Communicating Trans-Species Empathy: An Interview with Amy Donovan
By Scott Slovic
In her research as a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, Amy Donovan studies the ways humans know and listen to whales and how we might expand our listening. While working on her master’s in creative writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, she wrote a novel that imagines how a more-than-human community of narrators experiences offshore fracking. Her creative work, which focuses on multispecies storytelling, appears in a variety of journals and collections, such as Riddle Fence magazine.
In the following interview, conducted via email in February and March 2022, Arithmetic of Compassion contributor Scott Slovic and Amy Donovan discuss Amy’s article “Raw, Dense, and Loud: A Whale’s Perspective on Cold Water Energy,” which appears in the book Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures, edited by Fiona Polack and Danine Farquharson (Routledge, 2022). The conversation below explores many aspects of empathy across species, particularly addressing the importance of humble and adventurous imaginative strategies and innovative communication approaches. The ideas that emerge in this interview richly expand the Arithmetic of Compassion beyond the human realm. The imaginative and literary strategies offered here might well apply to our efforts to empathize with species other than mammals—and also to our efforts to achieve deeper compassion for fellow human beings.
There is a common idiom regarding empathy that goes, “Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.” In your essay “Raw, Dense, and Loud,” you seek to swim many miles, it seems, within the consciousness of a right whale, which is even more difficult than trying to walk in another person’s shoes. How did you come to be interested in trans-species empathy and to feel that such a leap of the empathetic imagination might be possible and might be needed?
I became interested in empathy across species when I was working as a national park guide during my undergraduate degree. We had a visitor hike called “Seeing in the Dark,” in which we would set off along a lakeside trail at sunset and finish the trail after dark. I first experienced the hike when guided by its creator, Munju Ravindra, and was amazed by how my senses came to life in darkness to allow me to walk without falling. The experience reminded me that I was an animal too, and taught me about bodily capacities I was not even aware of, like proprioception, and the ability to feel the contours of the ground not just with the soles of my feet in boots, but, somehow, with the surfaces of the palms of my hands, too. To hone our human navigational abilities, Munju encouraged us to mimic the techniques of animals accustomed to the dark forest, for example cupping your hands around your ears to give your hearing the directionality moose hearing has. In the dark forest, without the visual boundaries I was accustomed to and as my own sensory bounds loosened, it seemed the boundaries between species receded.
I went on to guide the hike myself for years, witnessing hundreds of tourists go through this experience and emerge transformed; and bearing witness, also, to transformations in the forest, the most notable of which is that between 2011 and 2018, the year I left my seasonal job, the little brown bats we used to see every night all but disappeared. Bat colonies all over North America are being devastated by white nose syndrome, a fungal disease that, among other things, causes them to wake during the winter when they would normally be hibernating, and burn energy they cannot, during winter, replace. The disease disorients them and disrupts their ancient sensory rhythms, their ways of knowing and traversing the world. Spending so much time in the night woods taught me in a very concrete way the significance of seasonal and quotidian rhythms, and the precision which is required to navigate an equally precise environment. Bats thrive in a summer forest after dark. In the years when they were presences at our night hike, they would flit sometimes between a person’s shoulder and her ear. We saw their rapid silhouettes against dying light. The bats were among all our human heads and shoulders but never made contact. In winter sunlight, however, just as I would be lost if I were forced to find food by echolocation, they starve. Would I have taken the time to think about any of this if I had not spent time with the bats in Cape Breton, in their habitat? I’m not sure. It became evident to me in those years how meaningful it is to try to get into a nonhuman animal’s “umwelt,” its biologically conditioned lifeworld[1]—to make space for such other worlds in my all-too-human mind. That space changes how I behave and how I think.
But of course, not everyone has regular access to places like national parks—places where the nonhuman is loud and overt, where it is to some extent evident how nonhuman others want their world to be. I know that trans-species empathy is possible from a sensory-imaginative perspective because I have felt it. I believe it is needed because that is how we come to understand the threats to nonhuman thriving—by walking in nonhuman shoes, paws, hooves, etc., even though our ‘walks’ will never be wholly accurate. I started thinking about ways other than direct experience to facilitate such encounters, and that is what brought me to story. Learning about reading and mirror neurons encouraged me even more. Annie Murphy Paul put it this way in the New York Times: “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”[2] Stories transport us and change us; they are one way to make that leap of empathetic imagination possible.
