Things vs. Our Idea of Things

Steve Shepard 

A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.               —Bernie Krause

My interest in the sounds of the natural world started when I went in search of information that would help me become a better interviewer and audio producer for my Podcast, The Natural Curiosity Project. What I discovered along the way was a treasure trove of audio knowledge, free for the taking. National Public Radio, for example, has an entire curriculum available to anyone willing to listen, comprising hundreds of hours of training and insight. I listened to every lesson, even those I didn’t need (best safety equipment for war zone reporters). The online resource Transom turned me on to Sound School, Rob Rosenthal’s Podcast about audio storytelling. And somewhere along the way, I discovered an obscure, UK-based organization called the Wildlife Sound Recording Society—WSRS to its friends.

The WSRS is a consortium of purists, the high priests and priestesses of nature’s voice. Their interest is the sound of the natural world, a world that decidedly does NOT include anthropogenic sounds—the noise created by humans. I’m not sure what English word is worse than anathema, or abhorrent, but to these folks, hearing the faint sound of a car or airplane in the background while listening to the recording of a dawn chorus is right up there with finding a large roach swimming in your breakfast cereal. 

Many members of the Society have been recording for more than 40 years, and fondly remember the days when editing involved reels of magnetic tape that were edited using razor blades to cut and splice, days when a recorder weighed 15 pounds with the 12 D-cell batteries required to power it—for about an hour. And talk about innovation: This was before the days of readily available audio gear for the serious hobbyist. Much of what they used was contrived, homemade. My friend Roger Boughton, one of the finest field recordists I know, has an attic filled with gear, including no fewer than six parabolic dishes, all made from various-sized salad bowls and other contrivances. You couldn’t easily buy parabolic microphones at the time; you had to make them. And because these folks knew their craft, their jury-rigged gear worked spectacularly well.

It’s easy to laugh at their expense, at their sometimes Rube Goldbergian approach to gear, but let me tell you what I’ve learned from my acquaintance with people like Roger. I’ve learned to listen, which, I now know, is not the same as hearing. Now, when I walk into a place to record, I feel myself consciously and deliberately slowing down as I transfer my attention from my eyes to my ears. I close my eyes. I sit down. I shut up. And I just—listen. I didn’t do this before I met people like Roger. There’s a reason we have a wonderful quote, often attributed to WSRS President Chris Watson: “I like radio better than television because the pictures are better.”

I’ve learned patience. Unlike photography, there’s no such thing as a ‘grab shot’ in the world of wildlife sound recording. As St. Augustine reportedly observed, “The reward of patience is patience.” Not long ago I sat in one place deep in a forest for two hours without moving. Had I been in photographer mode, I would have stomped away in frustration after maybe ten minutes of fidgeting. Photographs are captured during intervals of thousandths of seconds; nature’s voice is linear, captured in real-time. Patience, then, is not an option. It’s a requirement. And the fieldcraft required to do it is critical.

I’ve learned context. When I sit in a place with my recorder beside me, my headphones on, my microphone pointed over there, I’m taking in much more than the sound of that pileated woodpecker hammering on a decaying tree, 100 feet away. I also hear his claws on the bark as he moves about in search of food. His movements make me wonder what he’s looking for. I hear him call, that ratcheting sound that can only be a pileated woodpecker. I hear him hammer, multiple times in a single second, and wonder how he can do that without suffering a traumatic brain injury. And I listen to the gaps, the intervals between his calls, and wonder, why that interval? And who jumps in during that period of woodpecker silence to fill it with their own voice? 

I’ve learned about cooperation, the kind that goes on in the domain of wildness. This comes in two forms. The first is the human kind. For reasons that are a mystery to me, sound recordists have no problem—even the best of them, the ‘rock stars’ of the craft—answering questions for less experienced recordists. In fact, they go out of their way to respond to queries posted on the few blogs that are devoted to nature’s voice. 

