Moreover, fighting noise is not the same as preserving silence. Our typical anti-noise strategies—earplugs, noise cancellation headphones, even noise abatement laws—offer no real solution because they do nothing to help us reconnect and listen to the land.

Long before the noises of mankind, there were only the sounds of the natural world. Our ears evolved perfectly tuned to hear these sounds—sounds that far exceed the range of human speech or even our most ambitious musical performances: a passing breeze that indicates a weather change, the first birdsongs of spring heralding a regreening of the land and a return to growth and prosperity, an approaching storm promising relief from a drought, and the shifting tide reminding us of the celestial ballet.

A single law would signal a huge and immediate improvement. That law would prohibit all aircraft from flying over our most pristine national parks.

The good news is that rescuing silence can come much more easily than tackling these other problems. A single law would signal a huge and immediate improvement. That law would prohibit all aircraft from flying over our most pristine national parks.

Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything. It lives here, profoundly, at One Square Inch in the Hoh Rain Forest. It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. … But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it.

Silence can be carried like embers from a fire. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it.

Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything. It lives here, profoundly, at One Square Inch in the Hoh Rain Forest. It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest.

The first of the rainy season is not wet at all. Initially, countless seeds fall from the towering trees. This is soon followed by the soft applause of fluttering maple leaves, which settle oh so quietly as a winter blanket for the seeds. But this quiet concert is merely a prelude.

When the first of many great rainstorms arrives, unleashing its mighty anthem, each species of tree makes its own sound in the wind and rain. Even the largest of the raindrops may never strike the ground. Nearly 300 feet overhead, high in the forest canopy, the leaves and bark absorb much of the moisture…until this aerial sponge becomes saturated and drops re-form and descend farther…

Recalling the warning of Robert Koch, developer of the scientific method that identifies the causes of disease, I believe the unchecked loss of silence is a canary in a coal mine—a global one. If we cannot make a stand here, if we turn a deaf ear to the issue of vanishing natural quiet, how can we expect to fare better with more complex environmental crises?

My specialty is quiet, although I record other sounds, too. Quiet is almost too faint for human ears, but not quite, if you learn to listen carefully. I listen carefully.

If I had to supply a single answer to that question, my favorite sound in the world would be the sound of anticipation: the silence of a sound about to be heard, the space between the notes.

Three doctor visits and a CAT scan later, I learned that my hearing loss was due to a problem in my middle ear. But nothing could be done, at least, the doctors said, without the risk of making matters worse. Worse? The best thing to do, I was told, was to be fitted for a hearing aid and hope that the matter cleared up on its own.

My logic is simple and not simply symbolic: If a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can affect many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a 100 percent noise-free condition, will likewise affect many square miles around it. Protect that single square inch of land from noise pollution, and quiet will prevail over a much larger area of the park.

Olympic National Park was chosen for One Square Inch because it has a diverse natural soundscape combined with substantial periods of natural quiet. Unlike other national parks, such as Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, or Hawaii Volcanoes, where noise debates are long standing, air tourism at Olympic is still in its infancy. It has no through roads, no scenic drive to its highest peak. To reach its backcountry, you must go on foot. Because there are few noise intrusions in this wilderness, noise sources are easier to identify than at other parks.

By my reckoning, the rate of quiet places extinction vastly exceeds the rate of species extinction. Today there are fewer than a dozen quiet places left in the United States. I repeat: fewer than a dozen quiet places and by that I mean places where natural silence reigns over many square miles.

In 1984, early in my career recording nature sounds, I identified 21 places in Washington State (an area of 71,302 square miles) with noise-free intervals of 15 minutes or longer. In 2007 only three of these places remain on my list.

But few value Olympic National Park as I do: with my ears. I believe that Olympic Park is quieter than any other national park or wilderness area in the 390 units of the 84 million acres managed by the National Park Service—including the largest, Wrangle–St. Elias in Alaska, where squadrons of vacationing flightseers break the silence on a clear day.

