The Vitality Of The World

Sunset was hours ago, but the heat dallies, animating pulsing rasps and trills of insects hidden in tree branches. The pavement’s light has its own rhythm, a regular pattern from widely spaced streetlights along the park’s wall. The insects are drawn to the lights, gathering in the glowing orbs of leaves around each lamp. As I walk, sound and light rise and fall around me, a subtle swell. A few singers abbreviate the song to doublets and slow the pace. Security lamps behind a building in the park spill light upward into a cluster of oak trees. One hundred or more starlings gather in the branches. No sleep for these roosting birds, though. Stimulated by bright lights, they squeal, chitter, and whistle at one another, fluttering and jostling among twigs. A large airplane passes low overhead, lined up along the western edge of the park as it completes its descent into LaGuardia Airport. The sound starts as a thread on the southern horizon, fattens to a heavy, rough rope as it smothers the insects’ songs, then tapers to a frayed, rumbling tail as it leaves us. In the daytime, during peak landing hours, these planes pass every two minutes.

Scream Your Last Scream

I walked here from a chamber music concert in the basement of the public library. Musicians merged their bodies with wood, nylon, and metal, a chimeric union of animal, oil, tree, and ore that reawakened sound from its slumber on printed sheet music. Afterward, I spoke with friends and our tremulous vocal folds imparted fugitive meaning to breath. In music and speech, nerves enlist the air as a neurotransmitter, erasing the physical distance between communicating bodies. All these sounds draw their energy from the sun. Algae basked, grew, were entombed, then turned to dark oil. This year’s crop of sunlight, held in maple and oak leaves, feeds the katydids and crickets. Wheat and rice do the same for humans. It is night here, but the sun still shines, photons transmuted to sound waves. An ordinary evening. A few insect sounds and some birds. Cars and planes on their rounds.

Any Other Way

Human music and voices. I take this for granted. A planet alive with music and speech. Yet it was not always this way. The wonders of Earth’s living voices are of recent origin. And they are fragile. No creatures sang when the seas first swarmed with animal life or when the oceans’ reefs first rose. The land’s primeval forests contained no calling insects or vertebrate animals. In those days, animals signaled and connected only by catching the eye of another, or through touch and chemicals. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution unfolded in communicative silence. Once voices evolved, they knit animals into networks that allowed almost instantaneous conversation and connection, sometimes at great distances, as if by telepathy. Sound carries its messages through fog, turbidity, dense thickets, and night’s dark.

Hold On To This Hope

It passes through barriers that block aromas and light. Ears are omnidirectional and always open. Sound not only connects animals, its varied pitches, timbres, rhythms, and amplitudes carry nuanced messages. When living beings connect, new possibilities appear. Animal voices are catalysts for innovation. This is paradoxical. Yet in its passage, sound links living beings and wakes the latent powers of biological and cultural evolution. These generative powers, acting over hundreds of millions of years, produced the astonishingly diverse sounds of the living Earth. Hundreds of thousands of other wonders ring out across the world. Every vocal species has a distinctive sound. Every place on the globe has an acoustic character made from the unique confluence of this multitude of voices. The diverse sounds of the world are now in crisis. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world’s acoustic riches. Habitat destruction and human noise are erasing sonic diversity worldwide. Never in the history of Earth have sounds been so rich and varied. Never has this diversity been so threatened. We live amid riches and despoliation. Environmental problems are often presented in terms of atmospheric change, chemical pollution, or species extinction. These are essential perspectives and measures. Our actions are bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. As wild sounds disappear forever and human noise smothers other voices, Earth becomes less vital, blander. This decline is not a mere loss of sensory ornament. Sound is generative, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative. The crisis exists within our own species too. Listening opens us to the wonders of communication and creativity. Listening also teaches us that we live in an age of diminishment. Yet we are increasingly disconnected from sensory, storied relationship to life’s community. This rupture is part of the sensory crisis. We become estranged from both the beauty and brokenness of much of the living world. This destroys the necessary sensory foundation for human ethics. The crises in which we live, then, are not just environmental, of the environs, but perceptual. When the most powerful species on Earth ceases to listen to the voices of others, calamity ensues. The vitality of the world depends, in part, on whether we turn our ears back to the living Earth. To listen, then, is a delight, a window into life’s creativity, and a political and moral act. Wherever life’s voices are hushed or absent we hear sounds largely unchanged since Earth cooled from its fiery start more than four billion years ago. Pressing against mountain peaks, wind yields a low and urgent roar, sometimes twisting into itself with a whip crack as it eddies. In deserts and ice fields, air hisses over sand and snow. On the ocean shore, waves slam and suck at pebbles, grit, and unyielding cliffs. Rain rattles and drums against rock and soil, and seethes into water. Rivers gurgle in their beds. Thunderstorms boom and the surface of the Earth echoes its reply. Sporadic tremors and eruptions of the underworld punctuate these voices of air and water, sounding with geologic growls and bellows. These sounds are powered by the sun, gravity, and the heat of the Earth.