Jim Nollman

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Jim Nollman was born in Boston in 1947 and graduated from Tufts University in 1969. He has been a composer of music for theater, an internationally distinguished conceptual artist, and an environmental activist. In 1973, he was commissioned to compose a Thanksgiving Day radio piece for a U.S. national network, and recorded himself singing children's songs with three hundred turkeys. He has recorded interspecies music with wolves, desert rats, deer, elk, whales, and dolphins. He directed one of Greenpeace's first overseas projects, at Iki Island, Japan, where fishermen were slaughtering dolphins to compensate for human overfishing.

He is the founder of Interspecies, which sponsors research on communicating with animals through music and art, and promotes a model for communion between species. Interspecies' best-known field project is a twenty-five-year study using live music to interact with the wild Orcas who inhabit the west coast of Canada. Nollman is currently directing a project in Arctic Russia to protect the last beluga whales in Europe, and is learning how to communicate with these whales. For more information about this ongoing work, and to hear many examples of music between species, visit the Interspecies website at www.interspecies.com.

Jim Nollman is the author of five books, including The Man Who Talks to Whales and Why We Garden. He has also written essays which are anthologized in several collections of nature writing. He is contributing editor of the largest whale site on the Internet, with 10,000 visitors a day. He lives on San Juan Island in the northwest corner of the United States with his wife, Katy, and daughters, Claire and Sasha.