But I’m also talking about a form of biological cooperation, for lack of a better term. I spent my career in telecommunications, where we learned to share the scarce but valuable resource known as broadband in two ways: the first, a technique called time division multiplexing, or TDM; and another called frequency division multiplexing, or FDM. No need for a degree in physics: in TDM, we give you all of the available frequency for some of the time. In FDM, we give you some of the available frequency for all of the time. In other words, in TDM, we tell each user, “You can holler as loud as you like, but only for this much time, and then you have to shut up because it’s somebody else’s turn to use the channel. Don’t worry, you’ll get another turn.” Think round robin. In FDM, we tell each user, “You can holler as long as you like, but only within this limited, dedicated channel we assign to you. Stay in your lane.” 

We think of ourselves as being such a technologically sophisticated species, yet nature has been using these techniques for eons. We’ve all heard birds calling back and forth in the forest, taking turns. One calls for a period of time, then passes the talking stick to another. That’s TDM. And years ago, legendary field recordist and acoustic ecologist Bernie Krause posited his ‘niche hypothesis,’ demonstrating using spectrograms that the natural world has been doing Frequency Division Multiplexing for—well, forever. Bullfrogs are way down here in the frequency domain, timberdoodles just above the bullfrogs, crickets and katydids are here, red-winged blackbirds and spring peepers, way up here. Everybody sings at once, but everybody stays in their lane. 

I witnessed a human example of this just the other day at the local coffee shop. A group of women had gathered to celebrate a birthday, and in their excitement at the arrival of the guest of honor, everybody was talking at once. One woman was trying to get everyone’s attention to let them know that the server had arrived to take drink orders, but to no avail. Without even thinking about it, she pitched her voice way down low, and with tone and timbre that made her sound like James Earl Jones amidst the cacophony of higher-pitched voices, she got their attention. 

Frequency Division Multiplexing.

These techniques have worked well for the non-human denizens of Earth for as long as they’ve been on the planet. At least they did, until humans came along. And what did we do? Through our cacophonous and indiscriminate use of cars and motorcycles and off-road vehicles and chain saws and logging and snow machines and propellers and ship sonar and two-cycle leaf blowers and airplanes, we stomped on all those frequencies. We overwhelmed them with noise. Not with mating calls, or threat warnings, or information about where the flowers are with the most pollen or nectar, but with industrial racket. Meanwhile, all those non-human residents suddenly find themselves in a world where their voices count for nothing. They can’t call for mates; they can’t hear the approach of a predator; they can’t hear shared information about food, or weather, or habitat availability. They can’t detect the approaching bulbous prow of a tanker, and they can’t get away from the flesh-rending blasts created by oil exploration, so they beach themselves to get away from the pain—and they die.

The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it.           —Bernie Krause

We are always quick to point to the obvious biological indicators of climate change: Red tides and the mass die-offs of fish and other species that accompany them. Anoxic dead zones in the ocean. Massive mats of blue-green algae in large bodies of otherwise fresh water. Retreating glaciers, and sea level rise. Increasing prevalence of disease in wild and domesticated species. 

Yet, one of the best indicators of the overall health of the planet is the condition of its voice. The sounds of the non-human world are growing quieter, while the sounds of human activity are growing louder. A lot louder.

Many who read this will be quick to lash out by noting that humans are as much a part of the natural world as humpback whales, pangolins, houseflies, chickadees, birds of paradise, and koala bears. And, they would be correct. But the things that humans surround themselves with, those two-cycle chain saws, loud cars, gas-powered leaf blowers, snow machines, and undersea detonators, are not. It isn’t the buzz and rumble of human conversation that overwhelms the natural soundscape and makes it impossible for the other species to carry on with their lives and coexist; it’s our thoughtless and indiscriminate use of technology as the enabler of industry that can’t operate without making noise.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.                              —Jean Arp

So, where am I going with this audio essay? Probably not where you think.

