Foreign sound can be as intrusive and disruptive a scar on nature as a clear cut slash of forest. The visual damage we do is easy to digest. It's right there. In front of our eyes. We feel a profound sense of loss when a landscape has been ripped away. But when we trespass onto the sound of nature, do we feel the same level of loss or guilt or responsibility? Is the screen age numbing our other senses, eroding our auditory acuity? And our sense that we should not be so gratuitously stepping on the sounds around us. Has our sensitivity to spectrum of sound become narrower as well?
When something like a gas powered ATV scrambles thru the forest, the dispersion of natural sound is obvious. It flees. Birds and animals scurry away, depriving us of their sound symphony. Instead we are left to a noise made by man. We disparage the interloper whose machine is disturbing our contemplative time with nature. We are angry at the ATV for making its artificial roar. True. But the auditory loss is not from the temporary foreign sound. It comes from the gradual disappearance of natural sound following repeated intrusion of mechanical roars. Birds and animals migrate away to quieter forest far from our reach. Their sounds fade from our sphere of consciousness. The wonderful tones that elevate our auditory horizon and nurture strong emotions. The haunting call of a loon. The barely perceptible moan of a beaver. The trill of a warbler. Sounds that encourage and reinforce fading human traits. Wonder. Curiosity. Study. Meditation. Just some of the human attributes that are diluted when we are deprived of nature's sounds.
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