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How Nature's Silence Was Lost — And Why We Need It Back
From Albuquerque Journal, July 2008
By Richard Mahler
I checked in with Gordon Hempton the other day. He took my call on his cellphone while shoveling gravel outside his Washington State home. I was lucky. The 52-year-old adventurer is frequently off in the wilderness, recording pristine sounds of our natural world. You may have heard his soundtracks of rainforests dripping, surf crashing, frogs croaking, and birds singing. This self-described "Sound Tracker" is an activist in defense of Earth's undisturbed ambience, which Hempton laments is disappearing faster than it can be preserved for posterity. Why? Humans make too much noise.
"Quiet is going extinct," said the acoustic ecologist, a fancy title for an expert on the environment of sound. The grating of stones against metal reverberated in my earpiece.
Preliminaries out of the way, I explained to Hempton that I was curious about sound levels in the Mountain West. "Have you followed up on your 1998 survey?" I asked.
The shoveling stopped.
"Nah," he replied. An edge of disgust had crept into the mellifluous voice. "Conditions were bad everywhere I went, including parks and wilderness areas. I knew I would never make that trip again."
Ten years ago the man with the ultra-sensitive microphone packed his gear and toured 15 states west of the Mississippi. "I made a loop from the Pacific Northwest down through the Southwest and up through the Rockies and northern Midwest," Hempton recalled. During daylight only two locations — remote parts of Colorado and Minnesota — were reliably free of noises caused by the likes of car motors, jet planes, music players, chain saws, and gunfire. Even the interiors of Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon were assaulted by the whine of snowmobiles, whump-whump of helicopters, and drone of other distant traffic. Taping a mere quarter-hour of uninterrupted ambience was nigh impossible.
"It was so much work to get 40 or 50 hours of usable sound in places where I should have recorded 200 to 300 hours," Hempton sighed. "That was my last chance in those spots to get a reasonable return on my investment."
Until the 1980s, said Hempton, most invasive sound came from single, stationary sources: "I could wait for a while and the interference would stop. But now I'm likely to hear two or three or four periodic, intrusive noises." Aural clutter drifts through the backcountry from cows, dogs, all-terrain vehicles, portable stereos, bells, trucks, trains — you name it. Even mountain bikers pose a problem. "They tend to chat with one another even when they are 50 yards apart," Hempton noted, "or they talk loudly on their cellphones."
Pro-industry policies of the Bush Administration have aggravated the problem. Over the past eight years an estimated 40 million acres in or near the Rockies have been offered for oil and gas drilling or other extractive uses. A similar fate has befallen 70 million acres in the Alaskan Arctic. Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that development chews up 6,000 acres of open space in this country each day.
A discouraged Hempton has all but given up on recording within the Lower 48, preferring these days to visit remote destinations elsewhere. He declined to pinpoint these locales, fearing their discovery and spoilage.
"Where are the places entirely free of human-created sound?" he asked rhetorically. "There aren't any, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. It's all gone, at least for now. Even the North Pole is under occasional flight paths." But Hempton estimates about one-tenth of one percent of all land still offers periods of natural quiet longer than 15 minutes at a stretch.
"Wherever there are lots of people, there's lots of noise," he said. "And some cultures are louder than others. For instance, there are a few developing nations where the only acceptable volume on a boom box is all the way up." Even the steady hum of electric transmission cables and whoosh of natural gas pipelines can travel long distances. "I can hear it, and my hearing is not significantly better than that of the average person."
Our conversation confirmed my realization that the mechanical clamor of the Industrial Revolution and the electronic beep of the Information Age are conspiring to obliterate a balm that once soothed humankind. That's too bad. Retreats into the relative quiet of the natural world helped our ancestors maintain psychological equilibrium. Here they developed the inner resources and resilience to handle whatever personal challenge or crisis was at hand. Hempton calls such quiet places "the think-tank of the soul." Scientific studies confirm that a sanctuary of stillness may reduce stress, expand insight, and promote a sense of wellbeing.
I believe restorative time in the great outdoors is still where many of us touch the fullness of possibility, waking up to the cause and effect of our lives. Getting away from what one poet called "the world of the made" opens doors to the unconscious mind, the yearning heart, the wisdom of our intuition, and the truth of our experience. On hikes in forests and deserts near my New Mexico home I easily reconnect — often within minutes — to some of my strongest passions, fondest wishes, and happiest memories. This return to self-awareness is part of what gives life its depth and meaning as well as pleasure and strength. Such solitude allows us, as Henry David Thoreau reported from Walden Pond, to “be completely true to ourselves.”
Yet according to a study published last February, Americans are becoming increasingly disconnected from nature. Experts looked at trends in various measures of "nature-based recreation," such as visits to national parks and forests and time spent hiking or camping. Since the late 1980s, the percentage of our population taking part in these activities has fallen by about one percent annually. National parks in Japan and Spain are experienced similar decline. As a consequence, researchers warn that less exposure to nature, particularly during childhood, may decrease societal interest in conservation.
If we make it our intention to embrace the serenity of natural quiet we may discover how readily it can be welcomed into daily life. Eventually, we may willingly let go of some of the busy behaviors keeping us indoors in the first place. We may find that less really is more, that a simpler life may be a richer one, that a walk in the woods is its own reward, and that the calming sounds of Planet Earth are worth fighting for.
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