Silent Spaces—Part 1

Last year I read a new book that struck a resonant chord within me. Gordon Hempton and John Grossman wrote One Square Inch of Silence in an attempt to wake people up to the fact that our auditory environment is badly polluted. Most everyone knows that cities are noisy places. Music, traffic, and most every human activity are overly loud. Our ears are assaulted by TV, by the neighbor’s yard machines, by passing traffic, and by constant airplane flights to and from nearby airports.

Hempton and Grossman focused on the incessant human-made noise in the wilderness. Hempton has scoured the country looking for really quiet locations—finding that they are virtually nonexistent. Even the most remote corners of our national parks are not free of the intrusive noise of human activity. Snowmobiles and four-wheel machines invade backcountry. Heavy airplane traffic rains down its continuous noise upon us. Even the most isolated corners get violated several times every hour with overflights. The noise of a jet at 35,000 feet can be heard scores of miles away.

In an attempt to dramatize the situation, Hempton has found a tiny patch of land—one square inch in area—that is, as far as he can tell, the most noise-free spot in the country. He’s trekked into many remote locations with sound level meter in hand and ears at alert, seeking pristine quiet locations.

Hempton’s quietest spot is a one square inch that he found in the Olympic National Park on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. He lives nearby and often hikes in, to savor the (near) silence in that little patch. Trying to raise awareness of the problem, he drove across country a couple of years ago in an old VW microbus—ending up in the other Washington (D.C.), to meet government officials and try to convince them to take action to lower the volume. It remains to be seen whether or not they heard him. (Is that a pun?)

When I read this book, the location from which the resonant chord resounded in my soul was created during my former career in acoustics. My focus in those days was to investigate how machines generated excessive noise and to conduct experiments to demonstrate how to quiet them. It was the heady days of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—in wake of the Noise Control Act, which charged EPA with the mission of reducing noise pollution. (EPA was also enjoined with reducing air and water pollution.)

Studies showed that noise is far more than an intrusive, unpleasant thing. It’s a health issue—and that’s what got EPA going. Exposure to loud noise can damage the delicate hearing process. But noise is also a psychological problem. It can disorient us (and animals even more), create emotional and physical stress, and interfere with sleep.

More noise next time…