Olympic National Park retains much of its natural quiet for one reason: overcast skies. The region has more than 200 completely cloudy days each year, and even more partially cloudy days that go uncounted. Many of those cloudy days are also rainy days. Rain, and lots of it, is a big deterrent to selling tickets for scenic tours.

Its unequaled acoustic environment has no special protection, no special management, and not a single person on staff specifically trained in acoustic ecology. It is clearly as vulnerable to the same administrative bungling that has destroyed the natural soundscapes of Grand Canyon and Hawaii Volcanoes National Parks.

By keeping even one square inch 100 percent free of noise, or at least attempting to do so, I am able to push back aircraft for many miles and help to preserve natural quiet over much of the entire park. Natural quiet, like clean air and clean water, is part of a delicate ecosystem. So when man-made noise intrudes in the wilderness, the equivalent of crackling static on the phone line of all creatures but man, it impairs the ability of animals to communicate.

White-tailed deer are among my favorite advisers. Being an important food source for the many cougars that inhabit the park, they seldom remain close to a noisy river or stream for longer than the time required to drink, and while they do, they pause often and look in different directions to compensate for the temporary inability to use sound for their security surveillance.

For example, here in the Hoh Valley, away from the water sounds, the natural quiet is typically around 25 to 35 dBA. On paper this hardly looks quiet, but to most ears it will sound stone silent at first. Only after a period of minutes will small textures appear, typically the subtle sound of distant wind playing high in the forest canopy.

Inner silence is that feeling of reverence for life. It is a feeling we can carry with us no matter where we go, a sacred silence that can remind us of the difference between right and wrong, even on a noisy city street. It resides at a soul level.

This humming sound is so delicate that it cannot stand up to the slightest noise intrusion. Even the listener must remain absolutely quiet—no talking, no foot or arm movements, and quiet, slow breaths with open mouth. I believe an open mouth improves hearing for two reasons: it straightens the auditory canal and it enables the mouth to serve as a resonant chamber, amplifying faint sounds to more audible levels. This is exactly what children do instinctively when the lights go out: the jaw drops and faint sounds are more easily heard.

Does a place have a soul? Yes, I think so. And a place has intelligence, too. Just look at any clear-cut hillside. What does that place want to do? Heal itself.

To be a listener requires a certain willingness to become changed by what you have not yet heard.

Sound waves travel at different speeds depending on the temperature, so the cold, thin air layer that hugs the surface of the lake puts an invisible ceiling on the lakeside amphitheater, enclosing the sound, with remarkable results. Sound echoes back and forth across the lake, connecting everyone and everything.

This deep, cold, and clear body of water stretches about a mile across and 15 miles long and is entirely surrounded by steep mountainsides. Its icy waters cool the air immediately above, allowing sound to travel much farther and clearer than normal. Sound waves travel at different speeds depending on the temperature, so the cold, thin air layer that hugs the surface of the lake puts an invisible ceiling on the lakeside amphitheater, enclosing the sound, with remarkable results. Sound echoes back and forth across the lake, connecting everyone and everything.

When I taught a Joy of Listening seminar at the Olympic Park Institute in the late 1990s, I would take the class here and we would listen to the lake, and then move elsewhere in the park in order to listen more deeply and closely.

Murray Schafer, the author of Tuning of the World (Random House, 1977), has proposed that the ability to hear our own footsteps should be a noise standard for cities, meaning, simply, that the places that we inhabit should be quiet enough that we can hear ourselves (and others) walk.

In the stacks of books I note the quietest reading yet: 40 dBA. In the Reading Room, where only two of 17 people are holding books (the others peruse their laptop screens), the meter registers 44 dBA. Then a phone rings. From 30 feet away, my meter jumps to 58 dBA, equivalent to the snap of a cedar campfire in the dead of night.

Before literacy became the measure of education, aural traditions were. Our first libraries, if you will, were places of listening: the supper table, bedside, churches, town squares. While in Hawaii to record chants for the Smithsonian, I learned that until the nineteenth century Hawaiians had no written language. Their entire library was chanted. A single chant, such as the Kumilipo, or creation chant, tells of life arising out of the ocean and onto land. It runs more than 2,000 lines.

