"Our mission is to create culture and kinship with the more-than-human world through long-term commitment to attention, reverence, and place."
We do this by listening deeply—species by species, year by year—to restore relationships, spark ecological imagination, and cultivate shared rituals that renew belonging to Earth’s unfolding life.
Why A Hundred Years Of Listening?
We live in a time when the silences of the more-than-human world are becoming deafening – not because there is no longer anything to hear, but because we have forgotten how to listen. The Oslo Fjord, once alive with the pulsing rhythms of herring, eelgrass, and harbor porpoise, now suffers ecological collapse. And yet, we believe that healing begins not only with science or policy, but with attention. With listening. With the steady, reverent act of turning toward the world, year after year, asking not “what can we take?” but “who is here?”, “what is being said?”, and importantly, “what is being asked of us, the human kin and participant?”
A Hundred Years of Listening is a long, slow commitment to these questions. It is a communal vow to live the question, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote – not to force answers, but to carry the question as one carries a child, letting it grow in time. Each year, a single being from the Oslo Fjord's watershed – be it a cormorant, a lumpfish, a diatom, or a glacial erratic – will be the center of our shared attention. Through music, art, and story, we will attempt to listen our way into their world, and offer a concert of honor at the turning of the equinox. In this way, one hundred beings will be given voice over the course of a century. One hundred pulses into the aliveness of our fjord.
This is not a blueprint. It is a humble compass. At its heart lies a conviction: that the human is capable of becoming a mindful participant in the unfolding of life, rather than its interruption. We are not the only species to sing, to sculpt, to mourn, but we are perhaps the only ones who can carry the stories of others through time, shaping memory into form. We are the ones who can say: you were here, you mattered.
In this way, we do not claim to “speak for” the more-than-human world, but rather to hold space for its intelligences, its voices, its silences to be heard alongside ours. This is not sentimentality. It is a moral and practical responsibility. For what – whom – we fail to listen to, we lose. And what we forget, we destroy.
Let this be a culture of co-inhabitation. A community not only of people, but of presences. A slow weaving of trust across species lines. A pedagogy of attention. A practice of care. The future will ask of us not simply how we mitigated damage, but how we tended the unseen, the unheard, the fragile threads of kinship that make life possible. This is a century-long ceremony of reconnection. A re-entry into the community of the living world.
We do not promise salvation. Only the dedication of presence. Only the gesture of listening, made again and again, as long as it takes.
And perhaps, in that listening, something – someone – returns. A slow unfurling: the glint of herring beneath the surface, the calling of a curlew over the tidal marshes, the dark arc of a porpoise surfacing at dusk, eelgrass anchoring itself again to the shallow seabed. Stories once thought lost begin to circulate, spoken not as nostalgia but as guidance – of harvesting blue mussels in bare feet, of winter ice thick enough for skating, of childhoods where the sea was both playground and teacher.
Such ways of knowing are shaped by tide and moon, by the careful tending of nets and friendships and silence. Cultures of coinhabitation reassemble through practice: shared maintenance of coastal paths, foraging walks where elders teach the names of seaweeds, shared songs by the fire, the small hands of children learning the names of wind and stone and fossil, grandparents speaking of summers when the fjord ran silver. In the act of listening, the baseline shifts – not backward, but toward the possibility of a world more deeply and more caringly inhabited.
Team
Austra Apsīte, MPhil
Austra carries the name of two trees. ‘Apsite’ is the Latvian word for the ever-singing Aspen tree. ‘Austra’ is both – the first morning light and the Latvian Tree of Life – the Oak tree. Austra holds a master’s in ecophilosophy from the University of Oslo, where she wrote about how we are connected to trees through voice. She works within deep ecology, phenomenology, animism, mythology, ceremony and folklore. She now lives by the Oslofjord and listens to her voices.
Martin Lee Mueller, PhD
Martin has been mentored by migrating cranes, salmon, killer whales, and by rivers both in his native Germany and his adopted home, Norway. He is member of the core team of the Arne Næss Foundation in Oslo, which is mandated to carry the living legacy of Arne Næss into practices for our time. His debut book, Being Salmon, Being Human, won a Nautilus Award. He is currently at work on his next book, A Hundred Years of Listening: Letters to My Daughter—a memoir of fatherhood unfolding alongside the slow collapse of the Oslofjord, the beloved home they share.
Partners