I am many things, but naive is not one of them. I believe that we need to move away from petroleum-derived fuels as much as we can, because the carbon compounds created when they burn do, beyond a shadow of scientific doubt, contribute to the greenhouse effect that is warming the planet at an alarming rate. Notice that I said contribute—not cause. Human generation of greenhouse gas is one of many factors that lead to climate change and a warming planet. But it’s a big one. 

However, if you want to talk about cause, let’s do that. A warming planet causes weather patterns to change, and from the perspectives of things that live here, not in a good way. Increasingly violent weather, less predictable storms, and acceleration of the Niño/Niña effects are immediate and visible examples of an atmosphere that is increasingly incapable of venting planetary heat into space. 

And what about less visible effects? There are many, and they’re insidious. As the planet warms, the ice at the poles begins to melt. Feel free to doubt this cause-and-effect relationship, but it doesn’t take a degree in meteorology or geography to look at aerial photographs of the North and South Poles on Google that were taken in the 1960s, or the planet’s major glaciers, or Greenland’s massive ice cap, and compare them to the same images taken today. The difference is striking. 

Another factor is albedo, a measure of a surface’s ability to reflect heat. The ice at the planet’s poles reflects 90 percent of the sunlight that strikes it, serving as a cooling engine for the Earth. But as the ice cover shrinks, that reflectivity, that albedo, shrinks as well, and the heat is absorbed by the planet, rather than reflected by it. And yes, it bodes badly for charismatic species like polar bears and walruses and penguins, but it also bodes badly for us. Why? Because of that very same cause-and-effect relationship I mentioned earlier. The ice at the edges of the planet’s ice caps and floating sea ice is frozen fresh water, not sea water. It isn’t salty, because as polar seawater freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving behind pure ice that could be chopped up and dropped into a cocktail. Greenland’s icecaps and the world’s glaciers originated as snow, thousands of years ago—and were therefore freshwater to begin with.

As the ice melts, the salinity of the surrounding water goes down. And while this change in salinity can be bad for organisms that have adapted to a certain level of salt in the water, that’s not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is far more consequential.

Because of a number of related factors such as density differences between fresh and salt water (salt water is denser than freshwater), temperature gradients between deep and shallow ocean water, winds, and tides, ocean water is constantly moving. In the abyssal deep, cold water rivers flow, great currents that transport heat and nutrients throughout the world’s oceans. Some call these flows ‘liquid wind.’ Meanwhile, in the shallower depths, warmer waters flow. But as the warmer waters circulate to the poles, they chill, and then they sink, forcing colder, nutrient-rich waters to the surface, a phenomenon known as an upwelling. This constant exchange of warm and cold water results in colder climes at the poles and warmer climes at the equator, and relatively predictable global weather patterns. It also creates a consistent nutrient delivery engine for everything that lives in or near the oceans.

But: if the ice captured at the poles and in glaciers and atop Greenland melts, here’s what happens. The heat-based differential energy source that keeps oceanic currents circulating disappears, as warmer waters cool, and cooler waters warm. The temperature gradient-driven system of oceanic currents slows and stops; nutrients stop moving; and a mass oceanic die-off occurs as the food chain collapses, including the loss of a little-known bacterium called prochlorococcus, which captures roughly 50 percent of oceanic carbon and produces more than 40 percent of the world’s oxygen. Compare that to nine percent produced by the planet’s tropical rain forests. 

Meanwhile, the polar regions warm; the equator cools. Weather patterns become increasingly violent and unpredictable, as the moderating force of oceanic currents fades away. Sea level rises; coastal areas flood; island nations disappear beneath the waves. Kiribati, Palau, the Maldives, Fiji, the Marshall Islands—all are at high risk. Global average temperatures settle somewhere in the mid-50s Fahrenheit, 10 Celsius, as the liquid wind of the great oceanic rivers slows and ultimately stops.

 Meanwhile, changes in weather patterns lead to extensive, long-term drought in interior farmlands, while coastal communities deal with extreme flood events. Deep continental aquifers fail because of a combination of over-pumping and a lack of the rain that typically recharges them. Storms become more violent; crops are lost; farmland becomes unusable.

