However much this might sound like a Zen paradox, the END requiring member states to produce them—and to meet tight deadlines to avoid massive fines—makes them very real in monetary terms.
After a couple more hours of tutoring, I began to grasp that noise maps basically chart all human movement, transportation infrastructure, major manufacturing, building types, and land contours within a given geographical area. Or at least that’s what I thought I understood—until I got more of the story when I talked with Colin Nugent, the EU project manager for noise, who is based in Copenhagen.
Colin Nugent is a young, handsome man from Belfast with a gentle brogue and an unflappable command of acronyms, an essential skill, given the labyrinth of agencies, committees, steering groups, studies, networks, and centers he must allude to in the course of describing the European pursuit of silence through policy.
In a therapeutically soothing voice, Nugent explained that the first phase of the directive mandated that by June 30, 2007, all member states should have completed noise maps that would chart noise levels during the previous calendar year for all towns and cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants, for all roads on which there were more than 6 million vehicular passages per year, for all rail lines on which there were in excess of 60,000 train “movements” per year, and for all airports with 50,000-plus air traffic movements. “All in all,” Nugent observed, “these are quite large sources, but there are a great many of them.” In 2012, member states are required to carry out the same procedure for agglomerations of 100,000 and above, doubling the number of cities involved.
But what about actual noise reduction? I asked. Where does that come in?
“Well exactly,” Nugent said. “There are also action plans.” The END required that no later than July 18, 2008, based on the first noise maps, “competent authorities” would draw up action plans “designed to manage, within their territories, noise issues and effects, including noise reduction if necessary” for all the sources charted in the maps.
In practice, things haven’t quite worked out like that. As of spring 2008, eleven member states hadn’t reported anything—let alone begun their action plans. Expired and unmet deadlines have continued to pile up ever since. “Plus,” Nugent said, “the directive states that if there is a significant change to any transport sources—like a major airport that extends a runway for another 1,000 flights or an extension of a major road, that would need to be included in the noise map.”
But aren’t roads and runways being built all the time? I asked.
They are, Nugent concurred. “So in essence the noise maps we’re producing are already out-of-date because the major road network is changing all the time.”
I asked whether what had been done so far at least provided the basis for the real business of reducing noise as mandated by the action plans.
“Well, noise reduction is not ‘mandated,’” Nugent said. “Member states are required to produce noise maps and action plans, but they’re not required to take any actions.”
“There are no requirements for any actual actions at all to reduce noise?”
None at all, Nugent calmly affirmed. That is left up to individual member states. All that the END requires them to do is to map and produce plans of things one might do to decrease noise based on what those maps show.
I was again experiencing vertigo. If these Borgesian cartographical extravaganzas, which were out-of-date before even being completed, carried no statutory power beyond their own colorful borders, why were they considered so important?
Because, Manvell and Nugent explained, with all their flaws they are yet a powerful tool to persuade politicians to take action. Hence the decision to present all this data as maps to begin with rather than just data streams. Presentation is key, Manvell said. “The visuals are what people want.”
Manvell explained how a politician armed with a noise map showing that his district was being exposed to unhealthy decibel levels could go to a national or EU body to argue that the area was entitled to a grant of so many euros for noise reduction. This is why, Nugent explained, his agency worked closely with the World Health Organization. The WHO is revolutionizing our assessments of the disease attributable to noise.
In 2009 the WHO issued a series of reports containing some of the most robust data ever compiled on specific health hazards of noise. These reports are providing the basis for development of a new, stringent set of noise guidelines. They present devastating findings about the impact of traffic noise on the cardiovascular system, in particular. For the first time, such studies have been able to factor for socioeconomic differences that might influence lifestyle health issues. (Previous efforts to gauge the effects of noise pollution have been plagued by the difficulty of filtering out other health risks that are often part of the life package for someone residing near a major roadway or airport.) The studies also pinpoint the effects of noise on different zones within a single house.
It sounds promising. And it would, of course, be foolish to assume that, just because it’s never worked in the past, this won’t be the time that medical findings about noise translate into a public uprising. Nugent is thoughtful, hardworking, and dedicated. Rokhu Kim and his team are savvy and driven. But there’s a long road to travel. To date, as results of noise mapping begin trickling in from Europe and the United Kingdom, it seems clear that the maps are accurate at identifying high-noise-level areas—the kinds of areas that teams of college students like Rice’s tootometer scouts might be taught to identify with great accuracy by the naked ear alone. Middle levels are proving more difficult. The identification of low-sound-level zones has barely begun. Mostly, areas are designated quiet by default—points where the maps do not indicate exposure to high or middle levels of sound. Yet many of these areas, Nugent told me, were you to visit them, “would actually seem very noisy indeed.” The END introduces the concept of quiet areas in language suggesting that it’s been tacked on as an afterthought: states are required only to “aim to preserve” them. In consequence, undeveloped quiet areas can get treated as noise-dumping locations to keep population centers from getting louder. Case in point: a recent plan by British authorities to reroute planes away from the city of Southampton by directing them over the New Forest, a picturesque region where people go for quiet recreation.
