KAREN HARWELL’S OPTIMISM is infectious, and she’s shown that one yard can seed the next. But if we’re going to create truly restorative human/nature habitats, we’ll be facing some formidable foes.
Global warming? Welcome to global blaring.
Gina Pera, a northern California writer and former magazine editor, describes her struggle to cope with urban noise. “Right now, I am sitting in my home office. I have a stunning view of the East Bay and Mt. Diablo,” she wrote in an e-mail. “My backyard is starting to bloom with hyacinths and peach blossoms. Rather than be out partaking of this beauty, I am blasting Puccini on my computer speakers. Why? Because it is the only way to drown out the omnipresent cacophony of chain saws, wood-chippers, blowers, and other thermonuclear lawn implements cluttering our airspace.” She said she’s stopped walking in her beautiful neighborhood because she is “shell-shocked.”
Noise, like fear of crime, keeps people indoors, or outdoors with iPods plugged into their ears. A nature-loving friend in Seattle is so disheartened by the noise of car alarms and leaf blowers in her neighborhood that she wears noise-canceling earphones when she’s gardening.
Appropriately, the word noise is derived from the Latin word nausea, which translates as seasickness. Excessive noise in neonatal intensive care units may disrupt the growth and development of premature infants, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Noise is linked to elevated blood pressure, myocardial infarction, loss of sleep, and changes in brain chemistry. The World Health Organization warns that such noise-induced problems “can lead to social handicap, reduced productivity, decreased performance in learning, absenteeism in the workplace and school, increased drug use, and accidents.”
Excessive noise can also affect animal physiology and behavior, including the reproductive success and long-term survival of sound-dependent sea life. It’s even changing the sounds of nature. Bernie Krause, a bioacoustician and author of the book Wild Soundscapes, has sold over 1.5 million CDs and tapes of nature sounds. He reports that the places where he can record such sounds uninterrupted by human noise are disappearing. The task is even difficult at the North Pole, in Antarctica, and in the Amazon Basin.
Everywhere he goes, he hears aircraft, chain saws, and other aural intrusions. In the 1970s, it took Krause about twenty hours of tape to record fifteen minutes of usable natural soundscape. By 1995, it took him two hundred hours. As a musician, who once played the Moog synthesizer with the Rolling Stones, he’s particularly sensitive to the musical chorus of wild creatures. He calls it a biophony. “The songbirds living around us today have had to adapt their songs to their new neighbors—us. To some extent, a few birds, like American robins, sparrows, and wrens, are able to change their voices so that they can be heard even when it’s noisy nearby. . . . Almost certainly, birdsong would be different than it would normally be in a forest.”
In the past, noise was like the weather. Everybody complained about it, but nobody did much about it. That’s changing. Antinoise groups are calling for new regulations and new technology. Some cities have banned leaf blowers, with ordinances mainly limited to residential neighborhoods and targeting gas-powered blowers. Enforcement is generally lax. An additional, and probably more effective, approach is to do the math. The typical gasoline-powered leaf blower lasts about seven years. In a short-lived program in Southern California, the South Coast Air Quality Management District launched the state’s first public incentive program to exchange noisy, smelly backpack leaf blowers with quieter, cleaner models. The trade-ins were crushed at a recycling center. Another program offered residents a good one-day deal: trade old gasoline-powered lawnmowers for new electric mowers.
“There is a tremendous opportunity over the coming years to dramatically reshape our neighborhood soundscapes by reshaping the lawn and garden marketplace,” reports the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse (NPC). Coming soon: affordable hybrid gas-and-electric riding mowers. “If everyone in your neighborhood was mowing at the same time with a quiet electric mower, it would probably be quieter than if just one person in your neighborhood was using a typical gas-powered mower,” according to the NPC.
Similarly, road noise could be reduced through wider use of hybrid-engine autos, which represent the first significant reduction in car noise in decades. Jets are already quieter, at least the larger commercial variety. Now researchers at Ohio State University have developed an even better silencer technology using electrical arcs to control turbulence in engine airflow, the main producer of engine noise. Urban designers are paying increasing attention to soundscaping and planting green areas around buildings; the plants absorb sound.
