Coastal Futures Conservatory

This article develops an account of listening as a model for integrating inquiries into rapid environmental change from arts, sciences, and humanities. The account is structured around interpretation of the Coastal Futures Conservatory (CFC), an initiative for integrating arts and humanities into the Long-Term Ecological Research Project at the Virginia Coast Reserve. The CFC organizes collaborative inquiry and public engagement around several kinds of listening, from field recordings and designed listening stations as practices of attentiveness to scientific data by sonifying data sets, across disciplines by commissioning convergent lines of research from humanities and sciences, and across political boundaries by creating cross-coastal exchanges. Working from reflection on CFC practices, the author evaluates the potential and the limits of a pivot from ocular to aural metaphors of creating environmental knowledge as well as the potential and limits of listening as a model for integrating that knowledge. The author then questions integration as metaphor for multidisciplinary collaboration by testing its openness to listening beyond human worlds. The article closes by arguing for the role of contemplative practices in developing “transformative listening” as a way to connect environmental sciences with processes of moral and political formation.