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.    

—Loren Eiseley

Let’s talk about Greenland for a moment. It’s a massive island, a protectorate of Denmark, with a population of 57,000. It’s covered by a massive ice sheet—one of the largest on the planet. Its average thickness is 1.6 miles, and in terms of size, it’s 1,500 miles long, north to south, and 470 miles wide. Let me give you some perspective on those meaningless numbers. Imagine a slab of ice, a mile-and-a-half thick, that covers most of the United States east of the Mississippi River, from the Florida Keys all the way to Maine. It accounts for just shy of ten percent of the planet’s fresh water. If it were to melt, and all the evidence says that that’s already happening, sea level would rise 23 feet.

I know what you’re thinking: you’ve heard all this before. Another overwrought, handwringing, save-the-whales, Vermont-based liberal snowflake with a degree from the Republic of Berkeley, for god’s sake. Well, let me be clear. I do want whales to be protected. I do want to preserve old-growth forests in perpetuity. I do want to see a reduction in the global consumption of beef. I do believe in the humane treatment of livestock. I do believe that climate change and the ongoing warming of the planet are real, regardless of cause. I do believe in alternative energy production, solar and wind and hydro and tidal bore and yes, even nuclear. 

You know what else I believe? I believe that we should continue to drill for oil and natural gas. Yes, you heard correctly. But let me tell you why.

Every 42-gallon barrel of crude oil produces just shy of 20 gallons of gasoline. The other 20-plus gallons become vitamins, medications, synthetic rubber, a huge range of cleaning products, plastic, and asphalt. Asphalt: of the more than four million miles of roads in the U.S., almost three million miles of them are paved with asphalt. We can change to cement, you say? Yes, we can; just be aware that the production of cement is one of the two largest producers of carbon dioxide—greenhouse gas—in the world. 

And plastics? Yes, we should absolutely reduce our use of the stuff. Single use water bottles, single use plastic bags, individual apples wrapped in plastic, then packaged on a disposable plastic foam tray and wrapped again in plastic wrap? That’s just idiotic. But let’s be careful, here. We also use plastic polymers—long, strong molecular chains—to manufacture heart valves. Artificial knees and hips. Prosthetic limbs. Polyester, the stuff that many forms of clothing are made from (Yes, that’s plastic). And then we have cosmetics, toothbrushes, iPhones, contact lenses, glasses, paint, toilet seats, nail polish, and countless other products. 

So, no—I don’t believe we should stop sucking oil out of the ground. I do believe, however, that we have an obligation to think differently about how we use it once we refine it into its many derivatives. But here’s my question: will we? 

Al Gore coined the phrase, “An Inconvenient Truth.” He hit on something important with that. We (and we can argue about who ‘we’ are) have become a culture consumed by the avoidance, at all cost, of inconvenience. Personal effort is inconvenient. Food preparation is inconvenient. Walking to the store instead of driving is inconvenient. Picking up the phone and calling someone instead of sending a text is inconvenient. Writing a paper or article or personal letter instead of asking ChatGPT to do it—that’s inconvenient. Thinking about the possibility that an outlandish idea is wrong before sharing it on social media is inconvenient. Thinking in a deliberate way is inconvenient. 

What this leads to is a concept that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I call it the difference between ‘things’ and ‘our idea of things.’ And I believe this idea is central to many of the challenges we face today.

Things vs. Our Idea of Things

Intelligent people tend to espouse theories of action that have little to do with actual behavior.                   —Peter Senghe

Imagine the following scenario. A town official is asked what she or he is going to do to cut unnecessary spending during a period of shrinking tax revenue. “Well, I have that all planned out,” the official says. “We’re going to lengthen road paving schedules to reduce materials cost; we’re going to limit snow removal to accumulations of four inches or more; we’re going to use less road salt; we’re going to put low-energy LED bulbs in all town buildings; and we’re going to close the town library.”

Say what? Close the library? Are you insane? No public official would ever dare do such a thing. Close the library. Please.

