Quiet places are disappearing faster than species are going extinct

Evidence

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. — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 63

Categorization

• SEED: Strong counters to the framing that species extinction is our worst environmental loss — an angle on acoustic extinction as a parallel, faster crisis.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter’s framing of quiet as a disappearing resource and the noise-as-pandemic thread. — connects to: Loss of quiet erodes the very awareness needed to notice its loss — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 896; Loss of silence signals our wider failure to address environmental crises — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 29; Drained marshland carries its whole lost community to extinction unnoted — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 573 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 63

Broader Connections

• Loss of quiet erodes the very awareness needed to notice its loss #expands (0.85) — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 896
• Loss of silence signals our wider failure to address environmental crises #expands (0.75) — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 29