I was struck by many stylistic aspects of your essay when I read it. It seems to me that you’re working subtly with a variety of literary approaches in order to bring readers on board with your challenging thought experiment. For instance, the compelling opening section of the essay uses a semi-fictional narrative from the perspective of a young whale whose mother has become entangled in a deadly “bloom” of “fronds,” which are actually traplines. How did you go about crafting this opening story so as to approximate what you imagine to be a whale’s consciousness? What do you think is the particular power that comes from certain anthropomorphic gestures in this section of the essay?
Working with nonhuman ‘characters’ is not that different from writing fiction about human characters who differ from you—the latter a skill that is taught in creative writing workshops and classes everywhere. Nonhumans are just a different kind of writerly work. Let’s say I am a novelist trying to write from the point of view of a child—I want to know what that child cares about/what motivates her, what sensory experiences most attract her, how she perceives the world, whether she is attuned to certain sounds. I learn this from real life observation of children, and from research about how their bodies work (for example, babies aren’t born with depth perception—they develop it within the first couple of years). In trying to approximate a whale’s consciousness, I try to learn as much as I can about how that whale moves, communicates, feels; what its surroundings are like and how that compares to its needs; how our sensory capacities differ and how they are alike. I usually read lots of scientific journal articles about things like group behavior, migration patterns and physiology, then I try to translate for myself how what I’m learning conditions the experiences of the animal I am trying to learn about. I’ll google questions like, “How does whale hearing work?” and then cross-check what I find with scholarly articles. In this particular case, the story of the young whale was true and was documented in various ways (a Globe and Mail obituary, an official necropsy, other news articles). So the plot already existed. I just had to add the fleshly bits, the textures and sensations and intangible emotions.
That’s the technical answer. There is also an artistic answer, which is that the process is a kind of meditation and there is something ineffable in it, something that can only be grasped by doing. Part of it is about asking my own sense of self to step back, so that someone else can emerge. I try to become the whale. I spend time by the ocean, I listen to whale sounds. And I write what comes to me through all this, and edit, and cross-check, and keep going like that until it feels like there are no obvious inaccuracies, and more importantly like there’s a coherent self on the page, like there’s that someone with whom readers can interact.
I think the power of what you refer to as anthropomorphic gestures is just that—to, in a way that is felt and not merely stated, bring to life an Other that is, in Martin Buber’s formulation, a Thou and not an It: an Other irreducible to the self, whom, in recognizing (and here I’m drawing on Michael Asch’s analysis)[3], we realize is essential for the affirmation of the self. When we recognize an Other as Thou we recognize we depend on our relations with it, and of course, with all the Others. The toxins that are in whale’s fat are in our fat too, because we depend on the same ecosystems, in which both we and the whales are also participants. These sufferings and dependencies are not evenly distributed, of course, across or within species including our own. But it matters to recognize that they are shared; that when we deplete the oceans of nutrients, of silence, of whales, we also destroy our own capacity for flourishing.
Of course, we need to be cautious about anthropomorphism. But while there is a fine balance to be struck in attributing characteristics we know are human, whose extent beyond the human we do not know—and where that balance lies is more a matter of opinion than any objective reality—I think it is better to assume that nonhumans are as interesting, as deep, as vibrant as we are, than to assume they are rote captives to their zoology. Jane Bennett has written that we must run the risks of anthropomorphizing because this “works against anthropocentrism,” situating the human within the “environment” rather than outside or above it: “Too often the philosophical rejection of anthropomorphism is bound up with a hubristic demand that only humans and God can bear any traces of creative agency.”[4] It is damningly reductionist, in our thinking and writing, to strip nonhumans of all we attribute to ourselves, save that Cartesian body-detached-from-mind. We miss so much if we do that, not only reducing that which we are able to think but also rendering the world we assume we live in so much blander than it is.