So change can occur. The trouble is, brains will be more difficult to retool; technological advances are seldom matched with political action. We’ll see more demand for quieter technology and living sound-scapes only when a sufficient number of us want to be outdoors.
Given the seriousness of the health risks, noise shouldn’t be an afterthought, and trade-in programs shouldn’t be a novelty. Nor should antinoise campaigns stop at the city line. They should, in fact, target those places in or near cities that offer natural refuge, including lakes. The NPC has, in fact, launched a “quiet lake” campaign, pointing out that boat noise limits are less stringent than federal limits for tractor-trailer trucks (eighty decibels at fifty feet) across the country.
We already have wildlife refuges. Now it’s time to create silence sanctuaries. One day, I was talking with a man who lives near Barrett Lake, an isolated backcountry reservoir east of my home. This is one of the most unpopulated areas of our region. Ridges stretch toward the horizon, and mountain lions are more at home here than are people. The man said he was retiring soon and planned to move to a distant corner of Arizona. “It’s too noisy here,” he explained.
Noisy? Here?
“Helicopters and airplanes. Too many of ‘em. I’m out of here.”
Later that day, I heard what he was talking about. I was out on the water, which is usually protected by the immense dome of solitude that covers this special lake, where the number of boats and size of engine are strictly limited. Hawks circled above. I could hear their wings move the air. Then a black helicopter popped over one of the ridges and dipped toward the water, its engine noise reverberating off the walls of rock.
In addition to noise, there are other barriers to human/nature habitation. Electronic competition, of course. Poor urban design. Work pressures. And fear of strangers and nature itself (the root causes of which are valid, though hyped beyond reality by incessant media attention).
Then there’s the sky blindness. In everyday—and every-night—life, looking up is part of the cure for nature-deficit disorder. But if you look up at night in most cities, you’ll just see a dome of artificial light. “Stealing starlight” is what Jack Troeger calls it. Troeger, who lives in Ames, Iowa, retired from teaching astronomy and earth sciences in 1999, when the Milky Way was no longer visible in nighttime Ames. But he didn’t quit caring. He initiated the Dark Sky Initiative, arguing that the overuse of artificial light wastes energy, disrupts the sleeping or migration patterns of wildlife, and contributes to climate change. “The stars you see tonight are the same stars your ancestors saw thousands of years ago,” Troeger writes. “Stargazing . . . bonds you, links you, fuses you to all the people who have ever lived on this planet. . . . You are the stuff of stars. The atoms that shape you were once the dust and gas of ancient stars.”1 The concern here isn’t only about seeing stars, but about the opportunity for humans to experience the absence of artificial light. Natural darkness itself has value; for one reason, our biological clock counts on it.2
Those who have done it know that long-term night work wreaks havoc with circadian rhythm, but there are greater risks than interrupted sleep. To cite one example, researchers in Israel looked at light at night (LAN) in 147 communities using nighttime satellite images and compared that data to breast cancer rates. The conclusion: “The analysis yielded an estimated 73 percent higher breast cancer incidence in the highest LAN exposed communities compared to the lowest LAN exposed communities.”3 Other studies have investigated links between serum melatonin levels (melatonin is normally produced at night) and different forms of cancer. By the end of 2007, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, had listed overnight shift work as a possible carcinogen. The American Cancer Society lists shift work as a “suspected carcinogen.” Some estimates show 15 percent of the U.S. population does shift work.
The most damaging contributors to sky blindness are air pollution and artificial light in cities and countryside. The poet, journalist, and fiction writer Jack Greer describes a year-round, twenty-four-hour-a-day security light outside a cabin in an otherwise bucolic lakeside atmosphere as something comparable to “a stuck car horn that never stops.” The Native American word Shenandoah, he writes, “means ‘daughter of the stars’ and now we must wonder whether we’ll have to change that to ‘daughter of the security lights.’”4
In a remote area of my county, a band of Kumeyaay Indians operates the Golden Acorn Casino. Built on the highest point on a great, empty plateau, the casino boasts a multistory, high-voltage sign—a midnight sun visible for twenty miles on clear nights. (This is one example of what I call the Trojan Horse Effect: the influence of a relatively small development whose noise, light, or visibility far exceeds the project’s size. Because the next time someone objects to a proposed backcountry development and more lights, the logical response will be a shrug: See all that light out there already?)
