The Gift of Silence

Anne LaBastille

Anne LaBastille, Ph.D., is an ecologist and author internationally recognized as an advocate of wildlife and wildland conservation. Her six books include Woodwoman, Women and Wilderness, and The Wilderness World of Anne LaBastille. She has also written over 150 articles and scientific papers and lectures widely. Anne was a Commissioner of New York State’s Adirondack Park Agency for over seventeen years and has received numerous conservation awards. "The Gilt of Silence” originally appeared in her book The Wilderness World of Anne LaBastille (West of the Wind Publications, 1992).

Silence is an invisible, intangible, exquisitely fragile natural resource is rarely thought about. No one makes an effort to save it, and no donates to preserve it. There is no Citizens Group to Save Silence, Coalition to Reduce Loud Man-Made Sounds in the Environment.

Silence is an integral part of every climbing, camping, or canoe trip. It is the heart and soul of the wilderness experience. It is the perfect prescription for a good night’s sleep, and the oldest remedy for stress. It may also be a partial cure for workers who are subjected to high noise levels in factories and who are prone to increased heart disease and nervous disorders.

Once silence stretched over the Adirondack Mountains from peak to peak like a velvet mantle. It was broken by wind soughing through great white pines, by August thunderstorms and February blizzards. It was disrupted by trout splashing, deer snorting, owls hooting, and coyotes yipping. These sounds melded and molded with silence, and have been there for ten thousand years and more.

With the invention of gunpowder, steam and electric engines, and gasoline motors, the erosion of silence begem. This erosion has accelerated dramatically in the last ten to twenty years.

Now on a typical Adirondack Park summer day, an inhabitant or tourist may hear the following: around 7:00 a.m., the noise of vehicular traffic increases as workers and tourists take to the roads. Then outboard and inboard motorboats start cruising the lakes. From 9:00 to 10:00, mail trucks and mail boats cover their routes. Seaplanes fly over, carrying fishermen or sightseers. Or an F-16 makes a sonic boom while A-10s roar above the treetops on military training flights. Camp owners make repairs with electric skill saws, drills, and wrenches. At intervals, commercial jetliners pass high overhead. As the day warms, water-skiers and jet-skiers streak up and down the lakes. (In the winter, it’s snowmobilers.) In the afternoon, chain saws rev up as firewood is cut. By twilight, most man-made noises diminish. A few late cars and boats go by. Finally, night sounds can preside, except for those infernal bug whackers!

Who among us today can say that they have spent a day totally free of sounds generated by motors, engines, and guns? Only the deaf, those in solitary confinement, and dedicated wilderness campers can claim this. The disappearance of silence in the Adirondacks, in America, and in every other First World country has been gradual, invasive, and continual. It will get worse as our materialistic society produces more and more mechanized products and gadgets.

The Adirondack Park and National Parks still offer substantial time blocks of silence. With it come those blessed feelings of solitude, contemplation, and creativity. Silence in the natural world has inspired humans as diverse as the biblical prophets, famous poets and musicians, and conservationists such as John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, Sigurd Olson, and Aldo Leopold.

We need silence. We need it to be reminded of the vastness of the stars and space that surround our tiny planet. Of the awesome beauty of wilderness. Of the implacability of Nature s laws. In short, silence put us in our place. It makes humans humble and reverent.

Here and now, I consider it a gift to spend a summers night with the sound of a loon s tremolo on a silent lake. And to walk through flaming leaves of autumn with the chorus wild geese migrating over' And to he for a moment at midnight on an icebound lake, wondering aurora borealis, and hear nothing but the trees cracking in the cold.

I fear the gift of silence will become even more precious and rare as we enter the twenty-first century.