Biologists studying bighorn sheep in the Grand Canyon found noticeable changes in feeding patterns and movement patterns in the presence of helicopters.

Yet, I wonder, might not older, quieter methods, such as track and scat data, be more appropriate in wilderness areas? Biologists studying bighorn sheep in the Grand Canyon found noticeable changes in feeding patterns and movement patterns in the presence of helicopters. The animals spent 14 percent less time feeding during the spring and 42 percent less time feeding in the winter, all the while traveling 50 percent farther while doing so.

Yet, I wonder, might not older, quieter methods, such as track and scat data, be more appropriate in wilderness areas? Biologists studying bighorn sheep in the Grand Canyon found noticeable changes in feeding patterns and movement patterns in the presence of helicopters. The animals spent 14 percent less time feeding during the spring and 42 percent less time feeding in the winter, all the while traveling 50 percent farther while doing so. In other words, the helicopters made a big impact on their energy input and expenditure balance.

Silence seems to make music from everything, simply by isolating individual sounds, allowing the sounds time to form temporal relationships. Music is made out of rests and notes. Quiet times and exciting times, silence and sound. We need them both. More than any other sense, hearing unites everything.

“The good news for the peregrines,” he says, “they habituated. There was no difference in productivity, their activity, their feeding, or incubating. The Air Force probably liked it. The Air Force didn’t want to do it at first. This was their symbol. So good for the peregrines, but they’re mostly visual. I don’t think other species are necessarily that way. Species like owls that hunt in total darkness and depend on hearing, they’re going to be more affected. Birds need quiet to find mates, defend territories. At some point, the noises do overtake an animal’s ability to communicate and catch prey, but it can be very difficult to prove.”

Researchers studying the impact of noisy compressor stations in Canada’s boreal forests have documented a decrease in successful mating among native ovenbirds, a beautiful, insect-eating warbler. More than 3,000 such industrial noisemakers pump oil and gas in the vast Alberta wilderness around the clock, radiating a low-frequency 75 to 90 dBA noise impact on the surrounding forests. The authors of the study report ovenbird pairing success of 92 percent in quiet habitats, compared to 77 percent at compressor sites.

More than 20 years have elapsed. Not a single national park has implemented an air tour management plan. Little has changed in the air, while on the ground the fight between the air tour operators and environmental groups and the internecine administrative battle between government agencies rages on.

I used to plan to stay at a different place each night, always moving on, noticing the changes from place to place but not noticing the changes in one place. I’ve learned the wisdom of staying put. There is so much that goes on in one place, and though largely repetitive from day to day, if you look and listen closely, you discover subtle variations, even minute to minute. It takes a minimum of several days in one place to know it, in my opinion.

Until recently, anthropologists paid little attention to the acoustics of ancient environments, overlooking the implications and impact of daily living conditions that were much quieter than today. But the very terms acoustic anthropology and archaeoacoustics show budding interest in a fascinating sonic spotlight on early civilizations

I get a reading of 35 dBA. That’s with the lights and the AC on. Lights off, it’s down to 30 dBA. That’s excellent. It’s reassuring to know that the Park Service officials responsible for soundscape studies and recommendations regarding natural quiet and man-made noise in our nation’s parks spend their working hours in a quiet workplace. The office, however, serves in an advisory capacity. Frank Turina says that last year the program received 12 requests for assistance from Park Service properties and estimates that there have been some three dozen requests in his three-plus years on the job. Clearly, most national parks are not diligently working on soundscape management plans.

“The loss of quiet is literally the loss of awareness. Quiet is being lost without people even becoming aware of what they’re losing. It’s tragic.”

The ouzel shows that a species can adapt to broad-spectrum noise in its environment, given enough time to evolve. But in the modern world, noise has come on so fast and so loud that it amounts to an ongoing explosion with no rest stops; there’s no time to adapt.

The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood.

Back in the mid-1980s, when I was a bicycle messenger, Professor Beecher invited me to his lab and showed me what amounts to photo albums of facial characteristics paired with sonograms—visual printouts of very minute changes in emitted calls.