Yet, how many people actually use the town library? When’s the last time you went?

Our greatest obstacle, I believe, is the difference between things and our idea of things. The idea of a town without a library is ludicrous. Yet, usage of library services tends to be low among most towns’ residents. After all, it’s inconvenient to drive or, good grief, walk, down to the library to browse the stacks and check out a physical, digital, or audio book to read, when we can far more conveniently sit on our growing asses in the living room and download one from Amazon without moving anything other than an index finger. But get rid of the library? Never. What kind of community would we be if we didn’t have a library?

That quote you heard a moment ago, “Intelligent people tend to espouse theories of action that have little to do with actual behavior,” is attributed to many people, mostly to Peter Senghe, although Web searches are ambiguous as to its origin. But it captures the sentiment of what I’m trying to convey here. We, as human beings, will say something with great conviction (‘Now that I’ve gone through this workshop on work-life balance, I’m going to leave the office at 5 PM every day from now on and spend more time with my family!’), but after the obligatory week of being a demonstrably different person because of the workshop, we creep back to our old ways and do what we’ve always done, proving once again that the allure of the status quo is as powerful as a tractor beam, and that it controls our behavior far more than we realize. Why? Because making a change like that is hard. It’s disruptive. 

It’s inconvenient.

The idea of individually reducing carbon emissions by driving less and walking more, of deliberately using less plastic by bringing our own bags to the grocery store, of refilling dish soap and shampoo and hand soap bottles at the bulk product counter at the health food store, of buying cotton or hemp or wool clothing instead of polyester, of eating less meat and more vegetables, of buying local produce from the farm stand instead of tomatoes from Chile and kiwis from Israel at the grocery store, are all great ideas, because they’re our ideas of things, not the things themselves. Our willingness to change is indirectly proportional to the number of excuses we can come up with to worship the status quo. Walk to the store instead of drive? It’s a really good idea, but it’s not safe. It’s cold. It’s hot. It’s windy. It might rain. I have too much to buy this time, and I look silly pulling a wagon. I don’t have time. Maybe tomorrow. Go to the farm stand? It’s out of the way. And I always forget to bring my reusable bags, and I never remember those bottles. Next time.

It’s just not convenient.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines convenience as “Personally suitable to ease of action or performance.” Etymologically, it comes from the Latin convenientem, ‘to come together or gather.’ As someone who studied the arcane field of Romance Philology at university—the origins of Romance languages—this definition strikes me as a tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum. If my thesis is correct, we aren’t willing to come together to do the right thing, because it isn’t convenient. We aren’t willing to behave like a true community, coming together for the greater good, because it’s not convenient. We’ll talk about it loudly, we’ll vocally support it, we’ll even slap the bumper sticker on the car—just don’t expect us to actually do anything. How is that an act of convening, of coming together, of convenience? Isn’t it, by definition, precisely the opposite?

Not My Job, Man

There’s another factor that must be considered: personal accountability. Somewhere at the nexus of ‘Not my job,’ ‘Not in my back yard,’ and ‘You’re not the boss of me’ lies the source of the human behavior I’m talking about. All too often, we agree with great fervor that something should be done, some catalyst for changed behavior, but it’s ‘all those offenders out there’ who should do it, not me. Pick up a piece of trash on the road in my own neighborhood? I didn’t put it there; that’s not MY job. Of course, I want five bars of cellular service on my phone in every room in my house; but don’t even think about putting a mobile radio tower where I can see it. And when public figures exhort us to do something, or to behave differently, our response is sadly predictable: how dare they tell us what to do. I’m perfectly capable of behaving in a responsible and civilized fashion.

If that’s the case, why don’t we?

