This paper uses an underwater encounter between the author and seven Dwarf Minke whales in the Coral Sea as a way to explore the environmental meaning of human relationships with nonhuman nature, drawing on recent discoveries in neuroscience about the lateralization of brain function.  Specifically, the paper examines the seminal work of British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist and applies his findings to our understanding of environmental interdependence, wildness, biophilia, and the quest for objectivity in science.  According to McGilchrist and many of his colleagues, modern humans increasingly deal with the world by relying disproportionately on left-brain modes of thought, which predispose us to see the environment as "abstracted from context and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a 'whole': something very different."  In contrast, right-brain modes focus on interrelationships, ecosystem-levels of awareness, elements of empathy and cooperation, and scanning approaches that favor synthesis and deductive reasoning over analysis, which is more closely associated with the left hemisphere.  The necessary tension between left-brain and right-brain thinking, and its implications for the development of environmental worldviews, are examined with special attention to the dilemmas that arise when environmental scientists becomes emotionally involved with cetacean subjects of study.