Photo credit: Bruce Tremper licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
Josh Wennergreen, a recent graduate from the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, pens an ode to the joys of nature. Wennergreen is an inveterate hiker who spends weekends hiking and camping in nearby canyons and national parks. He asks us to “[t]hink of all the human-made noise we hear in a single day: car engines, helicopters, computer pings, phone chirps, pounding construction, cash drawers closing,” lamenting that “It’s endless.”
And he examines the effect of all that noise on the human body, finding, unsurprisingly, that it’s not good for human health. Wennergreen cites a German study of one million people who live near airports that found a whole host of horribles that befalls those “plagued by background noise (jet engines, leaf blowers, cars)….[like] an increased risk of kidney failure, cardiovascular diseases, and dementia compared to people who lived in quitter settings.”
His advice is simple. “Never has it been more vital to re-charge in the mountains, to hear the wild soundscape,” he writes, adding that “[t]his is not some new-age plea, this is an urgent public health crisis.”
So find some time to get away to the mountains or the nearest national park. Just make sure to follow Wennergreen’s advice to “not be the loudest thing around” as you enjoy nature, because “[j]ust as a candy wrapper clinging to branches of a trail-side oak is litter on the natural landscape, loud and boisterous behavior is litter on the natural soundscape.”
Originally posted at Silencity.com.
