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Earth Ecstatic: Moon by Whale Light author writes to connect us to the natural world

We underestimate nature -- overestimate ourselves -- pretend we are not animals.
      -- Diane Ackerman

"Life loves life," said Diane Ackerman, author of 17 books of essays and poetry, in an honors class she addressed as part of a visit to Chico on September 19. "I promote not one cause, but a sense of reverence for all life. I am an 'earth ecstatic,' if I must label myself. My work is a form of transcendent play, a kind of religious activity."

Ackerman's book, The Moon by Whale Light, is CSU, Chico's Book in Common, a program intended to encourage campus intellectual dialogue and to provide a reference point for first-time students. In a public lecture, she traced the unfolding of her creativity and her development as a nature writer. In the honors class, she talked more about her work and its philosophical underpinnings.

In The Moon by Whale Light, Ackerman describes her experience on four separate research expeditions on bats, crocodilians, whales, and penguins. She writes in sensual detail about what it is like to be with these exotic creatures: the textures, the smells, the sounds -- even the tastes of her experience.

She writes in poetic detail, she explained, to counter stereotypes about the natural world and primarily because poetry is the best way to express extraordinary moments that seem beyond words. How else to capture a bat emergence: millions of bats spinning out of the cave in a dark column, sixty feet wide and thirty feet high, going all the way to the horizon. The sound was like a white-water riverÉ it looked like an open funnel. Like airplanes in a mountain valley, they must circle to climb, so they whisk around one another, wing to wing, in tight echelons.

She strives to break myths, especially about animals such as bats and crocodiles that get bad press. Her intent is to create the feel of a bat's fur, the smell of guano, the beauty of the scales on an alligator's back, the power of its head as it whips around and knocks her in the leg.

Why these particular animals in The Moon by Whale Light? Ack-erman writes in the introduction, "In all honesty, there is no animal that isn't fascinating if viewed up close and in detail. I chose to write about bats, crocodilians, whales, penguins and such because each would teach me something special about nature and the human condition."

Ackerman observes the human-like behavior in what we generally think of as the least human-like creatures. Take the mothering instincts of alligators: A baby alligator has a sharp tooth to break the shell, but sometimes the mother comes, hearing its calls, and gently lifts the egg in her mouth, cracking the shell by pressing it between the tongue and palate É. Then she leads the babies down to the water, sometimes carrying them there in her open mouth.

She writes of the respect and affection that grows as she hears the haunting song of a whale, learns that bats are among the most tidy of animals, or sees a male penguin trumpeting in ecstasy to lure a willing female. This respect and affection is of passionate proportion, of religious zeal that she not only admits, but revels in.

To the honors students, she countered two prevalent challenges to her working assumptions:

n On whether whales and dolphins can be said to have "language": "I definitely agree there is LANGUAGE and language. Whales and porpoises change their songs. There is a simple grammar. They use their songs to socialize. Before we were even Homo Sapiens, we had to have been able to communicate in ways even more simple than these."

n On whether animals have an intelligence that allows thinking and logic: "Alex, a 'smart' parrot in Chicago, who has been taught hundreds of words and phrases, vocalized as his owner left, 'Don't go. Take me. I love you.' Not only did he string together phrases in a logical way, he knew how to manipulate a human being!"

"I am not a scientist. I am a poet and essayist who has been privileged to write about science and nature," said Acker-man. "It was my poetry that first led me to writing about nature. All poets are nature writers." She can say that because her definition of nature excludes a dichotomy between what is human and what is "natural"; it is the full sum of creation.

Her work, she said, is both celebration and prayer. And although she steps away from having a particular ecological drum to beat, she does suggest that those who would join her in a reverent relationship to the natural world consider tithing a certain amount of time to help solve environmental problems.

Her unabashed message is, "I am a fan of the universe, and I want you to be one, too."

Kathleen McPartland