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ambience: Ventana Wilderness
Along with water, air and beautiful landscapes, one of our most precious natural resources is the soundscape – the way our environment sounds. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Like many of our other natural resources, the soundscape needs protecting. Peter Barnes is the author of the book “Who Owns the Sky?”
ambience: traffic
“The quiet of the soundscape is a commons. It’s a gift that we all receive together. And in fact, until two hundred years ago approximately, the soundscape was quiet. There was no such thing really as noise beyond the noise of a human being shouting or perhaps a shotgun going off every once in a while. If you just walked outside you would hear the wind, the birds, animal sounds, humans talking, or perhaps an anvil. Then two hundred years or so ago, the steam engine was invented and all of a sudden we started having machines. And machines were loud, and they started proliferating and noise as we know it was introduced into the sky and into our lives. And it’s gotten steadily worse and continues to get worse as more and more machines, and not just mechanical machines, but electronic machines like boom boxes, or cell phones are everywhere. And the amount of noise that we are dumping into this commons, the quiet soundscape, is reaching alarming proportions.”
We’ll hear more about protecting the soundscape in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is presented by the National Science Foundation.
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