Your essay presents a striking range of discourses, varying from section to section. The opening section and some of the later passages are vividly narrative, almost novelistic. Other sections, such as the one that immediately follows the opening narrative, are more journalistic and informative, often quoting from other sources. Later sections offer technical information about “3D seismic surveys” of the sea floor off Newfoundland’s Grand Banks or right whale populations and bioacoustics. There are also some vividly autobiographical sections, in which you articulate your own efforts to approximate the experience of being a whale, experiencing underwater seismic airgun blasts. I wonder if you could say something about how you came to include such a range of different modes of expression in this piece, and whether the shifts in style are somehow related to the ambitious project of inching toward understanding of and empathy for a species that is akin to human beings but also radically other.
Most of my academic training is in anthropology, where the primary method is ethnography—in-depth, immersive research most often characterized by participant observation, in which the researcher throws herself into whatever scene she is trying to learn about, in the belief that being in is the best way to gain the deepest, truest insights. Ethnography’s methods are often disparate and its insights are qualitative. It is curious and slow; it revels in complexity; it learns by wandering. Thankfully, it has by and large abandoned the notion of self-contained, distinguishable societies that early ethnographers took with them to the field. The anthropologist Anna Tsing wrote in her 2017 chapter on what she calls “Holocene resurgence” that we need to “expand our repertoire of the ‘people’ we might meet to include other living beings”; that we “can learn about them using all our skills: There is no reason not to combine what we learn from observation, indigenous cosmology, scientific reports and experiments, political mobilizations, and written and unwritten histories.” She qualifies that, of course, we need to assess the origins and methods of those sources, but suggests the very lack of unity of this archive might make it a more accurate set of tools to understand what Tsing calls the “patchy and fragmented ecological scene” we live in.[5] Our accounts of it, our attempts at understanding, can and should reflect this patchiness. I often think of the famous line from T.S. Eliot, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”[6] But I don’t think we can get away with an individual I anymore. What fragments can we shore, and can we avert our ruin—these questions remain open.
I hadn’t read Tsing’s chapter when I wrote “Raw, Dense, and Loud,” but the insights in it resonate strongly with my approach, which was to lay out a selection of the images and sources that seemed relevant, in the hope and belief that the fragments would add up to more than the sum of their parts. Deliberate disjuncture also seemed like the best way (without totally abandoning the parameters of academic texts) to reflect the many forces—ecological and pelagic, but also technological, bureaucratic, and anthropogenic-representational (in that the lineage of human thinking about whales affects the respect we deem them to need or deserve, or not)—at play in the whales’ surroundings, which condition not only their quality of life but their ability to live. Perhaps, too, making my method obvious renders the narrative sections more trustworthy—making possible the suspension of disbelief that fiction writers routinely ask of their readers but academic writers usually do not.
Lately I have been thinking about writing, as a mode of representing the world, in the way that John Berger thought about drawing in Bento’s Sketchbook.[7] He described his process thus: At the beginning of a drawing you “question the model”—for me in this piece, the whales and their interactions with offshore extractive technologies—about what shapes and lines to put on the paper. “The drawing accumulates the answers.” Then, Berger writes about how—“if you’re lucky,” he says—“the accumulation becomes an image, that is to say it stops being a heap of signs and becomes a presence.”[8] And then you can start questioning that presence too, which is something different from the model. After a couple of weeks of such questioning, the presence gains its own “skin.”[9] The artist can interact with this presence and so can others who encounter the drawing. But this can only happen through repeated “questioning,” and the end cannot be known in advance. One throws oneself at the work of representing, testing and experimenting, hoping that something, perhaps even someone, will emerge; knowing that what and who emerges will be a surprise. So absolutely, the shifts in style are geared toward inching toward understanding, as you say, with the full knowledge that I am really inching, and in steps so small they might be imperceptible until suddenly, if I’m lucky, that presence with “skin” appears.
