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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Down To Earth

Preserving silence - TAKE ACTION

We are a very visual people.  While all of our senses are stimulated on a daily basis, our sense of sight is catered too and targeted more frequently.  Which is why when someone explains something they've experienced they typically start by trying to place you in the scene.  As is the case with describing National Parks.  "And the geyser shoots up through the ground like a rocket of steaming water and mist, "rock formations, they are red like your shirt or what you'd imagine the surface of Mars looks like."  Very rarely do you hear someone talk of the smells, touches, or sounds of their nature experiences.  And almost NEVER do you hear someone talk of the silence of nature - at least not like they used to.

Gordon Hempton is an international acoustic ecologist, Emmy Award-winning sound recordist, and author of the book One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World.  He knows a thing or two about where to find truly unspoiled sounds of nature, and as he talks about in an article he wrote for the National Parks Conservation Association magazine, the places where you can go for at least 15 minutes, "without an intrusion like the brrrrr of a chain saw, the whine of an off-road vehicle, the crackle of power lines, or the roar of a jet passing overhead," are dwindling - as he estimates from his extensive travels and sound safaris - to about a dozen places in our vast country.

There are likely times when you've been in nature where you could assume you were in one of Hempton's estimated dozen truly quiet sanctuaries, but think about it, one quarter of an hour of ultimate silence?  Most of the time when you escape to the outdoors your experiences are quieter than your normal city experiences, but it's likley not total escape from modern noise.  Grizzly tracker and author Doug Peacock calls this, “the closest way to really get in touch with… your innermost humanity—that’s how we evolved, listening and smelling in ways that aren’t imaginable today. We’re the same species. The human mind, our intelligence, our consciousness, it all evolved from a habitat, whose remnants here in this country we call wilderness.”

Lucky for us here in Washington, one of those places is in Olympic National Park, which is convenient for Hempton as he's lived near the park since 1994.  Hempton writes, "Unlike most national parks, it is not bisected by scenic highways, and air tours have barely taken wing due to the near constant cloud cover. Furthermore, only three FAA-approved flight paths are overhead."  And consider that during daylight hours in Yosemite National Park, commercial jet traffic is audible 50 percent of the time and some 90,000 sightseeing plane and helicopter overflights are permitted each year over Grand Canyon National Park - despite 30 years ago Congress passing The Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act, recognizing “natural quiet as a value or resource in its own right to be protected from significant adverse effect." 

In Olympic National Park however, no such protection is offered, thus making the relative silence endangered - meaning nothing is stopping the FAA from approving more.  But what about getting rid of the three current ones and making Olympic National Park a destination for silence seekers.  According to Hempton's article,  "the FAA protests that it would be way too expensive to bend those jetways around the Hoh Valley to protect one of the quietest places in any national park, the truth is likely very different. Using an Air Transport Association figure of $66 per mile to fly the average commercial jet, and assuming no empty seats aboard that 243-seat Northwest aircraft, it would cost less than $1 per passenger to skirt One Square Inch and make that Seattle to Tokyo flight more sonically green."

If you'd like to help preserve and protect the sound of silence in Olympic National Park and other National Parks, the NPCA is working with its Congressional allies to clarify language in the National Parks Air Tour Management Act of 2000 this summer. Please contact your Senators at 202.224.3121 and ask them to contact the Senate Aviation Subcommittee and support the Park Service’s ability to protect natural sounds in our national parks. For more information visit www.npca.org/atma. Want a reminder of what’s at stake? Visit www.npca.org/magazine/sound.html.




Down To Earth

The DTE blog is committed to reporting and sharing environmental news and sustainability information from across the Inland Northwest.