Hey I am Swag

A mile down, where the light gives out, the sperm whales are talking. They speak in clicks, in patterns, and every clan carries its own accent. Nearer the surface the humpbacks sing, and a song begun off Australia this season will have crossed the whole Pacific by the next. This has been going on for millions of years. We learned to listen ten years ago.

And the whales are only the ones we thought to point a microphone at. The same is true of octopuses, crows, bees, and the fungal threads running beneath a forest floor. We arrived long after every one of them, into a world already intelligent, already beautiful, already working. Our whole job is to keep it that way.