Shhh...

Do you hear that?





Hear what?

Well, whatever's around you. Stop and have a listen.

Do you hear it?




If you were to listen to the office I'm sitting in at the moment, you'd hear my fingers hitting the keyboard and Badly Drawn Boy playing on the tinny computer speakers (not an especial favourite. I just have the eclectic station on, as usual). If you were at my apartment -- and you'd have to tell me where you got the key if you were -- you'd likely hear the television or stereo, the refrigerator motor, and my neighbours either playing video games or cheering whichever hockey team happened to be televised that night. You might even be treated to the hotel staff talking during their smoke break out on the loading dock that my balcony faces.

I have deluxe accommodations, you know.






Now, what if you were outside and took a moment to listen. What would you hear then?

Since I'm currently at work (late tonight, yes), I could go outside and be pretty confident of hearing the wind in the trees, whatever birds happened to be calling, Richardson's Ground Squirrels foraging... and the traffic on the major road to the north of us. It's not exactly an unspoiled wilderness.

But then, few of them are.

I was skimming through an interpretation journal today whose theme, as you might have guessed, was sound. Sound as used in programming, intrusive sound in supposedly protected areas; that kind of thing. One of the points made was that there are very, very few places left in North America where you can listen for, say, fifteen minutes and not be interrupted by at least one man-made noise in that time.

My first thought was that if you're around listening there are always going to be man-made noises, unless you're a ghost or an owl or something like that. Human presence = human noises. But then, you must remember that I'm a five-year-old with a short attention span and I'm easily distracted by niggles like that.

I (of course) see where they were going, though. We disrupt the natural world with sound just as much as (and possibly more than) we do with visible pollution. Man-made noise adversely affects territorial calls, mating, denning, hunting opportunities, and probably a million other things that I'm not going to bother thinking about just now.

This indicates that we're evil and should be gotten rid of.






Nah, just kidding.

It only indicates that we're self-centred, that's all. And whether we should be gotten rid of or not is a topic for another day, don't you agree?

Part of the difficulty with man-made noise, however, is that we don't listen as well as we might have in the past. And I don't mean that we're deafer than our ancestors, although I'm sure that there are audiologists out there who will tell you that we're doing our best to become that way, what with modern amplification and all of that other stuff.

What I really mean is that we don't have to listen so we don't try to. Most of us aren't worried about being chased down by predators. Most of us don't have to sneak up on our food or risk going hungry. We've become mainly visual creatures who exist in a world of artificially produced sound, because we don't have to care about the natural sounds that might be out there.

We simply don't listen.

Here at the nature centre, we often use a listening exercise to get younger children focussed on the natural world that they've come to visit (that they have to come to the centre to visit nature is a bit of a problem in itself, but again... another topic for another time). It's as simple as getting them to sit quietly (SIMPLE, that part. You're allowed to roll your eyes here if you've ever tried to get a group of preschoolers to sit quietly) and then having them count the sounds off on their fingers as they hear them.

It's amazing how well it works when done properly.

We often take things a step further by having them describe the sounds, guess what made them, or divide them into sounds made by nature and sounds made by humans. Even if you don't do that, the exercise is valuable. Just knowing that there are things out there that they didn't notice until they were really, really quiet is enough to get people interested in their surroundings in a way they may not have been to begin with. I'd say it's a different way of seeing, but seeing with your ears is just silly.

Even a preschooler can tell you that.

I suppose what I'm saying here is that we're never going to appreciate the world we have if we continue to feel disconnected from it, and we're always going to feel that disconnect if we insist upon wandering through life without senses. So... listen, dammit. Take a moment wherever you are and listen. Quietly. Without distraction.

Try listening for a minute. Fifteen. Whatever you can manage. Close your eyes and just listen.

Then try just watching.

I'd say to try just smelling next, but by now you've got to be getting the picture.





And besides, this has been a long time for a five-year-old with a short attention span to sit and focus.