In addition to providing your own lyrical passages in the essay, you move gradually toward a discussion of other literary efforts to apprehend what Hugh Raffles calls the “other worlds around us,” such as the poetry of E.J. Pratt and D.R. Wagner. I wonder if the discussion of these other examples of imaginative writing that seeks to enact perspectives radically different than those of the writers might give your own readers clues for understanding your own project. I have the impression that your essay not only includes some academic passages addressing scientific and philosophical angles on “a whale’s perspective on cold water energy,” but discussion of how language/art might enable deeper understanding of extra-human imaginaries. Even though you are commenting explicitly on other writers’ work, I have the sense that some of what you say about these other writers may also apply to your own essay (and perhaps to other work you’ve been doing in a similar vein). Might it be possible to say a few words about how your analysis of the poetry mentioned in your essay can also be applied to your own essay—to the way you’ve written your essay?
Your impression of what I am trying to do is absolutely accurate. One idea I’ve been working toward, related to the answer above, is the possibility that the act of representing is also one of discovery—that art can be a mode of science; that in the processual work of portraying, we converse with that which or those whom we are working to portray, and learn things about them that are new to us and perhaps new to “Knowledge.”
The overlap you mention between my commentary on the poetry, and my own approach to writing, was not something I was conscious of. But I think you’re right, and it makes me feel pleasingly fungal, like I’ve been wrapping my thoughts into an ecosystem. For me the poems I discuss in this essay are very alive, three-dimensional, not only in their words but in their texture and their relations to materiality. The Wagner poem is quite literally textured: In the essay I comment on the crackly, slanted quality of the poem’s typesetting and decades-subsequent digitization, and how this shaped my reading of its content. Further, the authors of both poems wrestled concrete, tangible images out of worlds that were distant and intangible to them—and in doing so made those worlds closer and more tangible for me, even though the substantive content contained factual errors.
I think I aim in my own writing for a similar kind of tangible crackle—lively, material, interactive, not pretending to aim for objectivity. I have done my best to avert factual error in terms of whales’ physiologies as science currently understands them. But I hope the more important part of my own essay is the texture, the rendering-tangible of something that is by nature difficult for the human brain. Many scholars have commented on the magnitude of the problem our language-saturated human world poses for our ability to apprehend worlds outside of language. Some argue it is insurmountable. But language can do a great deal that we do not often ask it to do, especially in academic work. “A word would have dulled the exquisite edge of the feeling,” Pratt wrote of a fight between cats—and yet somehow when I read his description of the fight, I felt that edge, its exquisiteness; I felt the poet teetering on an edge too, a thin and porous brink between his world and that of the cats. As a reader I am brought proximate to the moment, and a flash of otherness becomes available for me to inhabit—briefly, imperfectly, powerfully. For me such works are invaluable studies in technique, as well as reminders of the depth and texture that can be rendered, with particular modes of writerly attunement, with bravery, with patience.
I’m particularly interested, too, in the way you ask questions throughout the essay, frequently ending the sections with questions such as “Can the human imagination, can our empathy, travel over such distances, as whales do?” and “What could whales tell us about energy, if we knew how to listen?”, sometimes using questions such as “How might I swim with whales, hear their stories and voices?” in the midst of your paragraphs. To me, the abundant use of questions, as a stylistic device, implies a kind of necessary humility, an uncertainty about our human ability to know another species, that seems essential to this process of trans-species empathy. Does this make sense to you or do you have other reasons for using the device of asking questions in the essay?
What you call “necessary humility” is certainly the main motivating factor for my stylistic choice to return frequently to questions rather than statements. Some of these questions are ones my Ph.D. research in anthropology tackles, that I am working and thinking toward, but don’t feel I’ve answered yet.
I want them to also work as invitations to the reader to think with me, and to think expansively, into and beyond what I am offering them. Thoughts that take the form of statements or claims sometimes close off other possibilities as a consequence of form as much as content; propositions can provoke challenge or suspicion. If I state that the human imagination can travel the kinds of distances whales literally travel with their bodies—and I do believe it can—a reader might say to herself, “Not really, it can’t.” Formulating this thought as a question encourages the reader to at least consider the possibility, and makes more space for my narrative to “win” skeptical readers. It works as an opening. I hope it makes my writing porous, the way I think species boundaries are porous, the way the empathetic imagination needs to be porous.
