Silence: The Invisible Extinction

Houses beside highways. Restaurant music so loud that I go hoarse from shouting across the table to my dinner partners. Leaf blowers. Car horns that honk with every lock and unlock. Humming and beeping appliances.

Does no one else care for quiet?

A recent U.N. conference in Japan sought new targets and strategies to preserve our world’s many endangered plant and animal species. It’s a massive challenge but at least it starts from some baseline sense of pubic awareness. Just as endangered, but virtually invisible on the radar of public issues, is our access to natural quiet and silence.

On a recent run, I headed through a new subdivision that was an open field a few years ago, bordering Alberta’s Queen Elizabeth II highway. I ran past big McMansions where crews were busily spraying decorative finishes onto expansive driveways in front of three-car garages (designed in faux 1800s carriage house style). John Mellencamp’s Pink Houses comes to mind: “He’s got an interstate running through his front yard, you know he thinks he’s got it so good.”

On the other side of the street sits an earth berm and concrete wall that manage to muffle the highway cacophony so it’s merely a 24/7 rumble. The new home owners presumably see the highway as an advantage to their lives as busy commuters.

A couple of years ago in the autumn I took a long drive out into the Alberta foothills, hours away from the nearest city. It was a weekday and there were virtually no cars on the road. I parked in a trailhead lot that had two other vehicles, and headed off on a hike. In the first 15 minutes I passed one small group of people coming the other way. Then I walked for another hour, up into the autumn woods where the hills start rolling into the east face of the Rocky Mountains.

I stopped a number of times to appreciate the natural quiet – and it was soothingly peaceful. I could hear the pines sway overhead. Birds were talking. Not much else. Yet, still, the sound of humanity was unavoidable. From somewhere, miles in the distance, came the recognizable hum of tires on asphalt. And overhead, the whine of jets beginning their descent as they crested the Rockies and set their sights on Calgary International Airport.

My mother, who grew up in the 1920s, once remarked to me that what she missed most about spring was the sound. Huh? The sound of spring? That has a nice ring and I assumed she was talking about the return of songbirds.

No, she said rather matter of factually, what’s gone is the sound of little spring streams. We have channeled our water and the babbling brooks are pretty much now relegated to fairy tales. In cities, spring melt heads down curb grates, underground, to whoosh out in big gushers somewhere in the distance. In rural areas, it’s channeled into ditches and culverts.

There’s a qualitative difference between natural sounds like those lost streams and the droning, strident tumult of industrial society. Studies show that the hubbub causes not only stress but heart and other health problems.

We humans have a lot to say about silence, as online quotation sources quickly show. We have songs, and poems, and odes to silence. Yet our behavior shows that we don’t really care. We constantly chop away at the pockets of quiet in our days, in our countryside, in our world.

Sitting at my computer I hear its fan, and the slightly arrhythmic hum of an external hard drive on the desk. The dimmer on the desk lamp feeds a tinny zzzz into the room.

Our response to this aural barrage is to mask or artificially repel it. Noise cancelling headphones are increasingly popular and, in some cases, necessary for basic hearing protection. Check out the design of new high-tech buildings and you find that, rather than reducing noise producers, they are opting to add ‘white noise’ generators.

My personal search for quietude is a lost cause. Much as I resent the intrusive clamour of daily life, I can no longer luxuriate in the soft stillness of night or some buffered retreat. At some point in my middle age I developed tinnitus. The high ringing it produces goes mostly unnoticed amid the discordant din of the day. Ironically, though, it rises out of nowhere when there’s a lull in the babble.

Silence, it seems, is long gone. A small thing, I suppose. A small, invisible and elusive treasure. Lost.

Photo Credit

“Darwinian Self Portrait” Jon Betts @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some rights Reserved.

Recent Lorne Daniel Articles:

• Walking Consultations: moving public engagement beyond opinions
• Murals, pride and history help prevent graffiti
• Striding Unfamiliar Streets
• The Scientific Map Of A Human
• Office Technology As Appliances