David George Haskell - Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolutions Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction

The Forest Unseen: A Years Watch in Nature

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Natures Great Connectors

On the sidewalk that runs along the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, katydids and crickets spice the air with their late-summer songs. Sunset was hours ago, but the heat dallies, animating pulsing rasps and trills of insects hidden in tree branches. The pavements light has its own rhythm, a regular pattern from widely spaced streetlights along the parks wall. The insects are drawn to the lights, gathering in the glowing orbs of leaves around each lamp. As I walk, sound and light rise and fall around me, a subtle swell.

The katydids sing with snappy, buzzing tripletska-ty-didrepeated in a steady pulse, one per second. A few singers abbreviate the song to doublets and slow the pace. Unlike nights when the performers unite in a park-wide beat, powerful enough that I feel it in my chest, tonights katydids seem uncoordinated, each finding its own rhythm. These pulsations contrast with drawn-out, single-toned trills of tree crickets that twine their songs into a sweet and almost unvarying drone.

Security lamps behind a building in the park spill light upward into a cluster of oak trees. One hundred or more starlings gather in the branches. No sleep for these roosting birds, though. Stimulated by bright lights, they squeal, chitter, and whistle at one another, fluttering and jostling among twigs.

A large airplane passes low overhead, lined up along the western edge of the park as it completes its descent into LaGuardia Airport. The sound starts as a thread on the southern horizon, fattens to a heavy, rough rope as it smothers the insects songs, then tapers to a frayed, rumbling tail as it leaves us. In the daytime, during peak landing hours, these planes pass every two minutes.

Other vehicles join: the whirring complaint of car tires on asphalt, the bark and rumble of accelerating engines, a distant clash of horns at the angry intersections of Grand Army Plaza, and the fizz of speeding e-bikes.

I walked here from a chamber music concert in the basement of the public library. Musicians merged their bodies with wood, nylon, and metal, a chimeric union of animal, oil, tree, and ore that reawakened sound from its slumber on printed sheet music. Afterward, I spoke with friends and our tremulous vocal folds imparted fugitive meaning to breath. In music and speech, nerves enlist the air as a neurotransmitter, erasing the physical distance between communicating bodies.

All these sounds draw their energy from the sun. Algae basked, grew, were entombed, then turned to dark oil. We hear the algae roaring now as their long-buried stores of sunlight are released from jet and car engines. The e-bike is juiced by electricity from a coal power plant, the snared light of old forests. This years crop of sunlight, held in maple and oak leaves, feeds the katydids and crickets. Wheat and rice do the same for humans. It is night here, but the sun still shines, photons transmuted to sound waves.

An ordinary evening. A few insect sounds and some birds. Cars and planes on their rounds. Human music and voices. I take this for granted. A planet alive with music and speech.

Yet it was not always this way. The wonders of Earths living voices are of recent origin. And they are fragile.

For more than nine-tenths of its history, Earth lacked any communicative sounds. No creatures sang when the seas first swarmed with animal life or when the oceans reefs first rose. The lands primeval forests contained no calling insects or vertebrate animals. In those days, animals signaled and connected only by catching the eye of another, or through touch and chemicals. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution unfolded in communicative silence.

Once voices evolved, they knit animals into networks that allowed almost instantaneous conversation and connection, sometimes at great distances, as if by telepathy. Sound carries its messages through fog, turbidity, dense thickets, and nights dark. It passes through barriers that block aromas and light. Ears are omnidirectional and always open. Sound not only connects animals, its varied pitches, timbres, rhythms, and amplitudes carry nuanced messages.

When living beings connect, new possibilities appear. Animal voices are catalysts for innovation. This is paradoxical. Sound is ephemeral. Yet in its passage, sound links living beings and wakes the latent powers of biological and cultural evolution. These generative powers, acting over hundreds of millions of years, produced the astonishingly diverse sounds of the living Earth. The words on this page, inked stand-ins for human speech, are but one of the productions of the fruitful union of sound, evolution, and culture. Hundreds of thousands of other wonders ring out across the world. Every vocal species has a distinctive sound. Every place on the globe has an acoustic character made from the unique confluence of this multitude of voices.

The diverse sounds of the world are now in crisis. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the worlds acoustic riches. Habitat destruction and human noise are erasing sonic diversity worldwide. Never in the history of Earth have sounds been so rich and varied. Never has this diversity been so threatened. We live amid riches and despoliation.

Environmental problems are often presented in terms of atmospheric change, chemical pollution, or species extinction. These are essential perspectives and measures. But we also need a complementary frame: Our actions are bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. As wild sounds disappear forever and human noise smothers other voices, Earth becomes less vital, blander. This decline is not a mere loss of sensory ornament. Sound is generative, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative. The crisis exists within our own species too. The burdens of noiseill health, poor learning, and increased mortalityare unjustly distributed. Racism, sexism, and power asymmetries create dire sonic inequities.