I started this essay with some observations about the impact that human sound—noise—has on the Earth’s non-human residents. I’m reluctant to say ‘impact on the natural world’ because humans are as much a part of that natural world as all the other living things with which we share the planet. Even human voice is natural. But mechanical sounds, industrial sounds, vehicles that are loud for no reason other than to be loud, are not part of the soundscape of the natural world. They’re damaging, they’re offensive, and they don’t have to be. In the same way that I believe that we should continue to drill for oil for the foreseeable future, I believe that the sound of industry is a necessary thing in modern society. I would never suggest that we all give up our lawn mowers and buy sickles and scythes instead—That’s ludicrous. But if you’re going to buy a new mower, buy an electric one. Same goes for leaf blowers and other traditionally gas-powered devices. Towns should enforce noise ordinances on loud vehicles. Police officers respond to loud parties; why not offensively loud vehicles? Not only is electric quieter, but it also contributes far less to the atmosphere’s carbon load. But suggest that someone do something different to make a difference for everybody? Please.

This is a contentious path that I’m walking. On one side, extreme thinking demands that we ban all fossil fuels immediately. On the other side, equally extreme thinking insists that we pave paradise and put in a parking lot for the people who work at the refinery. The truth is that neither group is correct—or incorrect—in their demands. Should we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels? Yes, we should—and right now. Should we issue a full stop on the production and use of fossil fuels? Yes, we should—but not until we can do so without having a negative impact on the global economy and without depriving ourselves of the benevolent products (other than gas and oil) that crude provides us. Should we aggressively and deliberately move toward alternative sources of energy that are more sustainable? Of course—but we should also recognize that each of those comes with a cost and a negative environmental impact of its own. Yes, oil exploration and extraction have a bad effect on the environment, but so does the mining of lithium and other trace elements for the batteries and semiconductors used in electric vehicles. Wind turbines are terrific green options for power generation, other than the fact that they kill somewhere between 100,000 and 700,000 birds every year, according to a study by Smithsonian. On the other hand, house cats kill four billion birds every year. Everyone fears nuclear power, but it may be the cleanest and most efficient form of power generation we have—other than that pesky waste problem.

The truth is, there is no perfect solution for any of the problems we face. Every action comes with a cost. 

I recently read a novel by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein called ‘Starship Troopers.’ It’s the book that the movie by the same name is loosely based on, and while some of the politics in the book are questionable, the story is thought-provoking. At one point in the narrative, an ethics teacher notes that whoever it was who said that ‘the best things in life are free’ was wrong. They aren’t free, he argues; they have no monetary value, yet they are priceless, with life itself the most valuable—and valueless—of all. The cost of having these things is not measured in terms of wealth, but in the effort, the toil, the sweat and the tears required to achieve them. The instructor notes that receiving a medal for placing fourth in a foot race is far more valuable and meaningful to the recipient than a medal for first place that they might buy in a pawn shop, because the fourth-place award required personal and perhaps inconvenient effort. 

So, my question is this: At what point did inconvenience become an accepted inverse measure of the relative value of doing the right thing? Because if our willingness to do the right thing is directly related to how convenient it is to do so, we’re in a lot of trouble. Bringing ‘the thing’ and ‘our idea of the thing’ closer together, expending the effort required to make them resemble each other as much as possible, is work, and is therefore inconvenient. The idea of city streets that have no trash is the idea of the thing; but the thing requires our direct involvement—that’s the inconvenient part. But isn’t the result worth the inconvenience, especially if it contributes to the development of a tighter-knit community fabric? Whether we’re talking about reducing greenhouse gases or the noise that humans generate that unfairly affects the planet’s non-human residents, or doing something reasonable about the social ills that fill our daily lives such as the unconscionable hollowing out of the middle class, or gun safety, or a social media fabric that is anything but social, or an out-of-touch, broken healthcare system, or a corrections system that corrects very little, or an imperfect immigration system, or any of the many challenges that define life today, isn’t the effort expended to make any one of them more effective worth the inconvenience? This is life: there is no easy button. Maybe we’re measuring the wrong thing. 

Instead of assessing the relative value of the thing, whatever the thing is, perhaps we should be measuring Return on Inconvenience. Would that lead to a change in human behavior for the better? Probably not. But it’s a start.