One certain result of this report will be funding for new studies, and a rededication to the noise-mapping efforts already under way. This will mean a lot more money spent on noise measurement and modeling for companies like B&K and for the agencies, like Nugent’s European Environment Agency, that work with member states to encourage compliance with the END. None of this comes cheaply. The cost of noise mapping Birmingham, England (a city slightly larger than San Jose, California), would run about £100,000 ($165,000). If the contractor is asked to obtain and “clean” much of this data, that figure could easily double.
In October 1931, Professor Henry J. Spooner, a highly regarded pioneer of the noise abatement movement, gave an address to a society of engineers on the progress of the movement to date. After noting the great success in recent years of devising new instruments to measure sound, Professor Spooner extended a note of caution. “Important as the measurement of noise is for so many purposes, there is a real danger that too much attention may be focused on it, and the suppression of unnecessary, devastating, harmful din neglected,” he said. “Happily, Sanitation Inspectors, when they take action against foul-smelling matter or a faulty drain, have not to use a ‘yardstick’ or the like, to measure it.”
At the end of our meeting, Nugent and Manvell walked me outside to a pretty plaza near the sea. We began speculating about what had sparked this latest burst of noise-pollution-related activity in which they’d both become professionally involved. Nugent recalled that in the mid-1990s, the WHO had produced another set of noise guidelines that had informed European Commission policy decisions. The driver then, he remarked, was noise complaints. “That was one of the few indicat
ors people had that noise was a problem … But if you look at the noise-complaint statistics for the United Kingdom, year on year the biggest single complaint is dogs barking.” He chuckled. “That far outweighs everything else. Followed closely by noisy parties, and everything else is way below.”
“Dogs, neighbors, roads,” Manvell quipped.
“Yes, and if you look at roads—road traffic—it’s minuscule.”
We said goodbye, and I walked away.
It was my last day in Copenhagen, and I needed to clear my head. The ever friendly Danes at my hotel loaned me a bicycle, and I took off. I didn’t notice whether the shady neighborhoods I rode through were loud or quiet. I just felt the release of self-propelled speed and wind. I found myself smiling and serene.
After about a half hour, I reached my destination, the Assistens Cemetery in Nørrebro, where the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is buried. Once inside the gates, I dismounted and walked slowly down the long tree-lined rows of graves, listening to songbirds and looking for his name. It took me quite some time to find, but I didn’t mind. It was quiet and the light was beautiful—pattering the leaves and headstones. At last I came upon an old marker with a white crucifix on top and three white stone tablets inscribed with names of many Kierkegaards, Søren among them. I took out my copy of his essay “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” and read, “How solemn it is out there under God’s heaven with the lily and the bird, and why? Ask the poet. He answers: Because there is silence. And his longing goes out to that solemn silence, away from the worldliness in the human world, where there is so much talking, away from all the worldly human life that only in a sad way demonstrates that speech distinguishes human beings above the animals. ‘Because,’ says the poet, ‘if this is the distinguishing characteristic—no, then I much, much prefer the silence out there.’”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Dragon Trap
If you look too closely at the complexity of our noise problem, you might be tempted to add your own scream to the mix. Professor Spooner’s caution about sound measurement appears in the second report made by the New York City Noise Abatement Commission. The first report, published in 1930, carries a note of plucky optimism. It concludes by declaring that if the citizens of New York want to “do away with unnecessary noise and reduce to a minimum such noises as are necessary” they can do so “if they are willing to take a little trouble.” Yet just one year later, after the commission had tried to implement its own recommendations, the mood darkens. The epigram of the 1931 report is a quote from Jeremiah: “Behold the noise of the bruit is come … to make the cities of Judah desolate, and a den of dragons.” Before long the document breaks into a wild-eyed vision in which loud machines, “Frankenstein’s monster,” are “elected president by a grateful public.” Thereafter, “calm gave way to frenzy. Quiet was lost; the quiet to think and the quiet to feel.” Noise itself “became a minor god.”
After my own journey, I could empathize with the commission’s despair, yet I found I did not share it. And for a long time, I was unsure why that was. After all, in some ways the reality of our soundscape today is more apocalyptic than the one the commission envisioned.
One afternoon not long after I returned from Denmark, I had a chilling conversation with Michael Merzenich, a pioneer in the study of brain plasticity. Merzenich told me that the entire auditory cortex of many children may now be “rewired for noise” in ways that have devastating implications for a host of language-related cognitive functions. And Merzenich was not talking about basic traffic noise of the sort being studied in Europe. He talked to me of the white-noise machines given to the parents of newborns, and a host of random noise generators being switched on in hospitals and homes following reports that cases of sudden infant death syndrome decreased when babies were exposed to overnight noise. He spoke of homes in which televisions are droning in the background most of the time even when no one is watching them (reportedly some 75 percent of American households with young children). He talked of loud fans and air conditioners. And he likened the effects of continual background noise on children’s development of language to what it would mean for a single parent with a cleft palate to raise a child. In this scenario, the child’s exposure to his or her native language is muffled. “So what they learn is not English in the sense that you and I mean by English,” Merzenich said, but “noisy English.” English in which signal and noise are perpetually mixed together.
