What becomes possible when a people choose to listen
– truly listen – not for a day, not even for a decade,
but for a hundred years?
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 eco philosophy 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 Oslo Fjord 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.
Wenche Arff Gulseth
Wenche has lived by the Oslo Fjord most of her life—born where it meets the sea, now living at its quiet inner reach. The fjord has always been part of her, its saltwater flowing in her veins. A mother of three and grandmother of six, she longs for a future where they—and all life—can thrive with a living fjord. Trained as a lawyer, attorney, and mediator, she works for nature to be heard in the legal system. Her path also includes storytelling, shamanism, deep ecology, and the heart’s quiet power. She is an environmental activist, a dreamer, and a small stitch in the tapestry of life.
Partners
The Arne Næss Foundation works to carry forward the legacy of Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Næss, founder of Deep Ecology. Næss’ vision of ecological wisdom as rooted in lived experience, joy, and relational depth has inspired generations of thinkers, activists, and educators worldwide. The Foundation supports public discourse, education, and cultural initiatives that explore what it means to live meaningful lives in kinship with the Earth. With a focus on intergenerational learning and the renewal of ecological identity, the Foundation fosters new forms of community, inquiry, and action grounded in what Næss called ‘ecosophy’ – the wisdom of the living Earth. As a local partner of A Hundred Years of Listening, the Arne Næss Foundation brings philosophical grounding and a Nordic sensibility to the project’s call for planetary regeneration, helping anchor its long arc in both rigorous thought and local, embodied forms of belonging.
The Center for Humans and Nature is a publishing and thought-leadership organization dedicated to exploring and deepening human relationships with the living Earth. Through essays, conversations, books, and educational initiatives, the Center brings together voices from across disciplines – philosophy, ecology, Indigenous knowledge, art, and science – to imagine more just and life-affirming ways of being. As the publisher of A Hundred Years of Listening: Letters to My Daughter, the Center offers a home for this project's written reflections, ensuring that they resonate within a wider community of readers attuned to ecological wisdom and cultural transformation. With a commitment to beauty, depth, and pluralism, the Center for Humans and Nature helps make space for difficult questions, ancestral voices, and emerging visions of the future. Their partnership is both intellectual and soulful – an invitation to listen not only with the mind, but with the heart, the body, and the whole of our shared aliveness.
The Pachamama Alliance is a global community and education network working to bring forth an environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling human presence on Earth. In close partnership with Indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, Pachamama has pioneered new models for reciprocal learning and collective awakening. Among its most recent contributions is the development of Earth Listening Circles—a growing, grassroots practice of gathering in community to attune to the voice of the Earth and to reweave the human being back into the web of life. These circles are held not only in forests and fields, but also in cities and schools, catalyzing a quiet revolution of relational awareness. As a partner to A Hundred Years of Listening, Pachamama brings decades of experience in community-based transformation, Indigenous solidarity, and sacred activism. Their presence ensures that listening is not only poetic, but also embodied, ethical, and grounded in the concrete relationality of bioregional culture.
For two decades, Nature Concerthall has created immersive experiences where science, music, and landscape come together in harmony. Rooted in the Baltic region, this annual outdoor performance series brings together ecologists, composers, artists, and storytellers to co-create large-scale cultural events in living ecosystems. Their work invites public audiences to experience nature not only as backdrop, but as protagonist and collaborator. Through sound, light, and movement—always shaped in dialogue with the natural world—Nature Concerthall cultivates ecological awareness and wonder. Their deep expertise in weaving scientific insight with cultural sensemaking anchors this longterm initiative in a tradition of artistic and scientific rigor. Together, we trace a path of remembrance and renewal—amplifying voices long silenced, listening for the kin returning, and reimagining ways music and story may serve as refuge and re-entry points into a shared planetary future.