How listening can help us respond to a planet in crisis
What does it mean to listen to a planet in crisis? Scholars, scientists and artists are using sound to study biodiversity and the climate crisis, challenging us to consider how we listen to, and with, the living world. Recording technologies are making it possible to listen in unprecedented ways, taking on an increasingly crucial role as a tool for collecting data on species to support their well-being and survival, and as a way for humans to engage with the more-than-human world.
Kara Oehler, Director of the Institute for Climate Sound & Society and co-founder of Harvard’s metaLab, is a journalist and artist whose work focuses on sound, climate and data. In 2025, Oehler curated the “Copenhagen Climate Sound Series” at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking, which featured three events. Each event featured a special guest speaker who explored listening as anything but neutral, from who records and controls sonic conservation data to what sound can tell us about the emotional lives of animals, and the soundscapes hidden beneath ice and water.
Among the speakers was Joycelyn Longdon, a researcher and writer working at the intersection of ecology, technology, and environmental justice, whose work examines who is included and who is harmed when digital and machine-learning tools are brought into conservation, Elodie F. Briefer, a biologist who studies acoustic communication and social behavior in captivity animals, and what their voices reveal about their emotional states, and Jana Winderen, an artist who turns her attention to spaces and species that are sonically and physically difficult for humans to reach: deep underwater, inside ice, or in frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.
Read the full article on Resilience.org.
The article is written by CApE writer Semine Long-Callesen and is part of an article series published by the Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking at the University of Copenhagen with Resilience.org.