Man-Made Noise Interfering with the Earth’s Ecology

Shhh – do you hear that? It’s the sound of us effing up yet another part of ecology. Man made noise may actually be altering the sounds we should be hearing all day and night – those of nature. Field scientist Bernie Krause has been studying nature sounds for decades, and he’s noticed something disturbing: the natural sound of the world is vanishing.

Wired Magazine has it:

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It’s what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. “It’s getting harder and harder to find places that aren’t contaminated,” he says.

This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. The contamination of biophony may soon become a serious environmental issue — Krause says that man-made sounds are already wreaking havoc with animal communication. We worry about the carbon emissions from SUVs and airplanes; maybe we should be equally concerned about the racket they cause.

Krause’s argument is simple. In a biophony, animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don’t interfere with one another’s voices. He shows me a spectrogram of a wilderness recording, in which all the component noises are mapped according to pitch. It looks like the musical score for an orchestra, with each instrument in its place. No two species are using the same frequency. “That’s part of how they coexist so well,” Krause says. When they issue mating calls or all-important warning cries, they aren’t masked by the noises of other animals.

Nature has a way of delicately balancing every aspect of the world’s ecology, and as we humans have become more technologically advanced, we’ve fallen out of our natural place in the world and become tyrants, out of touch with our surroundings. Animals communicate with each other through sounds, and when our loud planes, construction noises and vehicles cover those sounds, an imbalance occurs. Suddenly an animal can’t make itself heard. While this might seem like a very small thing to some people, it can have huge effects on the ecosystem over time. It’s been suggested that we don’t just develop ‘green tech’, but ‘quiet tech’ as well. We certainly wouldn’t want to find out too late that yet another aspect of our dominion over the earth has created irreparable destruction.

Link [Wired Magazine]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

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