Various categories of pollution—air, light, soil, water, visual, radioactive, and thermal—have degraded the habitat of the human family regardless of where we wander on earth. Add one more to the growing list of pollutants that foul the home in which we live: noise.
Think of it this way. Step right over here. Open the door. Come through. I’ll show you around our home.
Straightaway you notice blue clouds of cigar smoke so thick in the parlor that you are forced to duck down the hallway, gagging as you cover your mouth with your hand. You walk into the kitchen and decide that a drink of water would clear your throat. Yuck! Water from the tap is brownish, brackish, and tastes vile. What’s more, it comes out in a trickle. Oh well, perhaps a bite to eat will settle your growing anxiety. So you go to the pantry only to find post-it notes stuck on most of the canned food. “Warning! Contents may be contaminated with pesticides and/or unnecessary hormones.” Now what? What more could possibly foul the comforts of home? Feeling hemmed in, you climb to the widow’s watch to view the night sky. Seeing stars should deliver a spiritual sense of well-being as it has since you were a child. Soon you realize that you cannot see even one fucking star because lights from the mall, the city, the ballpark, and the industrial complex overwhelm the heavens with a magnesium glare. Forced to retreat, you wind up in the cellar. There you find a Geiger counter on a workbench. Yikes! You turn it on just for kicks, and the gizmo goes crazy firing clacks like Gatling gun.
Holy Moly! Nowhere in this house is contusive to a healthful life. Nowhere!
Perhaps a good night’s sleep will ease your mind. Feeling your way back through the funky cigar smoke, you find a bedroom down another dark hallway. Ah, restorative slumber, yes, and tomorrow you will face the chores of making the house habitable. But wait! What the…what is that noise? Beeping from a truck as it backs up, a pile-driver pounding the earth down by the railroad tracks, a car alarm nearby, a low-flying jet plane directly over the roof, and a car stereo full blasting through the intersection. Good God! Is it possible for this place to get any more disquieting? As soon as you ask the question, artillery practice gets underway at Joint Base Fort Lewis and McChord. Thump! Thump! Thump!
Not to overstate the analogy, but shall we simply admit that we are not good stewards of our larger home—this good earth? The more we foul the tender balances of where we live, the closer we edge toward collapse. At some point, repairing the results of our abuses will fail; remedial solutions will have no redeeming effect.
Of all the ways we despoil our estate, noise pollution gets less attention than the numerous other ways we lay waste to our environment. Each decade we turn up the volume on the racket we create. Our machines and transportation systems insinuate clamor into our lives. More people, more machines, more need for earplugs and white noise. The constant auditory assault infects our health and well-being in ways that we are just now beginning to understand. Weed eaters, leaf-blowers, lawnmower engines, rackety compressors, chain saws, and motorcycles without mufflers have forced municipalities to impose noise ordinances all over America. Even so, noise grows louder as more people buy hootenannies and snowmobiles and Briggs and Stratton engines for everything from pressure washers to racing machines. There seems no end to the noisemakers we employ.
Noise creates human stress, not to mention the disruptions visited on animals, birds, aquatic creatures when they suffer from the tortuous din we spread over the surface of our world and beneath the surface of the sea. Simply put, noise damages us and all the creatures with whom we share space.
A few years back, my wife and I took a sabbatical to a small outport in Newfoundland. I assumed that winter there would bring the peace and quiet found in remote northern places. Far from cities and traffic, far from airports and sirens, Newfoundland would, I thought, be a sanctuary from the clanging, noxious urban areas in which I had always lived. As we watched the snow pile to the tops of our windows and icebergs float into our bight, we heard the real sounds of winter: snowmobiles pouring over the snowbanks, young riders revving their engines and whooping it up. I had not heard such racket since as a child I attended hydroplane races on Lake Washington during Seafair in Seattle (roaring engines one could hear 20 miles away, plus Blue Angels and other jet planes zooming over the lake in a celebration of deafening noise). So much for my idealized boreal winter sanctuary far from the madding crowd.
Perhaps I have misophonia, which entails an insensitivity to sound usually associated with OCD. But it is not just me. We keep turning up the volume. Noise pollutes our world, and it is pernicious. Smoking cigarettes, over time, will kill you; just as the bombardment of noise, nuanced though it may be, will also kill you.