In Europe, where natural quiet no longer exists, except possibly in some far northern regions of countries such as Finland and Norway, entire populations of birds are adapting their songs to be heard above the din of noise pollution. The New Scientist (December 2006) reported that in urban areas birdsongs were losing lower notes and shifting to higher pitches that were less masked by traffic noise.

The dramatic increase in human activities all over the world has caused, on an evolutionary time scale, a sudden rise in especially low-pitched noise levels. Ambient noise may be detrimental to birds through direct stress, masking of predator arrival or associated alarm calls, and by interference of acoustic signals in general. Two of the most important functions of avian acoustic signals are territory defense and mate attraction. Both of these functions are hampered when signal efficiency is reduced through rising noise levels, resulting in direct negative fitness consequences. Many bird species are less abundant near highways and studies are becoming available on reduced reproductive success in noisy territories.

Ambient noise may be detrimental to birds through direct stress, masking of predator arrival or associated alarm calls, and by interference of acoustic signals in general. Two of the most important functions of avian acoustic signals are territory defense and mate attraction. Both of these functions are hampered when signal efficiency is reduced through rising noise levels, resulting in direct negative fitness consequences.

The word noise can be traced back to the Latin word nausea. Noxious sounds and noxious smells are almost impossible to ignore. We evolved a sense of smell in part to protect us from toxins and actually have an inborn reflex to flee the stench of decay.

The farthest I have heard a sound travel was 172 miles, roughly the width of Washington State. This occurred on May 18, 1980, when I was fly-fishing in North Cascades National Park near the Canadian border. Dynamite, I thought. But Sunday morning? Minutes later, other blasts arrived from different directions. Hours later, ash fell from the sky. Mt. St. Helens had blown! … The subsequent blasts were not, in fact, true echoes, but rather different sound paths traveling different paths at different speeds due to variations in temperature and atmospheric pressure.

One study has documented sage grouse population declines of as much as 50 percent downwind from deep natural gas drilling rigs in Wyoming. Though factors such as chemical pollution may also be at work, the prime suspect is noise: 70 dBA at a quarter-mile away.

The slope of the land, which helps determine the energy of the flow, is like a volume knob. And the limestone rocks in the creek bed are the notes that the water plays as it flows down the gentle slope.

If a tree falls in the forest but there is too much noise to hear it, does it still make a sound?

Natural quiet is not a luxury; it is a human necessity. There is quiet, a stillness in all of us. But we require natural quiet to discover it.

The rushing creek defeats any attempt to speak, thrusts nature center stage, and silences human voices.

Our conversation on the way back to the parking lot continues in silence, that underrated third voice that never interrupts and always has something worthwhile to say.

Noise, even at levels that are not harmful to hearing, is perceived subconsciously as a danger signal, even during sleep. The body reacts to noise with a fight-or-flight response, with resultant nervous, hormonal, and vascular changes that have far reaching consequences.

Cardiovascular disturbances are independent of sleep disturbances; noise that does not interfere with the sleep of subjects may still provoke autonomic responses and secretion of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol

The song of a winter wren falls above 4,000 Hz, as does the music of many songbirds. Yosemite Falls, Rialto Beach, and Mississippi Valley thunder resound well below 2,000 Hz. Appreciation of these sounds, which fall outside the range of human speech, remain unvalued and unprotected. No wonder many Americans are becoming deaf to Nature.

It is time for me to calm down, look, and listen to where I am. I pull onto the shoulder next to an empty, rusty, log-hauling trailer parked in the cool shade of an oak tree.

Rampant, glorious birdsong, echoing through this forested corridor, stops me. I get a reading of 39 dBA as I listen to the first nature-dominated soundscape since Tennessee.

Accustomed to speaking louder than prevailing, man-made, city noises, they fail to readjust their conversational volume when in quieter places and continue to talk in their city voices. CSU-afflicted individuals fail to quiet themselves. Thus they miss the very quiet and quieting experiences they seemingly seek.

Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.

Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby.

A Place for Nature plays on a flat-screen monitor with a soundtrack of words, entirely without nature sounds.

