Second extinction no audio11/6/2022 ![]() ![]() And while noise is often treated more as a fist-shaking nuisance, it turns it isn't just annoying, there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that it could be harming our health too.Īccording to a study by the World Health Organization, the effects of long-term environmental noise pollution exposure – which include heart attacks, higher blood pressure, strokes, diabetes, dementia and depression, among other things – could be responsible for the loss of more than 1 million years of full health among Western Europeans. But just as we humans have littered the Earth with our rubbish and the seas with our runoff, we are also polluting the planet with sustained exposure to man-made sounds like construction work and road and air traffic. It's invisible, it vanishes without a trace, and it leaves nothing for us to clean up. Noise, on the other hand, is a more insidious threat. ![]() We can see pieces of trash on the ground and smell toxins in the air and water. "Isn't global warming more important, and toxic waste clean-up and habitat restoration and endangered species? Well, when you save quiet, you actually wind up saving everything else, too."Īs environmental crusades go, noise pollution hardly gets a murmur – and that's partially because it's so elusive. "Why save quiet?" Hempton whispered, holding a decibel reader and peering up at the moss-draped masts of 500-year-old Douglas firs in the Hoh Rainforest of Washington's Olympic National Park. Yet, the sound Hempton is most concerned about preserving is the most endangered of all: quiet. He's huddled inside a hollowed-out Sitka spruce log in the Pacific Northwest to record "the world's largest violin" floated down the Amazon River in a dugout canoe to track the melodic trill of rare, migrating songbirds and won an Emmy for his documentary, The Vanishing Dawn Chorus, which captures the cacophony of dawn breaking across six continents. What you likely didn't hear is silence, and if you ask Gordon Hempton, that's a problem.Īn acoustic ecologist, Hempton has circled the globe three times in the last 41 years searching for and documenting the planet's "solar-powered jukebox" of disappearing natural soundscapes. ![]()
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