Review: May 2009

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I write this review at a remote observatory in the Southwest, a place I considered exceptionally quiet until I read One Square Inch of Silence. Now, standing outside the shuttered telescope dome, I hear the drone of a distant plane above the whistle of the wind, and, from time to time, the gravelly crunch of a passing car on the county road at the foot of the mesa. Holding my breath, I even notice the rumble of traffic on the interstate, fifteen miles away as the crow flies. The noise of civilization intrudes, even deep in a national forest.

Gordon Hempton, the principal author of this ear-opening book, documents nature with an audio recorder rather than a camera. He won an Emmy for a PBS documentary that followed the dawn chorus of birdsong around the globe, and his sound clips have been featured on National Public Radio. He’s become distressed by what he hears of late. “Natural quiet,” he writes, “has become an endangered species.”

Except, perhaps, along the Hoh River Valley of Olympic National Park in Washington State. “One Square Inch of Silence” is a spot deep in the woods there, a site Hempton has chosen as the focus of a personal campaign to preserve the soundscape of the wilderness. He’s marked it with a stone, and written a proposal for the Department of the Interior to establish a prototype sound-management area surrounding it, so that it will remain “a sanctuary of silence for present and future generations to enjoy unimpaired by noise pollution.”