Should Sapiens Survive? (Pro Point #4)

Travel to the Living Earth—Without Leaving It

“Deep in the forests of Ecuador, preservationists have created the first ‘quiet park’… the Taiwanese forest bureau recognized a ‘National Silence Trail’… [New Zealand’s] MacKenzie River Basin received their Dark Sky Reserve designation in 2012.”

– Sam Goldman in “Building a movement to preserve silence as a natural resource,” Vox

Some of the most valuable wild areas on earth are becoming even more valuable because people who have recognized the harm done to life by business-as-usual modernism are protecting it and sharing it. Sound recordists—perhaps surprisingly—have taken up the banner of Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence movement, which has given way to a global one that is finding its way into mass media. Fueled by research that shows the ill effects of sound-induced stress, and that any modern can experience directly without mediation by “experts,” these lands bring tourist dollars to people living in priceless places. Sam Golden reported on several in , and Pete McBride reported on others in “The Last Quiet Places” in The Smithsonian.

Still other people (see “Rewilding for human health” and “The Virus Hunters”) are broaching the role of wild ailments in human health and survival in relation to COVID-19. Evolve Medicine takes it to the next step by linking chronic human ailments caused by the human injuries to habitats that are propelling us to the Sixth Extinction. Unfortunately, habitats don’t consume media, leaving it to to rescue life on earth, perhaps via wildlife veterinarians like those who helped Dr. Dennis Carroll to suppress the spread of H5N1 bird flu.

Unfortunately, Gordon Hempton’s Silence Movement has not thrived in its home territory in the Pacific Northwest, to which I have returned, and which I may be obliged to leave again due to an unexpected ham radio group. We are still, as Eugene O’Neill put it, “a little [too] in love with death.” Perhaps the One Health Initiative, a partner in viral pandemic control, will step up; or, perhaps sound recordists will lead us to renewed life on earth.