One researcher, Terry Daniel of the University of Arizona - Tucson, offers a different sky-blindness theory. He suggests that the human eye is less sensitive to stimulation from the upper region of the visual field and is most sensitive directly in front of the eye and below the horizontal plane. Why? Because we evolved upright, with eyes necessarily on the front of our heads—where food and enemies are most likely to be. “To see the sky clearly the human must tilt his head back and look up—or lie on his back to place the sky in the most sensitive part of the visual field,” according to Daniel.5 If this is true, skywatchers are defying not only urban barriers to seeing what’s above us, but also evolution. Still, it’s hard to believe that humans are wired for sky blindness, especially considering the millennia of human navigation by stars.
Even if Daniel is right, then sky consciousness is a bonus experience, an expansion of our awareness. At a dinner party not long ago, I mentioned that, as a former Midwesterner, I remain fascinated by tornadoes, and feel admiration and even envy for the stormchasers who hurtle across the prairie in pursuit of twisters. A professor at the dinner, one who spends his days in a lab, couldn’t understand the appeal. Why? he wanted to know. It’s just wind. The best explanation I could muster was that they’re not chasing wind; they’re chasing dragons, each with a distinct personality. Even more than Alaskan brown bears, they stimulate awe. The scientist shook his head and shrugged. Not all of us see the same sky.
In recent years, urged on by astronomers whose work has been disrupted by those domes of artificial light, cities in the United States have begun to require low-pressure sodium streetlights and other light-pollution controls. In addition to stricter regulation, we can expand human appreciation for the gifts of the sky. This can be accomplished through sky-watcher groups, amateur meteorologists, and other citizen naturalists. Star charts —some of which you hold up against the night sky to locate constellations —are now available for smartphones and computer tablets. So the case could be made that technology can increase the odds that we’ll see the details and subtleties of the sky. Telescope manufacturers would certainly agree. We do have necks that bend, and the sky above us remains an immense theater, art museum, symphony hall. And we have four-season tickets, even if the view is only from a window.
A couple of years ago, I visited a friend and his family outside Washington DC, in a neighborhood with broad yards, gnarled old trees, and Colonial-style homes. The two children, a girl and a boy, were filled with opinions, spirit, and energy. They loved nature. The boy spoke impressively about his interest in science. Later, their father said that his little girl spent a lot of time outdoors, but his boy seldom ventured past the front door. He explained that this child suffered from several learning difficulties and a condition that caused him to be overwhelmed when he went outside. So he spent most of his time in his room.
On my way home, in an airport bookstore, I thumbed through an intriguing book called The Cloudspotter’s Guide, by the Britisher Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who encourages people to look up. He launched the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2004. Build a garden weather station, he advises —all you need is a view of the sky. Cirrus, cumulonimbus, and altostratus “come to remind us that the clouds are Nature’s poetry, spoken in a whisper in the rarefied air between crest and crag.” Clouds can be specific to place as well; the sky as seen over Melbourne, Amsterdam, Santa Fe, and one’s own home exhibits subtle, and sometimes dramatic, distinctions. Who knew that clouds are used as tools to predict earthquakes? Or that glider pilots in Australia have learned to surf a cloud like a wave? The society’s manifesto proclaims: “We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance. . . . Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save on psychoanalysis bills. And so we say to all who’ll listen: Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!’”6
I bought the book and sent it to my friend’s son. He might not be able to step outside the front door comfortably, but he could still exercise his curiosity about nature—he could still see the sky from his bedroom window. Then I bought a copy for myself.
Some of the barriers separating people from the rest of nature are self-imposed, others created by media or the commercial world. That will continue, but we can resist; we can tune down the decibels, turn down the lights, and turn on the senses. A few businesses may even join the resistance.