And we know the clang and bang and thrum and roar of human seafaring commerce has turned the ancient, serene soundways of whales into a constant, maddening heavy metal concert from which there is no escape.

Into this bedlam, comes a relatively new sonar -- the high intensity kind -- used to detect secret submarine activity at long distances. It's long been suspect in the beachings and deaths of several species of whales and dolphins, but absolute proof is hard to come by, and the U.S. Navy -- even though conceding their sonar probably was at fault in a couple instances of whale beaching -- isn't going to stop using it.

Imagine what it must be like. Totally surrounded by pulsing blasts of noise, confused and frightened, unable to tell where the sound is coming from. You start swimming to get away, but you can’t. Your ears start bleeding; you can’t communicate with others because the low frequency sonar overpowers your calls. You keep swimming. In circles? Back and forth? In a beeline toward somewhere else? The blasting noise follows. Finally, finally you throw yourself onto land, and the noise stops. But if you can't return to the water, you die. Some of your friends die before reaching land; their bodies sink to the depths, air bubbles in their blood and tissues. Others are wounded, deafened.

But what if whales could scream? What if their agonies could be translated into human-sounding screams that would fill the ears of the sailors tuned into their sonar echoes? Would that give us pause?

In a case calling for the Navy to stop high-intensity sonar use, a Supreme Court majority recently wrote that while the worst case scenario for whales was harm to an unknown number, halting sonar use would force "the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force," jeopardizing the safety of the fleet. Still, I wonder -- if those Justices actually heard the whale screams; if they witnessed the animals' desperate attempts to find escape from a noise hundreds of times louder than normal, a sound that filled the water for miles -- would those ocean voices haunt their dreams?

I suppose as long as we can tune out the moans and cries of our fellow humans, whale screams will not be heard. Yet when we begin to hear the whales, our values and priorities may rearrange. Our perception of this planet and our place in it could change.

Henry Beston, in his classic book The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod, thought so when he wrote:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Numerous mass strandings and whale deaths across the globe have been linked to military sonar use.

• January 2006 At least four beaked whales strand in the Gulf of Almeria, Spain, while sonar exercises take place offshore.
• January 2005 At least 34 whales of three species strand along the Outer Banks of North Carolina as Navy sonar training goes on offshore.
• July 2004 Four beaked whales strand during naval exercises near the Canary Islands.
• July 2004 Approximately 200 melon-headed whales crowd into the shallow waters of Hanalei Bay in Hawaii as a large Navy sonar exercise takes place nearby. Rescuers succeed in directing all but one of the whales back out to sea.
• June 2004 As many as six beaked whales strand during a Navy sonar training exercise off Alaska.
• May 2003 As many as 11 harbor porpoises beach along the shores of the Haro Strait, Washington State, as the USS Shoup tests its mid-frequency sonar system.
• September 2002 At least 14 beaked whales from three different species strand in the Canary Islands during an anti-submarine warfare exercise in the area. Four additional beaked whales strand over the next several days.
• May 2000 Three beaked whales strand on the beaches of Madeira during NATO naval exercises near shore.
• October 1999 Four beaked whales strand in the U.S. Virgin Islands during Navy maneuvers offshore.
• October 1997 At least nine Cuvier’s beaked whales strand in the Ionian Sea, with military activity reported in the area.
• May 1996 Twelve Cuvier's beaked whales strand on the west coast of Greece as NATO ships sweep the area with low- and mid-frequency active sonar.
• October 1989 At least 20 whales of three species strand during naval exercises near the Canary Islands.
• December 1991 Two Cuvier's beaked whales strand during