Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann — One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World

93 published claims from this book.

• A court ruling on Grand Canyon jets may yet be undermined by agency inaction.
• A nature-dominated soundscape had been absent since Tennessee until this point
• A noise-free square inch can protect quiet over many square miles
• A place has a soul and an intelligence that seeks to heal itself
• A single ringing phone doubles the acoustic energy of a quiet library
• Aerial views converted Lindbergh, Markham, and the astronauts into environmentalists
• Aircraft noise dissipates with altitude but regulatory floors fail where tours fly low
• Altitude-based flight regulations exist to shield wilderness from plane noise
• Ambient noise impairs birds’ territory defense and mate attraction
• An echo is partly an original sound from the reflecting material
• An open mouth amplifies faint sounds by serving as a resonant chamber
• Anthropologists long overlooked the acoustics of ancient environments
• Anti-noise devices fail because they do not restore listening connection
• Anti-noise strategies fail because they cannot restore listening connection to the land
• Attentive listening to place must precede any attempt to record it.
• Background noise may prevent us from hearing an otherwise audible forest sound
• Banning aircraft over Olympic Park costs only 0.04 percent of US airspace
• Birdsong variations can be visualized as sonograms paired with faces
• Cloud cover and rain protect Olympic Park from noise by discouraging scenic flights
• Cold air hovering over a lake traps and echoes sound across the water
• Cold water layers create a natural acoustic amphitheater
• Conservation must trump use whenever the two conflict
• Conservation should outrank use when the two conflict
• Darkness reliably predicts natural quiet on Earth
• Even nature exhibits are made without nature sounds
• Having to shout at three feet signals hazardous noise
• Hawaiians preserved their entire library as chanted verse until the 1800s
• Hearing often precedes sight when encountering grizzly bears
• Hearing one’s own footsteps is a proposed noise standard for cities
• Helicopter noise measurably alters bighorn sheep foraging behavior
• Helicopter overflights disrupt wildlife feeding and movement patterns
• Highway sound barriers mainly serve as political solutions
• Human hearing evolved to decode natural sounds beyond speech or music
• Individual trees each sing distinct sonic textures a patient listener can analyze
• Industrial noise measurably reduces ovenbird mating success
• Inner silence is a portable reverence carried regardless of outer conditions
• Knowing a place deeply requires staying put for days
• Landscape slope and creek rocks act like a volume knob and notes
• Listening well demands openness to being transformed
• Loss of quiet erodes the very awareness needed to notice its loss
• Loss of silence fundamentally alters human nature itself
• Loss of silence signals our wider failure to address environmental crises
• Loud natural sound can override and silence human speech
• Medicine offered no risk-free remedy for his middle-ear hearing loss
• Most grizzlies are first detected by hearing, not sight
• Most national parks are not actively working on soundscape management plans
• Natural gas drilling noise correlates with 50 percent sage grouse decline
• Natural quiet is a human necessity required to discover inner stillness
• Natural silence is a positive presence felt in the body
• Natural soundscapes are best understood by comparative listening
• No national park has implemented an air tour management plan in twenty-plus years
• Noise harms hearing-dependent wildlife more than visual species like peregrines
• Noise harms the cardiovascular system even without disturbing sleep
• Noise perceived as a danger signal triggers fight-or-flight responses even during sleep
• Noise pollution directly reduces birds’ reproductive success
• Noise pollution is excluded from global environmental rankings for lack of data
• Noise regulations protect only speech frequencies, leaving nature sounds unprotected
• Olympic is the quietest unit in the National Park Service’s 84 million acres
• Olympic National Park’s quiet stems from lacking roads and air tourism
• Olympic Park was chosen for its quiet because air tourism there is still nascent
• One law banning aircraft over parks would immediately rescue silence
• Overcast skies protect Olympic Park’s quiet by deterring scenic flights
• People carry city vocal volume into quiet places and miss the quiet they seek
• People need natural quiet to access the stillness within themselves
• Perceived silence emerges only after minutes of acclimatization
• Preserving silence paradoxically requires inviting people into it
• Prey animals avoid noisy areas because sound is their security surveillance
• Protecting one small quiet spot can preserve quiet across a much larger area
• Quiet places are disappearing faster than species are going extinct
• Quiet sounds remain faintly audible if one learns to listen carefully
• Rain can fall through layered forest canopy without reaching the ground
• Rerouting flights imposes real costs on ordinary travelers
• Seeing how wilderness connects to settlements heightens the sense it must be preserved
• Silence cannot be imagined but only heard firsthand
• Silence enables sound to form musical relationships
• Silence functions as an underrated conversational presence
• Silence is a positive presence rather than mere absence
• Silence is an active presence that must be experienced, not imagined
• Silence shapes the very vocabulary people use to describe experience.
• Sudden modern noise gives species no evolutionary time to adapt
• Temporary hearing muffling may become permanent with repetition
• The most valued sound can be the silence preceding a sound
• The most valued sound is the silence anticipating a sound, the space between notes
• The Mount St. Helens blast was heard 172 miles away
• The Pacific Northwest rainy season begins with falling seeds, not rain
• The quietest national park lacks any staff trained in acoustic ecology
• The word noise traces back to the Latin word for nausea
• Tinnitus arises without an external acoustic source, likely from central nervous system mechanisms.
• Tinnitus signals damaged inner-ear nerve cells
• Urban birds shift their songs to higher pitches to escape traffic noise
• US airport significant noise exposure fell from seven million to five hundred thousand
• Visual bias consistently outranks sound in public nature exhibits
• Washington state’s quiet places dropped from 21 to 3 in two decades