that we can listen to the acoustic environment as a musical composition while also owning responsibility for its composition. This (de)composition is a form of self-critical environmental sonic art that is playing out right now, in everyday life (DeNora 2000) and which forces its participants to confront their own preconceived notions about ‘nature’ and their relationship to it (DeLuca 2016a, 2016b).…”