The Quiet Places

Outside Magazine

 Gordon Hempton has been on a quest to protect quiet. Here's his organization's website which identifies the quiet parks, quiet trails, experiences.

In 2019, Outside mag published - "A Quest to Protect the World's Last Quiet Places" (by Chris Wright) profiling Hempton's efforts.

Just as humans have spread colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and trash around the planet, we’ve also blanketed it in our damn racket. Air traffic has tripled since the 1980s, and the number of cars worldwide, already over a billion, is expected to reach two billion by 2030; the U.S. Bureau of Transportation estimates that 97 percent of the American population is regularly exposed to highway and air-traffic noise. And it’s not just in populated areas. A study published in Science in May 2017 found that human-caused noise had doubled background decibel levels in many of the most protected wildlife habitats worldwide. (In some endangered habitats, it increased background decibels tenfold.) Human noise is constant and practically everywhere.

"Hempton estimates that there are now fewer than ten places in the U.S. where natural noise can be heard uninterrupted by noise pollution for longer than 15-minute intervals."

Recent studies have shown that quiet can decrease stress levels and lower blood pressure and heart rate; another showed that silence helped mice regenerate brain cells in their hippocampus. On the flip side, man-made noise has been proven harmful both to people (causing high blood pressure, heart disease, and low birth weight) and especially natural ecosystems. When a researcher from Boise State University introduced a “phantom road” into pristine Idaho wilderness by simulating the din of traffic through loudspeakers, the noise alone drove a third of the local songbird population away. Some of the birds that stayed lost significant portions of their body mass, likely because they couldn’t hear to communicate or hunt.

The first question QPI has to answer seems simple: How quiet is quiet? Hempton and his team have already identified over 260 exceptionally quiet places around the world. Next, with the permission of local communities and governments, they hope to send out teams to certify those areas as quiet parks.

The teams will test each potential site for three consecutive days, measuring natural-noise decibels and intrusions; while no area is pristine, these readings will help them set the organization’s official standards for certification. According to Hempton, any “alarming or shocking” signature, like gunshots, sirens, or military aircraft, would immediately disqualify it from certification. Loud noises, if they’re natural, are fine.