At the last minute, the audio portion of the exhibit was cut to accommodate the wealth of photographs. Another case of the visual trumping the aural and a great opportunity missed: educating the public about our sonically alive natural treasures.

That number has fallen—2005 is the last year on this chart—to around five hundred thousand,

And those poor people who need to fly to see Grandma are going to pay more for that ticket,

FAA airspace over the United States would be reduced by only four one-hundredths of one percent (0.04 percent) if Olympic National Park were to become off-limits to aircraft.

Despite a 2002 Federal Court of Appeals Decision (yes, there have been lawsuits slowing things down), which ruled in part that the Grand Canyon Overflight Act did apply to high-flying jets, the Park Service appears to be letting go of the rope on high-altitude commercial and private jets in its tug of war with the FAA, at least at this one battleground national park.

How different are these words, written in silence, than, say, those of urban-dwelling graffiti artists who travel noisy urban streets and write on walls and signs and subway cars? The thoughts in the jar reassure me that I am not alone in my love and wonder of quiet.

There is no such thing in the noise category. … Meanwhile, as our cities grow more toxic with noise, and we drift toward a nation of shouters, the sound of our footsteps has all but disappeared.

Noise impact falls off dramatically the higher a plane goes, which is why flight charts are full of markings requiring pilots to stay 2,000 feet above sensitive bird-nesting areas, 4,000 feet above wilderness hiking or canoeing areas, 14,500 feet above the most scenic parts of the Grand Canyon—so high that pilots are required to use oxygen masks there. (So why is the Grand Canyon still noisy? Because commercial tour operators are allowed to fly lower.)

Viewing the land from above is among the most effective ways to appreciate its wild areas. … The connected, knit-together nature of the landscape is the most lasting impression of the aerial view. Everything is tied into everything else. The city runs into the suburb, the suburb peters out into the woods. … Once, over the Midwest, I could see factory smokestacks in the distance ahead of me—and out the left window, small ponds that were waterfowl spawning areas, dotted with thousands of birds. The wild areas seemed the more important and the more vulnerable for being so directly connected to the towns.

I think I am beginning to understand why Charles Lindbergh spent his last decades as a passionate environmentalist; why Beryl Markham, the English writer who as a young woman learned to fly in Kenya, as an old woman became a Kenyan naturalist; and why, of course, the early astronauts knew they had transformed public consciousness of the natural environment with the first photo of the entire shimmering globe.

Each was expressing itself in its own way—singing its own song, and making its own peculiar textures…. The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf—all this was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly bent…

In November 2007, Mainella did so, stressing, “When there is a conflict between conservation and use, conservation is predominant.”

When there is a conflict between conservation and use, conservation is predominant.

About half of all the grizzly bears I have seen I first heard moving through the timber as they emerged for evening feeding.

Adding landscape berms, barriers, and large plantings to your yard to reduce highway or road noise actually accomplishes very little. Even the professionally installed highway barriers are not very effective unless you are very near to them (within a distance comparable to their height). They are installed mainly as a political solution to noise complaints.

Even the professionally installed highway barriers are not very effective unless you are very near to them (within a distance comparable to their height). They are installed mainly as a political solution to noise complaints.

A good rule of thumb: If you feel the need to shout in order to be heard three feet away, the noise levels are probably 85 dBA or more and hearing protection is recommended

If you feel the need to shout in order to be heard three feet away, the noise levels are probably 85 dBA or more and hearing protection is recommended

Called tinnitus, this annoying internal noise is like a “sunburn” of the nerve cells of your inner ear, indicating that they have been irritated and overworked.

An apparent muffling or softening of sounds after exposure to noise signals a temporary hearing loss, called a threshold shift, one that can worsen and become permanent with successive exposures.

Light pollution is the evil cousin of noise pollution. Find an unilluminated place on earth, and you are more likely to find periods of natural quiet than simply studying a map.

Many people have been critical of my effort to save silence by inviting people to One Square Inch and posting its very location on my website. There is no other choice. Either silence changes us or silence will go extinct. If one thousand people walk silently to OSI in a month, could we ask for any greater tribute? Surely the silence of the Hoh Valley would walk out with us.