Quiet, please. We are not alone.

Posted on by Live & Learn

Spring unfolds each year in color, yes, but also in sound. And, regrettably, in noise — some of it emanating from our gardens.

When Nancy Lawson, a Maryland-based naturalist and nature writer, speaks about the voices of frogs or birds, she uses the word “sound.” When she refers to humanity’s voice — the din of mowers, blowers and chain saws — she describes it as noise, specifically “anthropogenic noise.”

Her definition: something that is “disrespectful of all the other sounds and runs roughshod over them,” she said, with “often unnecessary rudeness.”

These days, we’re not just driving one another crazy with the racket that fills most neighborhoods. We’re “smothering some of the opportunities for animals to communicate through their senses,” she said, “to perceive the world through their senses.”

That means communications are masked and predator alarms and other critical life cues are stifled.

The challenge she poses for us: “Let’s think about the fact that these are our neighbors, too. And they can’t just run inside and put on noise-canceling headphones.” […]

In other words: Easy does it.

“If you treat the local environment like the homeland it’s meant to be,” she writes in “Wildscape,” “you’ll be exposed to more cultures and ideas and ways of life than if you visited with people from every country in the world.”

Sometimes, she said, that’s not about doing something, but the opposite: Stop mowing so often; stop leaf blowing. “Stop these sensory disruptions,” she said.

Even with actions we know can cause harm, like using pesticides, it’s not just the direct damage that she alerts us to.

“It turns out that putting out scents into the world that cause odor pollution can disrupt flower fragrances, and bees’ ability to find the floral resources that they need,” she said of an often unnoticed violation of the Scentscape.

Noise has unexpected effects, too, like reducing the nesting success of bluebirds and tree swallows, and decreasing the foraging ability of owls and bats.

Or this: As cars drove past, Ms. Lawson noticed a monarch caterpillar flinching upward from the milkweed it was feeding on near her roadside. A paper she found cited the same reaction — and how traffic-stressed animals even bit the researchers, something they had never documented before.

Quiet, please. We are not alone.

— Margaret Roach, from “Quiet, Please: You Are Not Alone in Your Garden”

Notes:

21 thoughts on “Quiet, please. We are not alone.”

  1. Problems I don’t think about very often…but I should. Thanks for bringing this topic into the light.

    Even in my relatively small rural Vermont town with a population of 13,000 people, the noise pollution is everywhere.

  2. Now I have a scientifically-backed reason to justify my aversion to city noise. Thanks 🙂
    But really, this is incredibly eye-opening. I think often about the myriad ways in which we disrupt our natural environment, but I had never thought of the impacts of noise in this way. Thank you for sharing.

  3. HOw fascinating. I’d say, “Sound the alarms” but that would be contrary to what she is prescribing.

    Fascinating, startling and awakening — all of it. Thanks DK Off to learn more!

  5. So sad that this condition is not likely to improve. Does anyone remember the New York Times Book Review [maybe even 15 years ago] of a book by a man who searched all over our planet to find any places without mechanical noise? I gave the review to a young Indian man who was a tenant for awhile who felt this was a problem he’d like to devote time to solving.

      1. Nope. The writer was a man who traveled to unusual places all over the world in hopes of finding natural silence. He commented on what he heard…fascinating.

  6. Thank you Margaret and David for sharing this.
    So many people become oblivious to nature around them as they focus in their own gratification.

  7. Fascinating. I was sitting on our porch early the other morning and thought, “Hmm, something is off.” After pondering for a moment, I realized that there was a cessation in the traffic noise from a nearby road, so all I heard was the frogs and the birds. It was such a jarring realization that this cursed noise of trucks et al had become such an engrained part of my ‘personal soundtrack.’ Very hard to find peace and quiet anywhere these days, no two ways about it….

    1. Lori, that must have been a Moment. Reminds me of:

      At any given moment, it was a necessity. Funny how quickly I had lost the idea of “any given moment.” … ett ögonblick, a blink of an eye. As a puff of smoke giving in to air, I watched the moment disappear from me.

      — Szilvia Molnar, The Nursery: A Novel https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FNursery-Novel-Szilvia-Molnar%2Fdp%2F0593316843%2Fref%3Dtmm_hrd_swatch_0%3F_encoding%3DUTF8%26qid%3D%26sr%3D&t=ZWMxN2YxMzkxZjZmMTAyZDdkZDgxMzlhZmVjODFkZTIxNGY4MGE2MSxhSmdoUEhEYw%3D%3D&b=t%3Anj6fTAbTPfiiL0__-1bW6Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Fthrive.davidkanigan.com%2Fpost%2F719011866998882304%2Fa-blink-of-an-eye-as-a-puff-of-smoke-giving-in-to&m=1&ts=1686132892 (Pantheon, March 21, 2023)

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