摘要：As a biologist and educator, this essay weaves together personal experience with pedagogical exploration through narrative and academic prose. First, we explore bird language, nature attunement, and what shadows can teach us. Bird language is an aural blessing and soundscape that, to the attuned ear, reveals storm, predator, and wonder alike. We consider the Ecology in 1m-squared study I co-developed for remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this place- and inquiry-based project, students contemplate, in silence, a microsite several times a week over the course of a month. Then we go on a soundwalk in the city, where habituated noise pollution dulls our senses to the more-than-human world. Finally, we bear witness to Takaya’s tragic story, the lone wolf who lived for eight years on an island just outside a metropolitan city. Through storytelling and philosophical consideration, alongside more academic modalities, I explore the importance of active listening beyond the anthropocentric babel. If we can hear the downstroke of a raven’s wings, the creak of an old alder, the warning trill that goes Chickadee-dee-dee, perhaps we can better attune to the more-than-human world and both recognize and atone for our destructive actions towards the Earth.
