been put in touch with your mammalian past, you had best give up listening to vocal music.” The visceral experience these recordings provided became, in essence, the soundtrack of the environmental movement. As the 1970s came to a close, National Geographic magazine, in 1979, inserted a flexible audio disc of whale song recordings into each of 10 million printed copies that went around the world, putting whale songs on a par with some of the most successful album releases of the era.

Yet, the essential problem persists, indeed has arguably only worsened as we stand at the edge of the Anthropocene: in the absence of a political commitment to habitat preservation, and a willingness to live with the risks that wild animals, particularly large carnivores, can bring, soundscape ecologybecomes a form of archiving rather than conservation, rather akin to the frantic late 19th century attempts to stuff display cases with the relics of vanishing cultures. The experience of soundscape ecology pioneer Bernie Krause highlights the very fine line between soundscape ecology as science and nostalgia. Forty years ago, Krause, a member of The Weavers folk group, left popular music to order to collect the sounds of nature. In his 2013 TED talk, Krause urges us to realize that “every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information.” In the early 1970s, Krause estimates that he gathered, on average, approximately one usable hour of acoustic material for every ten hours of recording: enough data for an