Two of my teachers have been particularly influential for me in this regard: Brian Noble and Rob Finley. Both have, when editing a draft or other of something I was working on, suggested to me the power of that which is tentative and inquiring, of writing which probes possibilities and otherwise-s, rather than writing which asserts. Their guidance was essential in developing the writerly humility I try always to remember. On a broader scale, humility also works against human exceptionalism—the idea that humans are the ones who know things and make history, and that nonhuman animals merely do things, and exist in history. Humans, specifically western humans, need to learn how to ask questions of nonhumans, and how to listen to as many as we can of their modes of response.
Your essay appears in a book devoted to understanding the cultural and ecological ramifications of petroleum exploration and excavation in the northern seas. The collection as a whole offers various approaches to what scholars call “the energy humanities.” I wonder if you have some overarching thoughts about how trans-species empathy, which is at the core of your own chapter, is relevant to our efforts to combat various crises, not only humanity’s excessive hunger for energy resources and our impacts on whales and other marine species.
I think the western tradition of human exceptionalism, and the associated human hubris—the belief that we can exploit and dominate “nature” without adverse consequences—is at the root of the ecological crisis we are all—differentially—living. One thing human exceptionalism does is dramatically reduce the possibility and depth of empathy across species. If, as the philosophy goes, humans exist above/outside the nonhuman, that fundamental difference creates a barrier between us and all the others. Whales, if one gets to know them, are very good at dismantling human exceptionalism because they are so obviously and measurably intelligent and social, even by the fraught standards of the western tradition which prioritizes mind/brain over body, individual over group competency, etc. Such dismantling makes space for empathy. In turn, when empathy across species becomes possible, further space opens for us to perceive the real consequences of the destruction our actions are wreaking on the world’s ecosystems—because we are able to perceive empathetically how this destruction is felt by others to whom it means more, to whom it perhaps means even everything. The crisis I have the privilege of offhandedly labelling “the ecological crisis” is multiple, composed of innumerable small and large and immeasurable crises, to which we all have differing degrees and kinds of proximity. Trans-species empathy brings us closer to some of the specific crises, and I hope results in increased care on the broader scale.
Of course, the classical pyramid which placed humans above everything did the same for men and Europeans, resulting in innumerable other crises. We need to challenge these ideas of domination from all the angles, of which a challenge to the human hunger for energy is only one. I think finding, or perhaps more accurately, learning, heightened empathy towards any kind of other increases our capacity for empathy as a skill and practice, as an approach to the world. So it’s also relevant for becoming better neighbors to humans who are different from or far away from us. Those of us who were trained in the dominance-focused, individualistic western tradition of thought need to shift our way of thinking, and that is a huge undertaking that requires many solutions, and skills we might not even know about yet.
Amy would like to thank Fiona Polack and Danine Farquharson, editors of Cold Water Oil, in which the essay “Raw, Dense, and Loud” appeared, for their invitation to contribute and for their guidance, support, patience, and excellent editing.
notes
Von Uexküll, J. (1934). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. In C. H. Schiller & K. S. Lashley (Eds.), Instinctive Behavior. International Universities Press, Inc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html
p. 204–205 in Asch, M. (2001). Indigenous self-determination and applied anthropology in Canada: Finding a place to stand. Anthropologica, 43(2), 201–207. https://doi.org/10.2307/25606035
p. 10 in Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.
p. 62 in Tsing, A. L. (2017). A threat to Holocene resurgence is a threat to livability. In The Anthropology of Sustainability (pp. 51–65). Palgrave Macmillan.
Eliot, T. S. (1922). The Waste Land. Boni and Liveright.
Berger, J. (2011). Bento's Sketchbook. Pantheon.
p. 8
p. 14
Photo credits
North Atlantic right whale: FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Southern right whale (Eubalaena australis): Gregory Smith CC BY-SA 2.0
Caudal fin of a southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) near Valdés, Chubut, Argentina: Dr. Haus CC BY-SA 3.0