Since the 1930s, research has repeatedly drawn attention to the highly developed intelligence and fundamentally peaceful nature of whales and dolphins. Initial efforts to protect whales were undertaken; particularly endangered species, such as the humpback whale, which at the time numbered only about 100 individuals, were placed under international protection; and the first protected zones were established.
Nevertheless, in the 1960s, whaling on the world’s oceans remained a common practice, while at the same time, a different kind of business involving these marine creatures was launched in SeaWorld parks around the world: in small, artificially constructed pools, orcas and dolphins, deprived of their freedom, performed acrobatic tricks for a paying audience.
Then, in 1974, a book titled “The Spirit in the Waters—A Book in Honor of the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins,” edited by Joan McIntyre, was published. To my knowledge, it was the first book to compile the findings of various researchers on the intelligence and social behavior of whales and dolphins into a comprehensive anthology, making them accessible to a wider public.
“But how is it for that other mind, the mind in the waters? How is it for these enormous, alien brains that traverse the oceans, whose songs ring out, which dream, which dwell on distant memories, which school one another in decency and morals? What does it look like in the spiritual world of a creature whose brain is larger and possibly more complex than ours and which cannot translate its will into world-changing action – if only because it has no hands?”
When OUBEY and I read this book for the first time in 1984, ten years after its publication in Germany, we were impressed and moved by the encounters with whales and dolphins and the stories of experiences with them recounted here. The pathos of esoteric whims was equally foreign to both of us. From our perspective, however, this was about knowledge and a fundamental understanding of facts. The idea that other living beings inhabiting this Earth or its oceans might possess consciousness seemed unimaginable to most people— , at least at that time. That they are intelligent and capable of learning was, after all, no longer in dispute. After all, intelligence agencies have often used the occasional dolphin for their espionage operations and still do so today.
But that they possess consciousness? Don’t they simply follow a genetic-biological program? How could they gain insights that would constitute consciousness, when they know only the elements of water and air and nothing of life on land? And where would they get the free will to make decisions?
We discussed these and many more questions. With questions of this kind, our aim was not to find an answer, certainly not the one true and correct one. In these conversations, our own consciousness opened up to possibilities we had not previously considered. Our self-perception as a species was constantly being put into perspective, without ever underestimating it.
Today, one can find many excellent scientific reports and impressive videos on this topic online, most of which have been published in the last five years. Fifty years ago, Joan McIntyre’s book was a completely new source of insight and inspiration, at least for OUBEY, to whom and to whales and dolphins we have therefore dedicated a special Spark in the OUBEY MINDSPACE:
By the way: 50 million years ago, the ancestors of whales and dolphins still lived on land when, during the Eocene epoch, a major climate change began that caused temperatures and water levels to rise drastically. 10 million years later, they had completely and successfully shifted their habitat to the sea. A unique and impressive evolutionary process that, as a species-specific life and world experience spanning such a long period of time, can justify the idea that something like consciousness may indeed have emerged in this process—whatever that may be.
OUBEY would have been delighted to learn that India officially recognized dolphins as non-human persons in 2013. And even more so that in 2024, the New Zealand Maori, together with the indigenous peoples of Tahiti and the Cook Islands, adopted a joint declaration declaring whales to be legal persons.
If you’ve read this episode, you can perhaps imagine how thrilled and happy I was when nature and whale filmmaker Daniel Opitz, founder of the Ocean Mind Foundation, promised me in 2011 an encounter with an original image of OUBEY on camera in his second home, Maui, Hawaii. Here you can watch the video of this extraordinary encounter.
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There are six rooms in OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story about OUBEY and what interested and inspired him. I will tell these stories here.
At this point, I would like to thank the Kubikfoto³ team for the great design of OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has already won three prestigious international design awards – most recently the Red Dot Award 2025.
How was it possible that flowering plants, whose first appearance in evolutionary history can now be dated back to 140 – 250 million years on the basis of fossil finds, could arise at all and develop at high evolutionary speed, since their first appearance, into a diversity of more than 100,000 species?
At first everything was green
Until then for three and a half billion years there had only been algae living under water but no plants taking root in the earth. The algae evolved into mosses and then, about 400 million years later, into ferns, the very first stem plants in the history of this planet.
The fern has survived all the ages of the history of the Earth and will also probably survive everything that awaits this planet in the coming decades and centuries – in filigree beauty and organic robustness. An undeniable example of the resilience of plants.
Many years ago when I once had the opportunity to go down into the depths of a coalmine with an experienced companion, when I was crawling through a narrow seam, out of the corner of my eye, in the light of my lamp I saw the imprint of a fern in a lump of coal. Never before and never since in my life have I felt myself so close to the traces of evolutionary history as I did at that moment. I was overcome with emotion and paused. Then I took hold of this lump of coal that who knows how many millions of years ago had absorbed this fern leaf, and continued to crawl on, supporting myself with just the one hand. In the other hand I grasped the fossilised fern and to this day I cherish it with a mixture of affection and respect.
Then colour appeared
Like other predecessors of today‘s flowering plants, ferns were and are so-called bisexual gymnosperms. Its bisexual DNA, however, conceals the predisposition to produce an angiosperm, i.e. a flower. Flowering plants have thus evolved from the genetic heritage of gymnosperms. However, with their flowers, which are true “architectural” masterpieces of nature in terms of their inner structures, they have a reproductive organ that cannot fertilise itself but is reliant on cooperation with other forms of life – bees, butterflies and other insects.
For the purpose of reproduction flowering plants developed characteristics that exerted a strong attraction on all kinds of animal pollinators such as bright colours and effusive scents. And due to cross-pollination species mixing or cross pollination spread as various insects took the seeds from one flower to other different kinds and deposited them. Today flowering plants account for 90% of all plant diversity.
Darwin would be thrilled
A mere 150 years after Darwin, in the 21st century palaeobotantists using state-of-the-art high tech have solved the problem that was still incomprehensible to Darwin in his time. He would certainly have been thrilled.
He would probably be much less enthusiastic if he knew about the way humans have handled this diversity in the last decades of the 20th century up to the present day. The natural proliferation of flowering plants that once existed in meadows and along roadsides has increasingly been pushed back by agribusiness oriented to the cultivation of crops, as well as by the sealing of the earth’s surface through the expansion of asphalted surfaces and the creation of gardens in which the colourful meadow flowers are eliminated as weeds and replaced by manicured lawns or trimmed conifers set in black gravel.
Every human intervention in the cybernetic system of nature has consequences. If the flowers disappear, the consequence is that their pollinators also disappear. We have known this for a long time. And have started to breed bees, to breed forests and to industrialize farming. But cybernetic systems do not function in linear monocausal chains of action. They are complex. Let’s see how long it takes before our species has really understood this. At least the natural scientists have grasped the point.