In A Resonant Ecology, Max Ritts traces how sound’s integration into the environmental politics of Canada’s North Coast has paved the way for massive industrial expansion. While conservationists hope that the dissemination of whale songs and other nature sounds will showcase the beauty of local wildlife for people around the world, Ritts reveals how colonial capitalism can co-opt sonic efforts to protect the coast. He demonstrates how digital technologies allow industry to sonically map new shipping lanes and facilitate new ways of experiencing sound-premised not on listening, but on sound’s exploitable status as a data resource. By outlining how sound can both perpetuate and refuse capitalist colonialism, Ritts challenges the idea that the sonic realm is inherently liberatory and reveals sound to be a powerfully uncertain object. Through a situated geographical approach, he makes the case that only a decolonial and multigenerational environmental politics can counter the false promise of “sustainable marine development” held up by industry and the state.

“This superb book is the first work of which I am aware to bring sound studies directly into dialogue with a thorough and grounded ethnography of place and identity in the context of ecological being. Delivering a thick, rigorously described sonic materialist ethnography, A Resonant Ecology is a model of and for how anthropologically angled sound studies can open up fresh ways of engaging in participant observation as well as novel ways of apprehending and representing social, political, and multispecies worlds, especially in a time of climate distress.” - Stefan Helmreich, author of (A Book of Waves) “Max Ritts’s focus on the region of the North Coast, where he charts the complex relations between whales, scientists, environmentalists, governments, and Indigenous communities, offers a great richness of sites and stories. By taking a close look at community knowledge and creative initiatives in the face of corporate, governmental and technological developments, Ritts makes a vivid contribution to musicology and sound studies, environmental politics, science and technology studies, Indigenous studies, and animal studies.” - Jody Berland, author of (Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures)

Max Ritts is Assistant Professor of Geography at Clark University.