On the most basic level, this means that children raised in noisy environments have dramatically slower capacities to process language. But Merzenich raised a more frightening prospect. He told me that he believes this situation, in which increasing numbers of children lack the attentional control necessary to interpret speech at the clip of normal conversation, is one of the main reasons for the increase in incidences of autism. Shortly after our conversation, New Scientist reported on a study at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that measured the response time of autistic children to a range of sounds and syllables. The study discovered a 20 to 50 percent lag time in the pace of sound processing among autistic children. Since a single syllable in a polysyllabic word might take less than one-quarter of a second to articulate, this delay can significantly impede comprehension. Merzenich’s speculations about the way noise hinders brain connectivity, combined with the findings of this study, suggest that the rise in autism may be directly tied to our epidemic of excessive acoustical stimulation.
Whatever the source of my lingering hopefulness, it seemed impossible to deny that a crisis was at hand. Yet I kept feeling the problem had to do not just with noise but with how we’ve chosen to frame the problem. Turning off a white-noise device or an iPod is not like turning off a transportation system. If we wanted to, we could end this new noisiness nightmare in a split second. Click.
But if I was right and we were somehow focusing our efforts the wrong way, where should people be looking in order to break out of the noise/antinoise trap? I found myself thinking: Alright, the dragons have arrived. Now how do we go about trapping them?
There’s a funny thing about dragons, though: once you set aside the Bible, they start taking on a very different appearance. In Buddhism, the dragon is a guardian of the enlightened teacher and Buddhist law. The dragon’s presence is associated with the pursuit of silent illumination. It’s also a shape-shifter, who can assume human form and even mate with our species. Almost all Japanese temples and Buddhist monasteries have dragons painted on their ceilings to protect the buildings and adjacent Zen gardens.
When it comes to dragons, apparently, just as with noise, it’s all a matter of your point of view. Another way to trap the creature is by switching attention away from its monstrousness and beguiling the dragon over to your side. How, I wondered, might one do this with the beasts of loudness?
Since my efforts to look at the pursuit of silence through official channels of soundproofing and policy technocracies mostly ended up revealing new strains of noise, I thought to myself that perhaps I’d better go look at a dragon for inspiration. Or at least at one of the gardens that the swirly scaled beasts have been induced to watch over.
THE SILENCE GARDEN
On a cool spring morning I stood near the entrance of the splendid Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon, awaiting the arrival of Virginia Harmon, the director of grounds maintenance. I was looking up and down the road for a car, but Harmon rose abruptly over the crest of a steep hill beneath the garden on foot, accompanied by a petite woman of Asian descent who vanished after smiling at me, but whom we would glimpse occasionally gliding behind one or another screen of trees in the course of our ramble. “She’s a chef. She’s quite popular,” Harmon rather cryptically observed.
Harmon herself is a tall woman of uncertain age with much elegance and wavy blond hair. She walks vigorously (when we met, she’d just strode for an hour up from the center of Portland) and maintains a brisk, articulate patter that seems intensely serious but is relieved
by sudden, disarming smiles. I kept falling behind Harmon while we meandered the garden paths, but her description of the importance of silence in Japanese gardens and tea ceremonies captivated me. I’ve struggled to catch up ever since.
Harmon told me about the use of water as a purifying force in Japanese gardens, both with respect to ritual washing and for the way that its pleasant sound punctuates the silence. She talked about how, unlike in Western landscape design where a single structure serves as a focal point, a Japanese garden will present myriad centers of attention: stepping-stones, pines, a lantern. “All the elements are represented,” she said, “the movement of branches, the sound of the wind in the branches, our own movement.”
Eventually our walk led us to a garden of sand and stone, the “dry landscape” style developed by monks in Zen Buddhist monasteries. “The old feudal castles were taken over by monks who began raking the gravel—growing plants in the course of their meditation,” Harmon said. The form evolved from Chinese ink drawings on scrolls with their cliffs and waterfalls, and vast empty spaces between the two, usually veiled in mist, suggesting the unknown beyond. The white gravel represents the void, ma, emptiness—which is also silence. The act of raking can be seen as a representation of man’s aspiration to enlightenment. “Our visual focus,” she continued, “is on the stone bridge in the distance, the place of actual transformation, man to spirit. The raking makes the focus on the emptiness ahead not so daunting—that giving of pattern. So by interruption, emptiness with pattern, we create a welcoming expanse.”
In Pursuit of Silence Page 20